Nightmare Fuel / SCP Foundation: SCPs 5000 to 5999

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SCPs 001-299 | SCPs 300-999 | SCPs 1000-1999 | SCPs 2000-2999 | SCPs 3000-3999 | SCPs 4000-4999 | SCPs 5000-5999 | SCPs 6000-6999 | SCPs 7000-7999

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SCP- 5000

• SCP-5000, "Why?" It's centered around the Apocalyptic Log recovered from an exosuit that teleported from an alternate reality where the Foundation indiscriminately began to slaughter the human race by freeing every single anomaly they have (except the friendly ones, which they destroyed as well) due to what's implied to be them finding out the true reason why SCP-682 is disgusted by them.
  • Before committing their worldwide massacre, the Foundation got the results back from a mysterious experiment, and the results really, really didn't sit well with them. These lines of dialogue pertaining to this can be found by converting the very last image using a Steganographic program.
  My hands shake as I hold the document. "This is confirmed?"
  He nods. "We got the report from PNEUMA staff yesterday. It's everyone."
  "Even us?"
  "Even us, Tejani. To think I'd find myself agreeing with that damn lizard..."
  "What do we do?"
  "You know what we have to do. We'll have to disseminate a cure, I think, among personnel before we get things underway. It'll try to stop us otherwise."
  "God help us, One."
  "Don't be like that, Tejani. That's IT talking."
  • The article also shows us a scene where an MTF squad commander starts checking her subordinates… by stabbing them in the shoulder with the knife. When one of them gives in to the pain, he is immediately executed by gunfire. This is how ruthless the Foundation has become.
  • After a lengthy time-skip, it's revealed that Pietro Wilson is carrying around SCP-055 in a personal briefcase. He doesn't remember why he has it or why he's going where he's going, but he eventually comments that he's started using it as an intentional form of Brain Bleach to keep him from crossing the Despair Event Horizon at witnessing so much horror and destruction. When things get too rough he opens the briefcase, forgets whatever is driving him insane and wakes back up miles away.
  • The methods the alternate Foundation chose to exterminate mankind deserve special mention:
    • Photographs of SCP-096's (The Shy Guy's) face were circulated throughout the Internet. Before the photos were taken down from social media sites, worldwide death tolls had already rocketed into the triple digits, and the numbers are still increasing.
    • The Foundation detonates nuclear charges on the back of SCP-169 (The Leviathan) to make it stir in its sleep slightly. The result? A chain reaction of tsunamis and earthquakes that decimate coastal settlements worldwide. And remember that this is just what happens when the enormous sea monster is just stirring gently whilst still asleep.
    • Somehow, the Foundation has figured out how to create their own copies of SCP-173 (The Sculpture), called Blinkers, which look like Foundation MTF soldiers with empty eye sockets and mantis-like blades instead of hands. And they're significantly more efficient than the original's method, with one of them massacring an entire crowd in the split-second a gust of smoke obscured it from view.
    • Samples of SCP-610 (The Flesh That Hates) got sent to the capital cities of the world's nations with predictable consequences.
    • SCP-662 (Mr. Deeds) is sent to assassinate multiple heads of state with whatever he can find available. He's never heard from again afterward, which has unpleasant implications of its own.
    • SCP-682 (The Hard-to-Destroy Reptile) simply got released. That's it. No further information is given, though the amount of harm it caused would be certainly immeasurable.
    • One news report implies that the Foundation is using SCP-447 (Ball of Green Slime) on civilians. How is obviously kept in the dark, but it's made clear by the wording that it has something to do with whatever happens when the slime comes into contact with dead bodies…
    • SCP-1440 (The Old Man From Nowhere) is utilized to destroy refugee camps in his usual way. For some reason, his anomalous effects no longer extend to Foundation personnel.
    • In a rather brutal form of Yank the Dog's Chain, the Foundation decides to convince fleeing refugees that they can take shelter in SCP-1678 (UnLondon). Once they've herded enough people down there, they destroy the entirety of UnLondon with a nuclear detonation.
