"CONCERNED, it says! ME? About the fucking GOC figuring out 
we're breaking the 1987's agreement in at least eight points?" 


"Excuse me?" 


"We don't deal with the GOC, Hippo. We don't deal with them ‘cause 
they don't actually LIKE us. They think we're more trouble than we're 
worth, and they think we tell them whenever something goes awry, 
but this time we haven't told them, and if that thing from before, if 
Locke-oh God." 


"I told you I'm not that." 


At the time, Sarah Desjeux was alone in her surgery room. Out of 
mere habit, she merrily hummed, but she wasn't putting her heart 
into it; her mind was filled with what her mother would have called 
‘plenty of bad omens material’. 


-she placed all the boxes with surgical gloves in the top drawer. 
Then took one of them, which she left with the large bottles of 
disinfectant- 


Sarah was not a particularly joyful person. That was one of the most 
tragic misconceptions about her, and the most common one. She 
didn't exactly put a facade, either; she just wanted others to realize 
life could be lived with a smile and a shout and a laugh. That did not 
mean she was immune to its horrors, of course. 


-she counted all the surgical scissors again. She was missing one, 
and since they had had three major surgeries that day, and they 
could have left it in? No, she thought, that can't be, Lila was 
counting them, she never misses one- 


Actually, that was not entirely true. After living such a long, busy life, 
she was beginning to understand the calmness, the serenity with 
which certain old people used to carry themselves around. The 
aplomb. And that was what most people would expect of a leader 
such as herself: composure and seriousness. And that's what they 


would get. 


-and there was a large splatter of blood where that poor boy's leg 
had fallen to the ground. She examined it. Still fresh, no trouble. 
Sarah took a wipe and crouched to deal with the drops, the white 
floor bright anew as she went through it- 


That was not to say she was immune to worst things in life, but she 
was pretty resilient. She had buried dead workmates, she had 
performed amputations after running out of anesthetics and she had 
delivered dead children to young mothers who wished. It really didn't 
get much harder than that, she mused. 


-three, four, five, six, seven? | thought we had seven big bandage 
rolls here. She shook her head. Shouldn't have bought them large 
rolls, but would they listen? Noooo. We at the Continental Branch 
know what we do- 


No, life was hard, and it was hard on her too. Day to day life was 
difficult, filled with work, full of wonders and death alike. But it was 
good to have fun and try to enjoy it while it lasted; and there was 
something, something she had felt since she was a child. The 
smiles. She loved the smiles they dedicated her, and the laughs. 
She had grown into a person everybody around her liked, or at least 
respected; and they had grown, she knew it, thanks to that silly short 
woman under her almost indomitable mop of chestnut hair. 


-da doo doo daaa, now we clean around here, antiseptic 
everywhere and a bit of daa doo oh, what's with racket out there, | 
can't even think- 


She cleaned the shelf of the last piece of furniture in the surgery 
room until she felt satisfied with its neatness. She wiped her sweaty 
face with the back of her hand as soon as she discarded her gloves. 
Daily work. That was the key. Patching people, patching minds by 
talking to them and getting to know them. Humans, all of them 
mortal, all of them little, all of them inconsequential. All of them 
fragile. 


-all of them so very beautiful. 


SCP-682: Hard-to-Destroy Reptile 


Item #: SCP-682 
Object Class: Keter 


Special Containment Procedures: SCP-682 must be destroyed as 
soon as possible. At this time, no means available to SCP teams are 
capable of destroying SCP-682, only able to cause massive physical 
damage. SCP-682 should be contained withina5mx5mx5m 
chamber with 25 cm reinforced acid-resistant steel plate lining all 
inside surfaces. The containment chamber should be filled with 
hydrochloric acid until SCP-682 is submerged and incapacitated. 
Any attempts of SCP-682 to move, speak, or breach containment 
should be reacted to quickly and with full force as called for by the 
circumstances. 


Personnel are forbidden to speak to SCP-682, for fear of provoking 
a rage-state. All unauthorized personnel attempting to communicate 
to SCP-682 will be restrained and removed by force. 


Due to its frequent attempts at containment breach, difficulty of 
containment and incapacitation, and high threat of Foundation 
Exposure, SCP-682 is to be contained in site [REDACTED]. The 
Foundation will use the best of its resources to maintain all land 
within fifty (50) kilometers clear of human development. 


Description: SCP-682 is a large, vaguely reptile-like creature of 
unknown origin. It appears to be extremely intelligent, and was 
observed to engage in complex communication with SCP-079 during 
their limited time of exposure. SCP-682 appears to have a hatred of 
all life, which has been expressed in several interviews during 
containment. (See Addendum 682-B). 


