FAULT: an SCP SBI AU

This is an au that has consumed me. This blog will just be a terrible mess of whatever I’m stuck on for the week, likely with little explanation and heavy spoilers. Anyway, the general vibe + anomalous properties are below cut:

Commissions: Writing and Art. Starts at 5$

All Nom commissions are prompt gifts for donations to charitable causes, such as the environment, social justice rights, or victims of wars. I will not cover topics of romance, sex, or write about George, Dream, or Wilbur.

Writing: Base 5$ gets a minimum of 300 words. 10$ 1,000 word minimum, 20$ 3,000. I also have no self-control, and there is no additional payment if the prompt is amazing and I break the world limit.

Drawing: Base 5$ gets a drawing in full color. 'Animatics' start at 40$ for a verse, and the price increases for color.

Project Guide

The tag 'crumbs to tide you over' is how I organize ficlets, wip sippets, and fic announcements. Personal tag is something to nom on. Wilbur tags are noms Wilbur or scp Wilbur if you want to block tags, and my PR response to that is here.

Ao3 fics:

Fault. The titular SBI SCP AU. SBI trapped in the Foundation. Lots of angst, large exploration of trauma, dehumanization, moral philosophies, and messed up found family. Tags are fault au, fault memes pog, sbi scp au, fault analysis, etc. This is a whole series and has many associated works. Long Fic.

>Also Where, then, do your loyalties lie? for AU where human Phil works for the Foundation and tries to free kid SCP Tommy. Complete.

Mandatory Family Reunion. Techno kidnapped by criminal dark SBI and handles it very poorly AU. Heavy dark em duo. Explores different types of abuse, motivations, delusions, and how love causes harm. Tag is Mandatory Family Reunion, sometimes mfr. Long Fic.

The Lambs Wolves Wear (Ficlet is here; starts at the Reveal and currently goes further than the ao3) Fully dark SBI where Philza's children were replaced by monsters. Demon "Tommy", changeling "Wilbur", and ghost army "Technoblade" are violent and traumatized, their tensely conflicting infiltration motives jeopardizing the lives of everyone in a twenty mile radius. As they experience love for the first time, will the wolves in sheeps clothing be tamed? Tw for abuse and horror. Long Fic.

Way more below, those are just my main projects ^-^

Shakes them around

Meanwhile Philza isn’t entirely paying attention, and realizes there’s suddenly a small child sheltering behind him from a cop. He gives the cop the nastiest look imaginable, which causes them to back off enough that Tommy thinks his plan is working. Once the negotiations start Philza is baffled by who would have the gall to kidnap him, and so poorly at that. Frankly it’s an umbrage to face the work of an amateur.

Bonus 11) Torture and 22) Survivor’s guilt

Disclaimer: this blurb is set in the SCP SBI AU I have called Fault. No specific part of the timeline, summoning sessions happen so often it doesn’t matter. Explanation of AU; tldr.  

You’re not supposed to scream. 

That had been one of the hardest lessons of the summoning ritual for Tommy to learn. Screaming was a form of manipulation. It was a horrible, nasty trick to try on the humans, so of course a rotten monster like him had to be taught not to. He wasn’t supposed to exploit their mercy like that, and yet for some reason Tommy couldn’t manage to stop for the longest time. 

But given enough time even the most basic of instincts could be broken. Lessons beaten so deep even the terror of mortal panic could not override the need to obey. Little rules built together, each lesson learned a little harsher, until eventually Tommy was the perfect docile altar lamb. 

He learned to throttle his screams before the humans could do it for him. The whimpers, too, stifled alongside his sobs. Begging was forbidden, though that was easier to abandon given talking was already harshly discouraged. Tommy turned instead to silent, desperate pleading for salvation. He didn’t know if The Blood God listened to prayers.

He listened to pain, though.

A flinch jolted him at the brush of contact upon his throat, and at once he tried to smother it, shoving down the instinct. Tommy very carefully didn’t move, holding rigidly still as uncertain fingers prodded at the bruises already there from last session. His breathing hitched, heartbeat slamming against the hands resuming their place ensnaring his throat. The Blood God would be summoned right before Tommy drew his last breath and not a second sooner. 

He’d lost count of how many last breaths he’d taken. The familiar burn of his lungs, screaming at him to save them. That instinctual thrashing against the countless hands pinning him to the floor, a dance well memorized by his worn body. Minutes passed, the convulsions beginning as his diaphragm desperately compressed and contracted, trying to force air down. Writhing as fire ate through his chest, screaming for release that would never come, could never be allowed to come. 

Black ink pooled in the edge of his vision, death approaching. He didn’t fight it. He wasn’t allowed to. Even on the verge of his own murder was obedient, the lessons engraved into him. It was a resistance long broken in him, long before the current summoning session. First, still the want to fight. Things like swinging and kicking at the soldiers were discouraged quickly given their meager effects were repaid tenfold. Things like biting or scratching at the hands upon him were not approved of, though they were mostly reserved to occurring during the throes of panic when he had little awareness left. Still, enough punishment and even that stopped.