    • The SCP Foundation intentionally ignites the eruption of Yellowstone which in addition also obliterates SCP-2000 (Deus Ex Machina), showing that with the protocol now being the genocide against the human race, there is no reason to use SCP-2000 to save the world.
    • SCP-1048 (The Builder Bear) had transformed into a huge army of teddy bears while overrunning the city of Paris. The recording included an absolutely colossal bear roaming near skyscrapers.
    • SCP-2241 (Cameron the Crusader), one of the few human anomalies who wasn't outright killed by the Foundation, is being used as a Child Soldier whom the Foundation is using to destroy the largest refugee camps. We're never told how the poor kid is being controlled, but it can't be good, especially when you remember his file and recall that one of the options the Foundation considered was lobotomizing him.
    • At one point the Foundation just decided to airdrop SCP-3199's (Humans, Refuted) eggs across the world. Now, what was that tidbit about these creatures being eternally pregnant and being able to asexually reproduce at staggering speeds again?
    • Using temporal anomalies, the Foundation essentially made winter the only season on Earth just to further intensify SCP-4666 (The Yule Man)'s global killing spree. And remember, he only targets families with small children.
  • At one point, a GOC commander and doctor manage to capture an MTF leader after the latter and his team manages to blend in with a group of refugees before proceeding to gun them all down - men, women, and children alike. For a group that is known to destroy any anomaly regardless of threat they posed, the GOC is understandably horrified by the fact that a well-known organization dedicated to protecting humanity would turn their backs against their code in an instant. But when the GOC Commander and his Doctor demanded the MTF leader to answer why they're doing this, he manages to say something that managed to make his two GOC interrogators go insane, with his final sayings being eerily similar to SCP-682 itself:
  Samuel Ross: Look what you've done to yourselves. I told you you wouldn't like it, didn't you? That's why you hear your voice. But you wanted to know so badly. I really liked you guys, so I was trying to be nice. We're so kind to you, you know. We fight in the light so you can die in the dark.
  Samuel Ross: … disgusting.
  • On the subject of the GOC's interview with the MTF, Ross makes a throwaway comment implying that SCP-076 (Able) is helping the GOC fight back against the Foundation. Let that sink in: The Foundation's actions are getting so bad that even the guy whose only goal in life is to slaughter every human he ever comes in contact with refuses to join them and switches sides to their opposition (granted it could just be that Able wants revenge against the Foundation himself).
  • The MTF soldiers, the forces of the SCP Foundation which are "cured" of their protocols whilst viewing those unaffected as 'live' ones. It is heavily implied that they lost some core element that makes them 'human', which may explain how they feel no remorse, pain, or empathy for what they're doing in the war against mankind. This is further implied by various SCPs whose effects normally specifically function against humans not working while around Foundation staff, like SCP-1440.
  • Finally, what exactly is the reason the Foundation decided to wholly eradicate humanity? See the blank section between the final journal entry and the footnotes? It's intentional. If someone opens the source code for the article, another seemingly nonsensical line of dialogue between a bunch of staff members pops up where it discusses a feeling of "being invaded." While it might not seem to make any sense, the decision to eradicate humanity seems to have originated from the final results of Project PNEUMA, an experiment that involved mapping out the human psyche... and when the Foundation got the results back, it ended up uncovering something seriously wrong with mankind.
    • What did the alternate Foundation find out, you ask? Human emotions, including the good ones and the bad ones, are actually anomalous - they don't naturally originate in the human brain. The Foundation ended up learning that a mind-controlling entity had wormed its way into humanity's collective subconscious a long time ago and is currently responsible for the emotions that humans usually feel to this very day. The entity's motive for entering the human psyche remains completely unknown, but whatever that may entail, this discovery was apparently so horrifying that it ended up convincing the Foundation, the O5 Council, and even the Ethics Committee to destroy humanity in its entirety, since they consider it the only ethical method to free humanity from the entity's hold and whatever plan it may have in store because it's likely impossible to "cure" humanity with what the Foundation uses to "cure" itself from such emotions - especially when they're dealing with something THAT freaking powerful.
