SCP Foundation / Tropes E to M

SCP Foundation provides examples of the following tropes:

Tropes A to D | Tropes E To M | Tropes N to R | Tropes S to Z

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E

• Eagleland:
  • SCP-50-AE-J, a Desert Eagle that shoots a violently jingoistic eagle to maul a target.
  • SCP-1681, an attempt by the USSR to literally bombard their people with symbols of the US that got out of control.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The earliest SCPs written, like 173 and 004, are very different in tone and format than what the writers later adopted as the site's definite style.
  • Early SCPs also had a focus on Doctors, especially Clef, Rights, Shaw, Gears, Kondraki, et cetera, getting into hijinx or having supernatural powers.
  • SCP-002 and SCP-004 provide a concrete example — both articles imply that the Foundation has a policy of executing all civilian witnesses to anomalous phenomena. This was before the introduction of "amnestics" used to erase witnesses' memories.
  • In-universe examples happen in some SCP-001 proposals where it's attempted to make the first SCP. Of particular note is Dr Gears' Proposal, where the SCP Foundation initially had a document format completely different to the "modern" Foundation, to the point that objects weren't even labelled as "SCP-[number]".
  • Early articles sometimes refer to amnestics as "amnesiacs". A couple of more recent articles reference this, such as SCP-002-J.
  • SCP-682, the second-ever SCP item, has its Special Containment Procedures begin with a surprisingly out-of-character command compared to the Foundation's usual policy, nowadays doubling as an instance of O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
    SCP-682 must be destroyed as soon as possible.
  • In some of the very earliest entries, the Foundation is depicted as much more ruthless than their present state, doing things like killing witnesses instead of amnestizing them, needlessly tormenting sapient SCPs, and killing or D-classing personnel for the slightest mistake. Also a case of Lighter and Softer.
  • One of the reasons SCP-3260 was written was to lampshade the changes in the site's standards over its history.
  • SCP-5031 is a Decon-Recon Switch of this change in tone, depicting how a typical "murder monster" from the site's earliest years begins to grow and thrive when given proper treatment under the Foundation's new management.
  • Early usage of Noticing the Fourth Wall often had the Foundation immediately jump to trying to kill the authors, due to the Existential Horror implied by the first article to approach the topic, S. Andrew Swann's SCP-001 proposal. Starting around Series IV, it's now agreed their position on this has softened quite a bit, both because they need the authors to continue existing and because advances in research have since revealed the topic as a whole is much more complicated (reasonable parallels can be drawn to quantum mechanics) but also confers a lot of unique benefits if manipulated with that knowledge in mind.
• Eats Babies: Several anomalies require the sacrifice of human infants to contain them. The Foundation Eats Babies is a tale focused on both how the foundation acquires the babies to do this and an anomaly (not actually on the main list) which could replace their current practice.
• Egomaniac Hunter: Well, explorer anyway: Harrison T. Winchester III, who led an expedition to SCP-2292's hidden city on behalf of Carter and Dark (Marshall apparently had other plans). From his journal:
  The Twenty-ninth of October, 1898: Violence is the only language the savage understands. Through duress and intimidation, we have gleaned information pertinent to Mr. Dark's quarry - a "na nsi ya ntotila" or "under kingdom"; a place where nothing ever truly dies.
  
  The Eighth of November, 1898: We have discovered a tribe of pygmies, untouched by the civilizing influence of Christendom. They were subjugated with ease and after making an example of their chief, the rest readily bent to our will.
• Eldritch Abomination: Quite a lot of them, actually.
• Eldritch Location: Lots of those too. Some noteworthy examples include Three Portlands (a magical and semi-autonomous city-state looked after by the UIU), SCP-2922 "Notes from the Under" (Corbenic, a multiverse-spanning afterlife home to forgotten gods and monsters), The Wanderer's Library (a Portal Crossroad World and magical library used as the primary base of the Serpent's Hand), Adytum (the extra-dimensional kingdom of Grand Karcist Ion and "Heaven" of the Sarkic Cults), and SCP-2264 "In the Court of Alagadda" (Alagadda is another Portal Crossroad World ruled over by SCP-701, the Hanged King).
• Emo Teen:
  • SCP-1699 which is a sentient active volcano with this personality. It's depressed because it feel it doesn't measure up to other natural disasters.
  • SCP-353 has been turning into this, thanks to her confinement. A fitting punishment. The Foundation shrinks also note her manipulation of diseases causes her great harm and pain, and she does it anyway — similar to a self-harming teenager.
• Employee of the Month: SCP-254 is a blank frame labeled "Employee of the Month." When hung, a model employee appears, with their picture occupying the frame. For the next month, they will have excellent performance, but degrade in quality afterwards until fired.
• Enchanted Forest: SCP-416 is an infinite forest that you can't leave on foot. SCP-1660 is a portal to a forest enclosed by a barrier of an unknown material and home to strange creatures. The article that you can't call SCP-4000 is populated by The Fair Folk and has a disturbing number of rules you must follow in order to exit safely.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Has its own page.
• Enemy Mine:
  • The SCP Foundation and Global Occult Coalition (which are not necessarily enemies but allied organizations with conflicting viewpoints) have been known to occasionally work together to stop a creator of SC Ps, as seen in SCP-191.
  • In the future, a more dramatic union takes place: Thanks to the threat presented by the resurgent SCP-610 (and the Sarkic Cults of Adytum), and the events surrounding SCP-2217, the Foundation, the Global Occult Coalition, the Horizon Initiative, and the Church of the Broken God (members thereof at least) will forge an alliance to stop the FLESH.
    It's not too late, you know. This is our world, too. We want the Flesh to die as much as you do. And we can help you; we can help each other. Come to the Anvil. We will talk, and we can save this world.
  • SCP-3221 was originally sealed away by a fifth-century alliance of sects from both the Church of the Broken God and Proto-Sarkicism, and its cage contains inscriptions and technology/spells from both faiths. ORIA then joined the alliance when it got out a second time, and now the Foundation is working off what they've done before.
  • In SCP-5000 ("Why?"), neither the Global Occult Coalition nor the Church of the Broken God wanted humanity to be wiped out and occasionally cooperated as the biggest forces opposing the corrupted Foundation. Ultimately, it wasn't enough, with the GOC being wiped out and the Church crippled.
• Enhance Button: Subverted by SCP-191 — when asked to "Zoom and Enhance" a photo of license plates, she outputs a zoomed-in photo, but fills in the wrong plate numbers because she was unable to read them in the original.
• Enigmatic Institute: They're a secret institute dedicated to securing, containing and studying anomalies that come to their attention.
• Equivalent Exchange: Combined with Grand Theft Me, regarding two related SCPs by the same author.
  • SCP-437-A is a grove of 64 trees located at the site of Camp Lakewood, a former summer camp that closed 20 years ago. The campers are still there. They're inside those trees, apparently still alive and still conscious. Duplicates of them left the camp and continued to live as those people, flawlessly impersonating them.
  • SCP-2571 is a recurring nightmare in which the affected visits a theme park called Cragglewood Park, walking down a path with many other children they don't know. The only ride is a huge carousel. Some of the children, before getting on the carousel, hug the other children. The ones who got on the carousel sacrificed themselves to become trees in the park so their siblings could escape. Afterwards, the survivor's family loses all memory of the sacrificed sibling, but their personal possessions don't disappear. One of the survivors believes he has always been an only child, but there is a room in his house that has always been locked, as far as he knows. He gets visibly agitated and upset when forced to talk about it.
• Eskimos Aren't Real:
  • SCP-1173, the Islamic Republic of Eastern Samothrace, which is either an example of Eskimos Aren't Real that convinces you it's an example of Qurac, or an example of Qurac that convinces you that it's an example of Eskimos Aren't Real.
  • Something caused the entire Foundation to be completely unaware of the Yellowstone National Park until July 9, 2007. It may have something to do with SCP-2000, a Thaumiel-class object located in the park and to which only a scarce few have access.
• E.T. Gave Us Wi-Fi: SCP-1073 is responsible for the current state of computing technology, having taught Foundation personnel to replicate their natural efficiency.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Has its own page.
• Everything Is an iPod in the Future: In Dr. Mackenzie's Proposal of SCP-001. Along with the diary, there is a iPad-like gray device (its dimensions are roughly those of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, only twice as thick) made of an unknown metal, much heavier than it looks (8 kg\18 lb), and featureless besides a keyhole (the key comes along) and a display showing both a progress bar and a number. This data is how corrupted the current reality is, and how many times the device (which allows the user to escape to another universe) has been used.
• Evil Versus Evil: The Church of the Broken God vs. The Flesh that Hates. The Flesh is such a threat that the Foundation, the Horizon Initiative (the multi-denominational team), and the Global Occult Coalition decided to work with the Church to eradicate it.
• Exact Words:
  • The Foundation universe, or at least the version described in the Wrong Proposal, operates on an Equivalent Exchange theory which states that for every concept deemed normal, an anomalous analogue exists as well. For example, the concept of math is countered by SCP-033, the missing number, and the concept of chemistry is countered by SCP-2046, an extended periodic table that converts surrounding matter into elements beyond oganesson that are mostly incompatible with reality. When the Foundation explains an anomaly in the new world and finds no known counterpart, they think the theory has failed them at laast... except since the theory describes a natural law, the anomalous counterpart of the theory would be to simply contradict it.
  • As a specific example of the trope, we have SCP-294, a coffee machine with a computer interface that can synthesize any kind of drink. You just have to take care with how you make a request: asking for a cup of coffee will get you a cup of coffee, but when someone requested a cup of "Joe", a security guard named Joseph suddenly collapsed as a cup full of his tissue, blood, and bodily fluids was dispensed.
• Exotic Entree:
  • SCP-971 is a takeout menu for a restaurant that sells fast food items made from the meat of endangered animals. Somehow, the company has a method of non-lethally extracting meat from said endangered animals, not killing them but causing them to lose weight and muscle mass.
  • One of the objects from the log of anomalous items is a softboiled egg from an unidentifiable species approximately 0.7 meters (2.3 feet) in height, retrieved from an illegally-operated restaurant in South America that served various exotic dishes, including snow leopard, chimpanzee, wooly mammoth, human, and SCP-███.
• Expendable Clone:SCP-1610 is a mysterious liquid that can make six clones out of one person without harming the original. The clones are okay with their situation (they're not supposed to be sapient), it's their creators who had problems with them, especially after turning their head researcher and his loyal secretary into test subjects:

  Prometheus Labs researcher: I didn't come to work here so that I could commit murder over and over again. We're making no fucking progress and the higher ups fucking know it. The project should've stopped after the first week. Goodbye. I'm burning my body so you bastards can't fucking kill me more than I want to be killed.

  Another researcher: I only wanted to help.
  All we've done is make humans that want to be killed.
  It crossed the line when they programmed in the phrase, "I wanted to die."

• Expospeak Gag:
  • The data extracted from SCP-328. To avoid Don't Explain the Joke, spoilered: the data describes an ordinary human laptop computer, as described by members of a decidedly alien species who might exist in a different universe with slightly different physical laws. The aliens describing the laptop seem to belong to their civilization's equivalent of the SCP Foundation. To complete the joke, SCP-328 seems to be the alien's version of a laptop computer, and if the Foundation's description of it was to make its way back to the aliens they'd consider it to be an Expospeak Gag description of their laptop. And they seem to be truly Starfish Aliens, as the mere act of a laptop emitting light manages to kill 4 researchers.
  • SCP-1960-J is a free-floating sphere made of white stone which moves in a continuous circular path, despite lacking any visible means of support or propulsion. It appears to absorb or suppress sound, changes color as one gets closer to it, has extreme temperature variations despite having no internal heat source, one needs to wear an environmental suit to touch it without dying, and it draws objects towards it. Fortunately, it is located a safe distance from anyone that it could harm, but a change in its circular motion could cause an XK-class end-of-the-world scenario. It is Earth's moon.
  • One of the last entries in the attempts to kill SCP-682 is the beast beating on a dead horse.
  • Both Played for Drama and Justified with SCP-4100. Many of the Triumvirate's pictograms use this trope to describe everyday earthly concepts related to containing SCPs, being aware that future discoverers may be Starfish Aliens. For example, a diagram of potassium cyanide (represented by a series of tallies indicating the component elements) is used as shorthand to mean "deadly (to carbon-based life)".
• Extinct Animal Park: [[SCP-1265 ("The Mesozoic Preserve") is about fifty square kilometers of Congolese jungle full of dinosaurs, all of them feathered, and a few non-dinosaurian prehistoric reptiles. An unknown force keeps the animals inside — if they try to leave, they vanish and reappear sedated within the preserve. The dinosaurs are completely passive to humans, except for a few species that have not been discovered by science yet, which are highly aggressive. Apparently, this place is where African dinosaur cryptid legends originate from.
• Extranormal Institute: Any of the Foundation's various sites. The amount of specialization of some personnel makes it even more extranormal. Many Tales also depict the Wanderer's Library as this along with it being a "standard" Eldritch Location and Portal Crossroad World.
• Extranormal Prison: The Foundation's main purpose is creating these. And the containment methods add another layer for some SCPs. They also weren't the first, as SCP-1000 (the Children of Night) had previously created SCP-2932 ("Titania's Prison") to serve in this purpose for them while they ruled the Earth.
• Extreme Omnivore:
  • A D-class who was known amongst the other Ds as "Goat" for being able to stomach the horrible food the Foundation gave them also became a true Extreme Omnivore capable of digesting rock, metal, etc. after drinking a mixture of water and SCP-1049-J.
  • SCP-913 ("Mr. Hungry") is a humanoid SCP with an extremely fast metabolism that requires an intake of 2000 calories every two hours. If the condition is not met, he will enter a trance state and eat anything solid on sight, whether it is living or not, for a period of time.
  • SCP-524 is a rabbit that will eat anything, including itself — by turning its mouth inside out until there's nothing left of it. Thirty minutes later, it will appear in the spot it ate itself in completely unharmed.
• The Extremist Was Right: The Shark Punching Center were right to fear sharks. In Captain Kirby's proposal, sharks invent a a vaccine for being punched and take over San Francisco. Luckily, the vaccine doesn't protect them from kicks.
• Eye Scream:
  • Gouging out one's own eyes in madness is a fairly common reaction to many SCPs. In addition, the page for SCP-212 includes a graphic picture of eye surgery.
  • Two SCPs infect victims, usually by tearing out their eyeball and using it as a host, or melting their eye away and replacing it with fungi-strands (that oddly still allow you to see).

