Containment Procedure Update / /20 : SCP-873 is to be 
permanently relocated to Site and stored in a concrete-lined vault 
at least 2000m below ground and at least 100km from any other 
SCP containment facility or human population center. Archives of 
video surveillance are to be encrypted to a secure, dedicated data 
warehouse with access limited to level 4 and above. Any changes in 
mass, volume or apparent refractive index must be reported 
immediately to O5 command. 


Description: SCP-873 is a spherical object 138mm across with a 
detectable mass of 5.3kg. It gives the appearance of being made of 
flawless glass or crystal, but all attempts to determine the material of 


had to admit, she wasn't exactly surprised at this outcome, but it 
wouldn't have been her first guess if you'd asked her how she'd die. 


“Get it? My time is up? Cos, clockwork?” Her shit-eating grin fell 
back into her standard frown as she observed the serious faces 
around her. “Come on, guys, it’s not like we didn’t see this coming. 
I’ve been operating on the equivalent of a sentient magical bear 
trap, this was bound to happen eventually.” 


She turned to the young girl covered in blood for support. “Aries 
knows how this works." When the girl only bit her lip in response, 
she looked to the man in the discount skeleton costume. "Wilkes, 
you've been around the block too. It’s not a mission if one of us 
doesn’t die horribly, right? It’s just ... my turn.” 


She winced as the gears bit further into her flesh, flaying skin and 
muscle, and copper piping snaked further up her arms. She could 
feel hair-thin wires pushing into the cuts, running into her muscles 
and latticing around and between her radius and ulna. No escape 
unless she could perform a double-amputation from the shoulders in 
the next second or two. She breathed slowly, accepting her fate. It 
would be over soon. She wished she could say she had no regrets, 
but she had so very many. 


Wilkes and Huever were speechless, wrestling with grief and anger 
respectively. In the other corner, the faceless monk ~ shot her 
an telepathic :( face as he threw a sigil-stone into the midst of the 
growing cultist swarm. Their gears stopped dead and they fell to the 
ground twitching. Aries, standing by Cassandra, wrestled with her 
impulse to pat the older woman on the shoulder. She and 
Cassandra had never been close, but she felt like she should be 
saying something here. 


“You should, um...” Aries trailed off, not sure what the right words 
were. She bit her lip hard, the familiar tang of blood triggering a 
good thought. “We should-” 


The mechanism that had been winding its way down Cassandra’s 
collarbones met itself, clicked into place and unceremoniously 
snapped closed, crushing her skull instantly as counter-mechanisms 
tore open her ribcage. Wilkes doubled over, pulling up his mask to 


splash his lunch out onto the metal floor. ~ merely broadcast a :/ 
face. Aries sighed heavily and hit her communicator. 


“Davis? Cassandra’s dead, mission’s fucked. Requesting 
extraction.” 


December 


The angler thing tossed Trench in the air and swallowed him whole, 
then let out a bellowing screech that reverberated through the 
tunnels, receiving calls of response from dozens of slime creatures. 
Panicking, Fenton tried to reach into its dream self to assert control, 
but found nothing inside it. This thing was operating on pure 
animalistic instinct and bloodlust. 


Hey, at least Fenton could say he’d died to something cool. 


A mass of bats swarmed from an opening in the rocks behind the 
angler and it turned its head just in time to be smacked in the jaw by 
a great brown blur. The almost-solid swarm rushing by with enough 
force to stagger it. Fenton could just about make out a figure in the 
centre of the flock, supported on a churning, flapping platform of the 
flying rodents. Here was Aries. 


Fenton drew the handgun at his hip and stepped into the angler's 
line of sight. He fired a couple of shots at the thing, targeting its eyes 
and the lure that dangled from its forehead. The bullets ricocheted 
off it uselessly, pinging into the surrounding rock. 


The bat swarm clumped and merged into one single blob, a 
humanoid shape covered in still-flapping wings and furry squeaking 
faces. It slammed a bulky fist into the creature, making it stumble 
again. The angler faked out the bat-blob, moving to flinch back then 
twisting to ram itself sideways into the shrieking mess. As the blob 
fell on its ass, it burst back into a flock of individual bats, half the 
swarm falling to the ground immediately, their tattered wings and 
broken bones rendering them useless. There were more bats 
flowing in from every tunnel now, though, catching in Fenton’s hair, 
leaving scratches on his neck and hands as he swatted them away. 
They flowed into the bat-blob, but the angler had it on the defensive 


now and it was losing bats faster than they could be replenished. He 
turned to call to Nettle, to see they had already stepped out from the 
hiding place and were struggling, uncomfortable, their costume cut 
and torn. A pile of dead, mangled bats lay at their feet. What? 


A yell from the fight and he turned back to see that the angler had 
Aries caught in its jaws, hanging upside down, one long tooth 
piercing directly through her calf. She was reaching up to try to tap a 
sigil carved into her thigh, but the angler was bucking and snapping 
wildly, tossing her like a ragdoll as the last of her swarm petered out. 


