Not sure exactly what the prompt was – but presumably describe a normal day at an SCP-like facility.
A Day At The SCP Foundation
I’m so glad someone finally asked!
My day is, in a lot of ways, totally trivial. I admit when I first started it took some getting used to, but now, several years in, it feels just like any other job.
Every day starts with me driving to the facility and parking in the above ground lot. I have an old Kia, nothing special, and I always park in between two legal spots on the far side of a major big box store I can’t really go into any more detail about. Winky.
Anyway, when the right car parks in the right spot, it is brought down via hydraulics to the holding facility. That’s where I show my ID and change into my uniform.
There’s a real nice guard at the front – we call him Jose – but he’s not exactly human. He lives in the booth at the front of the giant underground facility, the whole multi-acre complex bored out from the bedrock. He appears to us in human form, speaks in a human voice, but that’s really just for our psychological benefit. His true form is a sentient vapor with intense psychic abilities. He was one of the first subjects – someone found him in the bell tower of an abandoned church – lonely and purposeless.
That was almost 80 years ago now. These days he is the face of the organization, in a sense. He loves his small confines – something about his physiology I’m told, he likes tight spaces – and his straight forward purpose as a psychic barrier to entry makes him feel useful.
“How’s it going Jose?”
“Doing great Barry!” Then without fail Jose guesses the right number I’m thinking with a smile. “2,543,111.” It never gets old.
Right inside the facility I check in with my supe, confirm facility status and my assigned route, and then put on the “utility belt.” That’s what we call the heavy duty leather belt we all wear in the facility, decked out with a wide variety of defensive and aggresive supplies and tools, enough to cover almost any situation.
Gas mask, active lens goggles that can darken as black as a welding mask, ear plugs and over ear noise cancelling ear muffs, aerosolyzed acid, aerosolyzed base, conventional pepper mace, much less conventional non-pepper mace I can’t disclose the exact contents of but which works very well against non-physical vapors and specters. A taser, a pistol, a knife. A small pocket loaded with tiny symbols from every major religion on earth. A holy water vial, a salt water vial, a heavy water vial. A small packet of live roaches and a variety of other tiny things that I haven’t thought about in some time.
Perhaps most importantly, and in fact the only thing I’ve ever used on the whole belt, is the prepared syringe of sedative. There are a couple of subjects it might work against, but its primary purpose is to knock me out – which is what I used it for several years ago when the Soul Seeker broke free for a few hours. There are a host of creatures who simply ignore the unconscious, and in the event of certain breaches of security, stabbing oneself in the thigh with a sedative is the first course of action.
Once I’m all decked out, it’s time to start the rounds. By this point its usually 7AM and the fellas are getting ansy. My route passes by several of the “heavy hitters” in the facility. Some cannot be discussed. I cannot be more specific about that. I hope you understand what i mean, if you are familiar with the database of the facility you may understand what I’m not referring to.
Once I move on, I encounter the Man-Child God of Bolivia – Hacua. Hacua is a real character – he has a mostly normal material cell, except for a few runic hexes laser etched into the concrete. The cell itself is plexiglass, mostly because Hacua is a spitter. Hacua eats meat, but likes to play with his food – about a goat a week. I feel badly about the goats, don’t get me wrong, but when they found Hacua in the Bolivian rain-forest, he was terrorizing the local populace, eating children after luring them into on a not so merry chase. Contextually, a goat once a week is a small price to pay to keep him sated.
Next we come up against the living Golem of Akarat. Its an incredible creature, it’s cage is made of sheer titanium, four feet thick. It has a tiny, 8 by 8 inch aperture, through which we sometimes converse or pass pulp romance novels from the supermarket. “Ak” – I call him “Ak” – has a real soft spot for cheesy romance novels. Technically we aren’t obligated to provide him new books, but it keeps him calm, which is good, because although he can’t breach the walls of his age, he can make his entire complex shake like the dickens.
Once me and Ak catch up on the most recent addition to our unofficial bookclub, I move onto the Hargrove Lich. He’s a bit of a dick, tbh. We hold him in a powerful electromagnetic sphere, as it suppresses his evil magicks, and his bony frame is shackled to the concrete floor. I can’t really blame him for being pissy, he’s physically very weak – and unkillable to boot. So he just lays there, day in day out. He likes classical music though – apparently he was a composer once upon a time, however many centuries ago, so I try to buy him new works on CD whenever I can, which we play on a small boombox. He just tells me to fuck off, but I think he appreciates it.
It’s not all just incarceration, we do run tests on some of the subjects. There is the telepathic spider someone found controlling the mind and body of a hulking biker in Nebraska. Apparently the little fella can bore into mammalian brain matter and take over like a driver at the wheel of a car. Right now we have him running an otherwise brain dead man’s body through its paces, testing coordination and vocal prowess. So far the spider has done incredibly well, although we still can’t fully understand how it works its magic.
The spider’s test has recently been taking me all the way to noon and a lunch break. The folks who work at the facility are an eclectic bunch, and some of them have…well…seen some shit. You have Jeremy with the ten thousand mile stare. He’s all there inside, at least HR OK’d him, but ever since his encounter with a Banshee, he just can’t make eye contact with anyone. There’s this one dude with two artificial legs chopped off by a living sword we call Snip. Ronald has only one eye, the other one still being displayed on the pointer finger of some nameless torture demon in high-sec. No one can go in there to get it, but they changed Ron’s shift so he didn’t need to look at it everyday.
I want to go on, but I’m being called to the cell of a sentient, floating face, whose name evades me at the moment. I think they found him in some endless basement somewhere, eventually sucked him into a box using a radioactive gamma vacuum. The alarm is going off now. I’ll be back in a bit.
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