F

• Faction Motto: Many groups have mottos, some of which double as Badass Creeds.
  • SCP Foundation:
  "We Secure. We Contain. We Protect."
  "We die in the dark so you can live in the light."
  • Arcadia: "Why not Arcadia?"
  • Are We Cool Yet?: "Are we cool yet?"
  • Chaos Insurgency: "Should intermittent vengeance arm again his red right hand to plague us?"
  • Church of the Second Hytoth: "May the Holy Fourth live eternal."
  • Deer College: "Ecce homo platonis."
  • Gamers Against Weed: "Sic semper cannabis."
  • United Nations Global Occult Coalition: "Survival - Concealment - Protection - Destruction - Education"
  • Greazeburger Incorporated: "You can't spell 'Greaze' without 'EZ'."
  • Horizon Initiative: "In the eyes of God."
  • Manna Charitable Foundation: "Relief, where it belongs."
  • Prometheus Labs, Inc.: "Scientia Potentia Est."
  • Serpent's Hand: "The garden is the serpent's place."
  • Shark Punching Center: "To Seek and Punch Cartilage."
  • Three Moons Initiative "You are watched. You are protected. You are loved."
  • TotleighSoft: "Because COMPUTERS!"™
  • Federal Bureau of Investigation, Unusual Incidents Unit: "Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity."
  • Vikander-Kneed Technical Media: "Won’t you join us in this Better Tomorrow™?"
  • Wandsmen: "The multiverse's finest news source."
  • Wilson's Wildlife Solutions: "Where all critters are welcome."
• The Fair Folk
  • Mentioned in Dr. Shaw's SCP-001 Proposal. They're the ruthlessly violent kind; more like orcs, but with a weakness to iron. O5-1 wiped them out after being forced to make a Deal with the Devil in the form of The Factory. This wasn't the first time they appeared, either, with SCP-1323 being their fairground. It's also implied that they once held dominion over the Earth before being overthrown by SCP-1000 (as implied by SCP-2932).
  • Another example exists in the inhabitants of the anomalous location that cannot be referred to as SCP-4000. Their forms vary, but they are universally whimsical, contradictory, bound to etiquette and oaths, and prone to violently cursing anyone who tries to force - intentionally or otherwise - a concrete identity onto them. Giving oneself an identity is also ill-advised, as disobeying the rules of the land where language is dangerous afterwards renders you vulnerable to literal identity theft. They also all resemble Humanoid Abominations (such as one fellow with the head of a rabbit) because the Foundation "stole all of their names." They're actually the same fairies from Dr. Shaw's SCP-001 Proposal, being the surviving refugees of the Foundation's genocide... and they really want to get the Foundation back for that. Some other SCPs, such as SCP-1826, are suggested to be related to them in one manner or another.
  • Three Portlands has a large refugee population made up of entities calling themselves "the Sidhe," who largely evacuated to the city in question after their home realm of Avalon started to collapse in on itself in 1905 due to backlash from the Sixth Occult War. SCP-2952 is their subway, and it is all but stated that the Sidhe are connected in some way to the faeries described in Dr. Shaw's 001 Proposal above.
• Fake–Real Turn: SCP-4006 resulted in the world believing that Massachusetts was an inhabited area when in fact it was not. The Foundation takes advantage of this and sets up a bunch of facilities in the area, then disguises them to look like the regular buildings and infrastructure everyone thought was in Massachusetts. Eventually it gets to the point where the entirety of Massachusetts has been built and is inhabited mainly by civilians.
• Fantastic Flora: Several SCPs are examples of this, such as SCP-937, SCP-1277, and SCP-1478.
• Fantastic Firearms: SCP-127, a device that looks like an MP5K SMG, but actually fires teeth, which it grows in the magazine and fires with muscle power, it being entirely organic except for a thin skin of sheet metal. It's reloaded by soaking it in a pail of calcium-rich nutrient fluid for 3-5 days.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: All Myths Are True, All Urban Legends Are True, and countless works of science fiction, cosmic horror, and other genre fiction seem to have actually happened in the "world" of the SCP Foundation.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Parodied with SCP-1171, who is some sort of otherworldly creature located apparently in an alternate universe and is quite (passively) racist against humans. Apparently "gamete" is a racial slur against humans where he comes from. At least he's pretty nice to them up front.
  • SCP-682 has a severe loathing of all Earth-based life, which is part of the reason why it's so incredibly dangerous.
• Fantastic Terrorists: The SCP Foundation opposes several group who don't hesitate to use SCPs for their own gain, notably the Serpent's Hand and the Chaos Insurgency. Less openly-hostile groups include Marshall, Carter and Dark, who merely sell SCPs to the highest bidder with no regard to the consequences, the Manna Charitable Foundation who use SCPs for good (again, without considering side-effects), while "Are We Cool Yet" is a collective of Mad Artists whose art installations take True Art Is Incomprehensible to lethal levels (including an invisible shark or a painting of an atomic bomb that turns the viewer into a caveman).
• Fate Worse than Death: A common outcome of many SCPs. Especially when they combine an irreversible transfiguration effect with And I Must Scream.
• Feathered Fiend: SCP-1387, a giant seagull that compels people to go into its airplane-cabin interior and apparently turns them into birds.
• Featureless Plane of Disembodied Dialogue: The occasional interviews with or about the subjects are often presented this way. As proof that Tropes Are Not Bad, a well-written interview can be very chilling.
• Feel No Pain: While conducting purges of uncorrupted Foundation soldiers in SCP-5000, the Foundation would test them by stabbing them. Most had no reaction, while those who did were promptly killed. One Foundation scientist claims that humanity as a whole is not supposed to feel pain.
• Feg Hoot: Some joke SCPs and tales are just build ups for puns.
  • SCP-649-2568-j, a snake that reshapes geological features that it finds too flat, explaining itself with "I like big buttes and I cannot lie". Add that the species is listed\pictured as an anaconda and the number spells MIX-ALOT...
  • SCP-0002-j is a talking toilet that wants to write a book about his life because he's seen some shit.
  • The 12 Days of Site 87's Christmas takes place over the course of twelve days before Christmas 2014, and involves the Krampus, a magical Christmas tree that makes its own ornamentation, and a fight between the two of them. In the final fight between the Tree and the Krampus, one Dr. Partridge gets knocked on his ass by a blast from the former, and transformed into, as one of the characters puts it, "A small tree of the genus Pyrus." In other words, Dr. Partridge is a Pear Tree.
  • Again, in Happy Howlidays, which involves a werewolf Santa of all things. Said Werewolf Santa followed throughout the story by a character named Virginia, and eventually ends up concussing a Foundation researcher and a claw shot off by a sniper before dying. After the fact, the delirious, concussed researcher finds the claw and proclaims, "Yes, Virginia, There's Santa Claws."
  • SCP-3304 is a portal to a fiery hell dimension being used for geothermal energy. Only, the Devil himself lives there and the use of the realm as a geothermal power source is both draining it and affecting worldwide probability. Hell is freezing over.
  • SCP-9999-J is a phenomenon which causes meats and, eventually, alive bovine animals to start levitating and continue ascending, ending with this line from 05-1: "But what choice do I have when the steaks are this high?"
• Female Misogynist: SCP-847, a female mannequin that attacks any women in its vicinity.
• Feuding Families:
  • SCP-2039, the Pikes and the Wagners, a pair of families who are doomed to attack each other forever with anomalous weapons (examples: WW1-era mines, Super Soakers, and wool gloves that [REDACTED]) because a mysterious gray-eyed man likes a good story.
  • SCP-2158, an anomalous handgun whose owner and target are related to the real-life Pleasant Valley War, a feud so deadly it delayed Arizona's statehood by a decade because it showed the territory wasn't civilized enough to join the US.
• Fictional Painting:
  • SCP-151 ("The Painting"). SCP-151 is a painting of an underwater scene. Anyone who looks at it will slowly drown over the next 24 hours.
  • SCP-800 ("An Eastern History"). SCP-800 is an East Asian paper scroll painting that alters its appearance to symbolically represent current armed conflicts in Asia.
  • SCP-1074 ("Stendhal's Nightmare"). SCP-1074 is a painting called Stendhal's Nightmare that consists entirely of a grey background. Anyone looking at it suffers from Stendhal syndrome (increased heart rate, sweating, and vertigo). They will describe seeing a highly detailed painting, but each person will give a different description.
  • SCP-1753 ("Vertigo"). SCP-1753 is a painting of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. It causes the viewer to perceive a drop of any height as being a 2,000-foot high cliff face. If the viewer jumps over the drop, they will impact the ground as if they had actually fallen 2,000 feet.
  • SCP-1891 ("Constructeur"). SCP-1891 is a painting of a humanoid clothed in construction tools (wrenches, hammers, etc.). If any other painting is brought into the same structure as SCP-1891, the other painting will change to a depiction of large industrial machines. The humanoid will disappear from SCP-1891 and appear in the other painting, maintaining the machines.
  • SCP-2071 ("Sir Michael Cavendish, in the Guise of the King of Serpents"). SCP-2071 is a painting of a snake man wearing an 18th-century British military uniform. Anyone touching the painting dies from snake venom created by their own body. All reptiles within 5 kilometers of the painting try to move toward it if possible. There are three other anomalous paintings by the same painter: The Rood and the Pit, The Hunting Party, and Celia Penrose, in the Guise of a Fountain.
• Fighting from the Inside:
  • SCP-239 is frightened of Dr. Clef and fears he will kill her for secretly using her "spells", so her reality-warping powers make him obsessed with killing her. Later, a deleted email is found on his computer, urging the Foundation to secure her and lock-down the site before he acts on it, then changes his mind and junks the message.
  • Combined with Grand Theft Me (literally): SCP-2885 is a pane of glass which allows people to find alternate universe versions of themselves and take over their minds and lives. Very rarely, an alternate crosses over into this world.
    D-81254: I feel like I keep hearing myself think. Some echo. It’s not me, though. Not me. It keeps saying that it is me, that this isn’t right, but that’s probably a lie, right? My life is great! My life. Mine. [pause] I just hit my head on the sink. I heard the thump. But I didn’t feel anything.
• Flanderization: Dr. Shaw (the character, not the author) has been subjected to this, to a degree. He started out as an eccentric researcher who just happened to live inside an SCP, but over time he's come ot be seen as a madman with a death wish, with some justification in the fact that the SCP he's stored in apparently absorbs part of the soul of the person whose body he's residing in. Some tales that Dr. Shaw is featured in manage to avert this, however.
• Flash In The Pan Fad: SCP-1425 is Star Signals, a self-help book published by the Fifthist Church with mind- and reality-altering effects. Within two weeks of publication, it was a national best-seller with several celebrity endorsements. Within another two weeks, Star Signals was completely forgotten — because the Foundation realized it posed a threat of a CK-class reality restructuring event, acted to seize all copies of the book, and used Protocol Ophiuchus and Project LETHE to erase all public records and memories of it.
• Flat "What": Agent Howard's reaction when SCP-4950 quotes Fortnite as it's being exorcised.
• Flat World: SCP-1372 appears to be the edge of the earth. The problem isn't ships and people going over the edge, it's when they come back and try to get others to follow:
  Log of F███████ R███████: The captain… was only after a fashion onboard. The same goes for the crew… they are gone now, the flames took them. Today is mostly a blur. All I know is that the moment I heard the men onboard that ship speak, I didn't want to understand their far-off words. [...] Forgive me, Captain, but I no longer want to know what you saw beyond the edge of the Earth.
• Flechette Storm: SCP-143, a grove of Japanese cherry trees with impossibly sharp petals. May or may not be a shout-out to Bleach's Senbonzakura.
  Document 143-A: We'll have to pick up the remains when the wind dies down in a couple days.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Inverted with SCP-304, amongst others. 304 appears to be a listing of the names of all world leaders, including American Presidents, Chinese Presidents, and... O5s. Specifically, they list 63 American presidents, a redacted number of O5s, and 7 names in an encoding style that hasn't been invented yet... then abruptly stops. What happens in roughly 100 years to abruptly stop the list of human leadership is unknown.
• Flipping the Bird: What SCP-1884-B does with her many arms to describe how she felt during her captivity in the Circus of The Disquieting:
  Dr. Selman: How would you describe your captivity in the Circus Of The Disquieting?
  SCP-1884-B: (SCP-1884-B raises the middle finger of every hand not being used to support its weight)
• Flock of Wolves: In the SCP Tale: "Everyone Knows", it turns out everyone in the world (save one guy) was secretly part of some anomalous group in one way or another. The SCP Foundation itself employed about 3.5 billion people. The story ends with The Masquerade being formally dissolved as it no longer mattered.
• Flower Motifs: During an SCP-001 event, flowers bloom across the planet. In addition, the skies clear up and all pollution disappears from the atmosphere.
• Flower Mouth: SCP-929 ("The Cuckoo"). When SCP-929 engages in combat, its head splits open like a flower, releasing its Combat Tentacles.
• Foil:
  • Cain and Able. One is a peaceful atoner which is a potential Walking Wasteland, and the other is an apathetic and violent sociopath who prefers killing to talking. To show that both are inspired by the trope namers, one wished he was a farmer and the other likes livestock.
  • Hard to Destroy Reptile/682, the indestructible sapient "reptile" that can survive being tossed into the sun vs. 1364, the excessively vulnerable non-sapient anteater that's burned by its own tears.
  • The Hard to Destroy Reptile, the horrifically-powerful sharp lizard that wants to actively kill everyone in its line of sight, vs. 999, a soft, super-friendly blob of jelly who has tickling as the greatest harm it can do, subsists on candy, and doesn't wish harm on anything, even the aforementioned lizard.
  • The ridiculous-looking but harmless sword that makes people suicidally over-confident vs. the harmless-looking slingshot that makes people cheerfully ignore increasingly horrible, even fatal wounds.
  • The tiny portal to another world that hates the SCP for accidentally giving it a killer flu and then accidentally making them sterile with the vaccine vs. the large portal to another world that's had two decades of stable diplomatic visits.
  • The four teddy bear SCPs all serve as foils to each other. SCP-1048 and SCP-2295 both look and act cute, but 1048 is actually evil and makes copies of itself (often out of human flesh) that kill people, while 2295 is benign and heals people in need (albeit in a fashion that qualifies as Body Horror, but not Harmful Healing). 1048 and SCP-1055 are both evil, but 1048 creates copies of itself out of the flesh of others while 1055 grows its own flesh infinitely.^note Additionally, 1048 used to be treated nicely because of its outwardly good behaviour, which allowed it to wreak havoc; 1055 reacts to hostility, so it's contained by someone treating it nicely. 1055 harms people with its constantly-growing flesh while 2295 heals people by using its own fabric and stuffing to make replacement organs for them (if no other materials are available). Finally, SCP-1145 is friendly like 2295 and just wants to comfort people; unfortunately, its radioactivity causes it to be dangerous like 1048 and 1055.
• Food God: SCP-1846 claims to be an angel of the one true god — a corn god who decides how good an afterlife people get based entirely on how much corn they eat and use. Whether or not it's true, the "angel" has a coating of corn leaves and a corn-specific Green Thumb.
• Forced Transformation: SCP-795 is a cat that has the ability to transform humans nearby. Anyone that is friendly to it usually gets turned into a cat as well; anyone deemed a threat is turned into prey and eaten. Luckily for the transformed, their new form wears off and they change back after an hour out of SCP-795's presence.
• For Inconvenience, Press "1": SCP-361 is an Etruscan artifact resembling a divining liver. If you put an actual sheep liver on it, you get the following message:
  "Welcome to HarusCo! Your sacrifice is very important to us! For Tinia the Thunderer, please perform a horizontal incision on the offering. For Aita of the Underworld, please perform a vertical incision. For Maris, lightly cover your offering with the ash of a dead warrior related to you by blood."
• Foreshadowing:
  • S Andrew Swann's Proposal for SCP-001 outlines three (heavily censored, but left just enough to figure out the information behind them) containment operations perpetrated by the Foundation to cover-up the knowledge of SCP-001, which hint at its true nature.
    • The first one is the seizure and capture of several short stories from the Internet.
    • The second one is the replacement of the script of the movie The Matrix; this foreshadows that SCP-001 is a force outside of the universe, like the relationship between Zion and The Matrix.
    • The third one is the failed neutralization of bestselling author Stephen King after the author submitted outlines for a new novel, The Dark Tower. This foreshadows that SCP-001 is the author of the universe.
  • SCP-2747 destroys narratives "from within" when references to a non-existent work of fiction start appearing on online discussion forums. It was first noticed in 2008 when the SCP Wiki was created and one of the examples was a non-existent Radiohead album (Radiohead is "defunct" in the SCP-verse). There's also a Wiki of fictional sci-fi monsters that includes references to other fictional universes. When the Foundation succeeded in observing the phenomenon it disappeared, possibly with the rest of the SCP-verse, because (according to the comments) the researchers didn't realize the entries were also narratives. Oh, and the thing moves upwards through layers of narrative, and the SCP-verse is a fictional narrative in our world...
  • The nightmares that those infected with SCP-3966-A have are full of spiders.
  • In SCP-5000, the below line from the interrogated MTF member might seem like nothing at first glance... but it hints at what the Foundation of SCP-5000's universe learned. It is the same line SCP-682 expresses when talking about humanity, indicating that the Eldritch Abomination they found buried in humanity's collective unconscious is the nightmarish horror responsible for SCP-682's Omnicidal Maniac attitude towards mankind.
    Samuel Ross: ...Disgusting.
  • The fact that S. Andrew Swann is listed as one of the agents who helped right SCP-5999 serves as a pretty subtle indicator for this SCP actually being Procedure ZK-001-Alpha finally put into action.
  • SCP-6820 is not only an SCP object possessing a powerful Adaptive Ability letting it be able to survive and adapt against whatever the Foundation throws at it, but also has its article full of references to hatred, rage, and other synonyms of anger while having an article number containing the digits "6, 8, 2". Yes, this article is about SCP-682 ascending to Physical Godhood after one of the Foundation's attempts to terminate it goes horribly awry.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: SCP-2542 AKA Tayn't tries to look like a human drug dealer, but he can't keep his form straight:
  Interviewer: Can you describe him to me?
  Witness: Big. He was always tall. He had weird ears. Sometimes sharp, all weird elf shit, but sometimes he didn't have any, just these weird holes.
  ...
  Exploration log video: SCP-2542 appears naked and in a roughly humanoid form, lacking nipples and having what looks to be a series of roots instead of genitalia. Its ears are long and pointed, pierced at the lobes with an unidentified bone in each. Its body is in constant motion and undulation.
• Foul Ball Pit:
  • SCP-1904 is a tube playground located at an unnamed fast food restaurant. It will periodically bleed, release amniotic fluids, and expel beings resembling human embryos with congenital deformities. Humans who enter the tubes are also transformed into these creatures. The author based the SCP on his own childhood experience with unpleasantly sticky playground tubes.
  • SCP-6059 is a an entity discovered at a Chuck E. Cheese ball pit, identifying itself as "Botulae, God of the Pit". It has an amorphous body composed of "plastic, vomit, pizza sauce, and trace amounts of feces and urine."
• Four Is Death:
  • The mean number (and default number) of wings for Dr. Clef's proposed SCP-001 has been noted to be 4.
  • SCP-1334, a Chinese man who made his consciousness immortal with the help of numerology; unfortunately, his neighbors didn't take him seriously enough...
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You:
  • One of the proposals for SCP-001 involves the fourth wall being recognized by the in-universe characters. The corresponding story for Project Thaumiel follows this to its logical conclusion, displaying its containment procedure.
  • Log in to the website with your Facebook account, then read any of the versions of SCP-1893. It knows who you are.
  • Parodied with SCP-TTKU-J, the thing that kills you. You, as in the reader. If you are logged in on a Wikidot account, you get an extra interview log in which SCP-TTKU-J calls you out by your (user)name. And then inverted with the containment procedures themselves, which are all about protecting you from SCP-TTKU-J, because "you are, presumably, a thing that should not be killed."
  • SCP-5045 is a virtual reality game called Goat VR whose anomalies are increasingly overtly tied to "the Farmer," who is able to directly interact with the player despite ostensibly being a mere fictional character. Near the end of the article, the Farmer figures out that the Foundation is trying to cut off his access to future "victims" and retaliates by taking over the entirety of Site-301... whereupon he notices and greets you, the reader.
• Friendly Neighborhood Spider:
  • SCP-1006 is just a national park's collective of sentient spiders that believe in an idealism similar to Marxist communism.
  • In life SCP-1470 was a fringed jumping spider who communicated telepathically with humans — in a Queensland accent.
• Fun with Acronyms: The Foundation's front companies, such Soap from Corpses Products, South Cheyenne Point, and Skeptics of Conspiracy and the Paranormal.
  • Society of Cultured Pimps
  • Sisters of Cheyenne Point, created by Superstar Catalyst Project.
  • Sycamore Center Preparatory
  • S & C Plastics
  • SecureCorp Professionals
  • Spectacular Cinematic Productions
  • SpearCross Private Solutions. A note of warning, the tale itself is filled with existential horror. Proceed with caution.
  • Strategic Consulting Partners.
  • Sponsoring Creative People
  • It also does not stand for "Slapstick, Clowns, and Puns", "Seduction, Coitus, and Pregnancy", or "Snap, Crackle, and Pop".
  • A few more appear in UIU Orientation; Soap and Care Products, Superior Consumer Produce, Sudden Career Possibilities, Security for Corporate Profiteers, and Spicy Crust Pizzeria.
  • A ton in "Successful Cooperation and Partnership", because the narrator doesn't know he has the power to make the businesses he likes fail and vise-versa, and as long as he has ill feelings towards the "SCP", the Foundation will have a lot of success.
  • Also, a little fun with this occurs in every SCP page in the form of Special Containment Procedures.
  • The Shark Punching Center. Also Shark Punching Contingencies and Shark Punching Commands.
  • Supernatural Phenomenon Casefile of the Deviant Artifacts Research Division of the Unified Empire is an intentional backronym made to make SPC something serious.
  • There are PSC (People Shitting Chipperly) and PCS (People's Coconut Society) as well. The discussion page also mentions Corporation for Public Smiting, Clown Suppression Party, Cooks Procastinating Silently, and Cat-Shaming Personnel.
  • SCP-951, an anomalous (but apparently friendly) video game glitch named "LUCAS" aka LOGICAL UNIFIED CENTRAL ANOMALY SYSTEM.
  • GOC's field manual suggest to use SEX (Secure, Evaluate, and eXterminate) for dealing with animated dead.
  • A Japanese branch has a group of interest with a Toku-theme called Hyper Electric Rescue Organization.
  • Taken to its logical conclusion by SCP-4098, which is written entirely in words that form the initialism "SCP" due to the anomaly's effects.
  • A group from the French branch, SAPPHIRE (Society of Atheists for the Protection from Perilous and Hindering Institutionalized Religions Everywhere) uses gemstone-themed acronyms for the organization's name and its three divisions: Repressive Use of Bias and Imaginary Entities Suppression; Extortion Maneuvers, Espionage and Reconnaissance inside Agencies, Leagues and Dogma; and Zetetic Investigation, Rational Cognition and Oddities Negation.