    • This creates an absolutely terrifying implication about the current state of humanity as we know it. Human beings are naturally just cold, stoic, and remorseless husks, but for whatever reason, the entity decided to invade the human psyche for its own goals and granted humans the very emotions that made them the way they are in the present day. And to think that the single greatest virtue of humanity wasn't even originally a part of them in the first place…
    • And finally there's the worrying implication that nothing will stop the alternate Foundation from repeating history. Will they realize that pursuing PNEUMA is not worth it and leave mankind alone, or will they continue down this path, now with the knowledge of how to completely prevent humanity's demise from being stopped? Since the Foundation in the current timeline does not engage itself with PNEUMA, it can be said that the project was discontinued or never brought to fruition... but since the project doesn't happen in this timeline, it's safe to say that the entity is left untouched and now may use its capability to grant emotions to humans to assist in whatever goal it has in store or it will be discovered a second time and humanity may end up extinct.
    • To add insult to injury, what if the Ethics Committee is just plain wrong? After all, these are the same guys who came up with Procedure 110-Montauk. The Ethics Committee is way into the Well-Intentioned Extremist territory. It could easily be thought that wiping out humanity won't actually help or, worse, is the easy way out and they could find another way if they wanted to. Especially because they never give any explanation about why they think they have to destroy humanity. Perhaps the entity might be benevolent and the Foundation is uncharacteristically overreacting to its existence. Or maybe both are evil.
  • A post-article analysis supplies a horrifying possibility on why Wilson reset reality and how he knew to do it; he was being used as a pawn by the entity. The entity needs humanity, either for some unknown plan or simply for sustenance, and the Foundation's efforts were damaging it severely. Wilson was manipulated by the entity to trigger the reset so it would not be discovered, and thanks to his sacrifices, the entity's now free to go on completely unchallenged, keeping humanity to itself for all eternity. The alternate Foundation did its best to vanquish the source of all of humanity's pain, cruelty, and darkest drives and it utterly lost. "Shaggy Dog" Story doesn't even begin to cover it.
    • Even worse, if you accept the theory that humans naturally don't feel emotions or empathy, then it's quite possible that this thing is the source of everything human.
    • Opening SCP-055 didn't simply wipe Wilson's memory, it allowed the entity to give him an emotional boost so he could keep going. As more and more of humanity was wiped out, the entity grew weaker, as did the emotions it could give him.
    • This tale reveals that the Entity is the cause of SCP-2718. That is, every human who dies experiences an eternal Fate Worse than Death as they are forever trapped in their decaying bodies, forced to experience the pain of their gradual decomposition that then transitions into an endless indescribable agony beyond human description once they have been completely torn apart, with the Entity feeding off their suffering. If the Foundation had managed to kill all infected humans, the Entity would have disappeared and the deceased humans freed from their torment. They failed, and now humans have no hope for anything except dying and joining the billions of billions of other humans in deathless agony for eternity. All thanks to Agent Wilson.
    • In the article, the Foundation unleashes various anomalies on the world and then ignores them as they run rampant. However, Wilson spots one anomaly that the Foundation is fighting, a distorted giant figure with huge pseudo-wings. It's implied that this is a physical manifestation of the entity the Foundation is trying to defeat.
  • There's the forgotten fact that at the article's end, Wilson made it to SCP-579's containment site. All we get is a simple line from him that says "Oh… so that's how it is" and a black image of 579.

