Description: SCP-974 is a carnivorous creature that superficially 
resembles a human child. It possesses greater durability, strength 
and stamina than a child of commensurate size and does not appear 


even brighter curiosity. She is no more than a couple 
years old at best. The Finman stands, and stretches, 
placing the book down on the end table. 


"Perhaps tomorrow evening, my dear, Papa has much 
work to do." The Finman walks slowly towards the door, 
and flips an oddly shaped switch, the illumination within 
the room fading to black. 


He opens the door and is greeted by two guards. They 
nod at him as he walks through. "Good night, King 
Aske." 


"Papa?" The voice of Hege calls through the door. King 
Aske, stops, and turns peering into the dimly lit room. 


"Yes my dear?" 


"When is Momma coming back?" Hege's voice is slow, 
filled with fatigue. King Aske turns, his face remaining 
stoic, but his eyes shimmer with recent grief. 


"| wish | could say, my Hege, | wish | could say." 


The Shape of a Gun 


Monica Pinkston hefted her 150-pound rotary-fire grenade cannon 
over her shoulder and sighed, surveying the smoldering wreckage of 
the building in which she had been imprisoned less than an hour 
ago. 


Smoke rose from its roof as the fires burned. Alarms blared in the 
distance. From the top of the hill, Monica had a good vantage point 
on the valley below. She knew that she could shell the entire site 
right from where she stood and reduce it to so much vapor and ash. 
She knew that she could take great vengeance upon everyone 
inside, delivered through the barrels of a hundred guns. There was a 
small and dying part of her that wanted to. 


But the rest of her didn't want to. Her heart had too many charred 
and broken corpses clinging to it already. She let go of her gun, and 
it fell out of reality rather than to the ground. She turned her back on 
what remained of her prison and walked away. 


After half an hour of walking through rocky scree and dry trees, 
Monica realized that she was not in Manhattan. She admonished 
herself for not stealing a car on her way out. Or a helicopter. 


She sat down on the softest-looking rock she could find and sighed. 
She had no survival skills, no equipment, no food, and no 
transportation. She had no idea where she was. And worst of all, 
she was nowhere near as alone as she wanted to be. 


There was something inside her. 


Now that her heart had slowed and her freedom was won, her mind 
started to work in the absence of more pressing matters. The 
echoes of the last hour reverberated through her, turning her bones 
to syrup. She fought back the urge to puke. 


One hour ago, Monica had been named D-77777. This had made 
her somewhat noteworthy in the minuscule community to which she 
had become accustomed. Lucky Sevens, they'd called her. Her 
natural tendency was to stay invisible, learned from a life of being 
hammered down like the lone nail whenever she stood out. But a 
computer somewhere had elected to make her inescapably 
noticeable, with five black sevens embedded in the orange of her 
back like so many fishhooks. So people naturally assumed that she 
had to be interesting. That fate had selected her to be something 
special. So they gravitated to her like moons around a planet. 


Monica was critically aware of how inaccurate all this was. She was 
a normal girl from a shitty neighborhood, too clever to be satisfied 
with what she had but not clever enough to know when to stop. A 
longstanding petty criminal with daddy issues, mommy issues, 
money issues, anger issues, and plenty more. Just another stupid, 
regrettable sob story among millions in modern America. A crater 
left over from some teenage catastrophe. 


But no. For some reason, you could talk to Lucky Sevens. Sevens 
was quiet, and would listen. Sevens gave good advice. Sevens was 
a quick study and knew how to survive. Sevens had made it through 
trial after trial without getting her face torn off or her guts melted or 
her brain sucked out, and she could probably show you how to do it 
too. Just stick with Sevens, and you'll be alright. 


This had happened without her permission. But convincing the rest 
that she really was a shitpiece waste of skin wouldn't have made 
anything better, so she kept her mouth shut and did her best. 


Then the labcoats brought her here. They put that goo on her arm. 
Then everything was different, all at once. Her body and mind 
collapsed. She was no longer her own self. She became a cup of 
her own soul being drunk by something very thirsty. And then it had 
pissed her back out. 


This had happened over the course of a few seconds. 


Nothing told her explicitly that she had gained enormous power and 
that she needed to use that power to escape. The message didn't 
come in words. It was like smoke and iron filings in her blood. She 


felt things she had never learned the words for. The thing that was 
using her body like a cheap apartment had taken something from 
her, she knew it. She didn't know what, but it was gone. Something 
was gone. And in its place had been left an arsenal. 


It had taken all her frustration, all her hatred, her misery and doubt 
and blackened determination, everything that she was as a human 
person, and smelted it into a shape. The shape that had hammered 
her life to pieces and defended the shards again and again. The 
shape that represented what she was to the world. 