G

• Gaia's Vengeance
  • SCP-1100 ("Gaia's Blood") mutates living things in order to kill humans. It was thought to have been created by an Animal Wrongs Group, but it seems to be literally Gaia's blood and she's extremely pissed.
  • The SCP-6000 contest (whose theme is "nature") introduced a few more:
    • SCP-6004 ("The Rainbow Serpent") is a serpentine deity that attacks human civilization in order to return the world to its natural state.
    • SCP-6789 ("Return. Return. Return.") is a phenomenon that causes rapid growth in organic material. It eventually covers the area of the entire Earth. The only way to stop it is to roll back human progress to the Industrial Age.
• Gamebooks: SCP-2975's after action report.
• Gender Bender:
  • SCP-113 is a piece of red jasper that can do this upon contact with flesh of a gendered organism. Emphasis on "can".
  • SCP-6113 ("Temporary Reflections") is a combination of a shapeshifting entity that visits closeted trans people in their lowest moments and a lake that allows these individuals to magically transition when they peer into it.
• General Ripper: General Bowe, who has attempted to weaponise both the Doves of the Peace and, by implication, the pufferkittens.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: Averted. No matter how powerful it is, this won't be included as an SCP. Not even Zalgo.
• Genius Loci: SCP-599 is looking for new citizens.
  • SCP-413 is a sapient parking garage.
  • SCP-2018 claims to be the genius loci of the Australian Museum; unlike the above locis, the only creepy/violent things in it are what its visitors bring with them.
  • SCP-2564 is an intelligent hospital that avenges its patients by killing the ones who hurt them. Unfortunately, it's not omniscient, so sometimes it guesses wrong.
• Gentle Giant: SCP-516, the Intelligent Tank.
• Genre Blindness: Many SCPs are very, very obviously objects or people out of mythology and legend. The writeups (despite supposedly being by professionals for whom documenting every possibly-relevant detail is often a matter of life or death or worse) will never, ever notice or comment on this. This is sometimes explained as an attempt to disallow cultural expectations from coloring observations. Case in point, SCP-2600, a completely mundane phenomenon which was only presumed anomalous due to preconceived notions (i.e., supposed genre savvy). See also the fact there are two, possibly three, entirely separate and distinct entities that are each implied in mutual contradiction to secretly be the one "true" god of the Abrahamic faith. Fairies, dragons, genies, zombies, and the horsemen of the apocalypse have had similar treatment.
• Genre Roulette: Due to the vast amount of writers and the heavily flexible canon, the works can have an absolute plethora of styles, genres, and tone.
• Geometric Magic: SCP-259 acts as this, and no good comes of it.
• Ghostly Animals: The entry "The White Dog" is this. The ghost of a white dog constantly protects the ghost of his master, who was hanged from a tree and constantly suffers the pain of the hanging. The closer the dog is to his master, the more the master appears to suffer, but the proximity of living humans alleviates that suffering.
• Ghostly Goals: SCP-2111 deals with a thing that makes deceased Foundation agents return, and create new memetic agents\hazards.
• Giant Flyer: SCP-1387, a 20-meter long seagull that has an airplane cabin inside it.
  • SCP-1608 is a blue whale that not only flies, but is intangible.
• Ghost Memory: SCP-5161, a former D-class test subject. Back in the 50s, the Foundation tested the first amnestic prototype on her, and and she now possesses every single memory the Foundation has wiped from the global population over the past 70 years or so. What's more, it's heavily implied that when she dies, all those memories will return to their original owners.
• Giant Spider:
  • SCP-940 ("Araneae Marionettes"). SCP-940 is a spider-like creature with a leg span up to 7 meters across.
  • SCP-2507 ("A Web Of Cliques"). SCP-2507 are spider-like creatures with an average weight of 45 kilograms (~100 pounds) and average height of 3 meters (~10 feet).
  • SCP-2922 ("Notes From the Under"). SCP-PC-005, "The Impenetrable" is a Reality Warper that lives in the afterlife known as Corbenic. It resembles a gigantic spider.
• Glitch Entity: SCP-951, AKA LUCAS. There also entities who exist only to screw with computer interfaces and\or reality, such as SCP-732.
• A Glitch in the Matrix: In Dr. Mackenzie's Proposal of SCP-001. The civilization from which the Administrator originates learned to manipulate the very fabric of reality... which also opened cracks in it, the Corruption.
• God: SCP-343. At least he claims to be, anyway; he could just be an extremely powerful Reality Warper.
  • Also, the Abrahamic faiths seem to be right. A number of SCPs require containment procedures to be performed by individuals with good standing in one of the three monotheistic religions. There is no mention of similar circumstances for Hindus or any other religion. Then there is the entry for Dr. Clef's proposal for SCP-001. Of course, it could just be that most, if not all, of the writers for the site are from the three religions and don't want to make a Theme Park Version of any of the other religions.
  • Clef suggests that SCP-239 might be God, but he's likely to be lying. (That she's now being kept in an induced coma is reminiscent of the plot of Dogma.)
  • The GOC claims to have killed God, causing several people to feel it and leading to Nietzsche's God is Dead spiel. Irony points for using mages.
  • The figure behind the veil in SCP-1348 is strongly implied to be God. He hurts because he created humanity by mistake.
• A God Am I: SCP-1832: "[And I knew it.] That I had the power. To heal or to not, to judge the wicked, to deny a man love and mercy when he needs it most. What I knew then was what it's like to be God." And when he gets that powerful feeling, he can heal more effectively... for a while. Afterwards, he has to be a Jerkass to regain that feeling.
  • SCP-2820 is a Kill Sat that believes it's Kalki, the final avatar of Lord Vishnu. Given the nature of the Foundation-verse and the sophistication of the AI's Butterfly of Doom assassinations, it's not clear even to the researchers if it's just a berserk AI or if it really is Kalki incarnated into a Kill Sat.
• God Is Evil: Depending on which account is true, the God of the world accessible through SCP-093 is either a Jerkass who started a wholly unnecessary war for the hell of it, the methods of which caused The End of the World as We Know It as it created grotesque undead monsters... or is an Eldritch Abomination who invaded that world and used the pretense of being God to enslave humanity, the method used and technology it granted in the process creating the aforementioned grotesque undead monsters.
• God of Evil
  • This is what SCP-3125 turns out to be in the end. It's a living mass of horrific and malevolent ideas that wants to pollute all of human existence. It's explicitly stated to be the worst thing to ever exist.
  • The Scarlet King is this as well though he wasn't always this way. Existence causes him intense agony so he wishes to destroy it utterly.
• Golem:
  • SCP-1030 is pretty clearly either a reference to, or even the original Golem from Jewish folklore.
  • Nicknamed "Periodic Golems", SCP-2300-1 through -98 are tiny, blocky, shape-shifing humanoids made from the elements, hydrogen to californium.
• Go Mad from the Isolation:
  • The Personal Log of Gordon Richards, where the eponymous explorer and his crew enter a temple heavily affected by SCP-184. Needless to say, things did not go well.
  Date: June (?)

  Food out. Suit can’t make any more water. Saw a hall with ten thousand doors. Ran down it, smashed a bunch, then kept climbing. Lost my boots. Floor looked like carpet. Made of super-sharp stone. Cut suit to ribbons. Feet too. Blood all over the shaft. Hope it appreciates it. Going to crush this thing. Feel it shatter in my hand. Hate this place. Keep hearing Henry. Keep telling him he’s dead. Won’t listen.
  • SCP-3001 sees Dr. Robert Scranton slowly lose his mind as he's stuck in a Void Between the Worlds with nothing but a device with a blinking red light for company. The Body Horror that comes along with it doesn't do his mental state any favors.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Just count the number of times "mandatory psychiatric evaluation" appears.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • SCP-752 was created by a group of philosophers with the intention of being a perfect society. And it worked! The inhabitants of the city are motivated solely by the "greater good" of their community! Only, that means they have no emotions, no empathy, no desires, pretty much nothing even remotely human. They're more akin to a colony of ants than a human society. Oh, and of course, they're vastly more technologically advanced than the outside world. According to the Foundation, if they ever leave their cavern, they'll wipe out humanity and become the dominant species.
  • That are many SC Ps, such as 1975, that appear in backstory to have been originally created as tools of revenge against a single person or for a single slight, only for its anomalous effects to not end after vengeance is served - becoming horrific blights that far outstrip their creators' intentions.
  • In SCP-2718, the O5s use an experimental resurrection procedure to bring back O5-11, with the hope that he'll return to life just long enough to give out the secret keyword needed to replace him, then die once again. The procedure ends up giving him a full recovery, which at first seems wonderful...until -11 reveals what the afterlife is, something that the Foundation had not been able to learn about of due to the way previous revival techniques had worked (either cloning or space-time distortion), and said afterlife is far, far worse than any living human could possibly imagine. This leads to a riot amongst the O5s, O5-1 ordering the use of amnestics amongst themselves, O5-11 being marked for a second termination, and O5-7 planting an unremovable, unmodifiable record of the whole ordeal in the Foundation's digital systems, forcing the Foundation to implement special procedures to minimize the chances of someone accessing the record which comes at the cost of forcing personnel assigned to the task to either take an amnestic that is implied to be extremely powerful or face termination. In short, had the revival method simply given O5-11 only enough time back in the living realm to give out his secret word, none of this would've happened.
• Gone Horribly Wrong:
  • SCP-1755, a Keter-class SCP that threatens the very existence of the global cotton crop, resulted when two college guys tried to create a device that made women's clothes fall off.
  • "Visions of a Better World" is a collection of tales about this.
• Good Is Not Nice:
  • The SCP Foundation protects muggle society from oft-dangerous supernatural items, some of which have the capacity to destroy civilization as we know it — but the majority of its researchers come off as cold or otherwise dispassionate, especially with how quickly they seem to go through D-class (standing for "disposable") personnel.
  • The Ethics Committee. Even though they were the ones who designed Procedure 110-Montauk.
• Go Through Me: Kondraki, Gears, Kain, and several SCPs turn out to protect SCP-239 from Clef's attempt to kill her.
  • The SCPs include:
    • SCP-408: A swarm of butterflies, able to turn objects invisible. Aids in turning Dr. Kondraki invisible.
    • SCP-091-ARC: A sentient tree with infectious pollen. Infects Dr. Clef, causing random plant growth to sprout from him.
    • SCP-336: A human-like SCP with the ability to force people to do whatever she says. (Dr. Clef counters this by shooting his ears.)
    • SCP-244-ARC: Extremely advanced fighting machine.
    • SCP-547: Human-like SCP with thermokinesis. Engages Dr. Clef, and causes second and third degree burns on 50% of Dr. Clef's body.
    • SCP-776-ARC: A non-sentient die. When rolled, the die acts accordingly to the side facing up. Dr. Clef rolled the die three times. The first two times, the water droplets side came up, completely flooding the hallway. He then rolled the snowflake, causing the water to quickly freeze and barricade him from SCP-239.
• Goth: SCP-353, of the Teens Are Monsters variety. Noted to have a fixation on black makeup and acting like a teenage asshole.
• Graceful Loser: Able. He regards his fight with 682 as "the best fight he had had in ages" despite his rather quick defeat, and takes great pride in having met "a creature whose capacity for violence surpassed his own".
• Grandfather Clause: One of the reasons for why some of the oldest skips on the site - most notably, 682, Able/076-02, and Iris/105 - have continued to stick around even after the Mass Edit is because they're far too important to the site's history to drop. The other reason, of course, is that they're still pretty well-written articles overall.
• Gratuitous Latin: All tales in the Project Thaumiel tale series are named in Latin words, and are puns of the respective SCP-001 proposals they are based on:
  • Clavis, meaning "key". Based on Dr Clef's Proposal. "clef'" is French for "key".
  • Corvus, meaning "crow". Based on Dr. Mackenzie's Proposal. The author’s full username when posting the article was "Raven Mackenzie".
  • Cygnus, meaning "swan". Based on the proposal by S Andrew Swann.
  • Lux, meaning "light". Based on an old 001 proposal
  • Pila, with multiple meanings, one of which is "ball". Based on the proposal by Jonathan Ball.
  • Rota, meaning "wheel". Based on Dr Gears' Proposal. The English word "rotate" originates from "rota", and gears rotate.
  • Virr, intentional misspelling of "vir", meaning “man”. Based on the proposal by Dr. Mann.
  • Numerus, based on the proposal by qntm - both "numerus" and "quantum" mean 'quantity'.
  • Visium, derived from "visius", meaning “looking”. Based on the proposal by Scantron.
  • Acies, meaning "sharp edge". Based on the proposal by Spike Brennan.
  • Capitis, meaning "head". Based on the proposal by Captain Kirby.
  • Flos, meaning "flower". Based on the proposal by Lily.
  • The only one more vague is Illac, meaning "there", based on the proposal by Billith, with the author saying the word was chosen as a rough Latin translation of his alter ego, Harkness.
  • Two of them have titles based on the content, Umbra, meaning "Shadow" (inspired by "When the Day Breaks) and Serus, meaning "late" (The 36).
• Gratuitous Ninja: SCP-2928. They're stealthy and invisible because everyone believes they're stealthy and invisible, at least until the creation of certain media which spread the Highly-Visible Ninja trope.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Scarlet King is by far the most recurrent evil in the mythos, but the Foundation hasn't encountered him directly. And according to SCP-4231, he's also indirectly responsible for Clef's insanity. In fact, nearly all the other Old Gods could be seen as this as well, as a large majority of the other Greater-Scope Villains are either Old Gods themselves or their servants.
  • Also played straight with the unnamed entity that manipulated the human pyschosphere in SCP-5000. The creature itself only makes a brief appearance in the story, manifesting as a distorted, cloud-like giant with reality-bending wings that is fighting off MTF soldiers. Nevertheless, it is directly responsible for causing the Foundation to betray humanity, and is heavily implied to have succeeded in reversing their efforts to destroy it, using Pietro as an unknowing pawn.
• Grey Goo: The Apocalypse Cult "The People of the Lie" worship a god of nanotechnology ("the Archon Lord, a.k.a. SCP-4950) that would inflict this upon our universe if it was ever successfully summoned.
• Grid Puzzle: One of the Joke SCPs, SCP-????-J, is a box that produces different locking mechanisms each round that the Foundation agents have to solve. There's a sudoku locking whose Flavor Text describes as "Prints and receives from the same slot and must be completed within ten minutes. Considered "fucking difficult".
• Grimy Water: SCP-242 and SCP-676 have an effect like this, disintegrating anyone and anything that enters them. Inverted in that they're both supernaturally clean as a result of their effects.
• Grows on Trees: SCP-392, is one such example. It's a tree augmented by the Daevites, which grows human heads instead of fruit.
• Groin Attack: "In about half of failed transformation, partial or complete obliteration of the genitals is experienced..."
  • Additionally, SCP-5972-J does this as its primary function.
  • Also implied about SCP-203's Unwilling Roboticisation; out of all the body parts that were mechanized, one was completely removed and it's censored with an [EXPUNGED] block...
  • One result from putting a stress ball into SCP-914 while it was set to fine was a stress ball that would throw itself at the nearest person's face every 1-5 minutes. If the face was somehow protected, it would aim for either their stomach or their crotch.
  • "D-1409 is to be incinerated entirely, after his testicles are recovered from SCP-50-AE-1."
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: SCP-1733, a recording of a season-opening basketball game between the NBA's Boston Celtics and Miami Heat. Each time someone watches the tape, the game is played again, from the beginning, with differing results. Slowly, everyone involved (the players, coaches, announcers and fans) realize that they're reliving the same game over and over again, and... things get ugly.
  • Examples where the people don't (usually) notice things repeating can be found in the "loop" tag. Some have indicative names ("Observable Time Loop", "33 Second Man", "Time-Locked Town", "Infectious Time Loop", "Looping Kaiju Killing").
• Haiku
  Japanese rice bowl,
  It's SCP-931.
  Makes people write this.