SCPs 5001 to 5099

• SCP-5045, You Get Used to It, starts off appearing quirky but not too harmful at first, being a sentient VR game with simple 2D graphics called Goat VR, with cartoon goats wandering around a farm and a humanoid figure who refers to himself as "Farmer" who can hear the player and nearby sounds outside the game, designated SCP-5045-1. Then you get to the part where 5045-1 actively tries to keep the player in the game before he pulls the plug, putting the player into a comatose state. And it just gets worse.
  • In the short-term exploration log (where a D-class is sent into the game for 10 minutes before the headset turns off by itself for safety reasons) SCP-5045-1 is very friendly; until one of the goats starts to act up dragging its head across the ground, makes 5045-1 go ballistic and start screaming at the goat, shortly after which the headset is shut off by the researcher. The D-class says that he was getting a headache and that it was starting to smell like smoke in the game.
    • In the long-term exploration log, a different D-class attempts to enter the farmhouse. When SCP-5045-1 lets him in, there's nothing inside except for a painting of a goat and some hay. When the D-class remarks that he expected more to be found, SCP-5045-1 vanishes with a door suddenly appearing where he stood before. After the D-class says that he doesn't want to enter the door, the walls of the house start cracking, making him run through in a panic. On the other side of the door is an empty field of grass with several structures and a purple sign that says "ENJOY." The class D decides to go to a building that resembles a silo because he thought he saw a yellow figure inside through the window. Once he actually meets the yellow man, who is designated SCP-5045-2 the two of them leave, as they head in one direction for about 10 minutes looking for an end and find… another fence. But they aren't back at the beginning of the game, because the fence is all wavy now and the goats are now highly deformed, with one being a puddle on the ground, another standing on its hind legs with a hunched back, and another one which appears to be the size of a house, vomiting with other smaller goats jutting out of its back. They keep walking, and SCP-5045-2 implies that he's a former player who is trapped in Goat VR who's unable to remember anything outside of the game. After SCP-5045-2 says that he's actually feeling hopeful about his situation, "Farmer" catches up to them, berates SCP-5045-2, pushes the D-class out of the way, and then abducts SCP-5045-2 in a flash of light, leaving the D-class to wander by himself until he sees a purple building with more yellow people in it. As he heads over, he realizes that he had already looked in that direction, right before 5045-1 appears. After the D-class shoves him reflexively and runs away he is blocked by a purple goat with the same voice as SCP-5045-1, after which he is surrounded by several more purple goats. Then 5045-1 jumps over the goats, and grabs the D-class before shutting off the game, rendering him catatonic.
    • The files have a picture of each goat, along with a quote presumably from the goat. These are all pretty unnerving. What's more, as of the D-class, there are now 853 goats. And then there's the entry for the purple goats...
      HELPERS
      INFO: THOSE WHO FREQUENTLY MISBEHAVE DON'T DESERVE A MIND OF THEIR OWN!
      QUOTE: HOWDY! THE NAMES FARMER!
  • The researcher decides to personally interview SCP-5045-1 without a headset so that he's safe, taking note of the fact he can hear sounds outside the game. When he confirms that he makes the goats out of past players, and is asked why, he starts crying about how lonely he is, asking the researcher to put the headset on. When the researcher calls him out on this, as well as his sadistic behavior during the explorations, he just laughs and says that most people fall for that, and asks when the Foundation will send another fun person in. When the researcher says that won't be necessary, SCP-5045-1 immediately realizes that the Foundation is responsible for removing his posts with download links and asks for them to stop. When the researcher refuses, SCP-5045-1 turns off all the lights in the site and starts walking towards the screen, asking the researcher what he misses most. The last image in the article is of SCP-5045-1 in a hallway of the Foundation site, seemingly transforming it into what looks like the same neon graphics as his native game.
  • For one last scare, clicking on the image goes to a transcript where SCP-5045-1 notices the reader and proceeds to climb out of their screen.

SCPs 5100 to 5199

• SCP-5140 "EVEREST" refers to a collection of corpses scattered around Mt. Everest, predicted to be around 100-200. These corpses completely absorb all heat of those who make contact with one of them, causing the victim to die and become another instance. Not that bad so far but we get a pretty disturbing mission log of an annual expedition going wrong, with the team steadily falling and the last survivor claiming he saw the corpses starting to animate. This however seemed to be due to hallucinations caused by malfunctioning equipment. Then we get the kicker: an incident log occurring in April 25th, 2024 where warming global temperatures caused an avalanche revealing that there are much more corpses comprising Everest, as much as 45% of its mass or around 714 billion corpses.

SCPs 5200 to 5299

• SCP-5254 "Gotta Catch 'Em All":
  • This SCP is a phenomenon where people and objects decked out in items that resemble the anatomy of any given Pokémon transform into said Pokémon. Said transformation is almost always fatal, and it's classified as Keter because there's no way of telling what merchandise or objects will instigate a SCP-5254 event until it happens.
  • The Foundation raids the headquarters of The Pokémon Company a few months after the first known SCP-5254 event. They find children from a local orphanage in various states of Pokémon transformation inside, all experiencing various forms of Body Horror. Several kids are in pain from overly large body parts, the fingers of a boy who became a bear Pokémon are rotting, and a snake Pokémon has the head of a crying toddler. Making things worse is that the kids have been there, in that state, for nearly two years.
• SCP-5256 "Perspective." It's a bedroom in a house formerly owned by a radical religious family where reality has been fundamentally broken causing bizarre phenomena. In one corner of the room, there is an object that can't be directly observed. One D-Class got close enough to it to figure out what it was made of: cloth, leathery material, and metal pieces pinning it to the ground. It's the remains of a child who was murdered via crucifixion.

