Priss' mind was numbed after a whole day of listening to Frank 
talking in three or four languages, reinstating old friendships and 
making new ones. In the blur, she had been regaled with an 
interesting practical class on diplomacy adapted to the Sool region 
— which had been mind-numblingly boring indeed — and on how 
the MCF interacted with local authorities everywhere. Frank knew 
when to be tactful, where to press his interlopers and how to do so; 
and, of course, had a certain talent for what he called "private 
contribution to the cause." But for the most part, Priss had just been 
along for a crazed, hot ride. 


And she had been carrying her backpack with an almost 
monomaniac obsession. 


What if they assault us?, she suddenly thought. 


They got to a dirt road that run parallel to the west side of the hill, 
near the camp. The cubes were, in theory, being planted there that 
very night. There weren't any lampposts, and Priss wasn't used to 
the measly light of the moon. 


Every shadow was a threat. 


The ape brain took over, and primal fears, the old friends pushed 
into the unconscious of the no-longer-a-prey humankind, reigned 
supreme again. 


Now, as we walk down the hillside. It's dark here, and we are just 
two tired whites just outside a village and a camp filled with 
desperate people. And we're not armed. It would only take two, or 
three, or more if they are trained and trying to be silent. They could 
take us down and have us with our pants down- 


As those thoughts started to gain way into her mouth, Priss noticed 
Frank was breathing laboriously, noisily and passing his left hand 
over and over his right chest. Suddenly, between a step and the 
next, he fell to his knee. 


"Man, what's up with you?", she nervously asked. "Don't just fall 
here, this is not-" 


"I know, | know. It-it'll just go away in a moment, okay!? Let me 
breathe! Jesus-" 


Priscilla looked down to him. In the now dim, far light that came from 
the bonfire, his face looked contorted and unnatural. He returned her 
gaze, all while trying to calm his breath. 


"Sorry. It's-l have a condition, okay?" 

"Panic attacks condition or heart attack condition?" 

Frank shivered for a moment, but in the end, he just shrugged. 
"Just-just panic. Well, sort of. Been having them since a little before 


| left the skippers. My mother had them too. Guess it runs in the 
family," he admitted. "It will go away in a moment." 


"Can you stand? I'd hate to be mauled by a tiger or something." 


Frank stuttered and laughed nervously. "A tiger? Here?" 


Priscilla looked at the now crouching man, feeling anger and shame 
filling her face. Fortunately, it was dark. How quickly that has 
become a good thing, she thought. 


"Fuck you, what do | know? It's not even my universe." 


Frank just laughed again. Then, suddenly stopped and seemed to 
listen. 


Priscilla stood alert, too. "| can hear it, too," she whispered. They 
heard an engine. Soon, a pair of headlights appeared, quickly 
coming to them along the road. 


It was a big MCF pickup, loaded with something large, covered in 
tarp and, judging by the way its heft leaned the open bed to which it 
was chained, heavy. Both relaxed, relieved to see the logo of the 
Charitable on the doors. 


The vehicle stopped near them. The driver, a tall, black skinned man 
in a dark form-fitting suit, stepped down. "Good night, miss Locke. 
You okay there, Frank?" 


"Yes, Frans, I'm fine," he said, managing to sound calm again, "just 
a bad step. You know Locke?" 


"Sort of." He came closer to them, and extended his hand to shake 
Priss', as he said in a lower voice: "Frangois Olympe. I've been told 
you are here on Lindberg's orders, not on the phoo's orders, and 
that he is your minder. No comments, no questions asked. Is that 
right?" 


"Why did they tell you?", Priss said, suddenly feeling uncomfortable 
at the thought of sharing her cover with too many people. 


"What if Frank died? They needed an insurance escort", was the 
man's nonchalant answer. The other Security Executive laughed at 
that. 


Feeling little to no trust in what he said, Priss carefully began to 
shake his hand, only to retire it quickly. "That is a glove, right?" 


With the permission of Agent __, Personnel 2/677 removed 
SCP-677 from containment and assembled it, claiming that he was 
“gonna break the world record for Extreme Pogo.” After donning a 
parachute and attaching several restraining devices between him 
and SCP-677, Personnel 2/677 began jumping. After eight such 
jumps of varying heights, SCP-677 immediately shot into the air, 
breaking its restraints and [DATA EXPUNGED]. Personnel 2/677 
was given medical treatment and severely disciplined. 


« SCP-676 | SCP-677 | SCP-678 » 


Olympe simply turned back to the pickup and got in, leaving the 
question in the air. "I'll be using the road to move the cubes now, 
Skippy. Jacob told me they're fresh and ready for transplant. Better 
stay with the others, they are just ahead." 


"Right, thanks." 


"See you two later," Frans said, and started the pickup again. It 
accelerated until Priss couldn't tell its dark form from the rest of the 
obscure nighttime. 