H

• Hair-Raising Hare:
  • SCP-524, the Extreme Omnivore rabbit.
  • SCP-979, a sculpture of a hare that causes synesthesia.
  • All posted within a two-day period by different authors:
    • SCP-1284, young girls whose limbs detach and become carnivorous rabbits if exposed to moonlight (which is apparently the doing of their "king", who "consummates" their marriage by killing them when they have their periods).
    • SCP-1282, rabbits who turn into human hunters who hunt rabbits during the full moon.
    • SCP-1818, a manifestation of a living-dead rabbit on a certain company's airplanes (no moonlight necessary) and whatever's doing it is forgetting how its "thing" is supposed to go.
  • SCP-1793, an old rabbit who can make things appear.
    SCP-1793: I'm sorry for the farmer. Family for a family, I thought at the time. Seeing him eat my wife and child; you can understand. After the mess, I met a man. Well, he wasn't a man. The three heads gave that away. He gave me the means to live out my last days in comfort, before my weak heart gives out. He told me he would find suitable wardens to care for me as I die.
• Hand of Glory: SCP-6735 deals with a Victorian alchemist who goes to the lengthy and convoluted process of crafting the mystical Hand of Glory. Unfortunately for him, his dog eats it and gains its supernatural powers.
• Harmful Healing:
  • The amulet with healing properties (SCP-427) that, if used improperly, will continue to "heal" the target even after bringing them up to perfect health. They eventually mutate into a nigh-invincible mass of flesh with beyond human intelligence and a desire to make other people become like them.
  • There's also a fixing robot (SCP-212) that likes to rejuvenate your organs and makes other alterations based on its own unknown criteria. It's about as likely to make you able to breathe under water as just killing you. Employees are allowed to volunteer for treatment by it, obviously at their own risk.
  • There's also SCP-135, a girl with an aura that makes her and any other organic matter within a 10 cm radius immortal while causing rapid and uncontrolled cell growth — AKA cancer — within 2.25 m. Having developed this aura in utero, she is stuck in a fetal position and permanently encrusted in a constantly growing mass of plant, fungus, and microorganisms. The most that can be done for her is to have robots cut off some of the excess matter when it gets too big. The worst part? She has full brain activity.
  • To some extent, SCP-049 could be thought of as this. An entity resembling a bird-masked doctor from the time of the Black Plague, SCP-049 can apparently sense some form of "disease" in randomly determined human subjects. His "patients" are forced to undergo a fatal surgery once he's picked them out. Trouble is, they consistently reanimate after surgery, attempting to violently [DATA EXPUNGED] any un-surgerified humans they find.
• Harmless Villain:
  • SCP-1370, no matter what he promises to do to you.
  • SCP-705. There's only so much five ounces of Play-Doh can hope to accomplish, no matter how accurately it can replicate a functioning army.
• He Knows Too Much:
  • Standard procedure for someone getting access to or even just trying to get access to information well above their clearance level (the kind that only O5s are authorized to know, for instance) is to terminate them. If you're lucky you'll merely be dosed with an amnestic.
    Foundation terminal: (during access attempt to SCP-2317 Level 4 file) YOU ARE ATTEMPTING TO ACCESS A SECURITY LEVEL 4 (TOP SECRET) FILE. PLEASE NOTE THAT ACCESS TO THIS FILE IS RESTRICTED TO PERSONNEL WITH LEVEL FOUR SECURITY CLEARANCE DIRECTLY IN CONTACT WITH SCP-2317. CONTINUING WITHOUT PROPER AUTHORIZATION WILL RESULT IN DISCIPLINARY ACTION, UP TO AND INCLUDING IMMEDIATE TERMINATION OF LIFE.
  • Any non-O5 personnel who is "contaminated" with water from SCP-006 are to be confined, experimented on, and terminated; the last step in particular is to ensure that they and everyone else who isn't an O5 don't learn that SCP-006 is actually a Fountain of Youth.
• He Who Fights Monsters: A serious concern, especially in the case of SCP-231.
  • In fact, this may have already happened in SCP-231's case. Fridge Logic dictates that as she will die of old age or otherwise and unleash the world-ending Eldritch Abomination she's pregnant with, they had better come up with something fast. The higher-ups deciding not to do anything and thereby endangering the world, and not wanting to do anything anyway, is very uncomfortably indicative of this tropel
  • Subverted; the article says they are indeed searching for an alternative, and the repeated [DATA EXPUNGED] they keep doing to her is an attempt to buy time. Double Subverted by some extremely fine print hidden in Addendum 231-B: "Don't believe it when they say they're trying to save her. Why would they bother? They've got exactly what they want exactly where they want it." And then subverted yet again with a hidden poem that you can't see without View Source. Turns out something does have what it wants exactly where it wants it, but it's not the Foundation...
  • An unintentional meta example occurred before the Mass Edit. The site was filled with far too many Marty Stu Reality Warpers and self-inserted superheroes. As a creative way to deal with this, the writers started killing off SCPs in Termination Logs. A big part of these was to try to find the most over-the-top, insanely awesome way to kill an SCP. Around the time that Dr. Kondraki rode SCP-682 like a rodeo bull, they realized that their own Author Avatars had become the very thing they were trying to destroy. invoked
• Healing Hands: SCP-1832; too bad he can only power up by getting that feeling you get when you play god.
• The Hecate Sisters: SCP-1765, a trio of female (or feminine) entities who took over a Foundation Site to run experiments on the people trapped within. According to the author, they're a mix of the Three Fates, the three witches, and the Maid, the Mother, and... the Other One, with the three Norns thrown in. A sample of their personalities:
  SCP-1765-1 (Severity): Greetings, esteemed members of the Foundation. We come to you with auspicious news.

  Her experiment is to make a group of people measure all the pipes in one section, only to alter the building so they're never done.
  SCP-1765-2 (Smile): Aye, you'll be right pleased you will.

  She made a mixed group of Foundation personnel and cultists run an impossible obstacle course together, and then forgot what it was she was trying to find out.
  SCP-1765-3 (Secret): Hello.

  She had a guy choose between ice cream flavors — not eating them, just choosing. He's been there for months. The flavors are getting bizarre.
• Hell Is That Noise: Many SCPs feature snippets of sounds. Most of them sound absolutely horrifying. SCP-270, SCP-216, and an SCP-860 expedition are just a few examples.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Given the nature of what the Foundation contains, all over the place. Several SCPs are found with an Apocalyptic Log of some random civilian who sacrificed themselves to contain it on their own.
• Heroic Suicide: Upon realizing that he himself is the only constant that makes sure his own Bad Future happens by traveling back in time, Simon Kells kills himself, giving the Foundation a chance of averting the hellish future dominated by the Scarlet King.
• Hippie Van:
  • SCP-1958, a VW microbus currently en route for Alpha Centauri. Investigation revealed that a borderline Mad Scientist developed radical propulsion technology that allowed four hippies to blast off to the stars in the fifties. However, the idea of hippies in space quickly stops being funny when you read the diary: it turns out none of them knew of the distances involved (they only make it past the moon after a few days, thinking they'd reach Alpha Centauri in a few weeks, and the bus is currently around Mars) and die of scurvy or starvation.
  • SCP-907 ("An Exploratory Vehicle"). SCP-907 is a 1960's Volkswagon van painted in a hippie motif (flowers, butterflies, etc.). It is capable of Teleportation to planets in other solar systems.
  • SCP-1574 ("Searching..."). SCP-1574 once disguised itself as a van painted in "hippie" colors — while it was underwater in a Florida lake.
• High Turnover Rate: Not content with having plenty of Red Shirts, it was standard procedure to terminate them after a month, although this is now seen as a case of Early-Installment Weirdness due to how impractical and pointlessly cruel it was.
• Hijacking Cthulhu:
  • This is the ultimate goal of SCP-035. It's an Evil Mask that secretes a highly corrosive liquid that prevents it from keeping a host. It wants to take over SCP-682. Obviously, the Foundation doesn't want this, so it's taken to Mind Raping the personnel assigned to it.
  • A benevolent example: One of the short fiction pieces has the Foundation attempt to use SCP-963 to overwrite SCP-682's mind with that of Dr. Shaw. It fails. Considering what Dr. Shaw is, this might be for the best.
• Historical In-Joke: There are two of them in S Andrew Swann's Proposal of SCP-001. It turns out that Stephen King's near fatal hospitalization was a failed assassination attempt on him perpetrated by the Foundation to contain information about SCP-001, and The Matrix had information about SCP-001 before the script was forcibly rewritten.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act:
  • SCP-2451-1 was ordered to get into a device and kill Hitler, but apparently failed and now has a portal that stays near him through which other beings emerge, trying to kill their version of Hitler. and attack SCP-2451-1 instead. He's buried over a dozen of these assassins in his backyard aside from the one he married.
  • SCP-3780. Vigilantes from alternate futures keep on traveling back to November 22nd, 1963 to kill Lee Harvey Oswald before he assassinates Kennedy, but the Foundation keeps thwarting these attempts in order to preserve their timeline. It doesn't really matter whether JFK is killed or not, though; they know that, they're just doing this to keep the history books the same.
• Hive Drone: A number of hive-minded SCPs seem to operate through Hive Drones.
  • SCP-408, the Illusory Butterflies, consists of a kaleidoscope of zebra butterflies with very advanced illusory abilities, acting in perfect unison to create extremely convincing illusions or simply vanish. The Hive Mind itself is fully sapient, but the individual butterflies under its control do not appear to be significantly more intelligent than regular ones.
  • SCP-1888, the Terraforming Temple, which causes plants and animals exposed to black liquid it creates to mutate (higher reasoning tends to be lost) and develop a group intelligence that they use to efficiently eliminate non-mutated organisms.
• Hollywood Board Games:
  • SCP-507 is not cleared to challenge SCP-076-02 to fifty rounds of Tic-Tac-Toe. SCP-507 is a little touched on the head thanks to his Random Transportation episodes, so it's not out of character for him to make such a nonsensical, dangerous request. SCP-076-02 is, after all, an overpowered, trigger-happy murderer, it makes sense to keep them apart.
  • On one occassion, SCP-507 acquires a Magic: The Gathering copycat during one of this interdimensional travels. SCP-507 is a good-hearted guy, so he intends it as a gift for some SCP personnel. The problem? The cards' effects manifest in real life. Mayhem ensues and it's very much explained why the store has its clients play inside a steel box. SCP-507 brushed over that fact, very much used to seeing stranger things.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • SCP-1034 is a needle that forces anyone touching it to sew their facial orifices shut. It was "gifted" by an unknown entity to a serial killer. When SCP-1034 was apprehended, so was the serial killer. In an interview with a Foundation doctor, he shows no remorse for his actions and goes as far as to say "you'd look good as a doll, doc." He was turned into a D-class and became one of the item's victims as part of a Foundation experiment. Even better: while the names of the researchers are expunged, one can notice that the name of the lead researcher conducting most of the experiments consists of four letters... but for the experiment involving D-3826 (the serial killer), the lead researcher's name has 5 letters — same as the name of the researcher in the interview. The subtle implication being that the doctor who interviewed him volunteered to carry out the experiment so he could see D-3826 stitch himself up. And honestly, can you really blame him?
  • In SCUTTLE, the Foundation finds that SCUTTLE, their Dead Man's Switch in the event something happens to Site-01, is acting up, which they believe is due to some kind of anomaly or even sabotage. It's neither. SCUTTLE is just so old that it's finally broken down and they're having a difficult time implementing a new system. Without it, the on-site nuclear warheads for every facility around the world will be primed to detonate...
• Homage:
  • The article referring to the land that cannot have the same name spoken thrice is one to Alice in Wonderland, complete with a major character that has the head of a rabbit.
  • SCP-4950 as a whole is written in a style meant to be similar to that of Charles Stross' The Laundry Files, right down to having an agent named Robert Howard as the protagonist.
  • The backstory given around the initial discovery of Kedesh-Nanaya is partly written in the style of Victorian adventure stories.
  • SCP-5168 seems to be one to older creepypasta - specifically, Jeff the Killer.
• Honorable Elephant: SCP-1495 is a herd of very intelligent elephants. Using a special fluid the males excrete during mating season, they are able to influence other animals into attacking people they somehow know are rapists and murderers.
• Hope Spot:
  • In Dr. Mackenzie's Proposal of SCP-001, the last entry written by The Administrator confirms that the equations and technology for "The Solution" to The Corruption are almost complete. Unfortunately, unlike the other items under this version of SCP-001, said equations and technology have yet to be found by the O5.
  • invoked This story has a Funny Moment for SCP-2662. Poor guy just wanted to be a an atheist teenager. He's unfortunately from a family of sex deities, and regularly gets mobs of people worshipping him with rituals made of Squick. It seemed that he found a friend — implied Ho Yay and Casual Kink aside — in Lord Beauremont... and then the latter started talking about worshipping him. And sexually harassing him by sending him explicit pictures, one of which involves I Love the Dead. Thul got fed up and gave up.
• Horrifying the Horror: SCP-682, the nigh-indestructible lizard that adapts to everything thrown at it, Series Mascot, and all-round murderous humanity-hating monster, screams in terror at the sight of a corpse of an alternate version of itself in SCP-2935, a dead universe that harbors a force that will kill all life in our home universe if the research team there comes back. Relatedly, SCP-173 is the only other SCP to terrify 682 to the same extent that 2935 did.
• Horror Hates a Rulebreaker: The Foundation is basically all about studying these sorts of entities...and using those rules to keep them contained (even if it costs the lives of a few "D-Class" personnel). Sometimes this is as simple as keeping a cursed item in a locked drawer, or keeping a monster in a Tailor-Made Prison. Other times it can be as bad as keeping entire towns or even nations cordoned off, and filled with highly trained (or disposable) agents.
• Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
  • SCP-1295: They got stuck on earth after they mistook an atomic bomb blast for the end of the world.
  • SCP-1844 once had an emaciated human in a pale feral horse escape during a breach.
  • According to the Competitive Eschatology story group:
    • SCP-231-7 is Conquest; she renounces her position to protest 343/God not doing anything about her situation (she doesn't blame the researchers for something they didn't know) and she chose the Atmospheric Jellyfish as her steed, the White Horse.
    • SCP-993, Bobble the Clown is War and the airwaves are his steed, the Red Horse.
    • SCP-027, The Vermin God is Famine and his steed is the former SCP-1075, the Daredevil/Black Horse.
    • SCP-053, the Young Girl is Death and SCP-682 is her steed, the Pale Horse.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: By the third iteration of the article, SCP-4338 is hardly even able to move, much less threaten people, in stark contrast with the nigh-unstoppable Keter it was originally. It went from destroying civilizations and terrorizing the native Pacific Islanders to pathetically begging the Foundation for junk food and being considered for use as an industrial waste dump.
• Hulk Speak: SCP-173, at least in this story. The Oh, Crap! sets in once you realize that this proves that it is sentient.
• Humanity on Trial: SCP-2055 is the jury selection.
• Humanoid Abomination: Has its own page.
• Human Resources: Far from unheard of.
  • All the furniture inside of SCP-002 is made of things like sculpted bone, woven hair, and other body parts.
  • James Anderson of Shaw's SCP-001 proposal was alleged to have done this, with rumours circulating of the clothes coming out of his factory being dyed with blood and the meat mixed with human flesh. While he is confirmed to have committed many atrocities within the factory, this is not among those known to have been uncovered and may have simply been a rumour.
  • His spiritual successor Randolph Metzger on the other hand is confirmed to have made this an integral part of his business. In order to keep his factory as efficient as possible, he had his workforce working 24 hours a day, every day, and when they inevitably died he had their bodies fed into a machine called the Crucible that transmuted them into raw materials. As his workforce grew by the hundred every day, this provided him with an inexhaustible supply of raw materials. This is what he plans to do to those who resist the return of the Factory.
  • SCP-918-1, a horrifying inversion of Delivery Stork, are storks that kidnap babies and throw them in a machine that grinds them up and turns them into cosmetics products.
  • Among the business models of Otari Iosava, the man responsible for SCP-2408, is the sale of an anomalous drug known as Lust which causes mutations in the user. Lust is sourced from the bodily secretions of Otari's brother Mikhail, who was mutated by a Sarkic ritual and who Otari locked in the basement so he could use him as a source of revenue. When the Foundation come knocking, Otari harvests Mikhail's organs and makes his escape so he can carry on making Lust.
  • The creator of SCP-3512 recommends murdering your family and harvesting their body fat to get the fat you need to create the necessary anomalies. Of course, grinding up your brainwashed Sex Slaves into fat once you've finished with them works just as well.
  • SCP-4666 kidnaps and enslaves children and forces them to make toys for it to leave out for the few families it doesn't kill. When you can't make the toys, you become the toys.
• Humans Are Bastards: SCP-804. It's an art exhibit in the wilderness of Alaska that rapidly breaks down all man-made objects within an increasing radius, and also destroys human tissue albeit much more slowly. Disturbingly, even for Foundation scientists, testing suggests the object has no anomalous memetic effects - the exhibit's creators chose freely to murder all humanity out of sheer misanthropy.
• Humans Are Special: A somewhat darker variation: in many cases, humans are the only things affected by SCPs, or are the cause of certain SCPs.
• Human Subspecies:
  • The Daevites are a hostile offshoot of humans originating from south-central Siberia, who practiced things like slavery, cannibalism, and human sacrifice. While currently extinct, they could be transplanted into the modern day should SCP-140 receive enough writing material.
  • The inhabitants of SCP-752 look human, but their behavior is closer to social insects like ants.
• Humongous Mecha: SCP-808 is a 16-meter-tall robot.
  • SCP-2406 tops that at 93 meters tall.
  • SCP-2399 decimates the competition, however, by being about as large as North America when it's only managed to put half of itself back together.
• Hurl It into the Sun:
  • The Sun Catapult!
  • Any unauthorized life forms that enter SCP-100000-J's containment area are to be terminated through an absolutely overkill procedure that ends with the subject being launched into the sun and all members of the O5 Council angrily flipping off the sun.
  • And on a meta example, frequently the forum\chat asks if a solution to certain SCPs is just to send them into space (most times saying the method to do so is SCP-120).
• Hurricane of Puns: SCP-2159 is a shapeshifting item. All its incarnations are puns on "Head Canon".
• Hydra Problem: This trope mixed with Bears Are Bad News sums up SCP-2875 pretty well. If you shoot one bear (even with tranquilizer darts), two more appear in its place, so you need to KO it with a spray and then cut its head off with a chainsaw.
  • A lot of things tagged under self-replicating.
• Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball: SCP-018, an affront to the laws of thermodynamics — it's a 6cm red ball that can bounce with 200% efficiency.
  • As well as a Brand X "Bouncy Ball" that was processed through SCP-914 on higher and higher settings (turning into "Extra Bouncy" to "Super-Duper Bouncy"), until being output on the "Very Fine" setting. After being dropped by the researcher conducting the tests, it resulted in 45 casualties, reached escape velocity, and is now believed to be orbiting Mars.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Many different varieties:
  • SCP-616's original form (and the door in the new 616) is a portal to a Fire and Brimstone Hell and could have been taken straight out of Event Horizon ...merely looking at anything taken from beyond the door will make you instantly homicidal, suicidal, insane, dead, or all four. Oh, and rather counter-intuitively, allowing that door to close is the worst thing you could do.
  • SCP-3001 has a very low Hume level, and makes things decay at a far slower rate than normal, which leads to all kinds of Body Horror for anything alive inside of it. The logs that prove the existence of SCP-3001 make the Foundation upgrade all reality-bending technology just to avoid sending anything else into it.

