//------------------------------// // Incident-2669-A // Story: SCP-2669 - The Thing // by One-Of-Three-Names //------------------------------// >THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN DECLASSIFIED. LEVEL 3 AUTHORIZATION CODE IS REQUIRED TO CONTINUE. >PROCESSING AUTHORIZATION CODE... >ACCESS GRANTED. AUDIO TRANSCRIPT OF AGENT BLITHE'S AFTER ACTION REPORT, INCIDENT-2669-A: [The recording begins with a period of silence, followed by an aural echo and the sound of something being placed on wood. Agent Blithe clears his throat.] You'll have to tolerate informal nature of this report. I'll be making an official version once I've collected myself enough to bother with protocol, but I'd be naive to think nobody else is listening to this. Let it be known I'm making this log for recollection purposes only. If working for you people has taught me anything, it's that memories are flimsy, and fallible. [Blithe chuckles, then sighs.] So this all started with a tip from SCP-001. About some vanishing city in the Frozen North or whatever, lost for thousands of years, blah blah, you know the story. Anyway, her word is gold, so we set a base up there. Nothing special, just an observation outpost. Horrible job, above average pay. I know a few researchers who took that job so they could use their free time to do... I don't remember, geeky shit. [Blithe unscrews a metal cap, and presumably takes a drink.] Anyway. Basically all this base is for is to watch out for the crystal palace place in case it shows up again. Kind of a waste of resources if you ask me, but I'm not in charge. And hey, what do I know, right? They certainly found something up there. Sure as shit wasn't a city though. Whatever it was, it screwed things up enough that the outpost's communications go out and they don't check in on time. That's where we come in. The yaks weren't thrilled with us, showing up all geared up like we were, but we intimidated them enough that they didn't dare start anything. We found the foundations usual guide contact, some yak named Garry. Garry didn't want to be seen with us, being the intrusive and rude outsiders we were. At least, not without additional compensation. That kind of pissed me off. Don't worry, while I did end up doing something stupid, it wasn't roughing that gak up. Agent Smiles insisted she had perfected a navigation spell that could lead us to the base. I decided we would give it a shot. I was confident enough in our navigational skills that we'd be able to make our own way back if Sunny's spell didn't work out. So, we packed up our sleds and set off into the frozen wastes by ourselves. Sunny's spell worked, though I doubt things would have gone as well if the Frozen North wasn't so empty. We only had to take a few detours around natural obstacles, as she could only tell the general direction to go. The trip to the base went more or less smoothly, barring one incident where we were nearly buried by snow and had to spend hours digging our sleds out. It only took us three days to get there. Three whole days. Sometimes I want to tell the teleportation department to shove its expenditure reports up its own... Ugh, nevermind. The outpost was trashed. Completely wrecked. Someone had deliberately and systematically destroyed every room of the place. It looked like a warzone, and at first we suspected yaks had raided the place or something. But yaks can't use magic, and as far as I know they think the idea of explosives is suicidal. There were signs of fire everywhere, and the buildings hadn't just burned down, they'd been torn apart too. It was surreal. A real mystery. It was as if they'd deliberately blown themselves up for some reason. We only found two bodies. Where the rest were, I don't know. If they'd been buried beneath the snow there was no way we were finding them. Looking back, I'm really glad we didn't search for too long. [Blithe mutters indistinctly, followed by a click as he presumably stops recording for a time. The dictation then abruptly continues, voice reverberation suggests a change of location.] I haven't mentioned the members of our team yet. There was Sunny Smiles, Shimmer Shield, Silver Streak, and me: Berry Blithe. Sunny was our magician, Shimmer our bio, Silver our tech, and I was just the chucklehead in charge. Not a large team, but we weren't expecting anything serious. And, immediate mystery aside, it didn't look like there was much for us to do. There wasn't anything left to salvage, and the dead weren't telling any tales aside from what Shimmer could discern from a glance, and all she could tell was that they froze to death. So, we chalked up the whole thing to a bunch of nerds going stir crazy. It's what we wanted to believe, and the evidence seemed to suggest it. We were all tired, and all we wanted to do was take our photos, set up our tents, eat, and sleep. So that's what we did. [There is a faint squeaking of wood, Blithes voice sounds further away.] If something happened that night I wasn't awake for it, but it would have been an opportune time. We only bothered to have a single guard on watch at a time, and we were in separate tents. [There is a short pause, and a faint clinking of glass can be heard far from the recording device.] The next day we set off. Didn't even bother to bring the bodies. We were sent on a rescue mission, and there was no one to save. The only corpses we found appeared to have died of natural causes, and the weather had destroyed any clues that hadn't already been blown up. Nobody on our team died, and that was enough to put us in a pretty optimistic mood. We even sang a little as we walked. Sunny kept joking about how all our names were alliterations. [Another