"And now," he said. "I will read from Dr. Merritt's sins, as he himself 
wrote them." 


Silas’ shuttle made the initial jump out of Luna. Now he could 
actually see the Homeworld, the shriveled husk that it was. 


"Experiment Log 18729-1!" shouted the priest. "Test 1! D-01921 
entered the testing chamber and read to SCP-18729 an excerpt 
from The Dark of the Eyes by Fortunate Bounty of the Third Mother! 
Instant incineration of D-01921 ensued!" 


Where Canada had once been, there was now a great red ocean. In 
Europe, the massive green vortex of the Mint Zone swirled, laying 
waste to the country once known as Germany. 


"Test 2!" screamed the priest. "D-01729 entered the testing chamber 
and read to SCP-18729 a copy of SCP-18729's own containment 
procedures! Data expunged - they themselves cannot look upon 
their travesties! They cannot face what they have done to our 
Homeworld!" 


The blood ocean and the Mint Zone were the biggest dangers on the 
Homeworld, but Silas knew that there were a thousand other 
anomalies, each capable of killing in horrific ways. 682, 058, 173... 
there were too many to list. Silas didn't think anyone would ever be 
able to live on the Homeworld again. Didn't know why anyone would 
want to. 


"The Desecrators refuse to repent their transgressions! They have 
brought our Homeworld to death, and so we are forced to do the 
same to them!" With that, the priest lifted up a pistol and blasted off 
the scientist's head. The image of his corpse remained on the 
screen for a few seconds, but was then replaced by pictures and 
names of known Foundation members. "Stay strong, stay vigilant, 


my children," said the priest. "This has been Father Brazil. 
Goodnight." 


Silas looked at the Homeworld for another second, a withered dead 
ball framed by the light of the sun. Then he pulled a lever, warped, 
and was gone. 


What Love Is, Part One 


"Warm and Wet" 
By Dr Rights 


SCP-542, Herr Chirurg, stands imposing at his current seven-foot- 
two even while seated, the recently-replaced bones in his legs 
having boosted his height, though he still hunches over under the 
strain of the bizarrely distended ribcage and the too-full torso. His 
arms hang well to his knees, but they are too constantly in motion to 
tell, the inhumanly long, slim fingers, wrapped around a book and 
drumming on the arm of his chair. He looks up with mismatched 
eyes, lips pursed in bemused thought, before splitting into a grin that 
spans practically the full width of his face. 


I’m...I’m sorry. You want me to talk about...what? 


No, no, it’s fine. | should have expected the most bizarre 
conversation as soon as you came in with a tape recorder. And for 
once, | don’t even have to take anything open to speak about it, ja? 


Love...I’m not sure if | can answer, exactly, what love is to me. 
Liebe... 


You know...that feeling you get, when the person you love very 
much touches you? Not like that, well, yes like that...but no matter 
where or when, that touch. When they place a hand upon your 
shoulder or gently brush their fingertips against the small of your 
back...that is what living tissue feels like. Once you get past the skin 
and into the true workings of the body, it’s just...that. Very real, hard 
to deny. 


...’m honestly surprised and impressed. Most, at this point, would 
have left the room... 


the reproduction of spores. SCP-995 has been known to reach the 
size of [DATA REDACTED] in diameter. Infants have become prey, 
along with household pets. If a large population of SCP-995 has 
spawned in a small area, SCP-995 will start to migrate, having the 
capabilities of infesting an average house by the hundreds in a few 
days. 


The first instance of SCP-995 was discovered in 's Furniture 
Shop in ,GA which closed down the previous month due to 
financial issues. A group of adolescents trespassed in the closed 
shop and discovered the partially consumed body of a homeless 
man, who seemed to have taken shelter in the store. Police were 
called in and discovered a large colony of SCP-995 in the store, and 
a Foundation team was sent to investigate. The team administered 
Class-A amnestics to the Police officers involved and shipped the 
colony of SCP-995 to Site- . 


Addendum: SCP-995 has been relocated to a larger containment 
room since the locations of 3 new colonies have been discovered 
and contained. A list has been configured to catalog the current 
colonies and their diverse characteristics. 


List of Colonies of SCP-995 


Colony: SCP-995-A 

Discovered: 3/3/ 

Number of specimens: 349 

Description: SCP-995-A is the original colony of SCP-995. 
SCP-995-A are greyish blue in color, ranging from 8 centimeters to 
40 centimeters in diameter during Mature age. 

Special Characteristics: SCP-995-A move on 4 appendages with 
clawed feet and currently appear to have the fastest reproductive 
rate. 


