The woman spread her arms apart innocently. For all her apparent 
healthy looks, she was dressed in a patchwork coat of thick cloths. 
Hagne thought she saw the subtle glint of metal underneath it. 


"Check my pockets. Take my clothes; | carry no purse on me. | take 
no coin, nor whatever currency these people use. Hello, by the way. 


My name is Dodger." 


Hagne tilted her spear, using the sheathed buttspike to keep the 
woman from approaching her, "Stand your ground. What is your 
business here?" 


The woman — "Dodger", she claimed — glanced around, and 
shrugged again, "People are my business. Miserable, filthy, 
hopeless people." 


"You prey upon them? Peddle them as slaves?" 


"Why so pessimistic?" Dodger looked hurt, "| serve them. Not as 
food for others, before you start leaping to accusations. I've been 
blessed with much, as you can see," She turned herself around, 
waggling her hips in a crude manner perhaps meant to be 
suggestive, before turning to face Hagne again, "| am a vulture. A 
vampire. A ghoul. | am addicted to pleasure, and the only pleasure | 
get nowadays is seeing the smiling, happy face of a person | have 
helped. The happy sobs of a grateful individual is a more potent a 
sound than the loveliest music. The sight of a wounded person rising 
to their feet in good health is more pleasurable than the boldest 
sunrise. The crushing bear hug of an individual to whom you have 
given all that you could to help is more gratifying than the loudest, 
screaming-est orgasm." 


Hagne-Allon's lip curled. She certainly saw the appeal of this woman 
to the miners. Lewd, crude, loud, and charismatic, and colorful to 
look at, "You'll forgive me if | have trouble believing it." 


Dodger shrugged again, "You don't need to believe; it's the truth,” 
She reached into her coat, withdrawing a small pouch and reaching 
in, "How are you, by the way? Is your body functioning properly?" 


Again, she tilted the spear, to keep her from approaching, "I'm fine. 
Don't touch me." She looked up and down the woman again. She 
had brought a satchel with her, which was on the ground behind her. 
Unless she held a short blade within, she was completely 
unprotected. 


"How have you lasted this long in the wilderness?" 


The woman shrugged, "I packed supplies." 
"| mean how have you avoided..." 


"How has someone as pretty as | avoided the unwanted advances 
of violent men brandishing bludgeons?" Again she looked around 
herself, "The same way you all have; | do not walk alone." 


"Where are your travelling companions?" 


"Spread across the land. We have outposts every few miles or so," 
She smiled again, reaching into her coat to take out a small square 
bit of parchment. Printed on the front in fine dark-green type were 
the letters 'MCF'. The rear showed a small map of the region, from 
Whore's End to the Dumping Grounds East. 


"What is this?" Hagne offered the parchment back to Dodger, but 
she refused it. 


"It's a card. A... it's a bit of parchment." 
"| Know what parchment is, | can read and write. What is 'MCF'?" 


Dodger smiled, and touched two fingers to the bridge of her nose, 
"Manna the power, manna the food, manna the drink, manna the 
entity and Manna the Entity — Would you wish me to leave?" 


"| wish you to leave." 


"Or — OR! Would you let me roam the ranks of your freed miners, 
my hands extended, offering everything | have to give, food, drink, 
medicine, until | have nothing left but the clothes on my body — or 
not even those? Would you truly deprive these people of any bit of 
help they can receive?" 


Hagne stared at her long and hard, waiting for some sign, a facial tic 
or unwarranted smirk, any excuse to vehemently reject the woman 
and send her off. The woman didn't even blink. 


"Fine. Stay. But you will receive nothing from me should you choose 
not to leave before we reach Whore's End. And should you continue 
on, you will submit to the Overseer's authority, in what-ever she 


might wish to do with you." 


Dodger nodded, and smiled to her, again with her incoherent 
chanting, "Because Manna helped us, what can we do but share 
that same help with all of their children?" 


Someone had spread the rumor once that the longer you lived on 
panacea, the more likely you were to forget your own name. They 
hadn't meant it literally... 


"Anna Sobotka," She said aloud, her own name for just over four 
thousand years. 


The ironic part — was it irony? — was that she had entirely forgotten 
who had said that to her. She'd always pictured the person saying it 
as being a woman like her, short and blonde, big nose and short 
hair. Then she saw a portrait in her main hall, and remembered it 
wasn't the person who had told her about panacea; it was a serving 
girl of hers, dead for at least 80 years. Her petrified body was in the 
mausoleum she'd established at the top of her cliff-side tower. 


"Honey Pot," She said aloud. That had been the girl's name. Her 
parents named her that, and she'd stubbornly refused to change it. 


