"| cleaned it up. That stuff's dangerous, wouldn't want someone to 
step on it." 


Felix rolled his eyes, gesturing around the room filled with 
deathtraps; Ruiz didn't notice, still engrossed in the cube. The 
Critic's hat still sat on his head, a flawlessly circular hole punched 
perfectly through the front. Felix went to pluck it off, then hesitated. 


"Felix." 


Felix spun to face the tall masked figure at the entryway. Ruiz 
looked up from his cube, and was struck with an instant sense of 
awe and confusion. The Janitor's dark trenchcoat dangled down its 
legs, billowing around without a breeze. It glanced around, silently 
appraising the room. Ruiz looked straight into The Janitor's 
darkened eyeholes. His pupils widened, his tongue felt as dry and 
rough as sandpaper, his lungs felt like they were on fire and his 
extremities felt numb and cold. For the first time in his life, Ruiz felt 
deep, soul-crushing fear. Well, that or love. He’d never felt either 
before, and from what he had heard, the two seemed very similar. 
Here was the being that would deliver him from his conundrum, the 
instrument of salvation; the supplier of The Critic's last rites. Ruiz 


blurted out the one thing he knew, from an artistic perspective, was 
objectively true. 


"You are beautiful." 


Ruiz stood and walked to The Janitor, grinning dumbly while offering 
the completed Rubik's cube. The Janitor cocked its head to one 
side, as if confused, then took the cube and placed it inside an inner 
trenchcoat pocket. A heavily obscured, almost mechanical voice 
buzzed from the diaphragm of the gas mask, and yet Ruiz 
understood every word. 


"You bring me order where once there was chaos. My thanks." 


Ruiz's grin widened even more, stunned into silence. Felix 
interjected. 


"The body's over here, Janitor." 


The Janitor turned and walked to the covered body. It carefully 
removed the blanket, folded it, and laid it down on the ground near 
the seat. It moved its hands into the body's pockets, checking for 
anything important. It removed a wallet; when opened, it was not 
simply empty, but brand new, the cardboard inserts still keeping its 
shape flat. The Janitor placed it on top of the blanket. It turned to 
Felix, asking for reassurance. 


"lam to remove the body, then?" 


"If it's not too much trouble. Sorry about... well, you knew him better 
than | did." 


"| knew him not better or worse. | knew what he was, and only that." 


The Janitor turned to the body, moving its gloved hands across the 
clothes, continuing to search for hidden possessions. It stood, then 
turned to Felix and Ruiz. 


"Avert your eyes. This will be brief." 


The pair of them turned away, then heard The Janitor click its 
fingers. Ruiz heard the sound of crunching bone, squelching flesh, 


crackling flames and running water. And then, in the next instant, it 
was gone. 


"It is complete." 


Ruiz turned around. The body was gone, as were the clothes, 
blanket, and wallet. The Janitor was crouched over the chair. All that 
remained of The Critic was his grey fedora, sitting immobile where 
the body had once sat. 


"| cannot remove the hat." 


Ruiz widened his eyes, surprised that anything was beyond the 
capabilities of the masked giant. 


"Why not?" 

"lam not allowed to. Is that all, Felix?" 

The Janitor stood and spun to face the man. 

"| think it should be, yes. Many thanks; I'm in your debt, as always." 


"Be prepared to follow through on that. | may collect sooner than 
you think." 


Felix chuckled as The Janitor briskly walked out the door. 


Ruiz continued to stare at the grey fedora. 


"Sam \" 
"Tim?" 


The Sculptor ran into The Composer's office, interrupting his work at 
a synth bank. 


"We've fucked up, Sam. Snipper's gone rogue, fucked everyone last 
night. Suits everywhere, and... fuck. You don't want to know what 
happened, man. It was bad. Suits pulled Bob and Robbo out, so 
they're gone, Felix's buggered off, Sandy's in the hospital still, and 


Critic won't answer his fucking phone." 
"Fuck. So it's you and me, then?" 
"Me and you... ha. Not quite." 


The Sculptor moved towards The Composer, driving a knife deep 
into his neck. The Composer's eyes widened in shock; he moved his 
mouth to scream, only coughing up blood. 


"Shhhhh, shh shh shh... don't try to talk. Whatever you were going 
to say was probably as stupid and derivative as your shitty little 
excuses for songs." 


The Composer mouthed silently, eyes rolling up into his head. 


"It's all part of the plan, Sam, don't worry. We didn't fuck up, you did. 
| executed this shit fucking flawlessly. Yeah, yeah, | was the one 
who gave Sandy that play, | pinned it on Ruiz, | sent those lazy 
fuckers Bob and Robbo in and got them caught. If my trace on Felix 
is still working, then Critic's dead, too. Leaving me to be the king of 
the hill... after some housekeeping, of course. That asshole Ruiz 
made a move before | could; Snipper reckons he was first into the 
subterfuge game. Those upstart little twats almost screwed me out 
of a well-planned coup. Still, had you all fooled to the end. I'm the 
last one standing. The way it was always meant to be." 


