This group has since been completely destroyed by the Foundation, 
due to their reluctance to surrender information about SCP-1000, 
SCP- ,andSCP- (since reclassified as SCP-1000- and 
SCP-1000- ). Remaining members have either joined the 
Foundation, or have gone into hiding, presumably as members of 
the Serpent's Hand. Weapons, tools, and other unique pseudo- 
technological resources in possession of the organization have been 
classified as SCP-1000-001 through SCP-1000- . These resources 
have been made use of by the Foundation in multiple instances; for 
a full list, see Document 1000-3534-Y (Level 3 clearance required). 
Access to surviving ex-members of the Children of the Sun is 
restricted to personnel with clearance level 4/1000 unless given 
direct authorization for contact by Director Jones. 


Further information is available to personnel with clearance level 
3/1000 or above. Personnel with clearance level 3/1000 or above 
are required to read Document Alpha-1596-1000. 


Addendum 1000-466-X: Update to Special Containment 
Procedures: As of / / ,SCP-1000's Special Containment 
Procedures no longer include Procedure 516-Lumina. [DATA 
EXPUNGED] indicates that SCP-1000 may be developing a 
resistance to the sonic element [DATA EXPUNGED] will not develop 
further, so that Procedure 516-Lumina can still be used in 
emergency situations. Investigation into alternate means of reliably 
keeping SCP-1000 away from human population centers is 
underway. Whether SCP-1000 resistance to Procedure 516-Lumina 
was Calculated (and as such may be a sign of SCP-1000 
[REDACTED)) or coincidental (by chance of natural species 
variation) is not known at this time. 


== LEVEL 3 CLEARANCE REQUIRED == 


Document Alpha-1596-1000: Missive from Director Jones 


You've probably heard the rumors before now. Everyone 
without the clearance level to know better wants to get 
their dig in. "Did you hear Sasquatch is an SCP? Are we 
gonna capture and contain Batboy next?" 


to confirm nothing implanted and resupply, then to the Library for 
some research. 


A month later, Nobody sat in a coffee shop in a different city, 
browsing through a laptop that he'd liberated from a careless 
Foundation researcher a while back. At least half of his methods just 
consisted of taking advantage of other people's natural tendencies 
and common quirks. Like every IT drone's nightmare: an employee 
with zero sense of hardware security or understanding that no, they 
weren't the exception to the "don't take sensitive data home with 
you" rule. 


He had snagged it for the technical specs on that telekill helmet, but 
it had some other files on it that he hadn't looked through much until 
now. Files about MTFs Omega-8, -9, and -10, nothing terribly 
interesting there, standard exploitative crap. What looked like a 
standard database of their disaster classification system. CK, SK, 
TK, XK, GH, RI, LO, wait. RI? Those O5 files he'd found were in an 
RI labeled folder. Let's see... 


RG-class: Reality collapse 
RH-class: Reality overwrite 
Rl-class: Reality incursion/invasion 
RJ-class: Reality de-reification 


Well. That certainly explained a few things that he'd overheard in the 
Library. Let's see, what else lurked in here... 


Huh. He skimmed through the helmet's documentation again and 
noted a memo he'd previously disregarded. 


The nature of SCP-148 in Fencepost cluster MNT-9T3- 
____ (key variant SCP-682) makes utilization difficult, as it 
deadens cognition rather than merely blocks intrusive 
telepathy. Deployment of protective equipment is not 
recommended in this cluster. Do not retrieve samples of 
SCP-148 from these Fenceposts, as there is evidence 
that it contaminates mainline material. Utilize variant 


assets from Fencepost PQ4-99R-DD6 for infiltration 
purposes. They have the greatest natural Psionic 
Resistance Scores of currently available subsidiary 
assets. 


A slow grin grew across Nobody's face. He'd started with slimmer 
leads than this. It was going to be a wonderful day. 


World Tour 


There were a lot of ghosts. It was a given, and she’d known it the 
whole time, but it still startled her a little as the UAV moved over the 
desert. They were usually invisible to the naked eye, but curiously 
enough tended to show up on camera. It made the otherwise empty 
desert seem like a fairly crowded place. Some of them looked up 
and waved, and just went about their business. Which seemed to 
be, mostly, wandering around aimlessly and talking to each other. 


She wondered if they got bored, or if ghosts could get bored. It had, 
after all, been three-hundred years. 


A whole three centuries of a nearly-empty earth. And then she 
wondered why all the ghosts congregated here, in the Midwestern 
area of the former United States of America. They had never seen 
ghosts anywhere else, perhaps there was just something about the 
area? 