The shape of a gun. 


She had thousands now. Millions. Pistols, rifles, grenade launchers, 
howitzers, cruise missiles, and other things that the human animal 
had not yet been able to imagine. Great expanses of black powder, 
rivers of bullets and endless fields of firearms now rested in a space 
just behind her own life. And she had used them to escape. 


And they had tried to stop her. But every impact of their bullets upon 
her skin was just a hammer driving down on the blasting cap of her 
soul. Her rage detonated against their need to keep her still. And 
they died trying to make it so. Her body had become a divine bomb. 
A celestial landmine. 


She understood none of it. She had just acted. She had had no time 
to see if anyone else could come with her; she had become too 
dangerous to be near. And so she was alone, but for the thing that 
had nestled deep within the superfluous folded meat of her body. 
The thing that spoke without speaking, the thing that told her only to 
live as she needed. 


What Monica needed right now was a fucking cigarette. 


She patted for a second and found the few that she had managed to 
smuggle into the compound. All but one was broken, but for right 
now, one was enough. And then she realized that even with infinite 
firepower behind her eyes, she didn't have a fucking lighter. 


And then there was a blowtorch in her hand. She gave up. 
Apparently life was now literally what she made of it. She smoked on 


the rock and wondered whether she was going to die. 


Then she heard a sound. The warm sound of an engine, getting 
closer. 


She figured that made sense. She had started with the element of 
surprise, but she hadn't killed everyone and hadn't destroyed 
everything. Now that they knew what to expect, they'd send their 
manhunters out, with better equipment and a better plan. They 
probably had snipers in the trees, zeroing in on her right now. 


Monica put her cigarette out and stood, walking forward into the 
clearing. She didn't care about being seen. Given what had already 
happened, she had no reason to expect that they were capable of 
killing her anymore. Even if they could... it didn't matter. Monica had 
made the decision to die shooting before and she had no issue with 
making it again. 


A black vehicle, some kind of dune buggy. Fat tires, exposed metal 
skeleton. There was only one person in it. She held her fire — even 
after everything these people had put her through, Monica refused 
to shoot first. 


The man got out. He was tall, and tan. Military-short hair. Muscular. 
A paint-by-numbers cutout of every action movie protagonist ever, 
all in black body armor. 


He smiled in a way that made her want to hit him and held his hands 
up. 


“Easy. | just want to talk.” 


Monica's right arm became an enormous mechanized bastardization 
larger than her own body. She aimed its iron fist at him, and a barrel 
on the wrist glowed red-orange. The air hummed and thickened with 
exhaust from the pipes jutting out of her shoulder. 


She replied, “Okay. | want to vaporize your ass with this fucking 
laser. But I'll let you go first, Jackboots. Talk.” 


He kept his hands where they were. “I'm not here to try to bring you 
back.” 


Monica whistled. “Wow. That's... that's pretty fucking smart, 
Heinrich! Considering the situation and all.” 


His smile faded. “I understand why you'd want to kill me. I'd probably 
want to kill me too. Do you believe in second chances, Ms. 
Pinkston?” 


She showed him her teeth. “Fuck you.” 


“| think you do. I've read your file. | know about most of the shit 
you've been through. Where you come from. Who's hurt you, and 
who you've hurt. And | have a pretty good idea where you'd be if no 
one ever gave you another shot.” 


She took a few steps forward and brought her titanic fist to within 
inches of his forehead. She could see the sweat on his skin, cast in 
the molten light from the laser's aperture. 


“Telling me how much you know about my life is really bad for your 
health right now, you Nazi motherfucker.” 


He swallowed, but kept his eyes on hers. “Here's the deal. I'm only 
alive now because I've got the sense to stay on the winning side. | 
know what's going on out there. The Foundation is /osing. I'm not a 
loser, and now neither are you. | have wheels, equipment, money, 
contacts, and information. You've been out of the system for years, 
Monica. Unless you want to make a monster out of yourself, you 
need my help. All you have to do is not shoot me.” 


Monica looked into his eyes, blue and cold, and made a choice. 


Queen of Spades, the Baroness of Old Vegas, watched as a floating 
blob of black plasma dissolved a mailbox a few feet from her head. 


She rolled away from the growing, glittering slime and stood, 
directing the row of artillery cannons behind her to fire upon the 
scrawny dickhead at the end of the street. 


The huge guns rattled the pavement and spat their shells down the 
block. A pseudopod of shiny black slime flicked up from the pool 


devouring the ground and swallowed them, erasing the explosive 
shots as though they had never existed. 


Monica said, “Why does this little shithead have to show up every 
time we get this zone clear? It's like he has nothing better to do. 
Motherfucker needs a hobby.” 