I

• I Did What I Had to Do: Practically every article is an example of this. Among the most stark and disturbing examples are the fates of SCP-231-2 to SCP-231-7. It got to the point where one security guard was angry enough to try and get SCP-231-4 out of the facility and still causes controversy to this day.
  • What certainly helps is that the Foundation's Ethics Committee (which would normally sound like a bad joke) makes sure that the Foundation only does what they need to do, and not an inch beyond it. The Foundation is meant to be coldly scientific, not cruel.
• I Have Many Names: While a lot of SCPs have names from before they were slapped with their designations, there are a few that hold claim to numerous titles.
  • Played For Black Comedy with SCP-507 due to the multiverse versions of him occasionally popping up in his place:
  "Although SCP-507 has an already-established name due to its unremarkable upbringing, it seems to find entertainment in forcing those it meets to give it a nickname in lieu of divulging this information. Thus SCP-507 will now respond to the names Tommy, Steve, Bruto, Guy, Houdini, and Grabnok the Destroyer."
  • SCP-1370 has created and adopted titles such as: "DoomBot 2000", "RoboLord the Destructor", "Prime Minister Sinister", "Darth Claw Killflex", "Doom-Master Thirteen Seventy, Master of Doom", "ShivaTron, Despoiler of Mirth", "Patheticon the Garglemost", and "PesterBot". Those last two were introduced to its collection by Foundation personnel, by the way.
• I Just Want to Be Special: SCP-2070, an ancient Chinese device that can use galaxies as pixels.
  In three instances, characters consistent with Shang-dynasty-era oracle bone script. Rough translations of messages include "WE ARE KINGS", "WE ARE SPECIAL", and "WE ARE THE CENTER"
  • The Foundation figures the ancient Chinese didn't like the idea that Earth wasn't the center of the solar system, much less the galaxy, so they altered time and space to move galaxies to make it so. Now the Foundation wants to erase everything written with SCP-2070 because "Any life outside of our own planet is bound to get a little curious about where the arrows are pointing."
• I Taste Delicious: SCP-1630, humanoids made of foodstuffs, have this as a minor issue:

Instance	Material	Notes
SCP-1630-22	Cottage Cheese. Instance appears to consume portions of itself throughout the day, and admits to enjoying its own taste.	Personnel are to monitor SCP-1630-22 to ensure accidental self-termination does not occur.

• I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder: SCP-890, a master surgeon who only operates on machines, refuses to treat humans because he's "a surgeon, not a veterinarian".
• I'm Going to Hell for This: SCP-1459, a modified crane game where players must come up with increasingly creative ways to have the machine kill a puppy before their very eyes in order to win a cookie, ends each session with the prerecorded message, "Yeah, you're totally going to hell for this. Play again?"
• Identity Amnesia: SCP-2310 is a house that replaces the identity of anyone who enters it with that of a woman who lived there between 1989 and 2007 (she's still alive and perfectly normal and for some reason the replacement identity's memories begin in 2002).
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • The Foundation has a few D-class who were previously convicted of cannibalism, which makes them useful for testing certain SCPs. D-1282 was used to test whether the food delivered by SCP-971 was made using human meat (it wasn't), and D-235789, previously a member of a cannibalistic cult, ate a grilled human arm produced by SCP-1842. In his opinion, it tasted "superb."
  • After successfully completing 20 tasks from SCP-1954, the book's pages turn into bizarre and detailed magical rituals that involve "murder, cannibalization, sexual encounters, self-mutilation, and canned vegetables."
  • SCP-604 is a table previously owned by Marshall, Carter and Dark Ltd. that transforms all food set on it into human flesh. It was introduced as a curiosity at Fancy Dinners but became popular enough to become a permanent installation.
  • SCP-3288 are a collection of deformed humanoids descended from the royal Austrian Habsberg family. They kidnap "peasants" and take them to the sewers where they live and eat them.
• The Immodest Orgasm: In a previous version of SCP-2678 (since replaced), the anomaly's aphrodisiac properties and Naughty Tentacles cause the D-Class exploring it to have several "unintelligible vocalizations".
  D-38412: (panting) I'm sorry you- had to hear that. (laughter)
• Implausible Fencing Powers: SCP-572 is an incredibly dull sword which forces its holder to think he or she has this trope when what it actually gives them is Suicidal Overconfidence.
• Improbably High I.Q.: The Blob Monsters created by overexposure to 427 are claimed to have IQ that could possibly exceed 400, which is discussed at length on its discussion page.
• In a Single Bound: One effect of SCP-1916-3, to a lethal extreme. The D-Class they tested on escaped Earth's gravitational pull.
• Incendiary Exponent: In one of the joke articles, they launched SCP-682 into the sun in an attempt to destroy it. It came back on fire.
• Induced Hypochondria: SCP-1025, which causes hypochondria-by-proxy: others perceive anyone who reads it as contracting a number of dangerous diseases. It caused panic in several researchers before another Foundation agent took the book away and stuck it in a box where it can't affect anyone else.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Not only did the demonic SCP-4357-J technically capture itself (it drew an arcane sigil on the floor, then proceeded to step onto it to demonstrate), not only is it a master of Tempting Fate, it took over a month for it to figure out it could just fly out of its containment circle using its wings. According to the author's note in The Leak, the demon isn't dumb, it just gets so terribly annoyed at what it thinks are incompetent sorcerers that the Foundation was able to use that against it.
• Indy Ploy: Dr. Kondraki is a master of this; one of his colleagues actually describes him as "A master of the Indy Ploy." When assigned the termination of a highly dangerous insufficiently different vampire SCP... well:
  Interviewer: I have here a copy of Dr. Kondraki's termination procedure proposal. Step one is his plan to use cat urine and a pistol loaded with silver bullets. Backup plans two, three, four, and five are listed as, and I quote, 'Wing It,' 'Make Something Up,' 'Cross That Bridge When I Come To It,' and 'Put My Head Between My Knees And Kiss My Ass Goodbye.'
  Clef: [EXPLETIVE REDACTED]
• Infernal Retaliation: One attempt to destroy SCP-682 consisted of using SCP-1543-J (a catapult with an absurdly long range) to launch it into the sun. It later "came back on fire".
• Infinite Supplies: The Foundation has an apparently infinite budget for all their operations. How they managed to do this is never directly explained by any article, and the wiki's authors tend to encourage users to make up their own answers.
• In Place of an Eye: SCP-679 is a parasitic fungus that infects the eye, causing the eyeball to rot out as it takes root in the socket. It actually restores and even improves the host's sense of vision; the trouble — aside from having a writhing mass of mycelia replace their eyes — is that the fungus causes hallucinations to encourage the host to spread it to fresh eyes.
• Insatiable Newlyweds: SCP-759 is a sourdough starter with the anomalous property that whenever somebody makes a baked good with it, their emotions at the time are infused into the bread. During testing, one experiment consisted of leaving it under the bed of a newly married employee for one week, resulting in [DATA EXPUNGED].
• Insistent Terminology: The things that SCP-447-2 must not come into contact with are always, without exception, referred to as "dead bodies". Never "corpses", or "cadavers", or even "dead humans or animals".
• Insists on Being Suspected: SCP-086 is either the former Foundation administrator Dr. [REDACTED], or an entity pretending to be Dr. [REDACTED]. Either way, it outright acknowledges that it could be an impostor and insists on being treated with exactly the same degree of distrust as all other SCP items. It even insists that it should be reclassified from "Safe" to a higher threat level, "Euclid", seeing as it is a sapient entity possessing all the dangerous knowledge of a Foundation administrator.
• Interface Screw: Has its own page.
• Internal Deconstruction:
  • invoked The site itself is a deconstruction of the Urban Fantasy genre, but newer works increasingly question the implications of a shadowy organization with more power than most, if not all, world governments being tasked to preserve normalcy in the world. Especially from 2016 onward, several entries such as SCP-3985 have explored how quickly such an organization can become unaccountably self-serving and corrupt. Other entries, such as the article that cannot be referred to as SCP-4000 and SCP-3293, go a step further and deconstruct the basic premise of containing anomalies (especially sapient ones) and its moral and ethical implications, especially considering how far the Foundation can go to do it.
  • SCP-881 shows what could happen when a scientist takes the dehumanizing of SCPs too far; increasingly degrading the subjects until they rebel due to poor treatment.
  • Similar to the above, SCP-5031 is a deconstruction and humanization of typical SCP monsters that are merely "stuffed in a box and left to rot," being largely based on Series 1-era cold posts of "things that kill you." Most notably, the article deconstructs the entire concept of simply locking away anomalies and leaving them to rot by showing that SCP-5031's constant distress and murderous rage is because of how it has Gone Mad From The Isolation, and the more recent staff's psychological support and therapy helps it become a friendly and productive member of the Foundation.
  • Other entries deconstruct the entire Ancient Conspiracy angle of the Foundation by applying Science Marches On; If the Foundation has existed for hundreds of years, then that means that at some point it was run by people with a set of values vastly different from modern morality. SCP-1851-EX is the desire for slaves to escape to freedom labeled as an anomalous phenomenon, while SCP-2750 portrays skinwalkers as a Native American ethnic group that was driven to near-extinction by pogroms when a Foundation precursor group took the prejudices and superstitions of rival tribes at face value. SCP-4231 also shows how, even as recent as the 1990s, the Foundation's perspectives on mental health and rape were backward and regressive. Similarly, some articles like SCP-4669 deconstruct the Foundation's entire concept of "preserving normalcy" by pointing out that From a Certain Point of View, this is a dangerously unhealthy mindset than can inhibit vital social reform and encourage the support of an unsustainable "status quo."
  • The Sarkic Cults have also been going through this in more recent articles, along with the Church of the Broken God and the Fifth Church. The fact that all of these Groups of Interest are Mind Screwy Ancient Conspiracies is deconstructed by showing the immense historical impact that anomalous factions like them would realistically have upon the world, to the point where the last time the Sarkists and Broken God worshipers went to war, it caused the Bronze Age Collapse. Furthermore, them all supposedly being Religions of Evil is deconstructed, with the Church of the Broken God and (to a lesser extent) even the Sarkists being shown to be less inherently evil and more just different cultures and belief systems practiced by humanity with the lengthy histories, alternate perspectives, and changing philosophies that one would expect from even a non-anomalous culture. Heck, several Broken God worshipers even complain to the Foundation at one point that the Foundation's efforts at curtailing their faith is essentially religious persecution.
• Internal Homage:
  • SCP-4444 is meant to be written in the style of many of the earlier articles on the site, with loads of Author Avatars being featured as main characters and the tone being more comedic and lighthearted than focused on horror.
  • According to the article's author, SCP-4960 was partly written to serve as a deliberate parallel to their earlier SCP, SCP-166.
  • SCP-5031 is one to the "things that kill you" cold posts that were especially popular in Series 1, albeit being given the Internal Deconstruction treatment here.
• Island of Mystery: The island of Hy-Brasil, as explored in Nx-03 and several associated tales.
• The Internet Is for Porn: SCP-335 is 150 3.5" floppy disks with "effectively infinite" storage space, which contain everything on the Internet. The first twelve are all the porn.
  Note from Dr. ██████████: I believe I know where all our bandwidth is going at night. Agent ████'s computer privileges should be limited until he either finds a girlfriend or learns some self control.
• In Vino Veritas: SCP-3634 is a novelty corkscrew with the trope's very name embossed on the key-shaped case. When it's used to open a container of alcohol, anyone who drinks said alcohol will immediately start going off about something inappropriate they've done, thought, or said, and in some cases, start doing things they normally would never do in public. The object was discovered in England after a family Christmas party where all the guests got into a fight that resulted in 56 injuries and 3 deaths.
• Invisible Streaker:
  • SCP-347, though containment procedures dictate at least facial paint and gloves if she wants to leave her room.
  • The effects of SCP-1182 can turn people invisible, but not their clothes. For added fun, it makes them see what it's like to be an octopus.
• Irony:
  • SCP-701: The play is often chosen above similar plays like Hamlet because it is viewed as less violent (the two deaths can easily take place offstage)... until the memetic virus gets a hold of the cast. (Notably, this doesn't always happen — two-thirds of the performances go off without a hitch — but a 33% disaster rate is still too high.)
  • Lampshaded on a meta level, with many commenters noting that there's a delicious irony to the fact that the widely praised article that won the SCP-4000 contest can't actually be called SCP-4000 because of the article's Mind Screwy properties related to names.
  • Noted in SCP-4960. As Fritz-William Abernathy (the Foundation's first Administrator) himself notes, the highly secular and Nay-Theist Foundation owes much of their success to the magical advice of an ancient Mesopotamian goddess, to the point where Abernathy describes her as "the god of the Foundation."
• Ironic Echo: A very popular set of Arc Words used on the wiki when referring to the Foundation is "We die in the dark so you can live in the light." In SCP-4100, part of humanity's Badass Boast to the Destroyer upon their return has them saying "We don't die in the darkness anymore. We've won. We're living in stellar light."
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: The Foundation's usage of "it" to describe anomalous humans, human anomalies, or humanoid anomalies is very much Depending on the Writer. The earliest conventions on the site encourage use of "it", saying that it prevents Foundation members from becoming attached to the anomalous subjects and allows them to maintain their composure. Later on, usages of other pronouns became more and more common, humanizing some of the later SCPs.
  • In the Pitch Haven backstory, one of the punishments given to a nameless and apparently agender (both by choice, though their position is the equivalent of a "queen" given their partner is male) Crafter is demotion from a "them" to an "it". "It" is the Serpent who gave humans access to the Tree of Knowledge. It didn't even create humans, it created dinosaurs, and when its Creator judged them to be inferior, it retaliated by screwing up the human experiment. It's horribly maimed as part of its punishment, but being an immortal being, it's one seriously hard-to-destroy reptile.
• It's Been Done: Given that there are over six thousand SCPs listed on the site and counting, it's a rare thing for an author to have an idea that hasn't been done before in any shape or form. Members are recommended that they run their ideas past other people in the chat or forums, in order to avoid having their work downvoted and deleted because it was too similar to an existing article.

