among people who can appreciate your stuff. Mutual critique. And, 
you know, we help each other out if we get in trouble, yeah? Like, if 


someone walked in on you here, they wouldn't get it, they’d call the 
police, it’d be awkward, but see, with us, we’d be able to take care of 
that for you. We’ve got a guy who can take care of the bullshit you 
can’t be bothered with — The Janitor, we call him — and he’d be all 
over that shit. You join us, you don’t need to worry about the 
normals. Nobody tells us what to do, you know?” 


“| Know. Nobody tells you what to do.” 


“See, you get it, man! Freedom from The Man. That’s what we're all 
about, man, it’s about freedom, you know? You could pull this shit in 
the middle of a street, we'd take care of you.” 


“So, what, | join your little club, and then what?” 


“| dunno, we just talk. You do your thing, we do ours. We make 
stuff.” 


“And what exactly was the last bit of ‘stuff that you made?” 
The Sculptor shifted awkwardly. 


“Well, personally, I’ve been, uh, taking a bit of a break at the 
moment. You know, busy with other things. Just putting time into 
personal projects, you know?” 


“Right. You see, Mister The Sculptor, | know about your little club, 
and your creative output has been somewhat... slow, to say the 
least, and if | were to be a bit more loose with my words, I’d say 
you’re at a complete fucking standstill.” 


“That’s not really fair, man, it’s a complicated-* 

“And you look at me, and you say, wow, here’s someone who’s 
doing something, let’s pull him in, let's wrangle him like a wayward 
horse, and break him in, and ride him like a two cent whore. Well, 
Mister The Sculptor-“ 

“Now, that’s just not-“ 


“lam your whore.” 


“...what?” 


“lam your whore, | am your spice, feel free to shake me all over 
your meals, eat me as you please, allow me to enter your body as 
you enter mine. You used to do things, there used to be change in 
this world we share, but then you stood up to the change, you 
resisted. You sat on your own corpse pile, and you said, NO! This is 
the BEST corpse pile, these are the BEST corpses, and anyone who 
wants to pick them up and turn them into puppets, into animatronics, 
into real people, anybody who dares to breathe life into MY corpses, 
anyone who dares to resurrect the DEAD shall be crushed and 
made dead themselves.” 


“Okay, | think I’ve kind of lost you there.” 


“That’s my point. That is my point exactly. You look at what I’m 
doing, and you raise your chin, and finally I've managed to bring 
enough of a stench to wriggle into your nose, make you look down, 
make you acknowledge my filth and squalor. Mister The Sculptor, | 
want to be inside you.” 


“Look, man, you’re making me a bit uncomfortable here.” 
Pico Wilson rose from his throne. 


“| want to be inside you. | want to be a part of you, | want to change 
you from the inside, | want to force you from your stagnation, | want 
to make you burst open like an overboiled sausage, | want your 
delicious meat to burst forth. You see the spark in me, and you want 
it. And | see the spark in you, but it’s been a bit too long, you’ve 
forgotten what it’s like to be used to start a fire, you’ve forgotten how 
to fan kindling into a blaze. So yes, | will join your club. I'll be your 
Clipper, your Snipper, your spark plug of creativity, and by the time 
I’m done with you, you'll never forget the spark again. Now get out of 
here, | need to finger a few more girls.” 


“Well, uh, that’s great, | guess! Welcome aboard.” 
The Sculptor turned and left the room. 


“Fucking nutjob.” 


« A Cooler Manifesto | Hub | Flexibility » 


Flexibility 


When we first encountered the Artists, we followed standard 
procedure. Shoot first, ask questions later, then pass around 
amnestics like candy at a birthday party. 


This did not work for long. 


The traditional textbook strategy that we employ is specifically 
designed to counteract organised groups. You look at our GOC 
policies, Chaos Insurgency policies, MC&D, the Church, pretty much 
every force that we exchange bullets with, and our interactions are 
dictated by the book. Hell, our interactions with them were what 
helped to write the book. With all of these people, the line is that we 
are waging wars of attrition. We are able to keep up with them, 
because while all of these groups are big, we’re bigger, and we’re 
going to keep shooting until their metaphorical clip runs dry and then 
some. But this strategy doesn’t work with the Artists. 


It's not because they’re bigger than us, because they’re not. It’s 
because attrition warfare assumes both parties have centralised 
management; there needs to be a singular point of control, 
constantly driving against the other side. But the Artists are not like 
this. The Artists are not centralised. The Artists are not unified. And, 
most importantly, the Artists do not shoot back. 