SCP-682 has always been observed to have extremely high 
strength, speed, and reflexes, though exact levels vary with its form. 
SCP-682's physical body grows and changes very quickly, growing 


And here | am, all alone, Sarah laughed at her own thoughts. She 
left the surgery room, going into the busy aisle outside, a few 
volunteers working with Somali doctors who had come from 
Mogadischu and Garowe. All of them wore the white-and-green 
surgical robes provided by the MCF. Some of them, whom she didn't 
even now, rushed to respond to some emergency. The hospital was 
alive. 


That was the part of a project she loved the most. See it outgrow 
her. 


As she glanced through one of the windows in the well-illuminated 
aisle, Sarah felt, if not happy, content. 


And then, as the small toy bird she always carried around and used 
in private to talk to her superiors and a few well-placed friends 
started to vibrate with the voice of a man she once knew, the 
window exploded towards her. 


"No, you don't get it. There is a basic law when dealing with the 
GOC and trans-reality stuff.” 


"There is?" 


"Yes. Just don't do it." 


When Frank reached the place where the shooting had gone down, 
he had been expecting to find a PR mess and a few injured people. 


Instead, he was met by a horrid scene. 


Several corpses were scattered around the now extinguished 
bonfire, where their volunteers had been burning meat — My orders. 
— as the gasoline-soaked wood underneath it had burn completely. 
As he came closer to it, he realized there were living, breathing 
animals in the pile, miraculously calm and silent. Some of their 
corpses were intertwined, already growing back and combining. 
Frank grimaced. There we go, Dodger's undying pets. Great. 


Frank wondered where she was. He could use a bit of Mission 


Watch insight now. 


The largest one, the head of a particularly badly hurt wildebeest, 
looked at him. Half its neck was covered in dirt. Under its neck, the 
rest of the body was covered in bleeding injuries and burns. 


Frank noticed the bleeding was slowly decaying, the corpse rapidly 
recovering from the injuries it had suffered. Not enough hurt to put 
you down, right, big guy? 


As if answering his thoughts, it softly bellowed. One of the AMISOM 
soldiers jolted and shot it twice. 


Frank grimaced. He turned to the other part of the scene. But he did 
not want to do it. He did not want to check on the bodies. 


The Executive Security member went over the corpses, he made the 
count. Seven of them wore white and green vests. At least ten were 
civilians. Six more were militians, perhaps irregulars that tried to 
stop the violence; most of their guns were gone. Some were piled in 
mounds, muddied and bloodied. 


Frank noticed one of the corpses was oddly familiar. His heart sunk 
as he recognized Enrico Momio's corpse. 


He had work with him for years. He felt the need to sit somewhere 
and sleep, sleep for a hundred years. Instead, he closed his eyes, 
open in an expression of surprise. 


"See ya, you pest,” he whispered. "Will Keep an eye on Tino for 
you." 


"This is more than just one shooting. They've killed a bunch of 
armed veterans! We have to report to our superiors, right now!," 
their sergeant said. Frank nervously nodded. 


"And it was not bandits, either. This is probably people from 
Laascaanood itself, angry over our decision to incinerate the meat," 
he said. The soldier cursed in Arab, but Frank did not have the time 
to argue. "Warn your superiors, tell them to bring here whatever 
men they can spare. Please. If they attack us, they will murder all of 
us. They will probably go after all those who supported us, as well. 


This could very well turn into a bloodbath. The hospital is our only 
quarters in the area and it is a very evident target, so as soon as 
you-" 


And then, he saw the explosion in the distant hospital. When the 
sound reached them, he was already running towards it, with a pistol 
he took from a dead member of the militia. 


"Don't do it? At all?" 


"They get real serious about it, too. They're all about causal cross- 
contamination and timestream fussion or collision between parallel 
Earths and stuff like that. They get rea/ serious. Real, kill everyone 
around the stuff itself just in case, serious!" 


"They do?" 
"YES \" 


"Well, then | don't understand why would anyone talk anything but ill 
of them. Your friends must be all liars." 


Last Hearth, AKA, Hearth Actual, AKA the Stoker, was calmly 
debriefing his boys as they flew to their target. He liked to think of 
them as "boys", despite the fact that they weren't children nor 
exclusively men. 


"Target is, as of now, unknown but present in a Manna Charitable 
Foundation station in Laascaanood, Somalia. As luck would have it, 
most AMISOM and Puntaland military units are out of town. As bad 
luck would have it, PSYCHE warns us of very high risk of local 
violence due to a combination of anomalous activities conducted by 
the MCF and inter-tribal or sectary violence. In fewer words, boys, 
this is an all-out assault, another one." 


