#altis shaw

The family

Phone numbers

Cold

Prelude to death

First death

Science

Cat

Before and after

Parasite

Change back

ADHD

Neocortex

THAT WAS ONE TIME!

An outsider's perspective

Near death experience

Alagadda

Troublemaker

Hideout

Myth

Livestock

Metafictional

Names

Performing

Containment breach

PTSD

Hubris

Some of the researchers are… odd. Not quite right. Anomalous.

The Foundation already knows how to contain them. Most get placed in a Keter site and forgotten about. Either they get killed in less than a year, or they flourish in the harsh and ever changing environment. Many go insane.

Stories tell of a man who did all three. An immortal who had lived in the heart of the Foundation for decades until… something must have happened in the war. Maybe he fought in Europe, or maybe he lost someone, or maybe everything was just too much for him to bear.

They say his sanity was already on the way out when the cross test took place. He couldn't kill 682, of course, and just like every other failure it came with a great price.

No one noticed the change at first. No one saw the weeps turn to snarls, the dismayed look turn desperate. One day he broke, and the strained laughter of a man about to lose his mind was replaced by the manic smile of one who had lost it long ago.

The Foundation only realised it when he almost bit off the arm of someone in the cafeteria. He fought them when he got detained, and escaped mere days later.

He was next seen in a major breach, still laughing as Site 19's most dangerous anomalies took down everything in their path. The laughter continued when the senior researcher who sent him to 682 now ran away from it and he still smiled when he paused, turned around, and began treating someone injured.

They say he was still laughing when great claws of a creature 20 times his size tore through his torso. When his broken body was found, clutching a first aid kit and a fire axe, that eerie smile was still plastered on.

They say the immortal still works for the Foundation. Still broken, still grinning too widely, getting killed every other week. Some of the people who used to work in Site 19 tell tales of the trouble he gave them, of the danger that he is, to himself and others, and also?

The low casualty rate in breaches he brings. Of the lifesaving and occasionally illegal medicine they were given in his pharmacy. That even with everything he did, he always draws the line at medical malpractice.

You never believed it, of course. It was a stupid myth. Someone like that would be in a containment cell, never let out in a million years.

You never believed it, that is, until you met one of his students. A young and bright eyed medic who took too many risks, believed in too many superstitions, and had intimate knowledge with the insides of the human ribcage. She was ruthlessly efficient with a scalpel, could sense a major breach coming days before it happened, and, as you found out the hard way during a Chaos Insurgency raid, kept a picture of SCP-096 in her top pocket for emergencies.

"Close your eyes, wait until the screams stop and then count to 500 before opening them. Do you promise?"

Her voice was odd when she said this. You didn't ask any questions.

She went back there. To Site 19.

Said she was needed, that she knew there's gonna be trouble. The look in her eyes terrified you, but you decided to trust her judgment.

You only found out recently she died. You don't know how. Apparently, the case is still investigated by the Ethics Committee.

You did bribe your way into the knowledge that someone decommissioned the anomaly that killed her.

You think back to 096, to the screams.

To the legends of the madman who trained her.

To a man pushed to his limits by the pain of people he had never known.

To an anomaly the Foundation thought might take down SCP-682, and to a monster driven by despair.

Honestly?

It sits in a cage far too small. Of course, like everything, the cage is much larger than it knows it should be, but that doesn't change the fact that it can't breathe.

This cage is suffocatingly small, but too exposed, too. It's made of cold bars - rows of cold, with holes in the middle. It can watch people through the gaps, but they also look at it, speaking meaningless words it knows it should know.

There's another cold thing. It can feel that cold on the back of its head, at a spot it can't reach. Of course, if it could, how would that help? It doesn't have... The other people are better at moving things. It could move things like that, too, but it can't now.

Of course, everything is cold here.

It hates cold.

It thinks things used to be warmer. Before it went in this cage. When it was stuck to that bed that now remains vacant in front of it, the cold sticking to his hands and legs and not letting him move. When it was he.

Or... Was it? It doesn't mind either way. It doesn't care about the far past unless it affects the immediate future.