Then, she looked at Frank. "How's the leg?" 
"Shut up and help me up." 


After a few minutes of silent walking, they saw the flashlights of 
those volunteers waiting in the area designated as "quarters" in the 
general planning for the camp. Twenty four squares, roughly three 
meters in side each, had been drawn with white chalk. They almost 
glistened under a couple of humming floodlights, fed by a roaring 
field generator. 


Frank, apparently recovered, started talking to some of his... 
friends? Workmates? Priscilla couldn't make out any formal relation 
between ranks within the Work Group, nor was willing to go over 
there and mingle. Not yet. She did not feel comfortable with such 
thinly defined relations. 


"Nice night we're having, right, Locke?" 


Priss turned to see Sarah Desjeux coming to her. The three Satanist 
Scientists and that other woman — Lila, she thought to herself — 
walked behind her, loaded with bags and cheerfully speaking in a 
language she did not recognize. The Health Executive member split 
from her little coven and went straight towards her. 


"It's dark," Priss said, without thinking. 


"Well, that's a night for ya!" Sarah answered, punctuating every word 
with a melodious inflection that annoyed Priss. The grinning dwarf 
kept talking, now in a more normal voice: "You've been assigned a 
one-person room, by the way. | thought you could use the intimacy, 


although we will use half of it to store some supplies," she admitted, 
with a slightly less bright tone. "We're short on storage space, after 
all." 


"Nil desperandum, Opal," Frank said, coming back from his 
conversation with a distant smile. Priscilla glanced at him for an 
instant and asked Desjeux: 


"Food and medical supplies?" 


"Oh!" Sarah clapped her hands and tightly gripped them together. 
"And books, and herbs, and spare parts for the trucks, and Vestan 
seeds, and-" 


"And supplies in general, Locke," Frank cut her superior, who looked 
somewhat grumpy at the interruption. 


"Oh. Ok." Intimacy at its finest. Joy. "As long as you knock before 
coming in to pick-" 


A loud noise was heard from the top of the hill. For some reason, 
Priss thought it sounded like a gigantic ball of compacted metallic 
scraps that was suddenly turning into a massive flower, blooming 
and tearing itself apart while doing so. It was followed by a quick, 
deaf thump that Priss felt more than heard. 


People around laughed and clapped when the thumping was heard 
again, and again. Those were footsteps. Massive ones. 


The exhausted Priscilla simply couldn't gather the energy to be 
worried, but still asked the obvious questions. 


"What was that?", she asked Sarah, who had joined in the clapping. 


"That?," she said, as a loud thundering noise echoed around the 
place. "Oh, that was Olympe, riding the suit! An old thing, mind you, 
but how he managed to get the Servants of the Silicon Nornir to 
accede at the petition from the Coalition Undersecretary is a secret 
he'll take to the grave, I'm sure." 


"What suit?" 


She heard the thumping again, now coming closer to the camp. 
Soon, Priscilla saw a light, two of them in fact; they looked like the 
far headlights of a car, but they swayed with every thump and 
moved too fast to be rolling safely down that slope. 


Suddenly, as it came closer to them, she could make out the four 
meters tall metal behemoth. 


Its long, multi-joint arms embraced the concrete cube it carried like it 
was made of cardboard. As it came even closer to the range 
illuminated by the flood lights, Priss could see it looked like a 
massive, skeletal gorilla that moved in a misleadingly ponderous 
way; even if it looked like it was slow, that was just an impression 
created by its sheer bulk. It had moved faster well faster than a car 
could have rolled over that terrain. 


The thing looked skeletal, she thought, because it looked like it had 
been stripped down to its basest elements; it was all hydraulics and 
a bare stressing, reinforced metal structure with hanging cables 
covered by transparent plastic-looking membranes. Priss could now 
see a few hissing actuators in its hands and feet and a transparent 
canopy in its center, inside which Olympe was cramped, almost 
forced into a fetal position by the many controls and levers that 
surrounded him. 


"The Fifth Global Occult Coalition Donation! A perfectly functional 
and thoroughly disarmed test prototype Orange Suit! We call it the 
Old Orange!", Sarah happily screamed as the massive robot gently 
placed the cube in the ground, neatly parking it on one of the drawn 
squares. "PTOLEMY, well, the Coalition engineers, discontinued it 
because it had too high a profile. Too noisy and all that. Good for the 
transport of large crates, though, better than our meager trucks! 
Even if we have to limit its usage to night-time." 


Priscilla realized she was gaping at the scene. "The Coalition gave 
you a mech!?" 


"It may look like a beast, Locke, but it is a harmless beast! Besides, 
it got them lots of good publicity within their own organisation! PR is 
important when your job consists on killing people, you know." 


Priscilla watched as the thing walked back to the hospital, probably 
to get the next cube. "Is it going to bring all twenty four cubes here? 
Somebody will see it!" 