SCPs 5300 to 5399

• SCP-5370 "Chessland" is a Thaumiel-class skip that describes a game of modified chess that is being played between BLUE TEAM, a group of Foundation mathematicians who are trying to keep it going for as long as possible, and RED TEAM, whose identity is secret except to BLUE TEAM. The set of criteria for finding candidates for BLUE TEAM includes qualities like having a high understanding of game theory, certified in grief counseling, and the required psychiatric evaluation to partake in assignments with a mortality rate above ninety-five percent. The log makes things even weirder.
  • The list of people present for the excerpt includes thirty-seven bits and pieces from a human body, one of which is an eyeball, that the poor member of the Ethics Committee present is forced to eat. The chunks of information taken out from the qualifications for RED TEAM result frankly disturbing lines of dialogue with barely any context.
  AS: —not as wasteful as you'd think, thankfully. Those parts of them will grow back after a while: well, maybe not the kids.
  AS: It's not blood I'm bleeding.
  • The last addendum at the bottom details the reasoning behind the creation of SCP-5370, as well as letting the reader puzzle everything together. The Foundation was losing too much information due to the numerous gaps in digital storage while the person who knew what went in those gaps kept dying or getting amnesticized. To fix this, they developed a "blackroom," or a location where all Foundation personnel go when they die, regardless of faith and beliefs. SCP-5370, in particular, managed to get around a few issues that they were having with the blackroom concept, like the method of communication, which was now coded in chess moves. It also fixed the so-called "inferno problem," where previous actions in a Foundation member's career made the blackroom inaccessible, by the space being morally neutral. So, to put it simply, the Foundation was trying to communicate with their dead staff but kept getting blocked due to their personnel consistently going to Hell due to all the horrible actions they had to perform while working in the Foundation. To solve this, they created an extremely complex Chess with Death purgatory, and are trying to keep the game going as long as possible, or else REDTEAM, the collective consciousness of all deceased Foundation staff, will go back to Hell. To make matters worse, the Foundation has thoroughly abused the system over the past few decades to the point that BLUE TEAM will be able to end the game within 200 moves. Given that the time limit on a move is 10 years, that means at most 2,000 years remain before RED TEAM is doomed to eternal damnation. The original useful life of the system? 260,000 years.

SCPs 5500 to 5599

• SCP-5510, Universal Remote, is a TV remote that can change time. It might not be obvious to you at first glance, but the pause button freezes time forever, and the researcher has pressed it.
• SCP-5555, Made in Heaven, is a mine shaft that, during a specific time frame, instantly neutralizes any SCP or person that enters, and then reincarnates a slightly different version of it where it was found/born, which goes about as well as you can expect when a fresh SCP is released. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is why the Foundation uses SCP-5555 every generation on every SCP and Foundation personnel they can throw in: because it's all a game. The entire premise of preserving, destroying, bartering, utilizing, inventing, creating, and playing with anomalous objects and places is actually just one big blood sport. And the players? They're all immortal gods who are playing the roles of the leaders of the anomalous organizations, stringing their minions along into believing in fake causes, all because they're bored. They even switch sides each round, further driving in that whatever view the Group of Interest has doesn't actually matter in the slightest to them.
  • The constant feud between the Church of the Broken God vs. The Sarkic Cults? Pointless.
  • The clash of ideologies between the Foundation and the Global Occult Coalition? Only mention it gets is D.C. Al Fine suggests someone else should destroy the chair next time.
  • All those times Fifthism managed to end the world? Big Cheese Horace gets a round of applause before everything is reshuffled for the next round.
  • Gamers Against Weed forming after someone defected from Are We Cool Yet? due to their brutal pieces? That's a sham too since both The Critic and even Jude Kriyot are in on it as well!
  • Looking through the page itself, you realize that it's a log of the former round, and the SCPs the group killed to "reset the board," as well as the changing of the leaders of each faction.
    • 049 used to have a gas mask.
    • The former round had Able summon guns instead of swords.
    • 173 became concrete, which is apparently more difficult to move that what it used to be made of.
    • The commentary on the chair suggests that the former round had Wondertainment be the ones to destroy it.
    • 963 used to be a jewel instead of an amulet, and the person trapped in it was named Jason.
    • Alto Clef was given to the new Administrator as Foundation personnel as part of a bet to see if he'd be their best agent or go ballistic and be a liability.
    • Everyone on the O5 Council was either killed (if they weren't aware of the "game") or was given a new role - O5-13 turned out to be the Administrator and became the current round's Dr. Wondertainment, and O5-1 - Everett - became a new variable for the game: "Nobody," a person whose goal is to kill all the other players.

