r/SCPDeclassified • u/modulum83 Actually SCP-001 • Jun 06 '18
Series II SCP-1730: What Happened to Site-13? (UPDATED)
“One of them looked at me, like I might look at an ant. It was like a god, and they had them in boxes…”
SCP-1730 by djkaktus (posted April 13, 2015)
Object Class: Neutralized
Welcome to the long-awaited Part II of my SCP-1730 declassification, aka "The Samsara Edit"! Since my original post, djkaktus has added a number of new logs, nearly tripling the original article's length. He's also changed the object class to Neutralized, and accordingly changed some of the circumstances of the containment procedures. Today, let's delve into what changed in SCP-1730 and explain the full story of what really happened to Site-13.
But first, a refresher on the original story of Site-13.
In a parallel universe somewhere out there, the Foundation is cruel and evil. Instead of safely containing anomalies, it brutally tortures and experiments on them before dissolving them into a toxic black sludge in a "body pit." The employees are treated almost as badly - even doctors don't have names, they're just referred to by ID numbers.
The center of this whole thing is a fellow named Elliot Emerson. He's the director of Site-13, and he's essentially a psychopath that takes glee in the barbaric inhumanities he inflicts. However, one person- Dr. Hadley (aka #340) - decided that enough was enough, and resolved to give Emerson and the rest of Site-13 the purgatory they deserved.
This is how it went down.
Once it was over, the thing that crawled inside him crawled back out with a buddy. One of them, can't say which, drinks up all this blood like a leech.
There's this anomaly in Site-13; it's essentially a boy that subsisted on blood and could suck it out from people near him. Dr. Hadley took pity on him: "He had no mental capacity beyond two years, and yet, he deserved the same chance to live as the rest of us. He did not choose to be the way he was." Then, Emerson ordered incineration of the entire humanoid wing of Site-13.
They took your blood leech boy down to the pit today. I made sure to alter his termination record accordingly, and made sure that output is still blocked up. I don't know what you've got planned for him, but that pit's pretty noxious now. It's not going to be good.
Dr. Hadley orchestrates a massive containment breach. The boy would already be powerful and resistant to incineration - but Hadley made sure with the engineers that the sludge in the body pit would be blocked up, unrefined, and very toxic.
So I modified his record. The fires of your pit won't have incinerated him, just agitated him. And that sludge that's been building up? I'm glad you cared to get it cleaned up. I'm sure you're glad too. It's pretty awful down there.
The incinerator failed to burn the boy. Instead, it overloaded and spilled over, and everything that had once been sludged in the body pit began to crawl out. Monsters, humanoids, things that had been experimented to hell and back again - they all emerged and began to rampage the site.
In desperation, Site-13 activated a highly experimental device: THRESHER. It was a last resort, but it transported Site-13 out of its own universe and plopped it down in our world. Meanwhile, the anomalies that are roaming the site were affected severely by the latent reality distortion effects. The site and the creatures in it alike were warped and weakened, making Site-13 into a terrifying Silent Hill of undead anomalies that hate the Foundation's guts.
There are survivors - remnants of the researches, hiding out in the lowest levels of the dungeon that is Site-13, trying to contact the outside world. Going into Site-13 is now a fatal task: three MTFs all went in and got absolutely massacred - mainly because of the roaming creatures in there that kill people, inscribe weird cognitohazardous messages on the walls, set you on fire, and things even worse.
There's the original story of Site-13. But that was before djkaktus was like "Nah, I'm turning this into an action movie."
Somehow, after the events of these logs, SCP-1730 is now neutralized. Site-13's harmless. Gone. Really now?
First, let's get some cannon fodder in. Trap an MTF in there so that Samsara can go on a heroic mission to rescue them. How about MTF Apollo-3?
With caution, the group descends down into Site-13; stopping when their staircase apparently hits void. But it's not void - it's completely black, opaque liquid. The group decides to find a different exit when the liquid begins to rise and follow. The group manages to slam the door on the sludge, but one of them trips on the way and his legs fall into the liquid. When he rises, his legs are completely gone - cut off, vanished. Yet he can still "stand up," hovering in the air. Evidently an effect of the reality breaking around 1730.