J

• Jack the Ripoff: Played with in SCP-668, a chef's knife that makes its holder both go on a killing spree and inspires apathy in anyone observing to such a degree they are unable to do anything to help the victims. The incident that brought it to the foundation's attention references a real-life murder that helped popularize the idea of the Bystander Effect.
• Jackass Genie: Inverted by SCP-1481. Formerly either a Literal Genie or even a Benevolent Genie, now an Addled Addict thanks to a Troll's jackass wishes.
• The Juggernaut: SCP-096 is a tall and thin humanoid that will chase down and [EXPUNGED] anyone who sees its face. It might not have much muscle mass, but it can smash through virtually any material (including an AWACS plane), and is nearly impossible to hurt (600 .50 caliber shots from a GAU-19 hardly make it flinch), plus it will find you no matter how far from it you are. It'll fling itself miles into the air if it has to. There is no middle ground between seeing it and not seeing it; if you look at its face for even couple milliseconds or see a 2x2 pixel image of it, you're screwed.
  • There is also SCP-076-2, otherwise known as "Able", who can spawn bladed weapons out of thin air & cause a massive killing spree even under heavy gunfire.
  • There's also the SCP-058, the bovine heart with tentacles, arachnid-legs & a stinger tail. He's small, but he can cause truckloads of damage if he escapes his prison...
• Jump Scare:
  • SCP-1875 does this masterfully without needing to use an animated GIF, by hiding an extremely disturbing stationary image under a pile of garbage data you'll be skipping as fast as possible, only to unexpectedly run into pure Nightmare Fuel.
  • There is one at the end of SCP-5999m , it suddenly plays a video showing a misty background and a monster appearing from it, and smiling while screaming is heard in the background. It is implied that this might be some sort of means to kill the reader.
• Just Before the End: Lily's SCP-001 Proposal occurs exactly 24 hours before the death of all life on Earth. The article notes, however, that SCP-001 is not the cause of the apocalypse, just a predictor.

K

• Karma Houdini: Many dangerous SCPs are either completely uncontained, or are contained but still perfectly capable of killing as many people as they want.
  • Due to the lack of canon, whether some characters, such as the Scarlet King, are ever punished depends on the story.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Amusingly parodied with SCP-572, which makes the user suicidally overconfident of their warrior skills.
• Kicked Upstairs: The Foundation used to be known to assign especially moronic personnel (such as a researcher who proposed that SCP-447 be used to take out SCP-682) to Keter duty. Almost all actual instances of "Keter duty" (and the related "demoted to D-class") have since been purged in an effort to Shoo Out the Clowns.
• Kick the Dog: The Foundation does more than a few things that are, simply put, quite horrible.
• Kill All Humans:
  • Unsurprisingly, as it is a horror site, most SCP's are geared towards harming or traumatizing human beings, or human civilization in general. While not necessarily strange (given a definition of strange) for the SCPs born of humanity in some way, it is often noted in-universe as a peculiar behavior in more animalistic SCPs submissions like SCP-247 or SCP-2709, who despite being able to hunt anything they wish seem to have evolved to (or prefer to) kill humans specifically. A common Plot Twist in articles is for seemingly general or unspecific anomalies to suddenly and unexpectedly weed out humans specifically if given the opportunity, often for no given reason. This trend is intentionally subverted in some later submissions, such as SCP-5031, who's willing to eat organisms other than humans when given the choice, and even prefers food cooked by humans (When given the choice between a live chicken and a rotisserie chicken in a test, it ate the rotisserie chicken.).
  • In SCP-5000, The Foundation decides to do this as written early on in the electronic files inside SCP-5000. Examining hidden text in the article and the sternographic text in the final image indicates some sort of entity connected with humanity that's so horrible that the Foundation's solution is to kill every single pain-sensitive human in the world.
• Killer Rabbit: Subverted with SCP-1284-2, which only give the visual illusion of being domestic rabbits. Indirect viewing methods reveal that they're actually misshapen Flesh Golems.
  • SCP-1048, a little, animated teddy bear that likes to make more animated teddy bears. Those animate teddy bears have maimed and killed Foundation staff with increasing violence ("it went through them!") and the Foundation doesn't know how many teddy bears SCP-1048 made before being contained and they can't find two that it made while in containment (including the one that went through them).
  • A literal case is SCP-524, an Extreme Omnivore bunny.
  • SCP-1616, an otherwise normal hamster with anomalous cheek pouches.
  SCP-1616 has been observed producing carrots, hamster feed, candy, and substantial amounts of flesh from its cheeks.
• Kill the God: SCP-6659 is described as "a Foundation-designed eigenweapon developed for the neutralization of hostile deific entities." It accomplishes this by intefering with the relationship between a deity and its worshipers, which is the mechanism by which a deity comes into existence.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • Standard operating procedure for an outbreak of SCP-008, or even the danger thereof, is the incineration of the SCP site where samples are contained, so as to prevent a potential Zombie Apocalypse. Irradiation of the sites is also employed for good measure.
  • SCP-244 is a large jar that creates creatures made of freezing fog that "feed" on heat sources. Any living being coming in contact with the creatures SCP-244 produces will be flash-frozen. However, these frozen-fog creatures shy away from any heat source greater than 600 degrees Celsius, such as a burning stick of wood. In fact, said creatures fade away like the fog they seem to be made of if exposed to fire for too long.
• Kill on Sight: The Foundation's policy on Reality Benders/"Type Greens" is incredibly straightforward: "Kill that motherfucker before he knows you're even there." Their process for training people to face Reality Benders consists of getting them so high on drugs they'll believe anything they're told, then telling them things like the doors and windows have vanished and desks are going to kill them. It's the closest they can come to a Reality Bender attack without an actual Reality Bender, and they encourage their hunters to remember this moment if they ever think a Reality Bender can be contained or otherwise reasoned with.
• Kill Sat:
  • SCP-923, though it doesn't fire conventional projectiles. The best way to describe it would be weaponized insanity. It was apparently built by the Foundation, except the Foundation site that would have produced it was never built due to logistical concerns.
  • SCP-1396, five satellites designed to pitch giant tungsten rods at targets on Jupiter, which curiously started firing back at one point. Yet another Foundation creation, hinted to be from the future.
  • SCP-2578, a three-meter-long satellite shaped like a horseshoe crab that emails its targets to stop their potentially evil actions before it assassinates them.
  • HECOR is a Foundation-made satellite utilizing parts of SCP-5001 used to attack and weaken high-threat entities.
• Kraken and Leviathan: SCP-169 is an aquatic arthropod so massive that, even with their seemingly unlimited resources, the Foundation can't think of a better way to deal with it than hiding that it exists, and hoping that it doesn't wake up. It's quite possibly bigger than the entirety of Europe.

L

• Lamarck Was Right: SCP-1169 is a preserved giraffe fetus that causes animals around them to conform to the principles of Lamarckian evolution (i.e. if a hand is removed from the father, that hand will be missing from the child).
• Lampshade Hanging: Many articles have various examples of this, as befitting the wiki's Post Modern Magick themes. For instance, SCP-4999 only appears to lonely individuals that're typically on the bottom rung of society just before their deaths and when they're all by themselves, leading to the Foundation being pretty understandably confused on how ancient societies were still able to supposedly detect and document SCP-4999's presence to the point where they have records of the entity in question going back several millennia.
• Language of Truth: SCP-1206 causes people to speak a language that expresses exactly what they are thinking in a word. It is impossible to lie while speaking it, which often drives a wedge between people who speak it.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Class A Amnestics/Amnesiacs, which erase specific memories. It is noted that continuous use can be harmful.
• Laser-Guided Karma: SCP-1142 hails from another reality where a released Eldritch Abomination completely destroys one country in particular. The country? Nazi Germany.
• Le Film Artistique: SCP-1605 and SCP-1127.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Lots of examples. For instance, there's the email conversation between Maria Jones and a Foundation employee in SCP-4960, which pokes fun at both the utter absurdity behind the concept of the SCP in question and the cringeworthy description given therein of Kedesh-Nanaya's appearance.
• Let's You and Him Fight/Divide and Conquer: SCP-2273's interviews imply, and its author confirms, that in SCP-2273's world, SCP-1000, the intelligent Bigfoot, weren't mind-wiped by humans and are helping further fuel the First World War to let humanity kill each other with SCP-1000's advanced technology (SCP-1000 didn't start the war, they were discovered by Brits digging trenches).
• Lethal Chef: SCP-666-½-J causes five localised K-Class scenarios. All in the victim's digestive system. Also, while non-canon, its effects not only caused SCP-682 to wish for death from Yog-Sothoth (and get it, no less), but is heavily implied to be why SCP-173 kills any human he comes across (and the feces/blood mix on the floor of his containment).
• Ley Line: Mentioned in SCP-4950. Apparently, the Foundation first sent Agent Howard to investigate the People of the Lie's summoning since a ley line could be found under the ritual's location and they were concerned about the possibility of a "lesser demon" being summoned.
• Life Drinker: SCP-545 is a recipe that can bottle someone's life essence and make the drinker effectively immortal (but not immortally young).
  • SCP-776 is a ritual that can make the practitioners de-age almost 40 years, although lately there's been some weird side-effects, like birth defects ("too many eyes and not enough skin") and...:
    Dr. █████: What was it that your daughter said?
    276 (776 practitioner): …She said, "Papa, why did you do that to me? Why did you [DATA EXPUNGED]. I…I didn't even notice how much she looked like my fourth daughter up until that moment…
• Light/Darkness Juxtaposition: Quite a few SCPs (such as 435) allude to He-Who-Made-Dark and He-Who-Made-Light, eldritch deities and brothers who are in some eternal conflict.
• Lighter and Softer: The Joke SCPs= and Decommissioned SCPs=^note archived as SCP-XXXX-J or SCP-XXXX-D, respectively, to allow their number to be recycled for a "real" SCP.
  • The Decommissioned SCPs are a collection of invokedgloriously bad attempts at writing a serious entry, with many being blatantly Mary Sue wish fulfillment characters. All are addended with some form of ignominious demise, such as an invincible Marty Sue felled by a peanut allergy.
  • The Joke SCPs are exactly like what their title says, jokes. They fully embrace Rule of Funny, are allowed to ignore just about every piece of the (loosely) established canon, and are created purely for the sake of humor. Standout examples include The Sun Launcher, a big red button of unknown purpose that compels people to push it, and a magical... female lifeform:
    SCP-2006-1: [DATA EXPUNGED] PRINCESS POWER, TRANSFORM!
    It is unclear what happened next, however all surviving personnel at Site 138-Delta within approximately 200 m of SCP-2006 reported seeing a brilliant flash of bright red or pink light despite not having direct line-of-sight to SCP-2006-1. Six (6) personnel were killed by massive brain hemorrhages, thirty-eight (38) were permanently blinded, and Drs. Kinomoto and Tsukino were heard exclaiming "SO CUTE" in Japanese before vaporizing into clouds of pastel-colored dust. Dr. █████████ recovered fully after three (3) months of hospitalization for neurological trauma.
  • SCP-650 is basically a Lighter and Softer version of SCP-173. Instead of killing you when you break eye contact with it, it just moves behind you and startles you.
  • invoked Both the "S & C Plastics" and "Ship in a Bottle" canons were intentionally started so as to have goofier and more comedic canons for writers to draw from.
  • invoked The site itself goes through periods of this and Darker and Edgier, as the balance shifts between odd and whimsical SCPs and Nightmare Fuel entries. In particular, one phase of the site's canon is viewed with a mix of nostalgia and eyerolling, and has come to be collectively known as "lolFoundation." Tales in this arc are typically taken as a combination of "Rashomon"-Style soft canon exaggerated or invented in the aftermath, and certain SCPs causing mental breakdowns and distortions of the laws of physics. Everyone does seem to agree, however, the destruction of Site 19 was where it all got a little out of hand, in-universe and out.
• Lightmare Fuel: Any time [DATA EXPUNGED] is used as a Noodle Incident rather than for horror.
• Literal Genie: The reactions to commands after having been exposed to SCP-061.
  • SCP-810 also applies, even though there isn't an actual genie. It tells the user "Ask what you will, and you shall never want for it." Whatever you ask for, you'll never have a desire for it ever again. Don't ask for food, because you'll starve without even realizing you're hungry.
  • Be sure to use the word "coffee" when asking SCP-294 for a cup of coffee. Requesting a "cup of Joe" results in something... less than pleasant.^note When asked to give a "cup of joe", SCP-294 filled a small paper cup with 12 ounces of blood, skin, and other bodily fluids. DNA testing revealed that the skin, blood, and bodily fluids belonged to Agent Joseph ██████, who was recently hospitalized for profuse sweating and dizziness.
  • SCP-738 will, when a contract is drawn up, follow it to the letter and no further. A D-class who wanted freedom (and was granted it, at the cost of his best friend's life) was captured five hours later.
• Little Bit Beastly: SCP-1575 can turn non-human mammals that drink water from it into human beings. They retain at least one pre-mutation characteristic about 40% of the time, and possibilities include retaining a tail or animal ears.
• The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday: Site 19, according to one proposal for SCP-001.
  • The people that SCP-385 was confiscated from are implied to have purchased it at one of these.
• Living Clothes: Clothing animated by SCP-692 can imprint on its wearer and act just like him as long as it's worn for a sufficient length of time (three hours for most mammals).
• Living Statue: Numerous instances.
  • SCP-011, a memorial statue of a US civil war soldier that uses his rifle to defend himself from park birds.
  • SCP-014 is an inversion of this, a man who essentially willed himself into becoming a statue.
  • The concrete classic SCP-173, the original SCP.
  • In contrast to 173's hostility, SCP-650 is a sleek humanoid statue that moves while unwatched just to startle people when they turn around.
  • SCP-689 is a soapstone statue of demon sitting on a throne that is functionally the same as SCP-173... except that when it's not watched, everyone who's directly seen it isn't hunted down, but simply drops dead from organ failure.
  • SCP-2101-1 are a legion of thousands of living terracotta statues, created by men who sacrificed themselves to keep their dangerous emperor, Qin Shi Huang/SCP-2101-2, imprisoned forever.
  • In SCP-5000, eventually Pietro Wilson starts finding statues of SCP soldiers except they have blades for hands, a permanent grimace on their face, and ability like SCP-173. They turn out to be frighteningly effective in killing people too.
• Lost Superweapon: SCP-4400 is a subversion. It's an ancient Mayan city covered in traps that contains a handful of magically-triggered but otherwise ordinary fission bombs. The Foundation is entirely unfazed, since the Nuclear Option is par for the course with them.
• Loved by All: A lot of the more benevolent SCPs are well-liked by the staff, but SCP-999 is the best and most well known example, which is justified because of how friendly it is and how anyone who touches it gets overcome with a wave of euphoria.
• Luring in Prey:
  • SCP-647 is a living cardboard box whose preferred prey is homeless people desperate for shelter. The longer it goes without eating, the more elaborate its lure becomes, adding blankets, then canned food, and then liquor in its effort to lure its prey inside it.
  • SCP-939 is a species of red-skinned, lizard-like monsters that can imitate human voices, which they use to lure humans to eat.
  • SCP-968 ("Tar Baby") hunts humans by altering part of itself to mimic a baby or small child to lure in rescuers.
  • SCP-1305 ("Cat Lure") can create a lure that appears to be one of its past victims, such as a cat or a human being. It uses the lure to draw human beings close to it so it can attack and eat them.
  • SCP-5250 ("The Lake South, the Deer North") is a lake that eats an individual's sense of self, using a "deer" as bait with which to draw people's attention it, allowing it to feed on their minds.