The Sculptor pulled the knife from The Composer's throat, letting his 
body drop to the floor. He flicked blood and viscera from the blade 
and carefully placed it back into his pocket. 


"| was here first, you fucks. | did it first, | was the one who got this 
shit started, and you have the fucking nerve to make me one of 
many? It doesn't work like that. It will never work like that. | am 
above you. Compared to what I've done, you're nothing. You get 
me? YOU GET ME?" 


The corpse remained silent. The Sculptor laughed madly, then 
abruptly stopped, angrily glaring at the gaping neck wound. 


"That's what | fucking thought." 


The Sculptor walked out of the room, leaving Sam's body to bleed 
out, rot, and be forgotten. 


the third of one is dawn of war 
The third of two is second strike. 
The Third Of Three Is The Last Straw 
ESCALATION AND A KNIFE 
« Detained | Hub | Snipped From The Same Cloth » 


Snipped From The Same Cloth 


Pico Wilson sat in the middle of his corpse pile. 
"What would you do with the powers of a god?" 


The corpses remained silent. This was partially because they were 
uncertain of how to answer, but mostly because they were dead. 


"Most people couldn't handle it. Some people would go out and 
solve world hunger, cure poverty, disease, inequality. Some would 
turn the world into their personal playground, wreaking havoc or 
destruction. Some people would just hide away, fearing what they 
might do if they lose control." 


Pico jumped from the pile of bodies, landing like a cat on the 
wooden floorboards. He had picked a long-abandoned building as 
his new home; mice scuttled around the walls, water slowly leaked 
from rusty pipes. 


"It's like this, right... if you make someone a god, if you give them 
power over reality and an undo key, absolve them of all 
responsibility or fear of retaliation? They stop caring. When you can 
solve any problem by clicking your fingers, then everything just 
stops being fun. Existence itself becomes joyless." 


The corpses remained silent. 


"Seventy percent, according to the books. That's how many gods kill 
themselves - sorry, ‘Reality Benders’. That's how many deified, 
glorious beings decide to ragequit reality. It's scary, isn't it? Scary 
that beings like that think that the world we live in just isn't worth it. 
Seventy percent figure it's easier on them just to stop thinking. 
Forever. With numbers like that, how can ants like us compare? 
With people as great and powerful as that, how the fuck do | justify 
continuing my own existence? How does anyone?" 


The corpses remained silent. Pico paced pensively. 


"The answer's simple. To keep people sane, to keep them satiated, 
to keep them static, you need to give them problems. Problems that 
they care about, problems that they can't solve trivially. It's like, you 
take a maths professor, and give him a bunch of addition problems. 
He could do it all, sure, but he wouldn't. Because it's not fun. No, 
he'd move on to algebra, and so we give him the more advanced 
stuff, solving for x, and he gets bored of that, and so we pump it up a 
bit, we give him functions, and sets, and transfinites and 
transcendentals, and imaginary numbers and quaternions and all 
sorts of nonsense and utter fucking bullshit... but, once they 
understand it, they'll get bored. People always get bored, so you 
need to mix up the problems, you need to change, right, you need to 
change the solutions to old problems. You get it?" 


The corpses remained silent. 


"So they figure, it's all below them or whatever, and they off 
themselves, like whiny little kids. But you see, the big man in the 
sky, he didn't like this, right, and so he sent down... | dunno what 
you'd call him. The holiest of all men, | think, my personal messiah. 
So there was a stupid little doctor who was messing around, and the 
man up there, he takes a gander at what's going on, and the doctor 
looks up at the creator of all the fucking universe and he says 
‘Making Life’. And the doctor carries on, and he doesn't realise it, but 
the guy upstairs tweaks one of them a little bit, and he turns it into a 
man called Redd. Mister Redd, if you'd believe it. And Mister Redd 
comes down and teaches people the most important lesson, the 
only lesson worth teaching, right. The only problem that keeps 
changing, the only way you can deal, properly, with being a god, is 
being your own problem, is hating yourself, is being contrapositive to 
your own soul and going absolutely, unforgivably insane. Redd's like 
Jesus, right? And the man in the sky's the one who named hin, it's a 
really clever little thing, because his name's kind of derivative of his 
own. Personally, | think it's a touch too obvious. Mister Redd, the 
Scarlet King incarnate." 


The corpses remained silent. 


"No gasping? No shocked faces? Tough crowd, you lot. That was 


by their usual means. Proximity to any source of decaying flesh will 
excite subjects into mating behavior, coupling without regard to 
original species. Any mechanically successful copulation will 
produce a fertile clutch of SCP-726 eggs, which reconstructed 
females attempt to deposit on any appropriate food source. 


SCP-726 has proven capable of replicating a complete body from 
any volume of flesh regardless of its condition, including multiple 
copies of the same body from disconnected fragments. 
Reconstructed bodies that have subsequently expired can be 
reconstituted again by SCP-726 like any other tissue sample, but 
are subject to an increasing degradation of accuracy (see attached 
Generation Log). 


Discovery: On August 16th, 19 aMrs. Faber of Beckley, West 
Virginia, was discovered nude in a dumpster behind a local ; 
engaging in [REDACTED] with a large male [REDACTED] and 
subsequently hospitalized for acute dementia. Over the following 
weeks, locals reported outbreaks of abnormal animal behavior, 
including large numbers of domestic cattle, swine, and poultry 
inconsistent with local livestock. Foundation operatives deduced the 
reproductive habits of SCP-726 and discovered animals 
reconstituting from meat scraps in the dumpster where Mrs. Faber 
had been found. During containment sweeps, identical instances 
of Mrs. Faber were found wandering the woods near her property. 
Under interrogation, Mr. Faber admitted to the murder and 
dismemberment of his wife. 


Test Log: 8/17: Dr. SCP-726 Generation Log 

I've decided to begin by testing the limits of repeated replication. A 
single SCP-726 egg will be introduced per sample. Due to their rapid 
multiplication, maggot volume does not affect their speed of 
operation, only the size of the organism to be reconstructed. 


Sample: one (1) freshly killed Norwegian rat, cut in half lengthwise. 
Result: SCP-726 reconstituted two versions of the same rat, their 
coat patterns mirror images of one another. 


Sample: remains of duplicate rats from previous experiment, 
processed into a fine paste and mixed. 


quite a twist, you know? That's what the world's built on. Revelation 
on revelation without any real grit beneath. But | digress. So Mister 
Redd, right, he comes down and he's basically Jesus, but the real 
one. And he tries to teach people how to handle godhood, yeah? He 
tries to teach people, but they don't listen right. So Redd made sure 
me and my brother listened. Now, my brother, he's a huge fucking 
heretic, he wouldn't listen to the word, right. But | did, | listened and | 
listened good, and so here | am. Passing on the word, trying to get 
people to listen, and they never do. You're all stupid, too stupid to go 
mad. | could handle godhood, right? | could totally handle it, | think." 


Pico spun around just as The Janitor appeared at his door. 
"What do you think?" 


The Janitor started to move towards him, raising its hand towards 
Pico's throat. 


"I reclaim the title of The Snipper." 

The Janitor stopped walking, lowering its arm. The Snipper frowned. 
"Ah, that still got you. How sad. Why aren't you free?" 

"lam free." 


"No, you aren't. We've been over this, remember? We've been over 
this." 


The Snipper walked over to The Janitor. 


"So how does this shit work, hm? Utter subservience to anyone 
whose name begins with 'The'? Because if that's it, this is seriously 
ripe for abuse." 


"There is-" 
"Silence!" 
The Janitor remained silent. 


"You're not free, see? You're not. Anyway, | was in the middle of 


something. Sit down until | finish ranting.” 


The Janitor crouched, then sat cross-legged on the floor. It looked 
up at the frowning madman in front of it, raspily breathing through its 
gas mask. 


"Okay. Anyway. Something about... satiation, yes. See, all that 
people need to be happy is to never be happy. Seems fucking 
stupid, but so are people. So, say you've got a shitload of people, all 
of them being unfairly ‘endowed’, and I'm not talking about the size 
of their cock here, but their crazy powers. Seven of ten off 
themselves, so what are the other three to do? See, the big bad 
man had them all occupy each others' time, and my brother the 
heretic didn't really fancy that. So he went off and he had this big, 
elaborate, bullshit plan to kill him. Then | walk in and blow some 
brains out like Nobody's business." 


The Janitor remained silent. Pico stalked around the sitting black 
figure, treading on its midnight trenchcoat. 


"It was at that point that | realised, perhaps, I'd made a fatal error. | 
only wanted to free you, you beautiful thing, and the fact that this 
one man was the singular uniting force behind the three most 
powerful paramilitary organisations, our metaphorical three people 
left, completely slipped my fucking mind. Of course, | also did the 
thing with the slime... which you ended up stopping, unfortunately. It 
would have been so impressive; a nice self-cauteristing wound. Now 
everyone wants to kill me. Which, | think, is a bit of an overreaction." 


Pico walked over and flopped, face-first, into his pile of dead bodies. 
He spoke again, words muffled and incomprehensible, while The 
Janitor sat and stared. The Snipper leapt out of his pile again, 
holding a decapitated head in his hands. 


"You know what | despise most of all? Trying to get it to make 
sense. Nothing makes sense. No point in trying to understand any of 
it. Accept it and move on, you know? It doesn't matter if it's coherent 
or not." 


The Janitor remained silent. The Snipper jumped over and sat down 
in front of it. 


"Can | take your mask off?" 
"No." 
"Don't move."