As such, we cannot engage them in the same way that we engage 
the other ‘players’. The war against the Artists is, unfortunately, 
waged on their home turf. While they throw us the occasional skip, 
most of what they make is not directed towards us. It is released into 
the wild, presented as ‘art’, and then summarily forgotten. It is our 
job to secure this ‘art’ and, if possible, the Artists themselves. 
They’re a culture, not a corporation. Our best guess is that the 
Artists are just a passing fad, and if we’re lucky, the cool of today will 
be bland tomorrow. Yeah, we’re always going to have a few, but 
they aren’t manageable right now. The best we can do is control 
their range, and even then, we're playing a losing game. 


The name of this game is not capturing and keeping the Artists. You 
will not be able to hold them. However, the game requires us to 
know where the Artists are going to be, and most of the time our 
intelligence sits on the spectrum between nil and fuck all. Current 
strategy is if the opportunity presents itself, you pick up a lone Artist, 
drug them to the dickens, squeeze them for all they know about 
local ‘exhibitions’, then hit them with standard amnesiacs. Then you 
need to reintroduce them into their environment naturally. If you’ve 
done your job right, your Artist will have no recollection that they got 
nabbed in the first place, and we'll have a place and time to arrange 
for inconspicuous crowd control. 


Don’t forget this, because it’s damn important: NEVER bring an 
Artist to a Site. If they try to break for it, they WILL have a plan, and 
that plan will involve grabbing anything they can grab and freeing 
anything they can free. You need a place to store an Artist, you stick 
them in a safehouse. We don’t keep safehouse locations on file 
anywhere. Once you're all assigned, I'll tell you where your area’s 
safehouses are. Do NOT write down the locations of safehouses, 
you memorise them, and you don’t say a word about their locations 
outside this room. As far as anyone outside this room knows, the 
designation ‘safehouse’ is not a part of Foundation structure, and 
you're to keep it that way. 


As | said, the Artists are decentralised and incoherent, and so the 
war against the Artists is a culture war. The thing is, as loose as 
their organisation may be, there’s still a tendency to arrange into 
tighter ‘cells’. These cells are the ones who organise exhibitions, 
they pick a place, and it spreads by word of mouth. This leads to our 
secondary strategy, and one that’s a bit controversial. Long-term 
infiltration. 


Yes, some of you are going to be masquerading as Artists. Yes, you 
will go to exhibitions, yes, you will smoke their weed, and yes, if it’s 
required by your cover, you’re going to have to make some art 
yourself. That’s right, you’re going to be breaking the Foundation’s 
gospel law, and you'll be making skips. Of course, since — | assume 
— none of you are capable of making anomalous objects by waving 
your hands and saying magic words, you’re going to need some 
help. That'll be covered by Dr. Samuels after lunch. Anything you 


make yourself, you need to destroy yourself. 


On the flipside of this, we are breaking the other gospel law of the 
Foundation: you are going to destroy skips. Back when we didn’t 
know what we were dealing with, we contained everything they 
threw at us. This was a massive, massive waste of manpower and 
resources. Much of what the Artists design are immovable, 
permanent installations in suburban areas. If we stuck to cordoning 
off and containing every piece, we’d have half of New York City 
under lockdown. Yes, yes, yes, | know what you’re thinking, we're 
violating every rule in the book. But this is the only way we can deal 
with them, and time has shown us that it works infinitely better than 
standard procedure. This is the only way that works, and if anything, 
we're results-based. 


Now, this does NOT mean that you’re going to be smashing up 
everything in sight. That’s the GOC’s job. Our primary goal is still 
containment. You’re to use your best judgement on whether it’s 
something that can be reasonably contained to begin with, and if it 
isn’t, you break it. If it’s something you can pick up and slip in your 
pocket, that’s what you do. If it’s a giant memetic hazard plastered 
on the side of a balloon, you pop the balloon, and see if you can 
recover it. If it’s something immovable that’s going to violate 
causality in the middle of Times Square, you smash it to 
smithereens. Also, and this is the one rule we really try hard not to 
break, don’t kill it if it’s alive. Yes, you are probably going to see 
living installations. No, they are not what you are thinking of. They 
are worse. 


Last thing. One of the biggest cells that we know about is headed by 
a guy called The Critic. Nobody knows much about him, so if you 
learn ANYTHING about this guy, you pass it back to us, because 
right now we know he exists and that’s about it. 


That’s my bit over, bagels by the door, Dr. Samuels’ part starts in 
ten. 


« Snip Snip Snip | Hub | Novel Cultivars » 


Novel Cultivars 


“| have bred a cultivar of celery that tastes like cheese.” 


Overgang Dood and Melanoma-on-the-arsehole-of-existence 
("Arsehole" to her friends) stared at the plate that Joey Tamlin was 
offering them. Then they looked at each other quizzically, 
(Overgang, of course, through his trademark sunglasses) then at 
Joey’s grinning face, then back at the plate. Overgang asked the 
question they both wanted answered. 


“Why?” 
“| don’t think you heard me, | said I’ve bred —“ 
“A cultivar of celery that tastes like cheese, yes. Why?” 