Fenton reached into his utility belt, searching for anything he could 
use against the thing. Something that could hit at primary logic 
centres? He couldn’t assume it had anything like a familiar brain 
structure, how did he account for that? Generalised targeted fear 
attack, distract it? He barely noticed as Nettle brushed past him, a 
numbing tingle spreading across his arm where they'd come close. 
He looked up as the numbing hit his fingers, everything from the 
shoulder down feeling alien. He wanted to challenge the kid on what 
the hell they'd done, but they were heading right for the angler, 
calmly pulling off their gloves and rolling up their sleeves, revealing 
their dark skin for the first time. 


“Nettle, get the fuck back, you can’t fucking fistfight that thing!” 


Nettle waved Fenton away dismissively over their shoulder, not 
bothering to even turn their head. “Not intending to, dude!” Their 
voice was young. Fenton would have estimated mid-teens. The 
Foundation were sick enough to bring kids into this shit now? He 
didn’t have time to contemplate long, as Nettle reached out and 
quietly placed a hand on the creature’s calf. 


The fireworks began. 


October 


“What do you mean there’s nothing left?” Davis’ voice was low and 
husky, irritatingly calm. 


Aries growled at the question, ducking out of the way of a falling 


pillar just in time, at this point fueled only by fear and spite. “Il mean 
they’re all fucking dead, Via! Tenochtitlan, ~, Eckhart. They’re 
trapped in that goddamn soul-mangler, and | will be too if you don’t 
extract me NOW” 


A blip appeared on her heads-up display, accompanied by a little 
chirp from her comm. “The asset hasn't yet been retrieved, Berlot. 
You know just as well as | do I’m not extracting shit until the cosmic 
daughter is locked down.” 


“She’s dead too, you bitch! Get in some people who know what the 
fuck is actually going on here, clean up this mess, and GET. ME. 
OUT” 


There was a pause as Davis deliberated, taking her sweet time 
while Aries ducked under a beam into the cinema atrium, scrambling 
to get away from the all-too-human barking of the chimerachological 
monstrosities hot at her heels. This bitch was going to kill her. She 
was actually going to do it. An icy chill ran through her as Davis 
confirmed. 


“Sigma-66, operation 46, full mission failure and total loss of 
operatives. Requesting clean-up, specialists in chimera tech.” 


Aries wasn't one to go down without a fight. Obviously. She wasn't 
one to do anything without a fight. She scrambled beneath the 
atrium’s grand piano, a plan already forming in her head. She 
yanked ~’s soul protection stone from her bra, careful to maintain 
skin contact, and bit hard into her thumb, smearing the blood that 
welled from it onto the back of the trinket. 


The barking was getting louder. They could smell her, she knew, 
even beneath the cloying smoke that was filling the cinema. 
Drawbacks of being constantly covered in blood. She rummaged in 
the depths of her trench coat pockets, her skin shredding against 
various blades and sharp edges, until they closed around the thing 
she wanted. 


The trigger for Simmon’s teleport mechanism, rusted from all those 
months tucked away. Totally non-functional, of course, but that 
hardly mattered to an artist. She swiped the bleeding thumb against 


that too. Protection, movement, what else? For good measure, she 
swiped the thumb against the comm in her ear. Location, maybe. 
Intent. 


The dogs were in the room. No time to perfect the spell. As one 
lunged at her, its plaintive eyes apologising for its vicious intent, she 
muttered a few words of incantation and squeezed the trigger. 


Aries was blasted instantly from her body, straight upwards. She 
caught a glimpse of her corporeal form being savaged before it was 
blocked from view, first by the ceiling of the theatre and then by the 
vast interconnected network of drifting souls that ran like blood cells 
through the astral highway. Above, she could sense terribly huge 
things moving sluggishly through the currents, sucking in souls like 
krill. 


Focus. You're only halfway there. 


Aries muttered the follow-up incantation to bring her back to the real 
world and felt a shift in her gut as she started moving downwards, a 
lazy arc transforming rapidly into a vicious plummet. Her soul 
seared, the astral plane’s equivalent of burning up on re-entry acting 
on every aspect of her being. 


Just as quickly as she’d left it, she was slammed back into existence 
as she knew it, her body feeling so much different now she wasn't 
taking it for granted. She was sitting in the command centre, legs up 
on a desk, the others in the room scrambling to get away from her, 
knocking over several swivel chairs in the process. 


There was something wrong here, their faces showing not just fear - 
what she’d have expected from an unexpected apparition - but 
disgust, lips curled and ready to hurl insults the second they were 
done making sure she couldn’t kill them. “What, you’ve never seen-” 


This wasn’t her voice, not even slightly. It was deep, husky. Smoke 
damage? Frowning, she swivelled to check her reflection in the 
outdated PC monitor in front of her, discern if there was visible 
damage. 


Oh. 