Colony: SCP-995-B 

Discovered: 6/ / 

Number of specimens: 10 

Description: SCP-995-B are dark green and range from 30 
centimeters to centimeters in diameter during mature age. 
Special Characteristics: SCP-995-B are the most aggressive of 
the species, and have an elongated snout with extremely sharp, 


Oh, yes, I'll continue. 


| long lost the urge to engage in copulation, you know that...but that 
does not mean that | do not still make love, if in different ways. A 
dear friend of mine- don’t give me that look, child. | still make 
friends, you know that. But a dear friend of mine was in an... 
accident, of sorts. She was eviscerated, slit open from her 
collarbone down to her pelvic bone. Everybody else left her for dead 
in that moment, but |...could not. 


Even as | knelt down beside her, she attempted to smile. Her 
diaphragm was, of course, badly damaged and one of her lungs 
ripped open, so she couldn’t truly speak, but | am fairly good at 
reading lips. She spoke to me- “Mein Herz ist jetzt deins” she said. 


“My heart is yours now.” 


Earlier | had...admitted that, were she to ever let her guard down 
around me, | would pluck her heart from her chest- oh, such a 
schdnes Herz, perfect and beautiful in sound, always such a steady 
beat, even when she was scared. 


| will admit, | was tempted. She was so broken, the poor muscles 
and flesh all ripped and torn asunder...but even if nobody else 
would try to fix her, | Knew that | could, mein Gott, | knew it. 


The worst damage was to her chest. The ribcage, oh, those poor 
ribs...the sternum had been pushed aside, into her lungs. It was 
very lucky that | had quite a bit of wire and string on me, indeed. | 
was able to repair the damage to her lungs best | could, and the 
entire ribcage had to be wired back into place. It wasn’t a perfect 
job, but | would be able to do more later, for now, | just had to keep 
her alive before she bled out. 


Was? Oh...yes, | can gloss over the details, if you insist, but yes... 
she lived. For another three years, she lived. 


Love? 
...Love was when | was inside her. 


No, not like that. Don’t give me that look when I’m trying to explain 


something, child. 


To feel her whole body, so alive, still alive, to know that she could be 
saved...when | gently sewed her broken intestines back together, or 
when | coaxed her heart to resume beating when it threatened to 
stop...that was love. It was, indeed, comparable to making love, if 
not in ecstasy, but in emotion. To gently close her body back up and 
watch as she breathed on her own was utter relief and bliss. 


Love is...Hei8 und na. Love is warm and wet. It’s alive and 
throbbing, moving...flushed with blood and- 


... You look uncomfortable. Would you like for me to stop? |am 
almost done, /ch verspreche. Hah. 


You see...our interpretations of love aren’t that different when you 
get down to it. There’s still that first soft, gentle touch, and then 
delving into something far more...intimate. Whether it’s through flesh 
and blood or not. And then everything is warm and wet, and alive. 


...You’re the color of a tomato. Lets stop this and play chess, mein 
Doktor. Maybe we can even bet on the stakes this time...we could 
put those lovely eyes of yours on the table. No? Well... maybe next 
time, ja? 


| really would be gentle, you know. 
Hei und naB, indeed. 
| call white this time. 


[[Note - Doing some minor edits over time as friends who know 
some German (unlike me) read it over.]] 


What Passes as Normal in the Digital Age 


Any time she heard the word normie, she had to wince. And in her 
circles, she ended up doing a lot of wincing. It wasn't their fault for 
the most part. It was a useful word, a good coded word. Said a lot 
without spending too much time saying nothing at all. But there was 
something about the way it sounded. The way the r fell into the m 
slid into the ie. And that's not even touching the displeasure of no. 


Dahlia hated walking to the post office. Her campus was small. 
Quaint small. The post office was a five to ten minute walk from 
where she lived if she felt like moseying. And Dahlia tended toward 
moseying. It was in a small town, and to be honest, most of the town 
was the campus. If not the entire town itself. Being in a small 
environment like the one she was in made her lazy. It made her 
resent having to walk up a hill to go to the dining hall. It made her 
resent her weird roommate who looked at her like she was an alien, 
and it made her think it was more of a pain in the ass than it was 
worth it to go to the post office and get her birthday presents. 


Her hands jammed in her pockets, black coat kept tight against her 
skinniness, she wondered and wandered. Her boots were getting 
covered in salt and slush, but that was what boots were for. Still, 
they were black and nice and new and just from Christmas. 


When she came into the post office, she tried to shake off the slush, 
stomping on a sad, wet mat that got caught in the door every time it 
was opened. 


“This is someone's fetish,” she said, and a townie looked at her with 
even more growing horror than usual. 


Really, she wanted to like them. Just because someone was rural 
didn't make them bad. Her grandparents had been farmers, and 
they still lived in Bumfuck Nowhere, Ohio, just in a different part of 
the state than her own personal slice of Bumfuck Nowhere. 