Jake said though her earpiece, “Beats me. We'd all prefer if you 
killed him, | think. | Know Dozer is getting tired of repaving the 
roads.” 


Monica dismissed the artillery cannons and summoned a battery of 
6 surface-to-surface missile packs. She fired them all 
simultaneously, sending no less than 120 high-explosive missiles 
shrieking through the air toward the irritating freak. 


“Well why don't you tell Dozer that he can drag his fat ass out here 
and he can try to earthbend this fuckhole into an early grave himself, 
huh?” 


119 of the missiles were swallowed out of reality by writhing 
tentacles of black sludge, but one of them found its mark. The pale 
man wrapped himself in an orb of the dark gunk to shield himself 
from the fire, and the rest of the stuff began to retreat, leaving 
carved furrows in the ground where it had been. 


Jake replied, “Got him. Press the advantage.” 


The Queen was starting to sweat. She was reaching the mass limit. 
Enough was enough. No more evacuated districts. No more scared 
families. This fucker had to die. 


Part of her was going to miss him. The perfectly black sludge with its 
somehow distantly sparkling stars was almost pretty, if you ignored 
the fact that it effortlessly devoured everything it touched. 


The black orb at the end of the street gathered itself up and hurled 
more levitating globs at her. They traveled slowly, quietly obliterating 
traffic lights, lampposts, and fire hydrants as they advanced. 


Monica extended a hand toward the sky and moved nowhere, 
calling down her coup de grace. 


The Showstopper. 


The air above the intruder wrenched in a way that was horrible to 
look at, and a thunderclap cracked the sidewalks as a colossal tower 
of churning metal appeared in the sky. It blocked out the sun, 
howling and smoking and torturing the air with its heat. The bottom 
end of the hovering citadel of dark iron glowed a ferocious white- 
orange, dripping molten metal which fell a hundred feet and 
splashed upon the blacktop. The enormous machine was barely 
able to contain its own energy. 


So she let it out. 


A deafening hum rang through the city like the chime of a great bell 
as the column of space below the orbital cannon transformed into a 
line of orange light. It punched into the earth and obscured 
everything from view, blinding and terrible, vaporizing everything in 
its path. Hot wind poured away from the laser and washed over 
Monica, searing her invincible flesh in a way that was tantamount to 
the orgasmic. This was destruction. This was the fire of the gods. 


Then it stopped. The light disappeared, and with it went the 
Showstopper, the pale freak, and all his miserable hungry slime, 
leaving only a smoking molten shaft in the ground where he had 
been. 


Monica swayed, mumbled “I think | got him,” and passed out. 

She awoke in stages. Her entire body felt like it had been punched 
by one big fist, and her brain was full of rubber cement. 

There was someone near her, so she mumbled, “What happened?” 


Jake's smile was above her. “Morning, Your Majesty. You pulled the 
Showstopper on Voidboy. I'm not sure if he was able to teleport 
away before getting melted. Dozer's mad at you. Apparently you 
punched through a buried sewer main.” 


Monica sat up, blinking. “Dozer can suck my dick.” 


Jake laughed. “I'll pass that along. How do you feel?” 


She blinked some more and looked around. She was in the Oasis's 
treatment center, in a private room. Dim lights, bad walls, no 
decorations. But the equipment worked, there was electricity, and 
she had hired actual doctors that were willing to do their work in Old 
Vegas, despite the inherent danger. 


“Like one big bruise. Head hurts. Can | have some water?” 


Jake handed her a glass from a nearby counter and she drank 
greedily. 


She set the glass down and was silent, looking down at her hands. 
The large man frowned. “Something wrong?” 

Monica shook her head. “No, not really. It's just strange.” 

“What?” 


She smiled. “A year ago you were a site security captain for the 
fucking Foundation. And | was one of your prisoners. Now I'm some 
kind of bullshit wizard mutant, de facto brute force mayor of Las 
Vegas, and you're running an entire town while keeping my dumb 
ass alive. And we fight supervillains.” 


“You fight supervillains. | stay very far away from the supervillains 
and give you occasional advice.” 


She nodded absently, and stretched. “Speaking of which. Did you 
learn anything useful yesterday? About the... whatever?” 


He made an apologetic expression. “No. Turned out to be a dead 
end; guy only had level 2 security clearance when he left.” 


“I don't know what that means.” 


“There's five levels. The higher your clearance, the more you're 
allowed to know. | was level 3, and | only ever got hints and heavily 
redacted reports. So a level 2 guy isn't going to know anything we 
don't already know.” 


“What'd you do with him?” 


“Offered him an apartment in the Wreck. He looked at me like | was 
a giant spider. Said he'd rather take his chances in the desert.” 


Monica scoffed. “Some people just don't want help.”