Everyone knew where she was; "Whore's Ena" they called it. They 
said it was named for her, but it had been called that long before she 
set up camp here. The river running through the land had been 
pristine at some point after the Fall. It was the last clean river for 
miles in every direction, and remained so for hundreds of years. 
Then erosion uncovered a stockpile of some manner of chemical 
waste. She didn't know; it was already ancient history by the time 
she'd found the place. The river became polluted, and started to 
stink of sulfur and chlorine. People who drank from it or waded in it 
felt it burn their skin, and called it "Whore's End", making light of a 
hypothetical young woman forced by circumstances to prostitution, 
succumbing to the bodily rot of some unknown venereal disease or 
other. 


Her enemies had taken to saying it referred to her, withdrawing to 
her wretched home at the end of her life. It was somewhat 


frustrating, but she refused to change the name. To do so would 
admit defeat, and admit that the place was indeed named for her. 


She had plenty of patience and more than enough time. The world 
around her had already dissolved into a thicket of savage tribes, 
people no longer identified as Americans or Canadians or anything 
else. Such words were older than ancient. They pre-dated myth. 
Men fought and died and established dynasties and empires lasting 
hundreds of years atop the burial mound of the greatest, richest, 
most technologically advanced civilization the planet had ever 
birthed. 


That civilization had reached space. They had eaten and slept 
beside small windows, outside of which they could bear witness to 
thick clouds of dust and ash that covered the world during the last 
days leading up to the Fall. How must they have felt, believing 
themselves to be the very last of their civilization, of their species? 


Anna only felt joy for them, convincing herself that they had turned 
away and gone in search of another home. She imagined now an 
entire civilization sprawling across a distant solar system, colonizing 
planets, mining comets and asteroids, and soaking in energy- 
abundant sunlight for hours every single day. 


Niggling doubt drove her on. Doubt that anyone had survived in the 
stations long enough to start moving. Doubt that they could even 
reproduce effectively enough in a zero-g environment. Doubt that 
even if they had made it out, their descendants arriving successfully 
on some life habitable planet, that they would even have survived 
long enough to become spacefaring again. 


That drove her here on Earth. A people perpetually ignorant, 
illiterate, living on legends, myth, fanciful stories of a version of the 
past that never existed. Believing themselves to be different from 
one another, and thus incapable of co-existing peacefully. Every 
little minor kingdom that advanced sufficiently was more likely to be 
broken and beaten by a lesser group, their scrapes at technological 
prowess erased, and the species as a whole back to the stagnancy 
of perpetual feudal living, spears and shield combat, pestilence, and 
hand-to-mouth living. 


The other Overseers didn't help matters. They only cared for 
eliminating each other, and carving out a following on Earth that 
would elevate them to living Godhood. Short-sighted, unsustainable, 
doomed to failure. The only thing that would work with creatures like 
that was violence. 


The thicket of savage tribes had to be burned down. Those who 
resisted had to be killed. Those who fell in line would remember their 
old tribal identities and their old lives as stories, while taking upon a 
new identity. Not a tribal one... but a human one. A single, 
monolithic culture, for a single, monolithic species. One that would 
breach the clouds that coated the Earth, and be able to once again 
see the sun any time they wanted. 


She missed the sun. It was still there, of course. It would outlast her, 
she imagined; outlast everything and everyone, panacea be 
damned. The clouds just made it impossible to see for months, even 
years at a time. Nothing could grow. Entire species went extinct. 
Vegetation was almost nonexistent, with the added benefit of the 
deluge of life-strangling ash, soot, fallout, and chemicals that had 
escaped from their containment once the infrastructure had 
completely rotted. 


Containment... She had nearly forgotten. All those Keter-class 
anomalies, run rampant for millennia. Or hell, there were Euclids 
and Safes that could wreak global catastrophe if left to their own 
devices. The fact that she still stood here, on solid ground, with 
thousands of living people around them, meant the best case 
scenario had occurred when the Fall happened. 


"This place smells like a Swimming pool," She said aloud. It was 
starting to hurt less to speak. Her jaw had been replaced the year 
before, and it still wasn't healing properly. She didn't want to have to 
rely on copious amounts of panacea on such a vanity, and so had 
relied on conventional treatment to help it along. She wasn't at risk 
of dying — worst case scenario, she use up the last of her panacea 
reserves, then hunt for more later on. 