The PO Boxes were small. Way too small. Most of them were for the 
students, rented out by year. Most of them were filled with junk mail. 
Most of them clearly hadn't been checked in a while. Her box was 
one of countless in rows and columns, with just a hint of glass and 
some nice old timey brass. It looked quaint. She turned the knob set 
in the wall, and it made her think of her high school locker. Gym 
class. Towels around waists and that weird move dudes did when 
they tucked their balls between their legs and tricked people to look 
at their weird thigh gap. 


“That was the first time | saw tucking.” She said to no one. For no 
one. Art is over. One billion million dead. 


When she unlocked the box, she pulled out a hefty amount of junk 
mail, some actual addressed letters, and three slips to get 
something too big to fit into the little cubby. She sighed, shoved the 
rest of the mail that actually mattered into her canvas bag and 
marched through the doors into the extremely small town post office. 


Really, it was a guy behind a desk with some mail behind him. That 
didn't strike her as a post office. Sure, she could mail stuff and get 
stuff, but what sense did it make to call something so small a post 
office? A mini office, maybe, if anything. 


The old man behind the counter gave her the same awkward, 
unsure smile when he saw her that the people around the town 
always did. Guy clearly wasn't sure what he was supposed to call 
her. That was the way it was with old people. But at least the post 
office general or whatever his position entailed was nice enough not 
to drop some slurs or anything. Of course, that didn't mean he was 
going to use any pronouns, either. 


“Well, hi there.” A perfectly polite man. She wondered if he would 
think of her as a faggot or something as soon as she left. She tried 
not to let it bother her. If she wondered if everyone she saw thought 
she was a degenerate, she wouldn't have time for other, more 
serious forms of self-loathing. 


“Yeah, | got a package here. Uh, three packages. Three. Here.” And 
she put the slips on the counter, holding her arms at her side. She 
wondered if that was all she had to do, all she had to say. She 


stuffed her hand into her bag and said, “Do you wanna see my ID?” 


The old man waved her away without looking, eyes on the tickets. 
He picked them up and walked deep into the post office's mail room. 
Which was actually only a few feet away. In fact, she even watched 
him bend over and pick up three packages. One was thick, in a big 
white United States Post Office envelope type thing, probably fit to 
burst. The other was a cardboard box covered in enough duct tape 
to probably fix a bridge or something. But, like, a big bridge. The 
other was a small box. Kind of shaped like a ring box. She hoped it 
wasn't a ring. She loved Andy, but Dahlia wasn't exactly the type of 
girl to get married. Anytime soon, at least. 


Did people mail proposals? People probably didn't mail proposals. 
But she didn't think that Andy would be aware of or care about such 
convention. 


The envelope, though gigantic, fit in her canvas bag, along with the 
small box. She had to hold the gigantic duct-taped monstrosity in her 
arms. Who the fuck would give her something like that? Dahlia 
thanked the post master office sergeant or whatever his title was 
and toted the box through the doorway into the cold. 


It'd suck to have to drop off her shit before her next class, but 
whatever. At times like this, going to a small, small college were 
great. Still, she wished she was magic. Like a character from Hunter 
X Hunter. Wasn't that what they were like? She wondered if Jude 
could fuck up enough and accidentally spec all of his magic wrong. 
Could Armand do nen? 


Could they ever use up all their magic? Was it like a a JRPG with an 
MP gauge? Did they have to give something up to be able to get 
stronger? Not like Fullmetal Alchemist shit, because she was pretty 
sure equivalent exchange was out the window, but could limiting the 
magic make it more potent? 


It didn't matter, though. Not like she could do anything special. All 
she could do was carry the giant ass gift some idiot best friend of 
hers got her and the heavy fucking shitty canvas bag and climb up 
to her dorm, and in that moment, as one of so many, she wished 
that she was like her friends. She wished that she wasn't such a 


fucking normie. 


And into the cold, the skinny girl, in her heavy black coat and ever 
fashionable black tights, trudged back to her dorm. 


Women in Early European History. It was a two-hundred level class. 
Maybe a three-hundred level? It didn't matter. It was easy, and it 
counted toward her Gender Studies minor. And besides, it probably 
would fill some weird anthropology requirement. 


It went off without a hitch, as usual. Sure, there were only about 
twelve other people in the course, but it was lecture-based. The 
professor was a nice woman, but she was old. And Dahlia knew, 
deep down, that she wasn't sure what to do with her. She didn't 
exactly have a Janice Raymond tattoo on her neck or follow Cathy 
Brennan on Twitter or anything. 


But she stared at her sometimes, when they spoke about 
womanhood. When they spoke about manhood. Was that the 
paranoia? Sometimes, she thought she read too much into nothing. 
Looks didn't necessarily always have to be pointed. Maybe she was 
just engaging with one of the few students who seemed actively 
interested in the material.