“Ladies and gentleman, the world tour has started!” she announced, 
moving the controls of the UAV smoothly. The secondary pilot 
grinned at her with his dagger-like teeth, the spines down his back 
pricked in excitement, and sat back, looking up at the massive array 
of screens. 


For Anahita, it was just like the first time she saw her world all over 
again. While she had been born and raised in the refugee city, and 
had grown up in a sky with too many moons, streaked with orange 
and red, the blue grasses and violet-brown trees...she couldn’t fight 
the part of her mind that was truly human, and recognized its home 
immediately. The burning yellow sun. The blue sky. 


She turned the UAV and it looked backwards, towards the small 
town they operated from. It was small, cramped, dusty and stuck out 
from the desert with its crude farmland and little garden sanctuary, 
just like any other earth town, but it was still not so bad a place. 
Then she turned the UAV back out, to the Midwestern desert, and 


pushed the controls towards. The sleek, alien device moved 
smoothly, like it was swimming through the air, and thus began her 
travels by proxy. 


The desert covered most of the former Northern Americas. An 
endless expanse of dust and sand, bone-white and golden for the 
most part, with occasional patches of scrubland clinging to survival, 
or thin rivers that trickled through cracked-mud riverbanks. The 
Mississippi crawled, only a foot or so wide, sluggishly through the 
channel it had carved, and she steered the UAV down with it, 
following southwards. 


Passing over the excavation site, she circled low and saw the 
workers, a mixture of human and lurks, look up and smile and wave. 
They knew that the mission was to be launched soon. 


The desert was more or less unchanged as they explored. They 
already knew what to expect, but the aerial view made up for plenty 
of interest. They followed a roving band of clickers for a few hours, a 
half-dozen individuals who trucked forwards through the sand, gears 
whirling inside their bodies, bronze and copper metal faces looking 
to and fro, searching for anything alive. 


They followed them south and west, to one of the larger clockwork 
cities. Its moving, shifting spires reaching into the sky. She circled 
the UAV around them and weaved it between buildings that 
occasionally rumbled and moved of their own accord in some 
unchanging pattern. A massive fountain with a living statue of a 
woman, composed entirely of pneumatics and gears, swam with koi 
made of gold, and workers went to and fro in their set patterns, 
unchanging, unnoticing of the world around them. 


Only when a guard, some mixture of human and a massive hawk, 
with silver blades for wings and a tunic made out of platinum threads 
woven so fine as to flow like cloth, caught attention of the UAV and 
took chase did they leave the shining, repetitive city. She recalled 
once listening to a traveler tell his tales of how he once walked clear 
through one of the clicker cities, timing so perfect that not a thing 
touched or saw him. 


The UAV, fortunately, easily could out-fly the guard, who eventually 


wheeled back to the city, and she took it to the higher atmospheres, 
where it went into a circling pattern for the night as she slept. The 
next morning, they powered southwards and over Mexico. She 
gasped as they rounded over a series of deep craters that formed a 
mountainous range, and saw for the first time in her life the green of 
grass that spread further than a few yards. Of a forest! How 
wonderful! 


So few people had been to the southern American jungles, after all. 
She steered the UAV in low, and slowed it down, weaving her way 
through the grassy forest, which slowly became a thick, lush jungle. 
Flowers the size of doorways bloomed, vivid red and orange. Trees 
hundreds of meters tall towered overhead, and she wove the UAV 
carefully around looped vines bigger around than her waist would 
have been. Here and there, she saw things move. 


A creature that could have once been a parrot, but now had slim 
green leaves for feathers and a dark wooden beak looked at her 
with beady black eyes, before fluttering off, becoming invisible 
among the plant life. She only thought about pulling out of the jungle 
when she found a clearing and spotted a group of plantlings resting, 
their soft membranous skin covered in dew, and long grassy hair 
braided crudely. She avoided nearing them, curious as she was, 
after all plantlings were a lot that was quick to anger and attack. 


There was a flash of copper, later, and she chased the UAV after a 
clicker, one that was fast and built like a jaguar, hurrying through the 
jungle. A messenger, she assumed. 


She pulled up out of the jungle at the urging of the copilot, and 
soared further south, until the jungle faded again and they neared 
another city of gears and metal, and gave it a wide berth when they 
spotted condors that were armored in gold and swinging steel 
talons. 