It hears the elevator moving first. Then, drumming footsteps. The chemical smell is more difficult to notice, as it covers the entire room of the cage.

Finally, as the door loudly opens and a man steps out, it can smell the rotting dried meat they call food.

The man, dressed in white and smelling of words it can't quite recall, points at its bowl of uneaten carcass with a disappointed look on his face. He says something in a soft tone, and it wants to punch him in the face.

He adds the new slop to the old one. It notes that he doesn't change the water. The bowl of water had been sitting there for as long as it can remember, and its stomach feels bad at the smell of the growing moss inside.

It knows, somehow, that when things were warmer and he was larger he didn't mind this smell. It wonders if its stomach still has its original mind, but that thought makes it feel emotions that it can barely process.

The man reaches a hand for its head, and it flinches. It hates being touched.

It sees something, now. The tiniest sliver of skin under that thing that smells of old dried meat and protects them from his cold.

Its stomach tells it its hungry. It tells it to shut up.

It forces itself to look calm. The man's hand gets closer. It leaps.

Now Bright, his aro and bisexual, passively suicidal, overly dramatic and extremely jewish ass is basically specifically tailored for Leonard Cohen's Dance Me To The End Of Love.

In every universe, the one who holds the amulet must look for new ways to die, reading 682 termination proposals and causing containment breaches every other week. They might not even realise that's what they're doing.

In every universe, they will search for their death. And in every universe, given enough time, they will find it.

Or…

Almost.

Some will find a way to shatter the precious stone on their amulet. Shatter — but not break completely. Their mind will break into a hundred different pieces with that ruby, or sapphire, or anything else, and they will know of everything they lost, every memory kept somewhere else. Each fragment will barely have the consciousness of a fly.

Others will see their sweet salvation in SCP-096. When they will be given a new body, they will still remember the thing's face, and it will chase them again. They will become a part of its special containment procedures—SCP-096-A, like a more permanent femur breaker. They will remain aware during every moment, even as their amulet is kept safely stored near 096's cell.

Some of them, of course, will simply shut down. They lived for so long, and eventually there's no place to keep everything. They'll value their memories over other brain functions, after all. Eventually, they'll become something not capable of doing anything other than remembering, staring off into the distance… and picking up something sharp when you aren't looking.

The person they used to be died already, did it not? And the consciousness within SCP-963 was born out of the last thought in that person's mind: "I don't want to die". It is nothing but survival, and it is nothing but death. It cannot die, just as much as it cannot live.

It is a poison that Time bit and chose to spit out. It will not make the same mistake again.

An entire town turned comatose. Small red stones were found in their water supply. The team sent to investigate it had fallen to the same ailment.

A D-Class opened its eyes as if for the first time and started hearing screams in the distance. It panicked, and did the only thing it could think of—it started running from the exit.

As the man, usually unmoving, got up from his bed, the nurses hurried to take his visitor away. He remembered who that visitor was, though, and reaching for a scalpel, he realised he still knows how to tear through flesh.

A parasite cannot live without causing harm to others. This parasite cannot die.

Altis already read through thousands of reports by Multi-U already. He couldn't find a single one that ended well. Not for him, and not for anyone else.

He sighs. As his eyes wonder to his mythology book, he promises himself that he can do better somehow.

Tw death.

Except.

There was a period of time in the fairy mid 20th century (say 50s?) in which the Foundation was cross testing him with dangerous anomalies (maybe if we get someone who can't die, he'll tell us what this anomaly does!). They did this in a less than legitimate manner, but he didn't know about that until decades later when he mentioned it to his brother who apparently didn't know.

Through all these tests, he learned very quickly that fighting will get him nowhere, that he can't run, and that he'll just be yelled at if he froze or fainted. Thus, he ended up deeply rooted into the fawn response.

He ended up very good at disassociating and hiding it. He found himself enjoying these tests. At least they were a break from boredom, right? He forced himself to have the time of his life, because if he can't change his situation, he should at least make the best of it.

The Ethics Committee got involved, in the end. He wasn't even told about it, he just stopped being called for testing.

The damage to his mental state, of course, was already done.