"| like the smell. It's pleasant. Even by comparison with the outside," 
She smiled. It hurt badly. Her teeth no longer clicked together when 
she spoke, but she couldn't stop the twitching in her jaw that made 


SCP-888: Memory Stones 


Item #: SCP-888 
Object Class: Safe 


Special Containment Procedures: A library located in __, Italy, is 
partly built of blocks of SCP-888 in its ‘full’ state. The portions of the 
building constructed of SCP-888 are designated as "rare-book" 
storage; only three senior librarians have access, and two of these 
are on the SCP payroll. The third librarian is aware of the room's 
true purpose, but is a representative of and liason to .A 
second sample, of 'empty' SCP-888 remains in the vault beneath the 
library, where it was originally discovered. Access to this vault has 
been rerouted through the "rare-book" room, and all other 
passageways to it have been sealed with reinforced concrete. At this 
time, no additional containment measures are deemed necessary. 


Description: SCP-888 is a mineral composite similar to a rare red 
quartzite found only in , Russia; however SCP-888 also 
contains trace amounts of an unidentified organic compound. This 
stone exhibits the capacity for large-scale data storage within its 
molecular lattices. SCP-888 exists in two distinct states, hereafter 
referred to as 'empty' and ‘full’. In its 'empty' state, SCP-888 is 
colored a pale pink, and is slightly translucent. In the ‘full’ state, the 
color deepens to a darker red, and the stone becomes completely 
opaque — see the attached image. It is theorized that these 
changes result from the realignment of the molecular lattices to 
contain the stored data. At this time, the source of this stone is 
undetermined. 


SCP-888 reacts to the presence of sapient beings, and appears to 
require direct skin contact to function. If a thinking creature touches 
an empty sample of SCP-888, the stone removes a memory from 
the subject, and stores the memory in itself, converting to the ‘full’ 
state in the process. The original memory is lost to the subject. One 
of the early test subjects described the experience as "like losing a 


the right side of her jaw itch insufferably. That had been another vain 
excess she'd insisted upon; salvaging what remained of her face. It 
meant the prosthetic would be all the more noticeable by being 
mismatched in tone. 


"It's hot in Topeka." 


The medicus behind her looked up. She smiled to herself, not 
turning to face him, "The pain is becoming more bearable. You can 
leave early today. | will see you next week." 


« The Under-Class | A Monolithic Species | Slay, Cure, Protect » 


Kingdom of Stone: Slay, Cure, Protect 


The whole mob seemed to groan as it came to a halt, like steel 
creaking and bending. Dodger had a foot out, ready to take another 
step, but held put as the order came to halt. They'd arrived at 
Whore's End. The stench of sulfur had been present for hours. Now 
there was a distinct tinge of ammonia and chlorine. 


"Beautiful place," Dodger said with a smile, approaching a nearby 
riverbank, where the water gushed rapidly, giving off the sulfur 
stench most prominently. It was even lined with trees — no leaves, 
though. A group of young people started flocking to the river, one girl 
kneeling beside it and reaching in to scoop up some water. Dodger 
vaulted over to her, grabbing her by her hair and yanking her back 
away from the water. 


"What's wrong with you? Didn't they tell you not to drink the water?" 
She looked in the girl's face. She was cute, though not as young as 
Dodger had thought. Her skin was red and pink, broken out like a 
typical greasy teenager. 


"They did, but- but then the others, they said 'Get Stoneface' — 
that's what they call me, by the way, Stoneface — ‘to drink it! She'll 
drink anything!’ and so | went and did." 


Dodger leaned in closer, clasping the girl's face and examining her 
skin, "Why do they call you 'Stoneface'?" 


"It's because of my face. It gets wet and bumpy, and when | scratch 
the bumps, they start bleeding. Then the blood turns to stone and | 
can peel it off like ice but it don't hurt any." 


Dodger smiled, "That's called ‘acne’. You just have to wash your 
face more often and it'll go away. What's your real name?" 


The girl squirmed, "I don't know. | been called 'Kitt' before, but that's 
all." 


A voice howled in her direction, sounding like the braying of a large 
animal. Dodger let go of Kitt and slowly turned to see a tall, imposing 
figure bounding towards her, dressed all in metal and black leather. 
She smiled sweetly, then stopped as she saw it was a woman; near 
seven feet tall, she figured, close-cut dirty blonde hair, and eyes so 
dark as to appear black from so far down as Dodger stood. 


"Why are you harassing the peasants?" The woman asked ina 
surprisingly wispy, throaty voice. 


"Familiarizing myself with the girl, and dispensing advice," Dodger 
smiled, bowing politely to the tall woman. She fished into one of her 
pockets, and found a small pack of antibiotics, precious few in 
existence, able to be spared only due to the recent influx in panacea 
she'd managed to get a hold of. She knelt down and handed it to the 
girl, "Swallow one of these with every meal," She hesitated, noting 
how small and skinny the girl looked, "Actually, swallow one in the 
morning, and another at night. Should help you with your stone 
face." She smiled and patted the girl on the head.