"Watch very carefully," he said, turning the machine on. In front of 
me, a television screen flares, and in the darkened room | squint and 
see numerous floating shadows, teal and white and grey, floating in 
the deep. "Footsteps of souls," | marveled. | moved my hand over 
the jet-black receiver. The display rippled with white like the froth of 


Subject: Dr. Garcia and Dr. Patel 

Photographed Activity: Standing side by side, facing the camera 
and smiling. 

Photo Result: Facing each other, each with his hands wrapped 
around the other's throat. 


Subject: Dr. Vang 
Photographed Activity: Taking his anti-anxiety medication. 
Photo Result: Leaning against the door to a containment cell and 
holding a key, grinning. The face of former Governor of 

is seen pressed up against a small window in the door. 


Subject: Research Assistant Reject 

Photographed Activity: Sitting at his desk, filing paperwork. 
Photo Result: The desk is cleared off, chair is empty. Research 
Assistant Reject is nowhere in sight. 

Note: /t appears that a metal desk has more personality than that 
senile bastard. —Dr. 


Subject: Researcher Mark Metzger 

Photographed Activity: Sitting in break area while writing in 
personal journal. 

Photo Result: Appears to be a photograph of a piece of paper with 
SCP-085 and a drawing of Researcher Metzger embracing. 

Note: By order of Director , Researcher Metzger is no longer 
allowed access to SCP-085 and is to undergo psychiatric evaluation. 


Subject: Senior Technical Researcher David Rosen 
Photographed Activity: Approving requisition forms. A supervisor 
is in the room with him. 

Photo Result: Sitting at his desk, eyes closed. The window behind 
him is broken. There is nobody else in the office. 


Subject: Researcher Ford 

Photographed Activity: Surprise and alarm covers subject's face 
(researcher Ford was taken by surprise while walking out of an 
observation of Keter level SCP-_ .) 

Photo Result: Picture shows Researcher Ford observing SCP- 
with the photographer inside its containment unit. 


Subject: Dr. Mark Kiryu 


lakeside waves. 


The method is such: first, | clear my mind. Then, | dredge this scene 
from memory and expand the screen until it fills my vision. On the 
screen | see myself and project field lines onto the image of myself, 
mapping the curves half by guesswork and half by rule-of-thumb. 
The colours | choose are teal and white, and once the curves are set 
in their polarity then | can begin channeling. 


Of course, the curves aren't real. Channeling is not a process of 
conjuration or sorcery. What it is are a set of techniques created to 
amplify, strengthen, and manipulate the effects of thaumic 
phenomena. Jo says that somewhere within the Foundation's ranks 
are true practitioners of the craft, real wizards and witches, Type- 
Blues, their existence closely guarded by security clearance and 
pain of death. | don't disbelieve her, but it doesn't give me any less 
reason to practice. There's always something romantic of the idea of 
having a fighting chance against the unknown. Besides, the aptitude 
for channeling itself is also a closely-guarded secret, and fewer than 
five qualify for Theta-77 training a year. Therein lies our grim 
unspoken creed: if not us, then who? 


So when the lady awakens and the alarm rings and the meters flare 
it's time for us to rig up and go, with patterns etched on placards by 
the hundreds in every vest pocket and sleeve. Some are mechanics’ 
tools; others are workings, to dispel and defend; more are sigil 
batteries, to fuel the workings; most comprise the sinks and 
dissipators and aether recyclers just to make sure Charlie and Jo 
and Rao and Jorge don't explode into smoke the moment they 
subvocalise their words of power. When the lady in the house 
awakens we need every advantage we can engineer. Push her 
back, beyond the doorway, buy enough time for a machine to be 
repaired or a working to be cast to seal her away for another season 
or more. 


A dozen exorcisms in and | think I've gotten the hang of banishing 
the thing in the jar. Fifty more and | might not even need the baking 
paper any more. On the job, Charlie subvocalises, subgestures, 
pictures workings resolving into spells and fights the monsters with 
his mind. That's the goal - once | can do that with the thing in the jar, 
he says, then | might remotely be prepared to survive. 


Last night, | emptied the jar in two minutes flat, flow unbreaking from 
start to end. A new personal best - Charlie was proud. Small goals, 
small wins. And for now that is enough. 


June fifth, midnight-thirty. My first breach event. Much to Charlie's 
chagrin, I'd barely only mastered subvocalising my workings, and 
only two at a time, so I'd have been useless in any regard. That's 
how | find myself crammed into the control center - really a three-by- 
two metre space in the basement of the hut lined to the brim with 
video screens and oscilloscopes and readouts and dials, all 
connected to a monstrous bundle of thaumically-shielded TV wires 
winding all the way upwards to the roof. 


The new guy is squeezed in next to me tight against my shoulder, all 
one-point-five metres of twitchy bones and contained precision and 
inexplicably still dressed in immaculate lab attire, white coat and 
laced shoes and all - it's three in the morning, for Christ's sake! And 
how? 


| don't rightly know how the monitoring setup works, myself. That's 
what the new guy is for, with angry black cables flowing out of the 
headset fixed onto his face like a vise, his fingers flying across the 
dials, conjuring images onto the screens in dizzying false-colour 
flashes - 1, 2, 3, switch; 1, 2, 3, switch. | ask him what's going on. 
He ignores me, hitting a series of switches on my left, then switches 
something on his headset, letting it unfold and slide up above his 
forehead. 


"Right now, that is team A," he intones, pointing at the largest 
screen in the center, where dull green figures crouch against a 
maelstrom of rainbow. | recognise the silhouettes: Charlie in the 
front, with his shaggy mane tied up in a ponytail behind his helmet, 
clad head to toe in protective plating etched with the ninety-nine 
names of God, barely legible in the flickering. Jorge, further behind, 
hunching under the weight of his toolbox. Both men are trembling. 
White light blazes from both of their hands, snaking upwards to hot 
spots at their armpits, waist, and thighs - no doubt from their 
overclocked sigil batteries. Anead of them hangs a Mark-IV AAFM, 
cloaked in its own flickering light, pale yellow sparks arcing 


ominously across its symmetrical geodesic shell. 


"Carrington, Vasquez - device ell-oh-one is just down the hall. I've 
amplified oh-two and twelve to compensate. Expect heavy 
turbulence." The new guy flicks another switch, showing the shadow 
of the empty stairwell. "Simos, Rao - no sign of dash-one. Stand by." 


| gulp. "How bad is it?" 


The new guy taps a dial twice, and the big screen flashes to another 
pattern - this time recognisable as a 2-D ARad render overlaid onto 
the floor plan of the house. Multicoloured field lines emanate from 
the center, dissolving at the edges into spikes of deep violet that 
crash into each other, and fade mutually into black. 


At one corner of the first floor, however, the rainbow escapes, 
propagating into starbursts of yellow that arc across the screen, 
looping around and bursting into the violet, staining it an ugly brown. 
"HEF leak," he mutters. "Thaum capacitor cycling loss in ell-oh-one. 
Symmetry is broken in three places. They can fix it, but they do not 
have long." His right hand gestures to another screen, where a 
waveform shivers taut like breaking thread. 


"Is there ... something | can do here?" 


"No." He brings his headset back down, and flips the left switches 
again in a different pattern. The screens flicker back to the 
psychedelic overlays, field patterns and projections, 1-2-3 switch, 
1-2-3 switch - but | notice the feed of Charlie and Jorge at my corner 
of the setup, their shadows striding into the storm. 


"Thanks," | whisper, even though | know he can't hear me through 
his torrent of thaumic data. 


As if in response, the comms crackle again, from Charlie: "/t's no 
problem, doc." Then, shortly later: "/ see it. We're going in." 


"Oh-two and twelve at maximum," reports the new guy. My screen 
flares to white. Five seconds of silence. Then, crackling, in Jo's 
voice this time - and | swear | can taste the fear beneath her calm. 


"Charles," she breathes, "she's here." 


And the screens explode into fireworks. 


In the blizzard forming on the screen in front of me, | see Charlie 
raise his right hand, his left hand clenching Jorge's. The interference 
grows worse, threatening to blot out the feed entirely, and before it 
goes out | can see that both of them are screaming. 


The new guy swivels into action. His hands fly over the controls, 
flickering between screens reflexively now, and his headset starts 
going off like a Geiger counter in heat - clack-clack-clack-CLACK - 
no doubt cycling through the massive wave of data flooding the 
ARIs. | smell burnt metal and lemons. The feeds are cycling faster 
now, flickering from spectrum to spectrum, far too fast for my eyes to 
register. 


Abruptly, the new guy speaks - with preternatural calm, from a 
million miles away - "Redirecting thaumic gradient. Team B, fire on 
target position." From somewhere, | hear the roar of whirring discs 
and crackling sparks as more than two hundred field modifiers strain 
under the astronomical load. 


He caps off his concerto with a final flourish of tweaks and flicks, 
ending (almost as an afterthought) with an arpeggio over the left 
switches once again. The rainbow storm on the main screen ceases, 
and switches to a dull brown shadow-show. 


| can barely make out the front door of the house - but the feed's 
been dimmed, exceedingly so, like watching a sandstorm through 
sunglasses. The double doors have been thrown wide open, and in 
the light that emerges | see two figures - Rao and Jo - flickering like 
dead leaves in a campfire. 


Jo's down into a staggered high kneel, body hunched over, hands 
clenched into tight fists. Rao stands tall against the storm, feet at an 
angle, his right hand held out in front of him, open palm facing the 
doorway. Faint light streams from Jo's hands; it forms rivulets of field 
lines that blow backwards into the wind - then bend, weakly at first, 
then strongly, into a steady trickle against the flow, straight into the 
shoulder of Rao's right arm. 


And in front of them, something coming down the stairs, something 


with the head of a woman and the body of a shade, fractal brilliance 
peeking over the threshold, burning pure white even through the 
new guy's filtered feed. | see her two eyes open like magnesium 
flares, see the terrible mouth gape vast, vast with unmodulated 
ARad, and Jo is instantly thrown onto her haunches, nearly breaking 
her connection with Rao. Rao, on the other hand, looks to all the 
world like a man encountering a slight breeze. His hand remains 
outstretched, poised, ready. 


Jo is yelling something | can't hear. From the way her jaw moves, it 
looks a lot like the word: "NOW." 


The lady stumbles towards the open door, bleeding madness and 
light. 


Rao shakes. His body rocks back on its heels. 


And the entire screen rends inwards as the combined energies of 
the house are channeled into the layers and layers of workings 
running parallel in Jo's head, sparking her scalp tattoos, blistering 
along her aura until Rao himself roars into action, transforming 
before my eyes into a phoenix, a waterfall, ten thousand points of 
light that blast from his fingertips into the open door of the house, 
striking the lady straight in the center of mass. The beam blossoms 
upon impact as the field overcompensates, rebounding excess 
discharge into silvery sparks that spread across the screen like a 
spiderweb. 


On another screen, the blizzard clears to a mere storm, and now 
Jorge is running, running, with Charlie backpedalling close behind, 
arms outstretched to defend against the burning backlash, hands 
reflexively spelling out defensive workings in strokes of white. Jorge 
reaches the device with his toolbox half-open and wrenches 
something out of the bottom with his bare hands. It hits the ground in 
a shower of green firecracker sparks and merges with the flow. 
Oblivious to the supernova around him, Jorge retrieves a fist-sized 
cylinder from his toolbox and slides it into the bottom of the field 
modifier with the precision of a ballerina. He twists, and it clicks into 
place. On the main screen, Rao expends a last burst of aetheric 
energy against the lady, toppling it back across the threshold. He 
collapses into a heap. 


Almost instantly, something pops. The new guy reaches forward 
with both arms and twists two large dials counterclockwise back to 
zero. On the main screen, the brilliance fades to black as Jo crawls 
to Rao and cradles his body. Jorge drops to his knees, gasping for 
breath in a cloud of sparks. Charlie, his armpits smoking, staggers 
over to Jorge and pulls a cord on the side of his vest, discharging 
the overloaded sigil batteries in a puff of silver steam. He then does 
the same for himself, first on his left side, then his right. He turns to 
the camera and gives a weak smile. "All good up there?" 


"Return to site for debrief," is the only thing the new guy says 
through the comms. He slides himself away from the console. With 
shaking hands, he peels away the tethers from his face. 


"Are you okay?" | venture. 


"I'm fine," he replies, and this time his voice is soft and high like a 
child's. 


"| didn't know you could - run the hardware like that. That was 
amazing." 


He doesn't reply. | hesitate a little, then place a hand on his 
shoulder. "Thank you." 


"What for?" 
"For - for doing whatever it was you did." 


He brushes away my palm and staggers to his feet. "It's my job. | did 
what I'm supposed to." He squeezes past me and, with his still- 
shaking hands, hoists himself out of the basement, one step at a 
time. 


In the evening of my first day Jorge slides the tape into the VCR and 
hits the play button with his thumb. The screen flickers to life -—a 
white wall, pantry stool, clock on the wall. It’s six in the morning. 
Hands adjust the camera, then the woman sits in front of it, jacket 
tied around her waist, tank top baring aged tattoos on wrinkled skin. 
Her long grey hair sweeps down to her waist; she sweeps it aside 


her face, sits feet astride across the stool, and begins. "My name is 
Masa Zupan," she growls, "and if you’re watching this, I’m already 
dead." 


There is stillness for a few seconds. Then something happens - the 
screen flickers - the light changes - and now Masa is doubling over 
in a low, throaty laugh. "Yeah, | can’t do this. Take two, take two." 


The screen buzzes, and Masa is seated again, this time with her 
hair tied up. "Look. You there, seeing this now. This is me. My name 
is Masa Zupan. | am sixty-two this year. | am a witch. | made a 
mistake, and now | am dead." 


"I’m sure you miss me. The lot of you. But | guess you’re playing this 
for a reason. If you’re watching this, I’ve gone down fighting with 
curses on my lips and dead ghost between my teeth. Or | slipped 
and fell in the bathroom. It could go either way. Regardless, I’m 
dead and gone. And | just want you to know that | am glad to be rid 
of you. Yes, every single one." 


Jorge smiles. "She was a real sweetheart." 


The figure on the screen leans in. She breaks into a sly grin. "And 
between us all, | can think of no others that | would rather have 
served with. Theta seventy-seven — here’s to us, my friends. Here’s 
to the duty and the job. And till we meet again."