That's what they called him for, usually. Him and his boys. He 
pondered them briefly; two hundred of the brightest and best the 
Coalition had, deployed by chopper from Mogadischu ‘cause, why, 
no apportation-capable Strike Teams were available at the time! And 


they needed a large Strike force this time, since riots and mass 
control might become an issue! 


Faint-hearted bastards, all of them. 


"Sentinel satellite 22 detected a huge Aspect Radiation spike near 
the town. It was Ebony, but brief. Very brief. We are not certain of 
the precise location of the entity that generated it, but it's pretty 
obvious that it should be in an MCF location. Problem is, with 
ongoing local violence, we will get in trouble if we just jump in... and 
it might be worse to not do so at all. We all know what will happen if 
other groups get their hands on an Ebony hue entity." 


They all knew. They had all lived through situations like those, 
generally to take back whatever the bad guys took for their personal 
use, and then set it on fire so that nobody else could use it. The very 
reason why the Global Occult Coalition existed. Last Hearth 
occasionally thought people upstairs were too interested in their own 
damned careers to remember that. 


"So we will attack first any group of non-anomalous combatants that 
may look like they are attacking MCF interests in the area. We will 
also be going in sort of blind. We will be going against civilians, 
militias and perhaps even the MCF volunteers themselves, if they 
are responsible for this mess." 


There were other Coalition teams available to deal with the problem, 
but they had chosen him and Team Phalanx for a reason. The 
reason being they knew everything there was about getting their 
hands dirty before joining the Team. Nowadays, every single one of 
them underwent post-mission memory wipes to keep them sane, or 
at least functional. Every single one of them was obsessed with 
physical form, absolutely committed to the five-fold Mission and 
conditioned to obey to him. Many of them had had organs replaced 
by wetware and hardware devices as part of the APAR(T) program, 
and one of them had even been selected for the SPAR(TA) testing 
program. He was basically a machine at that point, more a weapon 
than people. My boys, Umber proudly mused. 


"However, Mission-wise, this operation is to focus on Destruction. If 
Destruction is impossible, we will simply prioritize Survival and 


retrieve the item for further study. Concealment is secondary; the 
entire area has been put in a communications blackout by PSYCHE, 
and they'll chalk it all up to tribal violence when the deal is done and 
journalists are allowed to go back to the streets." 


And then, he waited for a moment before continuing. 


"Protection, in an operation where we can expect locals resisting to 
us, is a minor concern. In other words, business as usual. ETA: two 
hours, at around eight and a half local time." 


As their helicopters came closer to the place, Hearth checked once 
and again on updates from PSYCHE and the Sentinel network. 
There were no news from the latter, but the Special Observers and 
the only Assessment Team in the area reported many bad news on 
the civilian front. 


Other Team Leaders would have frowned, grunted and asked their 
superiors to reconsider their role in all that. Maybe send another 
group, or just try a different, more discreet approach. 


Team Leader Hearth would not. 


"Fuck. Never mind, you just don't get what you've done," Enrico's 
soul said. The Hippo's soul seemed embarrassed about the whole 
thing. 


"So...," it started, "| have an idea. You said you wanted to be alive 
again, didn't you?" 


"| can!?," Enrico jumped. 


"Not in your old carcass, it's wasted. | checked. Mmm... but there is 
another possibility." 


Olympe had felt the blast rather than hear it, since he was tinkering 
with Garziel and Poitriburg on the Old Orange. Technically, he was 
not allowed to teach them how to do it, but he had done it anyways. 


"Ziel, Poitri, go see what that was, please," he told his trainees. "Do 


what you have to protect the hospital. I'll charge Oldie." 


As the women left the garage in a hurry, their robes still stained with 
oil and the semi-abnormal fluids used by the machine's engine, he 
stood in front of the Old Orange and looked at the canister where he 
would be enclosed. 


Technically, he was not allowed to try and put layers of armor on it, 
but he was about to anyways. 


Rico's memory of a face grimaced. "I'm not possessing a person." 


"Oh, no, everyone finds mind-riding very inconsiderate even in 
cases of emergency such as this! Not to mention the kind of control 
required takes a long time to master... No, you wouldn't be 
possessing creatures that might have pure, immutable souls. You'd 
be, uh, possessing creatures with no mind." 


"What?" 
"You are familiar with the orchard somebody planted nearby the 


camp, | believe? 


« The Hammer Falls | Hub | Taking a Break from All your 
Worries » 


Taking a Break from All your Worries 


Her eyes were shut, and she daydreamed. It helped relax her, 
easing her breathing. It smelled horrible around her, but at least she 
could finally breathe clearly. She smiled to herself, feeling someone 
nestled in her chest lovingly. Then her eyes came open as she 
remembered who it was.