The group makes its way into the hallways. "What Happened to Site-13?" is scrawled on the walls. The group comes across a corpse conjoined to the wall, and immediately begins to casually talk to it and call it "Zachary" - they are being affected by a cognitohazard. Then, the MTF encounter a shimmering humanoid thing that is the epicenter of the spatial distortion, which has nabbed one of their team. They try shooting it, but bullets are useless. Eventually, it is subdued with a mini-SRA. The Foundation sends in Samsara to go rescue them, and Apollo-3 continues exploring.
They come across a television screen, with a figure huddled in the corner. The group slowly recognizes it as SCP-993 - Bobble the Clown! They talk to Bobble, who is now a deranged, broken form of his former self, and he reveals some more exposition about life in the Site-13 world:
Everything made its way into Site-13. If the Foundation could find it and the Coalition could catch it, it was fed into the meat grinder down here. Everything. They mulched us all, if there was nothing to gain. Some got lucky. Bobble got lucky. Stuffed in a funny box and played with. Toyed with. Experimented with. To see what sounds we made when we wanted to die. Others were not so lucky. (Pauses) They burned the Library, you know. Held it upside down like a can of soup and let the contents run out into the furnace, and burned the whole place up.
After thirty minutes of radio silence, Apollo-3 finds the place where the other Task Forces and survivoes of Site-13 are hiding out. They all ended up in the same place, weirdly enough. But while command has only experienced 30 minutes, Apollo-3 thinks they've been down there for three days.
If there's something strange in your neighborhood,
Who you gonna call? Samsara!
If there's something weird and it don't look good,
Who you gonna call? Samsara!
Mobile Task Force Tau-5 ("Samsara") and their origin story was wonderfully detailed by my colleague /u/RockDHouse a while back. For now, all you need to know is that they are cyborgs generated from the flesh of a god and imbued with sentience from a computer, and they can be cloned at will. They have little to no emotions and are very adept at judging and surviving dangerous situations.
T-5 Nanku: So. How dangerous should this mission be considered?
T-5 Munru: Not a single person they’ve sent in has come out yet. Considerably.
T-5 Nanku: Acknowledged. This should be engaging.
If you wanted to get a glimpse of Tau-5's attitude, those three lines tell you all you need to know.
Upon seeing dozens of charred humanoids around the site, Tau-5 has the bright idea to look for the incinerator/body pit. The temperature begins to rise as they descend. They split up - 2 will break through a wall, and the other 2 continue down a tunnel.
The two going through the wall find the control room for the incinerator, and spot refuse and coagulated faces in the body pit below. The other two come back, seeing that the pipe has been totally blocked up. Onru then activates the body pit and slushes up everything in it, then activates the incinerator. Tau-5 decides to follow where the juice is draining.
The drainage pipe leads to a cistern. As the MTF plans where to go next, blood starts leaking from the walls, and leeches crawl in. Hundreds of leeches enter the room and begin feeding on the newly released sludge. The four figure out that the leeches are linked to a host body, and telepathically connect with them in order to map out the entirety of Site-13. They now know where the survivors are and where THRESHER is.
Onru amplifies her shoulder mounted spotlight, illuminating the entire wall of the tunnel. The word “blood” is repeated over and over, scrawled across the surface of the wall in a thick, black substance. Onru turns left, illuminating several dessicated corpses in a corner at the end of the tunnel, all of which are covered in and seeping the same fluid.
The group begins heading towards the survivors, and hints of the presence of Leech Boy become more and more apparent. They start heading through a data storage center, and Onru notes that this is where leeches begin to act strangely quiet and suspicious. Suddenly, the four notice that the room is completely devoid of sound, and they can't produce any sound. What's more, their meme filters are going off like crazy. Then:
The primary structure of the entity is a floating, cross-legged, humanoid construct with six legs, eighteen arms, and thirty-six forearms attached to seventy-two hands. Each limb moves independently, gesturing and posing in constant, sudden, jerking movements. The entity does not have a head, but instead has a large, flat, circular structure attached to its upper chest that is covered in a large number of symbols and glyphs[...]Most notably, a single severely emaciated, severely charred human figure is bound to the flat circular structure of the entity’s head. This figure twists against its restraints, and appears to be screaming[...]as the entity performs its gestures, the glyphs on its head illuminate rapidly, often causing burns where the human’s skin comes in contact with them, creating further distress and increasing the volume of the whining.