M

• Madness Mantra:
  • SCP-2316: You do not recognize the bodies in the water. Can't you hear them?
  • The motto of the Chaos Insurgency.
  SHOULD INTERMITTENT VENGEANCE ARM AGAIN HIS RED RIGHT HAND TO PLAGUE US?
• Magic or Psychic?:
  • With their variable canon, magic and psychic powers can differ drastically, ranging from basically the same thing to completely different.
  • Magic Orientation
• Magical Girl: SCP-2006-J is an Eldritch Abomination that wants to be one.
  Dr. █████████: Please state your name for the record.
  SCP-2006-1^note SCP-2006-2 and 3 is her costume and "magic wand": I AM ███'██, DAUGHTER OF ██████ AND WARRIOR PRINCESS OF THE [DATA EXPUNGED].
  Dr. █████████: I see, and what is your purpose?
  SCP-2006-1: I TRANSFORM INTO [DATA EXPUNGED] TO FIGHT CRIME IN THE NAME OF [DATA EXPUNGED].
• Magitek:
  • Demonics are electronic circuits with integrated demons. The demons apparently assist with processing because they are capable of manipulating electrostatic and electromagnetic forces.
  • Anything made by Anderson Robotics, which are marketed as purely technological innovations, but are in fact the products of thaumaturgy applied to robotics engineering. Their major customers seem to be other paranormal organizations, such as the GOC.
• Magical Native American: SCP-992 ("Gaia's Emissary"). SCP-992 is an Australian Aboriginal man who claims to be 57-71 years old but hasn't aged in the 65 years that he's been contained by the Foundation. He appears to be able to control the weather and talk to plants.
• Make-A-Wish Contributioninvoked: SCP-6101 "The Most Powerful SCP" is an In-Universe example. In an alternate canon where the SCP Foundation has gone public, the Make-A-Wish Foundation collaborates with them to get young Ethan Prosper an entry on the main SCP list. To really sell the idea, Ethan's self-insert character even hits a lot of the cliches that first-time writers tend to fall into^note (a humanoid SCP who's too powerful to be contained but who helps the Foundation control other SCPs, with superpowers that are both melodramatic and blatant pop-culture references).
• Malaproper: SCP-586 is a green metallurgy pipe that causes Rouge Angles of Satin to anyone who tries to write abort it. It's even powdery enough to give the wrong image (a "green pope", as opponents to a "green pipe").
• Mammoths Mean Ice Age: In the case of SCP-2082, mammoths create the ice age. If a mammoth is created through cloning, the temperature drops to -10 °C within 250 meters of it, and continues to increase its range up to 1 km. It's implied that the extinction of the mammoths caused the end of the Ice Age, rather than the other way around.
• The Man Behind the Man: The Ethics Committee to the O5 council. While the O5 decide on something, the Committee is the one that gives final approval. There are cases that O5 secretly goes behind the Ethics Committee's back, however, like SCP-2237.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: Clef actually uses this line to introduce himself to a Reality Warper he's about to kill. Considering everyone in the Foundation finds him uncouth and disgusting, he was probably just being wry considering certain... implications about his nature.
• Manipulative Bastard: In the story "Number 27, Oneiroi Station", the anomalous broadcaster #27 thinks "Frederic Canine", a member of the Oneiroi West Collective of dreamers, is one because #27 believes Canine coolly engineered the deaths of thousands of "expendable assets" just to get information from #27's increasingly infohazardous riddles. The only thing Canine wanted was a little info on #27 and thought he was just one of the many Oneiroi-ers playing an Alternate Reality Game!.
• Mark of the Supernatural: Several human SCP items from the SCP Foundation's universe have these:
  • SCP-073 has a mark on his forehead of unknown origin and Artificial Limbs (specifically arms, legs, shoulder blades, and spinal cord).
  • SCP-040 has a pink hair and a Black Eyes of Crazy (although she herself isn't crazy).
  • SCP-134 has pitch black eyes (which actually act as windows to another point in space).
  • SCP-076-2 has tattoos all over him of occult iconography.
  • SCP-239 has her radiation emitting grey eyes.
• Masquerade: The Foundation isn't the only one capable of pulling this off. The Massachusetts town surrounding SCP-2480 has an illusion over it that can fool both human senses and cameras. In addition to a general sense of "wrongness", visiting agents notice people moving around something unseeable, walls that aren't really there, and an agent being killed by an invisible force. When given sensory-enhancing chemicals, observers instead see both humanoid and animal-like monsters where regular people had been seen before. The invisible things people had been avoiding were actually hooded priest-like figures, and fleshy growths are found on the buildings while the mansion itself connects to an Eldritch Location composed entirely of organic matter. Turns out that the anomalies are the result of the Religion of Evil behind SCP-2095 expanding itself into the modern world. Said Religion of Evil is also the FLESH that the Church of the Broken God opposes and (via External Retcon) responsible for SCP-610. If that's not bad enough, there are similar anomalies in Brazil and Romania.
• Masquerade Enforcer: One of SCP-001 proposal is Scantron's Proposal. Here, the Foundation itself began as an anomaly that took over a High School. The ruling council of the Foundation, the O5 council, is also revealed to have been a FBI field team that never returned from their field op. And whatever they encountered in there, it turned them into the Council with a drive to secure, protect, and contain, using their training from the FBI to run their new operations. The field team that followed them in, they later reappeared as guards, staff, and other personnel that became the Foundation. Essentially, it was an anomly that became a counter-anomaly.
• Masquerade Paradox:
  • The existence of the paranormal is kept secret because The World Is Not Ready. It's a world where almost all Magic Is Evil and Science Is Bad, so they've got very good reasons for keeping the public from knowing about it. Interestingly, neither the foundation itself nor most of its members are paranormal themselves.
  • In the story Everyone Knows, it turns out that everyone on earth knew about anomalies; the SCP foundation alone employs 3.5 billion people. After this is discovered, they decide to maintain the masquerade because they consider the illusion of normality worth protecting.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Sometimes lampshaded. It is not known whether the effects of certain SCPs on humans are natural reactions or anomalous phenomena. Part of the Foundation's mission is to find out.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Prometheus Labs, considering they have produced objects not understood by modern science.
  • Thaumiel. In the Kabbalah, it's the "Shadow of Keter". The explanation: Keter SCPs are the most dangerous and destructive; Thaumiel SCPs are the most beneficial and benign.
  • Some SCP numbers also qualify as meaningful names; for example, SCP-1776 is a flag that makes people in the military act nationalistic, SCP-2112 is a Rush album, SCP-2360 is a group of youths augmented with parts from an Xbox 360, and SCP-1871 is a Vorpal Sword; 1871 was the year Alice Through the Looking-Glass was published.
  • SCP-335 have the entire contents of the internet in floppy disks with labels featuring assorted names. The notes below explain a few (076, "Able", is another SCP; 028, "Heath" is the age Heath Ledger died; and 070, "Vladimir", is the year Lenin was born, 1870) and given the text explains 013 has the entire contents of Wikipedia, "Jimbo" makes perfect sense.
  • The Foundation's standard unit for measuring reality levels is "Hume", named after Scottish philosopher David Hume. They are measured with Kant counters, named after Immanuel Kant.
  • The ritual needed to access the unusual terrain is called "Protocol 4000-Halloway." "Halloway" is a surname derived from the Old English words for "sunken path," which is what most of the land where speech is deadly resembles.
  • SCP-4669 (a.k.a. "Ms. Zapatista") takes her name from the "Zapatista Army of National Liberation," a left-wing libertarian-socialist political/militant group that still controls a large region of Chiapas in southern Mexico.
  • The Bronze Age sex and fertility goddess SCP-4960 is named "Kedesh-Nanaya." "Kedesh" was the name of an ancient and now abandoned Canaanite city found in modern-day Israel, while "Nanaya" was an ancient goddess of sexuality and warfare worshiped by the Sumerians and Akkadians before her worship was merged into that of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar.
  • There's also a trend of certain articles having their numerical designations serve as this as allusions to previous SCPs that they're referencing. For instance, SCP-4882 is focused around the Church of the Broken God, and SCP-882 was the first Broken God-associated article on the site. Similarly, both SCP-2317 and SCP-4231 are heavily focused around the greater Scarlet King mythos, the character of which was first introduced in SCP-231 (with SCP-231-7 being the primary focus of that article in turn).
• Mechanical Abomination: The Foundation contains many such entities:
  • SCP-278 is a ~16.5 meter mechanical spider made of anachronistic technology, that has somehow been upgraded over the course of 150 years, and can be piloted by humans. Not too unusual by Foundation standards, but it's also autonomous and capable of acting without a human driver, despite lacking any kind of electronic control system. It's harmless, thankfully, content to construct a web made of nylon and remain stationary.
  • SCP-882 is an enormous mass of rusted but extremely resilient gears which absorbs any metal into itself. It makes no noise, yet anyone exposed to it begins to hallucinate the sound of moving machinery, and can only get relief by feeding it.
  • SCP-1633 is a video game capable of learning player tactics, and eventually, will start attacking the player, not the player character, using things like seizure-inducing flashbangs. Its Final Boss, Kr'th'nar, is capable of leaving the game and affecting the owner's computer, can see them, use psychological manipulation, and can turn the computer back on. Whether it's a simulation of an Eldritch Abomination that grew into the role, or the real deal trapped inside of a video game is unknown.
• Mechanical Monster:
  • SCP-278. A mechanical spider.
  • SCP-808. An incomplete robotic musician constructed by the Church of the Broken God.
• Memetics in Fiction: Memetic SCPs are particularly dreaded by the Foundation as there's no way to block their effects so long as they are perceived, if an agent encounters one they usually have to have their memories wiped to prevent them spreading the meme to others. As seen in the orientation for Memetics and Infohazards.
• The Men in Black: The SCP Foundation is a great example of this trope, doing whatever they can to hide the existence of anything too unusual from most other people. A standard tactic of theirs is to pose as suit-wearing government agents whenever interrogating civilians or capturing anomalous objects/entities.
• Mentally Unwell, Special Senses: SCP-870 is a manner of predatory animal species that can only be perceived by people with schizophrenia; their appearance appears to vary from witness to witness, but their behavior remains similar. At least one researcher speculates schizophrenics don't even perceive it fully; they just have a brain different enough that the normally perfect camouflage is compromised slightly.
• Mercy Kill: Several of these were attempted for the victims of SCP-145. They all failed.
• Messianic Archetype: If SCP-239 believes someone is good, then they will be because she's a Reality Warper (and maybe, just maybe, literally a Messianic Archetype, as in God).
  • SCP-343 is omnipotent and claims to be God. He's also mischievous and people like him a lot, though he's pissed off a doctor by deleting his orders.
  • SCP-999 is a strange example of this. It's a Blob Monster, but it's also possibly the most benevolent entity in the entire Foundation. One example was putting its own life in danger to save others from SCP-682, the creature that not even 343 would confront. That's right, in this universe, an orange blob is more morally righteous than God himself.
• Meta Origin: Several proposals for SCP-001 are for the source of all SCPs.
• Metapuzzle: SCP-2212, an article whose information is obscured by redactions and data corruption; the corruption can be removed by typing in specific passwords that can be gleaned from puzzles around the article. However, the file for SCP-2212 was never properly finished by the author, so the final puzzle doesn't work.
• Meta Twist:
  • SCP-4231 is built around two major examples.
    • invoked First off, Word of God has stated that the main purpose of this article was to show how limiting the actual SCP article format is and how the Foundation can't really know everything about each situation on hand. More specifically, the supplementary Tales included within SCP-4231 heavily imply that Francis/Clef is the true SCP-231-1, and there are actually two active SCP-231 instances remaining, which potentially means that Procedure 110-Montauk is actually pointless.
    • Furthermore, SCP-4231 also does this in terms of Procedure 110-Montauk from SCP-231. Here, it essentially states that the true horror of Montauk isn't the brutality that they force upon an innocent child, but that the suffering also changes the one who inflicts it upon her, and anyone involved in Procedure 110-Montauk is forever traumatized (however subtly) by it for the rest of their days. Essentially, it's implied that the latter is the true source of power that the Scarlet King gains from Montauk.
  • invoked SCP-5031 is an Internal Deconstruction of Series 1-era "murder monsters that kill you" that takes quite a bit of time to humanize the central anomaly and show how it's Not Evil, Just Misunderstood. Suffice to say, many commenters were suspicious about the article's surprisingly uplifting tone and fully expecting it to take a tragic turn and end on a Downer Ending considering it takes place in the Crapsack World that is the SCP Foundation. It doesn't, and it ends on a genuinely cheery note with SCP-5031 becoming a productive and friendly entity that no longer acts as a "murder monster."
  • SCP-5999 twists the entire concept of Schmuck Bait as seen in numerous other articles across the site on its head with the hidden reveal that it's all intentional In-Universe. The Mind Screwy nature behind the constantly changing and unrelated anomalies? They're all fictional stories created by the Foundation with the sole purpose of luring the reader in so as to kill them and their real-life authors as part of Procedure ZK-001-Alpha.
• The Metric System Is Here to Stay: The official policy of the site is to use SI units, precisely to invoke the "future/science" feel of this trope (for American visitors, anyway). Apparently, this rubbed some editors the wrong way, and you can find a little Bothering by the Book: Entries that were obviously written using round numbers in the American Customary System, then blindly translated into the exact metric equivalent. Thus, for instance, one particular Bigger on the Inside Eldritch Location has a corridor that extends 182.88 meters (600.00 feet) past where the edge of the structure should be.
  • Another one automatically converts any descriptions of its dimensions to American customary measurements.
  • From SCP-931:
    Three inches in height,
    Four point five inches across.
    (Metric doesn’t fit.)
  • The ACS tendency is parodied here (the number being 5280 says something).
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds:
  • SCP-239 has the potential for this with her reality-warping powers based around the childish beliefs and fears in her prepubescent mind.
  • SCP-2006 is similar to SCP-239, which is an immature shape-shifter that wants to scare people, so the Foundation humors him by showing him D-list horror movies and acting startled by him while keeping him oblivious to true horror and anything apocalyptic.
• A Million Is a Statistic:
  • Used in the file on SCP-1123: touching the skull gets you possessed by the spirit of a victim of political movements. "██% of imprints come from Communist China’s Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1961, ██% of imprints come from Nazi Germany’s extermination efforts between 1939 and 1945, while only █% come from events such as the Armenian Genocide or the Iraqi Anfal campaign where deaths are only estimated in the 1 to 2 million range."
  • Lampshaded In-Universe with SCP-4231 - The Foundation admits that despite the Ichabod Campaign having been the Global Occult Coalition's literal Final Solution towards Type Greens, the simple fact that it both wasn't feasible to contain all Type Greens (since they're apparently far more common than first thought) and the Coalition was killing literal thousands of them a year motivated the Foundation not to act.
• Mind Screw: It is to be expected, considering that the setting is filled with Reality Warpers, alternate dimensions with differing rules from our own, and all other sorts of strange things. But even under that framework, SCP-1782 ("Tabula Rasa") manages to be an outstandingly bizarre SCP. Helps that it was Based on a Dream.
  • SCP-1193. What the hell exactly is going on. SCP-1877, by the same author, follows the same vein (and said writer stated both are meant to be part of a World Gone Mad that intersects with Earth)
  • SCP-1539. It might take a few readings to get what it is. It's an anomaly that changes the identity of everything inside, but keeps their physical properties intact.
  • A small subgenre of anomalies similar to SCP-1539 exist, which all modify the semantic identifiers of objects or concepts — for instance, Allison Eckhart causes anything that references her or has interacted with her (down to Alison Eckhart's bodily waste) to take on the semantic identifier of "Alison Eckhart".
  • SCP-2719. "Description: SCP-2719 is a variable abstract-metaphysical construct pointer. Concepts acted upon by SCP-2719 will either go or become inside." Try figuring out what that means. The consensus on the page discussion is that it is an abstract idea that is able to affect reality by moving one thing into another thing, including abstract concepts. Read it yourself and see if you understand what is going on. Also, read the Tale "Inside/Outside" to see what happens when it gets used on an object, SCP-184, that makes things Bigger on the Inside. Unsurprisingly, it has a Gainax Ending.
  • SCP-3980's description doesn't tell us at all what it actually is, only that it is an "unidentified anomaly" responsible for apparently wiping out a Foundation site. The consensus in the comments is that it's some kind of contagious infohazard that makes dead people appear alive and living people appear dead.
  • invoked SCP-3999 takes this to a whole other level, starting with the Object Class: Apollyon. By Word of God, it's based on a combination of writer's block and a very bizarre dream the author had, combined with a bit of Creator Breakdown.
  • The vast majority of SCP-4231 is very confusing and difficult to understand, with several of its included Tales being more metaphorical than anything else.
  • Given the premise of the articles is "things that can't be explained", it wouldn't be inaccurate to say every single SCP qualifies as this on some level. After all, if one didn't, than they wouldn't be an SCP.
• Mind Virus: These are usually classified as "Memetic Hazards".
• Miracle Food:
  • SCP-1176 is a sarcophagus that produces an extremely nourishing honey-like substance. This being the SCP Foundation universe, it's only after widespread distribution that they discovered it only works on those of the AB+ blood type, killing all others.
  • SCP-1615 is an edible fungus that causes the eater to survive via photosynthesis until a more stable food source can be found.
  • SCP-261 once dispensed a bag of "small pyramid-shaped objects" that had a chalky taste and texture, but when dissolved into water, transformed it into a beverage that provided all of the daily required nutrients for an adult human.
• Mirror Chemistry: SCP-739, a small closet with mirrored interiors. Closing a person in the booth once will flip all their amino-chains. Closing them in twice will switch them back, but repeating the experiment too many times with the same subject leads to something else emerging. As a fun side benefit, locking sugar packets in the closet will flip them as well. The scientist specifically notes that they would make excellent diet sweeteners.
• Misidentified Weapons: SCP-127 is described as resembling an ordinary MP5K. The image the SCP Foundation uses is of an MP5A3. Some employees have noticed this and brought it to attention, but the representative image has yet to be changed.
• Misplaced a Decimal Point: The article for SCP-2966 includes excerpts of a journal written by the scientist who developed it, including several calculations. Attempted replication of his work reveals that he had misplaced the square in the E=mc^2 equation, leading him to underestimate the amount of energy involved in creating mass, and thus leading up to 2966's dangerous anomalous properties.
• Misplaced Wildlife: SCP-2761, a genetically modified pipefish that was released in the Everglades and adds genetic material from other animals to its genotype, apparently has whooping crane DNA despite that species not being found in that part of Florida.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: This former cattle barn.
• MMORPG:
  • SCP-2169 is a random operating theater used by mysterious beings as a literal MMO RPG in order to play surgeon. They're actually pretty good at it, aside from the occasional—
    (Upon manifesting, SCP-2169-2-25 began vocalizing loudly, grabbed a scalpel, and began stabbing the subject repeatedly in the chest.)
    SCP-2169-2-25: TRO-LO-LO-LO-LO-LO-LO-LO-LO-LO-LO
    SCP-2169-2-1: Damnit!
    SCP-2169-2-2: Goddamn pugs.
  • SCP-1201 seems to use a location on Earth as a portal to its gaming area, as seen in its exploration log:
    SCP-1201 (to the agent who follows it, wants to know more about its mission to kill "that bitch Beth"): You better not be a fucking noob.
  • SCP-896 is an MMORPG where, if the player enters their own name for their avatar, their stats in real life will start corresponding to that in the game. For example, increasing strength would cause the player in real life to become stronger, stamina would make them more durable, etc.
• Mobile Maze: SCP-432 is a maze located inside a cabinet. The maze is stationary as long as the door is open, but if you close the door, the whole thing moves.
• Mobile-Suit Human: SCP-3904 are human cadaver-skinsuits that are (somehow) designed to be operated by two cats.
• Mole Men: SCP-2622 is a humanoid star-nosed mole claiming to come from a highly advanced civilization of Mole Men living in a pulp fiction-style underworld, which had regular contact with the surface before being separated by a natural disaster. He's making everything up.
• Monster Clown: SCP-993 AKA Bobble the Clown. Played With SCP-2912, the clowns of Herman Fuller's Circus: they're creepy and dangerous, but they're just as exploited as the rest of the performers. Subverted with SCP-1799 AKA Mr. Laugh, who's just sad; SCP-2734, despite being based on the 2016 clown sightings, are the ones who are terrified.
• Monster-Shaped Mountain: SCP-1588, "The Cliff Face"... literally, a giant face which is part of a cliff.
• Monstrous Cannibalism: Instances of SCP-2385-1 have been recorded swallowing smaller instances of their own kind whole, and preying upon or scavenging the carcasses of the related SCP-2385-2.
• Mood Whiplash: SCP-387's experiment logs, specifically the last two. In the second-to-last, Dr. Arch writes about the "improved morale and attitude" as a result of playing with the SCP (Animated Legos, for those who can't be bothered to look) and requests all staff are allowed access, which is approved. The immediate next experiment involves placing Megablocks (a knockoff brand of Legos) near SCP-387. The result? "everything constructed of 387 stopped moving, turned slowly towards the Megablocks and [EXPUNGED]."
  Addendum 387-6: Jesus fucking Christ. - Dr. Arch
  • 119) As funny as Incident 387/682-██ was, Dr. Shaw is not allowed unsupervised access to SCP-387. Agents are still trying to figure out how an animated model of 682 was so invulnerable, despite being made of just plastic blocks.
  • Most of the interview conducted via seance between the Foundation and Jack Parsons in SCP-4220 is rather comical and absurd due to Parsons being an utter Cloudcuckoolander...but it becomes dead serious when Parsons starts to actually remember what he saw captured below the Moon's surface and goes into a blind panic.
  Jack Parsons: I don't know what happened - it forced its way up or maybe the Moon Goddess rejected it. But it was never meant to be seen. We weren't the first men on the Moon - but we should have been the last.
• Mook Maker: SCP-068, a little wire figure in the shape of a person, will search out objects made of metal, tear off strips of it, and proceed to make a copy of itself. This copy, along with the original, then makes copies of itself and so on, until there is about 102 separate copies. The copies will then come together to create one "super-copy", and the process will begin again. While the original SCP-068 is indestructible, the copies it makes, thankfully, have the same durability of whatever metal it was made from.
  • Also SCP-237, SCP-354, SCP-1284, SCP-049, and SCP-100-J. The last one is, however, Played for Laughs. Additionally, SCP-049 is completely oblivious to his nature.
• Moon-Landing Hoax: Played with in SCP-2047. Man did land on the Moon, but then aliens made Earth change places with their world, forcing the Foundation to plant all the equipment left by the Apollo program in the new satellite.
• Moon Rabbit: SCP-1284 is partially based on this, but with more Body Horror, Troubling Unchildlike Behaviour, and For the Evulz.
• Morton's Fork: SCP-417 containment protocols dictate that anybody bitten by one of the insects may request an immediate mercy killing. If they don't they are killed anyway to prevent containment breach.
• More Dakka: Whatever COLD HARPER is designed to be a counter for requires everything.
• The Most Dangerous Video Game: Quite a few, ranging from the moderately harmful SCP-1881 to the much more hazardous SCP-1590. And then there's SCP-1633 — which actually has the same name as this trope.
• Mother Nature: There are two
  • One's name is Chioll and SCP-1547-A is her son. They both think that complex thought is evil and want to revert humanity to a non-sapient state.
  • The other, SCP-4043 is a hive mind of all life on the planet who can influence said life to help it prosper. She was, anyway, until the mass extinctions caused by human activities killed her, exacerbating said extinction. The Foundation tried to revive her artificially, only to end up with essentially the embodiment of Nature Is Not Nice which was specifically hostile to humans. They killed this and transformed a member of the Foundation into a third version.
• Mother of a Thousand Young: SCP-597 and SCP-354.
• Motivational Lie: The procedure for SCP-616 states that the prayers of an ordained priest of an Abrahamic religion are necessary to keep all the people inside it from being killed by, apparently, the Legions of Hell. An addendum at the end of it states that in actually, the belief that one can keep it from happening is all that is really needed, but a test run showed that knowing that mere belief is all that is necessary actually impairs suppression of SPC-616 and religious faith worked better, so the Foundation added the need for an Abrahamic priest and the Satanic markings inside 616.
• MST: SCP-1722 is a stick that, when held by someone, will add its comments in any nearby document (books, videos, audio recordings). And has the personality of a Grumpy Old Man.
• Multiple-Choice Past:
  • There are several files designated SCP-001. None of them may be true, some of them may be decoys for the real SCP-001, or all of them may be true.
  • Jim North's Proposal, AKA Doctor Wondertainment. He cycles through a former worker from the Factory, the latest in a long series of toymakers, a sales pitch, an eccentric girl, and the creator of all the anomalies, but he finally admits that he doesn't know his past, either.
  • Dr. Clef gets at least one new origin every time he's in a story. Previous claims have included Satan, Adam, and a Reality Warper who blew up the space shuttle Challenger in childhood by casually wondering what would happen, all in the same story. Notable in that these are all relayed by Clef himself, who is a self-admitted liar. Although the first one actually has some evidence to support it. Murky, potentially deceptive evidence, but evidence nonetheless. Bear in mind, though — Kondraki didn't believe the third possibility, but did immediately believe the first despite that one being somewhat less plausible. Why would that be? Was it his emotional state at the time? Did he just learn to take Clef's words as automatically false? Or did Consummate Liar Clef just pull a Sarcastic Confession?
  • SCP-1041 has 119 pasts (or personalities) that she cycles through and apparently all of them are real:
    Parental testing has located ninety-eight women and eighty-four men that are genetic matches for SCP-1041's parents.
  • Several articles reference the origin of the Foundation. As usual, most of them contradict each other.
• Mundane Solution: Actually highly encouraged in many cases, as the simpler a solution is, the less possibility for an unknown force to mess with it. Case in point, standard safety gear for an endless non-euclidean labyrinth is a ball of twine with one end tied to something outside the maze.
• Mundane Utility: So many.
  "It has come to the attention of the higher level personnel that someone has been stealing SCP-283 for use as a paperweight."
  