And to Antarctica the following day. The death had barely touched 
here, and she curiously observed a group of penguins before 
steering the UAV through a small storm, and into the waiting shed of 
the Antarctic Observation Platform. A tall woman dressed in furs 
performed maintenance on the UAV to assure them it would stay in 
working condition the rest of the trip, and spoke over the videophone 


with a gently accented voice. They were back in the air by the next 
day, and this time Anahita shivered with excitement. Up, they 
crawled over the Atlantic, up and to the East. While the ocean was 
largely uneventful, sometimes they would catch glimpses of things 
moving under the endless blue waves. Seagulls still soared, and the 
UAV followed a flock of them until a tentacle that must have reached 
fifty meters into the air snapped up out of the water with lightning 
speed and grabbed one, yanking it down into the waters below. 


She pulled the UAV up higher after that, and they stared in 
amazement as nighttime fell and the bioluminescent spots of 
something the size of an oil tanker under the waves appeared, and 
then were joined by other creatures of the same type. They 
converged, lights flashing and flickering, then dove or faded out of 
sight. 


In South Africa, they cautiously slowed and approached a sight few 
had seen. The trees were not terribly large, but for their size, they 
were...strange. They grew everywhere, but only here had they seen 
a truly impressive forest of them. The flesh trees, twisted upwards, 
their multi-branched, stiffened arms reaching to the sky, skin 
hardened and calloused. Some of them were old, very old, and 
probably deeply sleeping, but there were a few, here and there, that 
were quite fresh. 


She steered past one that was newly rooted, still shaped like a 
young woman, eyes glassed over, arms just starting to split apart. 
The ground around her was scratched and scraped, like she’d tried 
to dig herself out before finally falling and stretching to the sky. Ina 
moment of misthought, she moved close enough that the tail of the 
UAV gently brushed the side of the new tree, and it shuddered. 
Although the microphone of the UAV was not on, they could tell that 
she had started screaming. The trees nearby all shuddered and 
opened hidden mouths as well. 


They moved away quickly, passing over a tribe nearby of 
unchanged humans, who glanced at the UAV with only a flicker of 
curiosity, before returning to their business. With humanity 
decimated, the wilderness here, in Africa, had returned. Scrublands 
and grasslands, just as before. Although, she steered the UAV back 
over a village, and they muttered and commented as a group of 


young men ran after a fleeting gazelle, before the men — in mid- 
stride — hunched over and became furred, massive facsimiles of 
hyenas and tackled it to the ground. 


They continued northwards, over giraffes and elephants, and 
everybody on the team expressed their distaste as they spotted a 
herd of zebras — but among the black and white stripes, there were 
individuals that were partially bronze, or iron, and some that were 
entirely mechanical replicas of the equines. Even here, the clickers 
took hold, she noted. 


Another night of rest for her, and then they crossed over the 
Mediterranian, where on small island flocks of birdlike creatures 
roosted. When she steered the UAV near the cliffs they were on, 
they came in close to curiously observe, looking like nude women 
with hooked, hawklike beaks on their chins under their mouths, and 
a bird’s legs, and wings instead of arms. Then they lost interested, 
and returned to their nests, where down-covered infants nibbled on 
rotting fish and leathery eggs waited. 


The ruins of Europe, as it turned out, were still there. Nobody went 
into the heart of France, or Britain, or Germany, not for what could 
be anywhere in there. And here they were, looking for it. It wasn’t 
hard to spot, as they circled over the overgrown rubble and dust that 
was once London, and the UAV’s sensors picked up life. They came 
in close and caught a fast glimpse of a girl, a little one with dark hair 
and eyes, and a wide smile, climbing over the ruined buildings and 
picking weed-flowers that had started to grow. 


Then Anahita frantically pulled the UAV up as what she could only 
describe as a dragon lunged from seemingly nowhere and 
attempted to snap it out of the air. It was massive and shifted like a 
liquid just as they watched it for a moment, before the UAV was out 
of reach and it turned down. Then they watched as the girl started to 
skip off, and the dragon dutifully followed, padding along like a 
much-overgrown dog behind her. They turned the camera away, 
fully aware of what exposure could lead to, and pushed southeast. 


They spent the next day with the UAV as the Saudi Arabian shelter, 
which existed just a few tentative kilometers from a large clicker-city, 
and the militant personnel there looked over the UAV, and spoke 


little, simply doing any needed maintenance and checking the 
device over. The captain of the base, a man with dark skin and a 
harsh, raspy voice told them not to go into Russia, and then thanked 
him for the advice with no intent to follow it. 


But first, they had the Indian Ocean to explore, and even at full 
height its most impressive feature was still fully ungraspable, as the 
creature stretched past the horizon like an island chain. One made 
of chitenous armor where lichen collected and birds roosted, that 
occasionally rumbled and moved a few feet forwards or backwards. 
It stretched all the way from Maldives to the Great Barrier Reef, 
where massive towers of coral stretched into the sky out of the water 
like some sort of bizarre city.