He had one act of rebellion, though. Eventually, they’d stopped caring enough to punish it, and Tommy clung desperately to the one piece of the ritual that was his. At the very start, when the soldiers dragged him into the summoning room, before the session began. Tommy stared every one of his sacrificers in the eyes. He couldn’t remember every face, they blurred together after so long. Still, it didn’t feel right not to try. Someone had to commemorate them, and if they succeeded Tommy would be the only one left who could. So Tommy locked eyes with each of his torturers. 

And then he apologized to them. 

He had to do it at the start, when he could still speak. Sometimes he wondered what they were told. Were they told how awful he was and know exactly how deserved this was, or did they think him some poor yet necessary cost in the name of countless civilian lives? Did they know they would be the ones to chain The Blood God once more? Were they simply following orders? Did they know nothing at all? 

Surely no one told them Tommy wasn’t the only sacrifice in the room. 

Or maybe they knew. Maybe they’d accepted their roles, just like he’d accepted his. Maybe they were willing, enthusiastic even, ready to become martyrs for the sake of humanity. Tommy didn’t know. He couldn’t ask. He was permitted his apology and no more. 

Tommy forced himself to remember the details of the person choking him to death. The curve of their nose, the few strands of hair escaping the biohazard face shield that was splattered with scarlet. The features blurred as darkness swallowed his vision, but he caught the flash of fear as the pool of ruby haloing Tommy rippled unaturally and surged outwards. Ruby runes carved themselves across the padded cell floor, smearing The Blood God’s name into existence. 

In the hesitation of confusion-awe-terror, the vice on his throat eased just the slightest. Tommy gasped, only for the grip to immediately tighten, gloved fingers clawing into the mottled bruises staining his neck in the dark shadow of a noose. Pulverising, and Tommy’s panic spiked. They should’ve let go, they needed to run. But the human was determined to finish the job even as scarlet light blossomed around Tommy. 

The strangulation abruptly stopped as The Blood God tore the human off him. They were ripped apart in seconds. Death fell upon the room, swift and brutal in his conquest. Tommy couldn’t save them, simply curling into himself where he lay in a pool of crimson. Each sucked down rasp of air hurt. Greedy, given the growing plethora of last breaths claimed by The Blood God. He alone would continue to breathe out of all of them. Each one hurt. 

Only once the last of them were dead could he speak again. The same words, over and over, no matter how it felt like choking out broken glass. The mantras Philza had given him to ward off the guilt of what he’d done. 

You didn’t choose this.

They deserve it.

It’s not your fault.

“It has come to my attention that Technoblade’s last…escapade ended poorly. So I have called this staff meeting to clarify my intent.”

“Look at him. Amazing. The best kid I could ask for.”

man that’s deep. Hope you're ready for a philosophical info dump! Fault spoilers abound though not really of the plot variety. Tw dehumanization, obviously, plus suicidal ideation mention.

On a very technical level it’s Homo sapians. Like that’s literally just it. (though as a bio major I must add that the concept of ‘species’ is incredibly flawed and so some may consider other hominids humans idk man) As for Fault, Tommy’s DNA is still human. Just because [redacted] happened doesn’t change the fact he is in a human body. His kids would be human. When his body decays into soil, is it still human? Probably not, by the way I instinctively used it to describe the corpse. So then the humanity is stored in the ba- soul. The soul encompasses the summation of that persons consciousness, and so therein lies their personhood. (Now dichotomy between spirit and flesh is false (emotions and memories being created via brain goop) but this ask can only withstand so many digressions. Let’s just say the body influences the soul and move on.)

Which could make the collective Tubbo human, due to having human souls. By that logic you can say The Blade is human, too. Like you could argue that…but does it matter? Does saying they technically are or are not a human change the person before you in a tangible way. I don’t think Fault souls are divided into human/all others dichotomy because I don’t think Wilbur’s soul is different from Tommy’s on a mechanical level. In Philza’s musings, he prizes humans for their creativity, but reflects that they aren’t unique in that ability, only in the scale they’ve managed. So mostly, being human is being yet another type of sapient creature and is largely defined by biology.

There is a divide between a Real and Conceptual soul, but as we see with Phil one can become the other. What I find more useful is the concept of personhood, which encompasses the ideas of someone’s humanity (things like agency, some type of perceived intrinsic value, consciousness, compassion/connections, etc) without strictly tying to a biological yes/no answer. Real souls act pretty solidly as people regardless of humanity, but idk about Conceptuals. I’d prefer to think that Niki is a person, but is Greg? Are random abyssal hands? Weird eldritch plants? It’s messy.

When Tommy lost his Red in the Grey Period, it’s arguably the most traditionally human he ever is in the main body of Fault. At least, the Foundation began considering the possibility of re-classifying him due to lacking anomalous properties. And yet in Tommy’s reflection upon the event he declared:

[“That wasn’t humanity!]…[It was hatred, and terror, and sorrow all writhing beneath a numbness so thick I couldn’t even remember to breathe. I didn’t even want to, sometimes. I may have never been human, but I wasn’t even a person then.”]