Sarah shrugged and giggled as Frank said: "Maybe, but a bit of 
indiscretion can't be compared to having a proper bunk so close to 
the camp, don't you think?" 


"Why not sleeping in the cubes up there, in the hospital? Where they 
were grown!" 


"There are a few beds up there already for the people that have to 
be there. These are getting placed here so we can use them as our 
temporary living quarters. It's better if we are closer to the camp. 
That's where we are needed. For as long as we are here, we'll live in 
there," Frank said. 


After his colleague was done talking, Sarah added in a confidential- 
sounding tone: "We would use the Vestan to create bigger places, 
or entire cities, even! We did, for a while. But they drew too much 
attention. The cubes aren't good to have entire families living on 
them, unfortunately... and more than a few would bring attention to 
us, So we'll be using them as storage and putting our bunks in; two 
or four per cube. That way, we can watch over the camp and sleep 
at the same time!," Opal raised her hands and sang: "Mul-ti- 
taskiiing!" 


"Ignore her, she's joking," Frank said. Almost immediately, he 
added: "Mostly." 


The volunteers stood away from the robot's path as it brought cube 
after cube to the camp. Mesmerized, Priss watched it for about half 
an hour before being gently pushed by Frank, who mentioned her 
cube was already rooted and ready to be inhabited. 


Everything was covered in white-green ceramics, or something that 
felt like it. There was a diminutive toilet and a small sink. There was 
electric light. 


There was a comfortable-looking bunk. 


She didn't even noticed it was still lightly wet and warm as she 
dropped into it, already asleep when she reached its surface. 


In the rapid and extravagant moving operation, two details went 
overlooked. 


First; there were six more cubes that had to be moved to the other 
sides of the projected area of the camp to use them as food 
distribution and storage centers and clinics, but the Suit had 
consumed its batteries. Without the kind of power necessary to 
recharge them immediately, the Work Group had to put it back into 
storage. Discreetly covered in the same tarp used by Olympe to 
conceal it, the Old Orange was placed in a patch of bare ground 
behind the hospital, where its bulking mass collapsed into a ball of 
solid wire and thick metal structure with that characteristic 
screeching sound. It would wait there until the power plant, 
programmed as part of the hospital and the water purification plant, 
was completely grown and ready to work. 


Second; and this one went entirely unnoticed. Several small rodents 
ventured a trip inside the previously closed and guarded perimeter 
of tarpaulin fences that surrounded the still-growing hospital. 
Wherever the cubes had been planted, a quickly dying paste of 
Mason Mold emitted a sickly sweet smell that exerted on them an 
overwhelming attraction. 


Even if most managed to leave on their own, the next morning 
several of the small animals were found lying on the already dry 
hollows where the cubes had been. After laconically asking his team 
of volunteers to go back to work, a preoccupied Jacob Torres 
gathered them, burnt them and, just to make sure they were nota 
problem, fed their ashes to the Hippo. The creature filtered them 
perfectly, while keeping what Jacob felt it was an accusatory silent. 


However, as he feared and kept to himself, the damage was already 
being done. 


« Breaking It Down To Me | Hub | Bed, Breakfast, Plague » 
\\ 5th-GOC-D-NA // 


Bed, Breakfast, Plague 


"Good morning, up and about, rise and shine, blah blah blah!" 


Priscilla Locke got up at seven AM, sharp, Somalia time, thanks to 
the loud shouting that emanated from the walls, straight into her 
ears. She managed to cover them for a few measly seconds. 


Then, the walls talked again. To her absolute horror, Priss realized 
they were talking with Sarah Desjeux's voice. 


"Will you wake up!? It's MEDICINE DAY! Come ON, 
parahealther, wake up, Frankie has been gone for hours and 
I've GOTTA SHOW YOU OUR STUFF!" 


Her voice went silent with a sizzling sound. By then, Priss was 
already squirming on the floor of the 'prefabricated' cubic room, and 
remembering how her room was not normal. It had been grown, it 
had an intercom and, apparently, it could be operated from the 
intercom as a god-damned home cinema system. 


Then, Priss saw her phone, and the time. She wondered when had 
that damned woman woken up. Wasn't she wired enough last night? 


Three minutes later, she was already dressed and ready to confront 
the day and a possibly drugged ecHealth. She was also loudly 
mumbling and grumbling under the unnecessary heft of her 
backpack and its main occupant, who- no, that was too heavy for its 
own good. 


She opened the door, expecting to find herself face to face with 
Opal; however, even if the woman's low stature would have made it 
difficult by itself, Priss's fear went unrealized, as she noticed her 
going from cube to cube, shouting into each intercom and giggling 
like a dope. A few volunteers were already up and out of bed, 
converging in front of a cubic structure slightly larger than the rest. 


The mess hall.