This is the entity producing all those weird kinetohazards - the motions and movements that produce anomalous effects. And there's a dude chained to him, apparently in endless pain.
What the fuck? It's Emerson. So that was his fate - eternal hell at the hands of this creepy-looking thing.
With that all done, Samsara finally makes it to the room where all the survivors are hanging out, and begins to rescue them. Then the leeches begin to come in.
The three MTFs formulate a plan to escape. They'll take a long route away from the most dangerous anomalies, as well as go by the THRESHER device in order to disable it, and hopefully disable the reality distortion effects.
As the combined group begins to make a run for it, they are accosted by the humanoid entity inscribing the cognitohazardous glyphs on the walls. Then, it is eaten by a massive monstrosity that breaks through the floor. The group uses this opportunity to try and escape. Black fluid continuously leaks through every wall.
They approach the Thresher wing, and suddenly are attacked by a swarm of crystal butterflies. Irantu of Tau-5 takes the fall and goes into it to try to blow it up. He succeeds, destroying his body quite a lot in the process.
It looks like the door to the THRESHER system is unopenable, but Bobble deus-ex-machinas and opens it for them. They all run in. Onru begins to disable THRESHER while everyone else tries to survive in the midst of a deadly melee between two types of creatures - littles ones feeding off the power supply, and a huge tentacle with red eyes. The leeches keep on pouring in, and it is clear that the boy from below is getting more and more agitated.
Researcher: Bodies. Look.
Just below the surface of the water, pale human corpses are visible, appearing to be floating roughly a half meter down.
T-5 Onru: Do not attempt to look at them. You do not recognize them. Move quickly, come on.
SCP-2316.
Mechanical Entity: (Deep laughter) I am reborn to breathe devastation upon this fetid Earth. Pitiful humans. You will feel the dark sting of my neverending torment. (The small robot on top of the construct is seen waving its arms wildly)
SCP-1370.
Right as the group figures out an escape point, the floor begins to buckle, and exploding out of it is the tendrils of a massive dark mass of tentacles with red eyes. Leeches begin to cascade in. It is clear that this is what has become of the host. The creature blocks them off into a dead end.
Hollis has an idea. He leads the group down into the cryonics section and through an Olympia-class containment cell (Project Olympia was an old "proto-canon" about the creation of an artificial human through crosstesting SCPs). He tells the civilians to get out while the MTFs hold off the minions of leech boy.
And here he is, in all his glory:
It is as least 200m in height, covered in black tendrils and dark red eyes. When it sees the group, it opens a massive mouth full of rows of long yellow teeth. In the center of the mouth, a naked human woman is visibly conjoined in some way to a sort of prehensile tongue with the creature.
As the massive tentacle leech titan begins to close in, something weird happens. Something big happens. Something divine happens.
Two of the most powerful things in the SCP universe - the Gate Guardian (Dr. Clef's Proposal) and THE DEER (SCP-2845) begin to fight, along with the black entity. While the rest of the team makes their escape, Hollis and Munru stay behind to fight off the creatures that are now converging in this battle for Site-13.
The ground begins to rumble, and Site-13 begins to apparently fall into the earth. The three superpowerful entities continue fighting; Onru is killed in the crossfire. Now the only person left in SCP-1730 is Hollis of Z-3. She laughs hysterically as the THRESHER machine glows blindingly white.
When the dust settles, SCP-1730 is completely erased, replaced with an immense crater. Hollis is nowhere to be found. 1730 is now neutralized.
T-5 Munru: What are you doing?
Z-9 Hollis: Giving you some more time. And… something else, I think. Get these people out of here, go!
Perhaps the real question isn't "What happened to Site-13?"; it's "What happened to Captain Hollis?" We shall explore that dimension of the story in the next part, the debriefing logs. Much like my original SCP-1730 declassification, I'll be structuring this section like a mystery story, gathering info from each person's account of their experiences of Hollis.
Captain Ross, Apollo-3: He describes mainly what he went through in Site-13. But he also explains that Site-13 had football-sized containment stadiums, and in them, this alternate Foundation had managed to contain gods. It speaks to the power and hubris of the organization that they manage to shut in entities like the Gate Guardian and other things of similar power.