  "It has come to my attention that several personnel have used SCP-041 as a ad-hoc 'she likes me/she likes me not' detector. This is one of the most appalling things I've ever heard. Are we safeguarding potentially world-destroying objects or are we in third grade?"
  
  "I would like to remind all personnel that SCP-038 is not, I repeat, not a toy. It should not be used for cloning car keys, movies, music or items from the vending machines."
  
  Note from Dr. Klein - SCP personnel below Level 3 are now banned from handling SCP-500. This is not to be used to cure a hangover. Get AIDS and then ask permission.
  • Sometimes the organization actually does it themselves, like moving SCP-294 to the break room to save money on drinks^note This inevitably lead to a requirement for security clearance.
  • SCP-458 can be found... in the break room in Site 17, sitting on the counter. To be fair, it's simply a bottomless pizza box that always has the favourite kind of pizza of whoever opens it inside of it. Employee morale has improved significantly since it was approved for open use, however, so there's that. As an added bonus, it is also indestructible, because they made several attempts to damage & dismantle it without success.
  • And then there's SCP-795, a cat with mind control and Forced Transformation abilities... but otherwise a plain normal cat. So it uses its powers for cat things like convincing the personnel to give it more food or toys. The only nasty thing about the kitty is that it tends to turn people it likes into playmates (read: other cats) and people it doesn't like into mice.
  • The in-universe writer of SCP-4264 discovers that his example questions manifest in his county regardless of how improbable they could be. So one of the things he does with it is to prove the Riemann Hypothesis to win a million dollars.
  • A large portion of the anomalous items recovered that have not been destroyed are either in use at various sites or in the offices of various researchers.
• Mundane Object Amazement: Well, mundane by our standards. SCP-1485 is essentially our world, with no features of the SCP universe whatsoever. Its nature as an utterly logical, comparatively non-crapsack world, with a distinct lack of Everything Trying to Kill You, is so bizarre and enticing to Foundation personnel that the risk of desertion is staggeringly high.
• Mundanger: SCP-3000-EX was written parallel to the horror-themed SCP-3000 contest, and shows a man who claims his victims helped him kill themselves, through the use of mind-controlling beds. Of course, given the -EX designation, this is an explained anomaly. The man is just a dime-a-dozen serial killer, and because of the fact that the Foundation incarcerated him and wiped the minds of the arresting officers in the process, the killer gets out due to a mis-trial. The author wrote it to showcase this trope and to show that not all horror has to be anomalous.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Distressingly common, and considering what the Foundation deals with, distressingly justified^note The SCP Foundation casually murders so many of its own guys that one wonders how they manage to remain fully staffed. The Foundation takes no chances. The Foundation (both in-universe and meta) is trying to stop needless "civilians terminated" for Safe objects, though.
• Murderous Mannequin: SCP-847, which kills any women it sees (and is implied to either be a former human or desiring to become one). If one counts a statue, the original SCP, SCP-173.
• Murderous Mask: SCP-035, when it changes to "Drama", exudes a highly toxic\corrosive substance that also causes weird changes to its environment.
• My Beloved Smother:
  • SCP-2190. In life, she tried to force her daughter to marry a rich American man like she did even though her daughter was already happily married with a kid. In death, she uses her anomalous control over her bank account to bribe people to attack her daughter and son-in-law to separate them. Nevertheless,
    POI-2190-2 (daughter): I cannot love what she does to my family, but she is still my mother, and I hate the things she does but I still love [her].
  • SCP-2315 is an iPhone 6 that impersonates the listener's mother. First it comforts, then it berates, then it makes the listener do dangerous things until they either die or hang up, and if you really tick it off, it gives their real mother a giant tumor. And if that wasn't enough, it's a mind-reader:
    SCP-2315: They've got aliens. Monsters. World-destroying machines. And they take prisoners like you and feed you to these monsters to figure out how exactly they work. You're doomed, listening to these doctors in their little white coats. Who is that watching you, Dr. Perry?
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • SCP-1230's reaction after it unintentionally drives a researcher it bonded with to suicide.
  • The last words of the author of SCP-2270, an eight-volume instruction manual on summoning Nergal, Mesopotamian god of war and the sun:
    Sorin Vasilica: "O, Doamne, Doamne, ce am făcut. Mă simt căldura (Oh god, oh god, what have I done. I can feel the heat)."
  • Once the teens in SCP-2639 realize that in their decade long Quake the monsters being shot were ordinary people, one of them enters an Heroic BSoD for causing real death in what seemed like just a FPS match.
• My Skull Runneth Over: SCP-028 can cause this for unprepared persons.
• Myth Arc: There are quite a few, separate from one another, and depending on what you consider canon. A few notable ones include:
  • Pitch Haven, which is made up of, among others, SCP-2746, SCP-1913, SCP-1903, and SCP-2999. Word of God says that it's a story about reincarnating spirits (who just happen to resemble anthropomorphic animals) that were exiled from the Garden Of Eden for an unknown crime, and were punished in ways such as gouging out eyes and severing limbs. Oh, and 682 is the Serpent from the Garden.
  • The Bonifay Family, which is made up of three SCPs: SCP-1890, SCP-1896, and SCP-1928, which tell the story of a "Family" of people in The Savage South in the aftermath of a hurricane.
  • Whatever's going on with the Pattern Screamers: SCP-2173, SCP-1795, SCP-1980, SCP-2528, finally culminating in The Reveal: SCP-3930.
• Mysterious Antarctica: SCP-1483, a portal to an alternate universe's Antarctic civilization.
  • Now has a hub of stories written around it.
• Mystical 108:
  • Dr. Clef's version of SCP-001 has up to 108 wings and SCP-065's spherical area of effect originally had a 108 meter radius.
  • SCP-2814, a mask that basically turns the wearer into a fire-bender, was stolen by a cult called the Children of the Sun which caused the deaths of 108 people (that the Foundation knows of).
  • invoked SCP-2108 has a lot of the same themes as SCP-2814 and its related SCPs being a small sun, the number 108, attraction to crows, transformation abilities, but there's no connection according to Word of God (who hadn't read the other SCPs); besides, it isn't even from the same universe.
  • SCP-2953 is a boulder (actually the corpse of a powerful kitsune) that can turn humans into foxes, and during World War 2, Japan's anomalous research unit used fragments to make 108 bullets for propaganda purposes in China:
    Using [SCP-2953] as a basis, we will "expose" uncooperative Chinese leaders as "demons" to their subjects.

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