“Well, | was making a sandwich, right, and you know how | get about 
my sandwiches, triple-decker, Colby cheese squares, sliced ham, 
gluten free white bread, because of the allergies, right?” 


“Right.” 


“Right. So, | go to the kitchen, and all we’ve got is shredded 
cheddar, since Molly — you know I’m living with Molly now, right — 
Molly got up in the middle of night and just ate the whole damn block 
of cheese raw, even though it was my cheese, and she knows how | 
get about my sandwiches, so | was kind of pissed off, right?” 


“Cheesed, even.” 


Overgang fist-bumped Arsehole, Joey barely stopping to register the 
joke. 


“Right, cheesed, nice, whatever. Anyway, I’m sitting here, and my 
bread’s still toasting, since you know | like to toast it a little bit, make 
it a little crunchy, right, and | look in the fridge and all we’ve got is 


shredded cheddar. So | think, sure, what the hell, toast’s already in 
the toaster, so | put down the cheddar ready to go. | pull out the ham 
then, right, and you know how we buy the stuff full leg at a time, 
because it’s crazy cheap like that, right?” 


“Right.” 


“Right. So, I’m sitting there, and | get out a knife, and | go to cut the 
ham, since | normally cut the cheese first, but like | said, the cheese 
was shredded already. So | go to cut the ham and then | realise, 
sliced ham only makes sense with sliced cheese, shredded cheese 
NEEDS shredded ham, so | think to myself that this just won’t do! So 
| look at my toast, and I’ve only got about half a minute left before 
it's done, and you know | need to chuck everything on right after it 
comes out of the toaster, right, so that the cheese melts and 
everything, or otherwise it’s ruined. So, quick thinking, | pull out the 
box grater. And | think to myself, hell, sure you can just grate ham, 
right?” 


“Right?” 


“Wrong. See, ham on the leg is crazy fibrous, right, so if you’re not 
doing it with a food processor or something, it just gets caught up 
and it’s basically terrible. If you’re not doing it right, it’s like you’re 
rubbing the grater against tree bark or something, right, bits are 
coming off, but they aren’t really woodchips if you get my drift. So 
my toast pops up, and | chuck the scraps of ham and the cheese in 
and | make my sandwich and it wasn’t super great, but it was 
alright.” 


There was a moment of silence, broken by Arsehole. 
“And... cheese celery?” 


“Oh! Right. Anyway, I’m eating my sandwich, and I’m thinking, well, 
the reason that you can’t grate leg ham with a box grater is it’s 
fibrous, right, but my cheese was already grated, so | think, ‘what if 
cheese was fibrous?’, and | think about this for a bit, and | say, what 
the hell, something to do | guess. So that’s it. Cheese-celery. 
Cheecelery.” 


Joey offered the plate again, grinning from ear to ear. Overgang 
continued questioning. 


“Why celery and not, like, cheese carrots or something?” 


“Well, Molly had some celery growing in the garden, so it was just 
handy | guess.” 


“And does Molly know you were fucking with the genome of her 
celery?” 


“|... may not have gotten around to telling her just yet.” 
Arsehole shook her head disapprovingly. 


“Should probably get around to that, Joey. Anyway. Cheecelery. 
Let’s have some then.” 


Overgang cautiously reached over to the plate, picking up a piece 
and examining it. It looked like celery. He snapped it with his fingers, 
producing a characteristic crunch. It sounded like celery. Then he 
licked the halves, and his tongue felt the taste of rich cheddar 
cheese. He placed them on his tongue and relished in his palate’s 
confusion, then started chewing. Crunch, crunch, crunch. It felt 
fibrous and crispy, and yet, CHEESE. 


“Joey, this is just weird, man.” 

Arsehole countered. 

“| dunno, | could get used to it.” 

“Could put it on crackers, | guess.” 

“Could put it on pizzas instead of cheese.” 


“Oh man, that’d be... weird. What'd stick the other stuff to the top 
though?” 


“Sauce is sticky, ya nong.” 


“Right, right. Lasagne?” 


SCP-722: Jormungandr 


Item #: SCP-722 
Object Class: Keter 


Special Containment Procedures: Due to the unique nature of 
SCP-722, effectiveness of containment measures are as of yet 
untried. Containment measures are currently focused on maintaining 
the current state of SCP-722 until a more permanent solution can be 
found. Brain-wave activity, heart rate and internal temperature of the 
artifact are to be monitored at all times, as well as any variances in 
the integrity and volume of the glacial range within which SCP-722 
currently resides, particularly Kangerdlugssuaq. Eight access points 
exist at various points in the glacier, each sealed by an airlock, with 
sound dampeners lining the glacial interior. At four hour intervals, 
nitrogen gas chilled to a near-liquid state is to be pumped into the 
room to lower the internal temperature as much as possible.