pause.] Nobody realized anything was wrong until the second night on our trip back to Yakyakistan. I don't even know if anything WAS wrong until that night. Silver raised the alarm and woke me up, shouting that Sunny was missing. I unzipped my tent and told her to calm down and report. The back of Agent Smile's tent had been sliced open, and she was nowhere to be found. Silver said she only discovered Sunny was gone when she went to wake her up for guard duty. The three of us remaining spent the rest of the night patrolling in the dim light, looking for her... But we left the next afternoon. We could have stayed longer, had plenty of supplies meant for any survivors we thought we might find. Could have stayed out there searching for weeks if we wanted to, but we didn't. We were spooked, and none of us wanted to meet whatever had gotten her. At that point we all thought she was dead. So we headed out. We'd been walking for two days, so with any luck we thought we'd be able to find Yakyakistan the day after. There aren't many landmarks in the wastes, so without Sunnys spell, all we had to work with was our compasses and our map. For whatever reason, that didn't seem to be working. The worst part though, was that we didn't notice until it was far too late. There aren't a lot landmarks out there, but there are some, and we had marked when we were supposed to come across them. The first missed checkpoint didn't worry us much, but the second did, and the third made us stop. Shimmer and I set up camp while Silver tried to figure out what in Tartarus had gone wrong. We were all paranoid now, and none us were looking forward to nighttime. That night was pretty bad. We decided that two should keep watch while the other slept, but nobody really got any rest. It never actually gets pitch black at that time of year in the Frozen North, so we could always see just well enough to make out shapes in the darkness. We were all sure we saw something at one point or another, but we'd been awake for more than a day at that point. Jumping at shadows. Silver just poured over the map most of the night, wracking her brain as to where we went off-track. All of us were starting to be glad Sunny wouldn't be needing her rations. By the time we finally found our way out of that freezing hell the sun was setting on the fifth day. That's almost ten days since we left Yakyakistan. They were waiting for us. We were thrilled to see them, but they didn't seem too happy to see us. [Blithe chuckles again, followed by nearly thirty seconds of silence.] I can imagine how they saw us, stumbling out of the sleet like zombies still wrapped in the useless vestiges of our previous lives. [Another laugh, slightly manic.] Sunny was there. She called us monsters, and to stay where we were while the other teams apprehended us. I was confused, but I wasn't going to argue with twelve foundation agents. [A long pause, sounds of liquid being poured.] At first I thought someone had opened fire on Silver. She... She seemed to explode. Chunks of her flesh went everywhere, vanishing into the snow. I don't know how none of it hit me. Shimmer wasn't as lucky. [Blithe coughs, and further pouring sounds are recorded.] A piece of Silver was stuck to her face, and it was moving. It was chaos at that point, everyone shouting. Nothing could drown out the sound of her screaming though. She kept yelling something about how it was eating her. Eating her face, and her eyes. It wasn't long until more of us stopped shouting and started screaming, but I couldn't look away from Shimmer. I couldn't look away from what was happening to her. It looked like her head was melting, dripping this pinkish slime down over her that seemed to dissolve any flesh and fur it touched. There was a point where she became incoherent, and she stopped saying things. I don't know which was worse. It wasn't until her voice started to change that the other agents finally put her out of her misery. At least, I hope they did. [Blithe sniffs, exhaling raggedly.] Gods, the sounds she made. [Blithe produces an audible gulp, before the sound of something being set down is heard.] The rest of that night is a blur to me. I was so jacked up on adrenaline. Any time I try to think about what happened I get their afterimages burned into my eyes again. I... I remember running, and blood, and... twitching, glurping bodies. There was an agent whose leg tore itself off before skittering away on spider legs, and tentacles or something started squirming from the gory stump... I'm glad Sunny got out alive. I have that at least. [Blithe sighs, and loud fumbling sounds are heard as presumably the recording device is handled.] There are so many things I want to know, and yet am terrified of knowing. I don't know whether to probe for answers from the other teams and researchers assigned to this, or to ask one of the brainiacs to make me forget the whole thing. [Blithe sets the recording device down again, and the audio is periodically interrupted by static from an unknown source of interference.] All I- [Static] -whatever those assholes found out there, they should have left it buried in the fucking ice. [Static] [There is a click as Blithe stops recording.] Following the events of this recording, Agent Blithe is put on administrative leave after his colleagues report his excessive consumption of alcohol. Examination of photos taken of basecamp has revealed the identity of the two bodies to be Researcher Clever Childs, and Assistant Mac Russel. Due to the events of Incident-2669-C, Agent Sunny Smiles was confronted at her home in Ponyville, where she tested positive for exposure to SCP-2669. The breach was successfully contained.