In the removal of the support pillar that kept him alive in the hell hole that is the Foundation, Tommy didn’t feel like he had enough value to be a person at the very moment the Foundation had to begin debating if they should consider him one. Which really just proves the disconnect between being human and personhood, and that personhood is defined by the individual’s judgement of value for both themselves and others, and so isn’t a firm metric within the Fault universe. It's somewhat analogous to respect.

Which leads to the second question. Fault deals heavily in themes of dehumanization, even if the person in question isn’t human. But if you want to talk literally and strictly humanity: no, if you believe in the afterlife, which Fault takes no stance on except if you count Tubbo and the voices as a form of afterlife, which I do. Otherwise, yes, using a gun.

When you take away someone’s personhood, it’s a pivotal step in oppression. The moment when it’s permissible, or even right, to harm them. It is easier to abuse something instead of someone, and thus it’s integral to the Foundation that anomalies are not people. And you can destroy parts of someone’s soul and therefore their personhood, be it magically, mechanically, or manipulation. The Foundation does so frequently to anomalies (and humans but the Foundation’s fascism is another essay), in isolation and destroying the bonds between community friends family, in ripping out the memories that people use to compose an internal narrative of themselves and the world, in stripping anomalies of names and calling them numbers and titles and slurs and objects and its, in manipulating their emotions to demonize weaponize control them, in stripping away rights and dignities like privacy, healthcare, freedom, safety. Aside from the amnestics these all are very real ways people are dehumanized. Tommy’s humanity was taken when he was told he’s a monster so often that he believed he could never be anything else, believed he had no agency, believed he didn’t deserve relationships with others, believed his life held no inherent worth. Essentially, it’s trauma. Deep rooted, the kind that destroys how one perceives themselves. Or, how one views a scapegoat population.

There are of course fantastical methods of removing personhood in Fault, usually targeting the soul quadrants.

True Name: this one is nebulous, but encapsulates a person’s agency. What they choose to be, what they long for. It includes self and external perception. Practically, this is propaganda, coercion, persuasion, and labeling (such as monster, hero, weak, what have you). Magically, you can destroy one’s True Name and thus their agency. What was originally a person is left a husk devoid of motivation. They still have things like obligations, emotions, memories left, but don’t want anything, have no will. Kinda stand there and breathe if not under orders. Plus no one can use that person’s names/pronouns anymore, the name ripped out of the world.

Emotion: The most mundane, heavy in the manipulation side. On the magical front this will be getting into Niki territory. The erasure or over ride of emotions that a person really feels that can push them to act in ways they normally wouldn’t depending on their control. But this is also Tommy territory, over riding what a person feels with unfathomable blood lust, driving them to act like a monster. Red is a huge way the Foundation dehumanizes anomalies by forcing them to murder D-Class in the name of research. Against pacifists, it’s a very direct hit to the self-perception. Easier to think you’re a monster when you’ve acted like one. Plus, easier for watching humans to believe it having witnessed horrific acts. And as a bonus treat death row inmates like animals to slaughter for the sake of curiosity.

Bonds: There will be like a whole villain exploring this magically, and has big implications for the vessel/Conceptual power system. Essentially ruin the Power of Friendship and Found Family tm. Practically, it’s textbook manipulation and isolation. Conceptuals cannot break bonds, promises, bargains, obligations, what have you. So for them, that destruction would have horrific implications that probably rip their soul apart physically. For Philza, being bondless means not being a person at all. For Wilbur, growing up cut off from society, it meant becoming human racist. But people also already break their bonds all the time; renege on a contract, break up with a partner, disown kids, skip a day of work, what have you. Sometimes it’s not very harmful, but also losing his bond with Philza immediately made Tommy suicidal, so it really depends on the person and what bond it is. Alternatively, forging a bond. The Blade literally gained sentience through his situation with The Blood God. But Rosalind joining the Hive made her literal less human, so again, depends.

Memory: There’s corrupting memories through introducing eldritch trauma, which can be things like learning forbidden runes that could end the world if uttered, or might explode one’s head, which isn’t much in the way of dehumanization. Proper Void metafictional madness is mostly isolation, existentialism, and nihilism which is already rampant, particularly in the form of conspiracy rabbit holes.

Amnestics are also magic aligned albeit of sci fi flavor, though brain trauma, dementia, amnesia, dissociation etc are real world forms of memory loss. I’m not here to claim people with dementia doing have a soul? Like for the record? But that memory loss can be a massive struggle and make it difficult to function. The amnestics are intentional tools however. Self perception of personhood is reliant upon an internal narrative, which for Philza was ripped out and replace with agony, confusion, fear as his relationships, memories, and synapses were artificially destroyed. (Aha what’s that? The false dichotomy of the spirit and flesh rearing its head again?) His dehumanization was rather literal as losing grasp on his personhood through blows to his memories and relationships directly led to losing grasp on his physical form. In retrospect, Philza considered it the closest to dying he’d ever come in his immortal life. Him lashing out in a rather animistic fashion further justified the Foundation’s dehumanization of other anomalies as yet more fuel for the propaganda machine. (Though he was still fully cognizant for the first amnestics massacre, so no getting off the hook for that one.)

"Wilbur": I use Perish Song :) :)

Philza: