Recovery: SCP-660 was originally recovered from an 
archaeological dig in , , where it was found in a purported 
gravesite among a number of other mundane artifacts. A beeswax 
seal covering the mouth of SCP-660 was dislodged during the 
excavation process, revealing SCP-660-1. [DATA EXPUNGED)], 
after which the site was secured by the Foundation. The notes of Dr. 

(presumed deceased) enabled the isolation of SCP-660 from 
the rest of the artifacts. 


Log of tests involving human experimentation with SCP-660 


Lab Report 660-A 

Sample Condition: Skin flap harvested from the left thigh of the 
cadaver of D-612. Donor was healthy in all respects prior to death. 
Sample Use: Tissue sample left in SCP-660 for two months' 
duration. 

Result: Daily biopsies indicate viability of sample. Cell samples 
taken from tissue graft are cultured in vitro, revealing a 
predisposition towards precancerous and cancerous growth. 


Lab Report 660-B 

Sample Condition: Skin flap harvested from the left thigh of the 
cadaver of D-612. 

Sample Use: Tissue sample left in SCP-660 for two months' 
duration, then grafted onto the torso of a D-class personnel with 
second and third-degree burns. The recipient's anomaly testing 
record had no contraindications with SCP-660. 

Result: Tissue graft takes without complication, healing according to 
usual steps of adherence, serum inhibition and revascularization. 
However, as is common with severe burns cases, the compromised 
skin barrier led to infection, and eventual fatal septic shock. Post- 
mortem biopsy and analysis indicates skin graft would have returned 
to full histological structure and function had the recipient survived. 


Lab Report 660-C 


3. Information Control: The Division of Informational 
Security will manipulate global and internal media and 
information to provide the impression of incompetence 
on the part of Prometheus Laboratories. Defective 
Prometheus Labs assets may be given anomalous 
status and internal documentation modified to reinforce 
this control. A continued campaign will make 
Prometheus Labs assets less desirable to external 
paratechnology and obsotechnology interests, facilitating 
the increased success of Task 1. 


Hughes looked up at Pietrykau. "So you're telling me...?" 


"Prometheus Labs would have never survived for over a century if 
they weren't good at what they do," he answered. "The truth of the 
matter, Captain, is that the Foundation managed to convince the 
whole world that Prometheus Labs were incompetent mad scientists 
so we could steal all of their work. It remains one of the greatest 
single Maskirovkas of the modern age." 


Pietrykau gave a short bark of laughter. "The day after the PL-76 
was unveiled, the GOC and Chaos Insurgency both tried to steal it 
for themselves and somehow opened up a portal to hell at the 
center of the base. Defense wasn't just turned into a crater on the 
map. From what we can gather, the entire facility - all of its its 
projects, people, and knowledge - was quite literally transformed into 
information and uploaded into the world's safest external hard drive: 
the Shiva." 


Hughes tried to process this information and decided to go with the 
simplest question. "So what happened to the Shiva?" 


"It disappeared." Pietrykau gave a slight shrug. "In the aftermath and 
confusion, quite a few of Prometheus’ remaining assets went... 
missing, and several of its subsidiaries suffered from so-called 
accidents. That was how the postmillennial age of eigenweaponry 
began: a half-dozen different organizations trying to cobble 
something together from stolen research and paratechnology. All of 
us trying to get ahold of the next big thing that would make the rest 
of the anomalous world quake in their extradimensional boots. 


The Global Occult Coalition assembled something codenamed 
Gaius Prime - all we know about it is that they sent it to Siberia in 
2000 to kill Project Redline and succeeded. By 2001, the Church of 
the Broken God had no less than three mechanical messiahs, who 
ended up excommunicating and then killing each other. When we 
salvaged Samsara in '02, we had this grand plan of making them the 
template for all our future Task Forces. The trouble is that the 
equipment we salvaged was damaged, so all we could do with them 
was test offensive paratech and handle thaumaturgic threats. Even 
that bloody gentleman's club, Marshall, Carter, and Dark, got in on 
the fray: they got their hands on an oracle to predict the stock 
market. As | recall, Samsara's second-ever mission, just before you 
were assigned to them, was to steal it." 


Pietrykau clicked to the next slide. On the screen, a gigantic, four- 
limbed man that appeared to be made of rock was caught in mid- 
charge towards a collection of massive, ornate orbs surrounded in 
flames and suspended in midair. Hundreds of people were in the 
foreground of the image, all of them like ants watching the two 
behemoths duke it out. 


"The arms race came to a head in 2004 with the First Eigenweapon 
Crisis. That year, the ORIA built themselves a thaumaturgic android 
codenamed Ifrit. It could fly, shoot fire, whip up hurricane-sized 
sandstorms... and sermonize. See those orbs? Every single one of 
them contained the brain of a priest. The Iranians sent it to India, 
probably so they could blame the Pakistanis and take advantage of 
the ensuing conflict. They had built a god in almost every sense of 
the word - and then used it to start a proxy war. " 


Pietrykau looked disgusted by the memory. "The Horizon Initiative 
was less than pleased by this and took matters into their own hands. 
They were working on their own eigenweapons project - an 
absolutely enormous golem, even by the standards of golems, mind 
you - and deployed it to kill the Ifrit. In the process, the two reshaped 
the Indian coastline. Whatever the hell was powering those things, 
we couldn't put a dent in them." 


"Then how did you destroy them?" Hughes asked, leaning forward. 


Pietrykau chuckled. "We didn't." 


The next picture also showed the orbs, but they were now 
extinguished and half-buried on a beach, with the tide pulling away 
in the background. 


"Il can only call what finally did them in an act of God," Pietrykau 
said. "But the aftermath... the Veil was torn to shreds and nobody 
had a sewing kit. Amnestics, PARAKEETS, antimemetics, you name 
it, we used it. A century's stockpile of the best mind-wiping tools 
known to man - gone in a flash." 


He closed his eyes for a moment. Hughes was about to ask about 
the logistics of amnesticizing the whole world, then thought better of 
it. 


"The only good thing about the Crisis was that it finally knocked 
some sense into everyone's heads," Pietrykau said. "A month after 
the crisis ended, the Coalition convened the Third Hague 
Conference and managed to corral all the major anomalous powers 
into disarming and deactivating their eigenweapons. Almost 
assuredly everyone who signed did so with crossed fingers, but 
much like nuclear weapons, nobody wanted to be the first to push 
the button. All we had to do was make sure things stayed that way." 


A thought struck Hughes. "What about Able?" 


Pietrykau snorted. "Omega-7 was the degenerate brainchild of an 
American general with an anomalous erection. The Yanks were all 
too happy to let us cover it up. We got off easy." 


Then another thought struck Hughes."First Eigenweapon Crisis?" 


Pietrykau clicked his tongue. "As of six months ago, the number of 
active eigenweapons increased to one.” 


He played a video on the projector. Onscreen, a young Japanese 
man stood in the middle of a barren field. 


"In June, we determined that IJAMEA - the Japanese department of 
anomalous research - was developing an eigenweapon codenamed 
Oyamitsumi." 


Onscreen, the Japanese man closed his eyes and stood there. Then 


his skin began to bubble and ripple, changing color from a pale tan 
to a deep purple and bulging outwards. A helmet and facemask 
burst forward from the sides of the man's head and slid over his 
face. A sharp, block-like weave pattern emerged on the skin around 
his arms and legs, granting it a distinctly mechanical appearance. 
Two smaller arms burst out from underneath the man's armpits, but 
there were simply holes where the hands should have been. 


"From what intelligence has been able to gather, Oyamitsumi was 
the first production-ready model of a new bio-mechanical force- 
multiplying armored endoskeleton. All the power of a GOC Orange 
super suit... grafted to a person's bones." Hughes could hear the 
admiration in Pietrykau's voice. "Twin auto-aiming plasma railguns 
underneath the regular arms. Armor tough enough to withstand a 
direct hit from Hellfire missiles. Strong enough to lift a tank. It was 
fast, too." 


The man onscreen had ceased to look like a man and now looked 
more like a purple Transformers action figure. Numerous tanks 
rolled into view around him and then stopped. Their cannons 
bellowed as Oyamitsumi was bombarded on all sides and then 
engulfed in smoke. While the smoke cleared, the men inside the 
tanks clambered from their vehicles and fled from view. Oyamitsumi 
strode out of the smoke towards a tank, completely unscathed. He 
disappeared behind it, and then the tank was suddenly hoisted into 
the air as if it were tissue paper and thrown at another one. Behind 
it, Oyamitsumi's railguns began swiveling and firing. Within seconds 
there were only chunks of scorched metal left. 


Hughes was so caught up in the spectacle that she almost missed 
Pietrykau's word choice. Almost. 


"Was?" she asked. 


"Was," Pietrykau confirmed. Onscreen, an Asian woman in a plain 
black dress walked into view. At first she looked perfectly normal - if 
incredibly out of place - and then her body suddenly exploded into a 
million tiny worms, all writhing around themselves and squirming 
and making up the general body shape of a person. 


As the creature stared at Oyamitsumi, he appeared to crumple 


inwards on himself. The railguns at his side forced themselves back 
into his body, displacing his internal organs in the process. Then his 
head quite literally bent over and stuffed itself into his stomach, 
before his legs, arms, and torso followed suit. Then the stomach 
simply ceased to exist onscreen. Hughes blinked and suddenly the 
humanoid mass of worms ceased to be a worm and started being a 
woman again. It walked offscreen, and then the video cut to black. 