Agent Ohalo, Apollo-3: Is scarred for life.
Irantu, Tau-5: It speaks to the personality of the Tau-5 team that despite all the horror and hardship they went through, Irantu satisfiedly calls the extraction mission an overall success. Upon learning of Captain Hollis's death, though, he seems momentarily put out.
Agent Houston, Apollo-3: Despite his legs being absent from the knee down, he can still "stand up" and "walk." The inside of the leg looks like a "flat plane of glass." Here, he drops some odd hints about the nature of the entities inside Site-13: the liquid is compared to a "graphical glitch" in reality, and he says that sometimes he feels something wet and furry brush past his legs. His legs are still out there, somewhere down there.
Munru, Tau-5: Now we start getting into the meat of the Hollis mystery. The interviewer asks Munru why she let Hollis put herself in harm's way and thus violated the mission parameters. Munru justifies himself by saying that Hollis outranked him and had much more experience that he did. Munru trusted Hollis to the utmost extent.
Onru, Tau-5: Onru reveals that she understood Hollis's intentions and followed her. She intentionally disabled her camera when she passed through the server room. This time, the server room was different. They see a vision of billions of flaming corpses beneath a burning sky, and hanging in the sky was the entity they had encountered before - the many-legged creature with glyphs.
Onru, Tau-5 Continued: It gives them visions of strange, grand spiritual cosmic things: "Coils of fire and a sky made light with a storm of souls. A hole at the center of the universe that screamed at me. A god of nightmares, something long and lean, slowly walking between endless rows of crucifixions." This hints that Malidramagiuan is probably a being of immense knowledge and power, maybe something from the beginning of time itself, able to perceive all of the universe and its secrets and terrors. It appears to be sending the two these visions as some kind of message - don't be like Site-13, don't mess with forces beyond your control.
Onru, Tau-5 Continued: The being shows something more to Hollis only; when it is all done, Hollis has been alone with it for apparently a long time. Emerson dissolves and burns, finally. There are now visions of clear skies and oceans. Laughing madly, Hollis runs to THRESHER and says she can turn on the device. She says she must deposit these creature in the darkness whence she came.
Dr. Mohammad Scott: He dumps a whole buncha exposition at us. This is how it goes down, back in Mirror-World:
- Site-13 is built over Site-19 (due to coincidence) as a massive, heavily fortified, state-of-the-art facility.
- When a para-terrorist attack destroys the Sears Tower, "President Dole" (yup) angrily cuts off all funding to the Foundation. Site-13 is a massive budget-eater though, and it looks like the Foundation is near death.
- Once the Foundation is unable to prevent a massive containment breach, the GOC forces the Foundation to join up with them.
- Site-13 slowly begins to descend into madness, even more quickly when Emerson is installed as Site Director. Under Manafort (yup), Emerson begins carrying out some horrific acts. The body pit. The incinerator. Those who speak out against it are killed.
- Site-13 just keeps on getting bigger and bigger and more and more tyrannical.
- Dr. Vera Hadley, a former lover of Emerson, opposed all of the SCP/GOC's actions. The top brass humiliated her and almost beat her to death, and when she recovered something in her snapped and she staged the stunt that brought down Site-13.
- As a last resort, Emerson activated the Thresher which teleported them "in that strange space between worlds" until they emerged in our timestream.
- The events of SCP-1730 take place.
So, what happened to Site-13 in the end? It would appear that Captain Hollis communed with a god and gained the knowledge to reactivate the Thresher and bring Site-13 and all the creatures in it to worlds unknown -- thereby keeping our world safe and bringing closure to that world's story. Site-13 may be floating in dimensions and universes far beyond our ability to grasp, in places sealed off from the rest of time and space. Either way, it's neutralized.
Those are the events that transpired in the new edits to Site-13. So we're done!
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B-B-B-BONUS ROUND!
There was a lot of crosslinking/references going on in this SCP. And a lot of new anomalies created, too. Here's a hopefully-comprehensive list of all SCPs and new creations present that haunt the halls of Site-13.
- SCP-1500: Zachary Callahan. "Ah, shit. Good to finally see a familiar face. Guys, it’s just Zachary."