SCPs 5600 to 5799

• SCP-5683 "Will you walk into my parlour?" said a spider to a fly is a SCP Foundation take on a classic horror story. After narrowly surviving one of SCP-682's rampages, Dr. Kristiansen is tasked with finding a way to kill SCP-5683, a being exactly like 682 except a spider instead of a lizard. After several attempts to destroy it fail, Kristiansen becomes enraged and starts a termination test without doing a tissue sample test first. The result is that SCP-5683 becomes more powerful and escapes, going on a rampage. Kristiansen locks himself in a bunker with his assistant Silva. Silva reveals that he tried to sabotage the test and volunteers to distract SCP-5683 so Kristiansen can escape. Kristiansen agrees and shoves Silva in the way of the monster... At which point it disappears. Because, in fact, SCP-5683 doesn't exist. Turns out that Kristiansen actually died in the SCP-682 containment breach and had been in Hell the entire time. The supposed SCP-5683 breach was a test, one Kristiansen failed once again.
  (The floor and walls drop away, revealing what is behind them.
  There is a great deal of blood.
  There is a great deal of fire.
  There is a great deal of suffering.
  There is a terrible stench.)

  (Laughter.)
  (Laughter.)
  (Laughter.)

  (Doctor Kristiansen starts screaming, and never really stops.)
  • The ending reveals that Kristiansen has experienced the chain of events 22,122,593 times.

SCPs 5800 to 5999

• SCP-5832, "Stained", is a long-abandoned apartment that prevents anyone standing inside it from being able to speak. The article only details the contents of the apartment, but gives just enough detail for a reader to piece everything together on their own. The bedroom contains the possessions of a young girl, but each one is warped in one way — the plush dog is stained and crusty, the clothing is also stained, the sole video game offers no dialogue, and the Disney Princess coloring book has every page that contains the Beast from Beauty and the Beast scribbled over in red. The toilet opposite the bedroom is where the atmosphere gets more grim, culminating in a single word that clarifies the horror — the toilet itself constantly has trace amounts of amniotic fluid, and the plastic cup contains a mixture of apple juice and mifepristone.^note A drug commonly used to induce abortions.
• SCP-5935 "Blood and the Breaking of My Heart." Almost everything in the SCP is horrifying as the Overseer desperately tries to revive his son. At one point he finds a hill outside the forest that must not be named where even the fairies fear to go. There he sees a question and does something horrible that revives his son. The question is revealed in hidden text to be "Who are you?" but what he did to bring his son back is never explained.
  I look down. There is a long dirt road leading down into a valley, down where IT is.
  Behind me are the trees. Above me are the faces.
  And in front of me is…
  the path I had to walk
  the place I had to stand
  the words I had to say
  THE THING I HAD TO DO
  • What is SCP-5935-1? It's an ancient force, possibly older than the universe. It is not a god as we define it, with abilities and history. It's not even a god of the fae. It is simply a question, which has never been truly asked. It is a void, which attempts to take the names of all humanity so that it may exist, and answer its own question (Who are you?). But it was never given one. Until the Overseer said his son's name, Jacob.
  • It's also slightly implied that the entity is God, or at least some form of creator deity. It states that it once had every name to itself, but as humanity grew, they took names from it for themselves and everything they found, until the entity had no names left. Until it wanted the names back.
• SCP-5999 "This is Where I Died" presents itself in a very dread-inducing manner by immediately showing a flashing red warning to not continue. In both access, each section is accompanied by an image of seven candles, with one lit one going out during each proceeding section, and in the remote access version accompanied by a whisper. Each section seems almost nonsensical to each other which just further raises questions, with the warnings almost begging you to not go on as you venture further. And then finally one reaches the end and you are greeted with a video of some sort of entity appearing and screaming at the camera (in fact, the video had to be tweaked because some readers found it too scary). Whatever the entity is, it's implied the reader, you, released it by going through the article. Or at least, that's what it seems to be. A chilling hint to the article's true nature can be found not in the article itself, but the article's edit history. The edit comment for the very first revision reads "Inform the appropriate personnel that our containment of SCP-5000^note  5999 was submitted as an entry for the 5000 contest is complete. Protocol ██-███-█████ tentatively initiated. Godspeed, gentlemen. See you on the other side." The pattern of black boxes corresponds to Protocol ZK-001-Alpha, the doomsday protocol mentioned in Swann's proposal for SCP-001 — the one where they figured out that their universe is run by horror writers. Furthermore, if the Foundation really didn't want you to read something, they'd threaten you with memetic kill agents or just redact it outright rather than hide it behind red flashing warnings. Those are Schmuck Bait of the highest caliber, and the article is the trap. It's written with vague connections between chapters and loaded with horror tropes and Continuity Nods to appeal to its reader, intending to keep you in place and reading to the end of the article to try and puzzle everything together before it unleashes a kill agent. That pants-shittingly terrifying video at the end? It's intended to give you, the reader, a heart attack.

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