"What the hell was that?!" Hughes exclaimed. She looked to 
Pietrykau. 


"At 0900 hours on June 16, Oyamitsumi was destroyed by what we 
have determined is another eigenweapon of unknown origin, based 
on its deliberate choice of targets and clear control of its abilities. At 
1100 hours on June 16, my counterpart in the Global Occult 
Coalition called me demanding to know what the hell we'd done to 
Oyamitsumi." 


Pietrykau stood up. "If the GOC knows, then the whole bloody UN 
does. Make no mistake, Captain - this is a crisis. The button has 
been pressed and we have no idea by whose hand. We need to act 
fast if we don't want history to repeat itself." 


He started making a list on his fingers. "We need to find out who 
created that thing, where it is, and what else it can do. And we 
especially need to make sure nobody else tries to follow its example. 
The Department of Analytics is reopening the Eigenweaponry 
Division to nip this situation in the bud, and we need someone to 
command the Division's field assets. That's where you come in. You 
were the most qualified candidate for the job, especially given your 
experience with Tau-5." 


"Are you offering me a new assignment?" Hughes asked 
bemusedly. 


"A promotion - to commander of Mobile Task Force Tau-1, 'Deus 


Vulture’," Pietrykau said. Congratulations, Major." 


Hughes' head was spinning. "Well, er... thank you. Where do | 
start?" 


"Excellent," said Pietrykau, rubbing his hands together. "We've 
already received reports of some suspicious temporal anomalies 
occurring in northern India; you'll be flying down there first thing 
tomorrow to establish what it is and what to do with it. The 
Department of Analytics will handle the paperwork and logistics - 
you won't even need to pack toiletries. A car will arrive at your 
residence tomorrow morning at six to take you to the airport. You'll 
receive a full briefing and dossier on the flight." 


He stood up. "Any questions?" 


"Just one," Hughes said cautiously. "Why didn't | just get an 
orientation lecture and dossier? Why did you sit down with me 
personally and tell me all this?" While still telling me nothing about 
my new job? she added silently. 


Pietrykau paused at the threshold of the room. "You needed a 
human perspective." 


He beckoned Hughes to leave with him. 


"| was there when all of these things happened, and | saw what the 
one common element among all of these eigenweapons was: 
somewhere along the line, everyone unconsciously decided that 
there needed to be a human mind in control in the process. 
Remember this, Major. A monster can be leashed and even trained - 
they are predictable. Men are not. Perhaps we needed to put human 
faces on inhuman creations, perhaps we needed to think we always 
had control, or perhaps it was simple hubris, but we made monsters 
with the minds of men." 


« T Plus | Deus Vulture | Conqueror Worm » 


Conqueror Worm 


« Deus Vulture | Conqueror Worm » 


Some twenty-eight parsecs from the planet Earth, in the atmosphere 
of a gas giant in a binary star system, a small hovering drone 
entered a long-abandoned library. The library was an ancient place: 
an enormous organic temple in the sky and the tombstone of a 
once-mighty race of oblate spheroids. The inside of the library was 
shaped like a teardrop, its pulsating walls lined with physical scrolls 
both outlandishly and prudently archaic; the ferocious storms 
constantly rolling through the atmosphere would have destroyed any 
digital information eons ago. Even the drone could not withstand the 
electromagnetic fields for long. Quickly, it floated to the outermost 
shelf and extended its soft grippers to carefully extract the 
uppermost scroll in the top right corner. The drone gingerly unrolled 
the scroll, took pictures of it, and then transmitted that information to 
a command module suspended in orbit seventy-three kilometers 
away. Just as gently, it placed the scroll back and moved to the next 
scroll. 


As the drone examined each scroll in turn, floating down the 
spiraling shelves, the command module overhead analyzed the 
images and began translating. Soon, a pattern emerged. The library 
was no mere information repository; it was a warning. Each scroll in 
the temple contained stories, myths, legends, and even scientific 
studies of an ancient, enormous creature, slumbering in the deepest 
reaches of the cosmos, of such might and power that its mere 
shadow was enough to swallow entire star systems. 


On top of a mountain on the planet Earth, a group of people trying to 
save the world were taught by an engine how to channel the Worm. 
With nothing more than a hope, a manuscript stolen from Vonnegut, 
and a metafictional condenser, they generated the perfect heroine. 
She could've been taken straight out of a book. She was intelligent, 
witty, charismatic, and strong. She wanted to save the world. 


They rewrote the script, hollowed her out, and filled her up with as 
much Worm as they could.