Staring back at her was Via Davis’ shocked face, blood welling from 
every orifice. Shit, that had worked WAY better than she’d thought. 
The radio crackled, and she heard Davis’ dying screams and curses, 
in the familiar voice of Clara Berlot, anartist extraordinaire. 


December 


The angler didn’t die instantly. Fenton kind of felt like it would have 
been better if it had. In half a second, cuts welled up all over the 
creature’s body, its legs broke, its scarred eye burst open and 
pumped out steaming brown blood. It wrenched its head around to 
look at Nettle with its good eye, and Fenton heard a sickening crack 
as the whiplash broke something in Aries. Her body went from 
struggling and angry to limp and lifeless in a heartbeat, as the 
creature similarly folded, hundreds of wounds both big and small 
accumulating to slit its throat. Nettle hopped back as the thing 
crashed to the ground, Aries’ body slumping beneath it without a 
fight. 


Fenton was speechless, paralysed with shock as Nettle rolled their 
sleeves back down and pulled on their gloves. They could do that 
with a touch. He felt his numb arm tingle and imagined it ripped 
apart, bleeding like the angler had. 


“| don't like doing that. Sorry.” Nettle gestured at him vaguely, as if 
waving a hand in front of his eyes. “You ok? That can be hard to see 
even when you're not the one inflicting it.” 


Before Fenton could reply, there was a loud groan from the angler. 
Nettle whipped around, ready for a repeat of the gorefest they’d just 
inflicted, but the creature was just as dead as they’d anticipated. The 
groaning was from underneath it. 


“Aries,” Fenton breathed, and they both dashed to heft the angler’s 
head off her, Nettle keeping a wide berth in an obvious effort not to 
touch Fenton. She was still, not a twitch from any of her limbs, but 
her eyes were flickering wildly. Fenton saw the heavy bruising 
around her neck, and it clicked. She was paralysed. He got Nettle to 
step back, then reached into the thing's guts and pulled out Trench's 
corpse. He rolled it over and tugged the backpack off its shoulders. 


After a half-second of hesitation, he took the time to roll the body 
back over and close its eyes. He wasn't a fan of Trench, but still, 
one deserved the right to dream when they reached Corbenic. 


The pulled out Trench’s hefty med kit and was in the process of 
assembling a neck brace on Aries when Willow’s voice buzzed in 
over comms. “Status report, stat. You’ve got two minutes until asset 
materialisation, 66.” 


To Fenton’s surprise, it was Nettle who answered first. “Uh, Trench 
is down, ma'am. Aries is incapacitated but still alive, | think. Fenton’s 
putting together the, uh, they’re bracing her neck. Uhhh, we killed a 
big monster fish thing.” 


“Casualties are acceptable." There was a half-second of pause. "I'm 
sorry, though. You’re in the antechamber?” 


“The - yeah, we’re here. Map says we're looking for something on 
the north wall?” Nettle rose from their squatting position by the 
angler’s tail and scanned slowly. 


“Look for an unusually flat section of rock. There should be a big 
round metal piece inlaid into it.” 


Nettle was against the north wall now, running their hand along the 
rock. The metal circle was clear as day, could they not see it? 
Fenton finished up with the brace and hoisted Aries into a fireman 
lift. Risky, but necessary for mobility if they had to run again later. 
She grunted into his shoulder, her drool soaking through the back of 
his thin shirt. He chose to interpret it as thanks. 


“Ok, I’ve got it. Big circle, ma’am.” Nettle stepped back from the wall, 
trying to make out the detail in the gloom. “It's just a rim, though, 
stone again inside. Should I—” 


“You don't need to do anything. I’m activating the circle via a relay in 
your collar. Lets hope Trench did his job right with those 
generators.” As she spoke, a hum started up deep below them and 
the metal in front of Nettle began to glow a faint blue. 


“Actually, Nettle, step back. Quick.” 


Nettle didn’t question the order, darting out of the way as the glow 
became a piercing light and, with the faintest of splashing noises, a 
man careened out of the solid stone wall, tumbling to a stop where 
Nettle had stood a second before. He wore the same orange 
overalls they all wore. Who-? 


Willow answered his question before he’d asked it, speaking over 
speaker comms from Nettle’s collar. “Welcome back to reality, Agent 
Alvares.” 


On his shoulder, Aries barked a harsh laugh that turned into a 
hacking cough, her body rocking with the force of her diaphragm 
spasming. “Hgfhh, fuggn... Alvrez!” Her speech was spluttered, 
slurred, but she’d undoubtedly said the man’s name. Fenton turned 
so she could see him. “Alvrez, yhuu.. Yuh... YHUU WANKR!” 


“Merry Christmas, Aries.” Willow cooed happily. “Prepare for 
extraction, folks.” 


Other works by Rimple 


SCP-2779, Rating: 187 
SCP-3880, Rating: 169 
SCP-2338, Rating: 153 
SCP-2559, Rating: 145 
SCP-948, Rating: 134 
Operation OverMeta, Rating: 120 

SCP-3559, Rating: 71