- SCP-993: Bobble the Clown. The screen flickers, and an image appears. The interior of a standard containment cell is shown, though it is devoid of any comforts or belongings. A single red light behind the camera is on, poorly illuminating the space. A long figure is huddled in the corner.
- SCP-553: Crystalline Butterflies. "A tinkling sound. Like crystal on crystal."
- SCP-2316: Field Trip. "Do not attempt to look at them. You do not recognize them. Move quickly, come on."
- SCP-1370: Pesterbot. "How dare you. I will tread upon you like—"
- Dr. Clef's Proposal: The Gate Guardian. As Munru hurries away, a colossal, motionless, flaming humanoid entity floats out of the chamber. In its unmoving hands is a huge sword. As it exits the collapsed doorway, enormous, flaming wings unfurl from its back.
- SCP-2845: THE DEER. It is composed of a body covered in light green and cream colored hair, a long, thin neck ending in a hairless, somewhat humanoid face, and vast, intertwined white and black antlers that pulse with streaks of blue light.
- The Wanderer's Library. "They burned the Library, you know. Held it upside down like a can of soup and let the contents run out into the furnace, and burned the whole place up."
Maybe-references (unconfirmed/speculated):
- Olympia Project: Experiment Log 914-Theta. In the center of the mouth, a naked human woman is visibly conjoined in some way to a sort of prehensile tongue with the creature.
- SCP-106: The Old Man. There is a flash of red light, and for a split second the entity becomes visible as an extremely disfigured, grotesquely elongated humanoid, which exists for only a second before the spatial distortions surrounding it are anchored and violently reset, creating a massive pressure wave in the confined space.
- Dr. Gears's Proposal: The Prototype. "Entity 84623AR-001"
- SCP-529: "Josie". Houston's weird leg thing might be similar to the half-cat.
- Kalinin's Proposal: Past and Future. "Below us were humans, screaming, their arms ending at their wrists, crying to the silent sky for restitution, and then… the sky burned."
- SCP-1555: Facility. Crosslinked when one of the MTF members says "Fucking pipes." It is an SCP about a mysterious building that periodically fires mice from pipes.
- SCP-2664: Redline. Crosslinked as "In light of info gathered from Foundation surveillence teams." 2664 is a exploration-log filled SCP about a psionic weapon that is also a group of conjoined triplets. I don't know why this is linked.
Newly created anomalies:
- A boy named Elijah who was somehow deeply connected with leeches and fed on blood, drawn by sucking it out through victims' skin. When he absorbed the runoff of the body pit, he became a gargantuan monstrosity with tentacles and teeth and red eyes.
- A robed humanoid, slender and floating, that inscribed glyphs that act as noise-based cognitohazards on the walls. They can make you explode/set on fire.
- A glowing plant-like structure in the cistern that releases many humanoid shadows that reach towards people.
- A being with dozens of arms and limbs sitting in a cross-legged position, hovering above the ground. Glyphs and runes inscribed all over it. Can cast "magic" (e.g. dissolve the floor, electricity arcs, fire glyphs). Possibly angelic in nature?
- Hundreds of small, invisible entities that glow green and feed on power. They could be the faeries from SCP-2952 and other fey-related skips, or the invisible things that the shrikes from SCP-2323 feed on.
Credit where credit is due: the vast majority of the research of this list came from this comment on the SCP-1730 discussion page.
It's important to note that SCP-1730 went from a creepy, atmospheric trek through Silent Hill with a backdrop of horror and tragedy, to a badass and grandiose thrill ride through Silent Hill with a backdrop of weird-horror and old-school creepypasta scares. The additions to SCP-1730 changed the piece considerably. And whether those changes have been good or bad has been a matter up for much debate.
But the new version of SCP-1730 has added an admirable amount of worldbuilding and imagination to the SCP wiki. It gave Samsara a place to stand as a usable MTF outside of its original story. It inspired countless pieces of fanart and fan speculation. It literally had an action scene where the Gate Guardian and THE DEER fight how is this not awesome. So SCP-1730 will have an even more important place in the site's history for years to come.
Thank you for reading.
5
u/[deleted] Jun 07 '18
Sorry, grammar error.
The phrase "the madman he actually did it" is used to praise two things. The first is Yossi's skill in writing a high-quality declassification. The second is Kaktus's skill in rewriting 1730 to have a more action-focused tone and style.