Name: The SCP Foundation

Series: The SCP Wiki

Disposition: ███████

Location: Believed to have facilities in all major countries, exact locations unknown.

General Information: The Foundation is the bogeyman of the parahuman world. It is known mostly through vague and often contradictory rumours which never contain any traceable details. It can never be proved to exist, or exactly in what form.

And no parahuman has ever returned from their searches for it.

What little is known is that the Foundation originates from sometime in the 1800's. Their goal is the preservation of the human race and the normal lives they lead. Any object or entity that stands in the way of their goal is Secured and Contained away from the public for the purposes of Protection (hence their name of SCP).

Astute readers will notice that parahumans fall squarely in the category of things the Foundation likes to lock away.

While Foundation agents are (almost always) normal humans the organisation as a whole is believed to possess the following ratings.

Classification:

Tinker 2-5: The Foundation has, over the years, collected vast amounts of tinkertech and has actually made some headway into reverse-engineering some of it. Normally employed on a case-by-case basis to capture and contain individual targets.

Stranger Other: The Foundation as an organisation uses political deals, professional hackers and memory-wiping tinkertech to erase evidence of their existence. Attempting to use Thinker powers on the organisation is dangerous because the organisation's existence is completely intertwined with the things they have locked away.
The Thinkers who have survived the attempts still haven't stopped screaming.

Recommended strategies: If outside personnel identify themselves as Foundation agents, assume there are extra complications to the situation. The Global Occult Coalition is the UN funded counterpart to the Foundation, and may be called on for help if necessary; although threatening to call them in will usually cause the Foundation agents to become more forthcoming about the problem at hand.

Rebecca made sure that 'Agent Timothy' was tailed as the meeting broke up, but she wasn't hopeful anything would come of it. For an organisation to have been around as long as the Foundation had and still be secret meant that they probably knew more about organising shadowy conspiracies than Cauldron did.

As everyone else filed out of the room, Rebecca made sure to grab Legend for a quiet chat. "Make sure you have a completely empty Earth to drop her on. Volcanic, if the Clairvoyant can find one."

"I know, I know." He waved her off. "If we're going to be rendering an Earth uninhabitable, make sure it was uninhabitable to begin with?"

"That, and if there are any lifeforms there then she might turn them into minions." She reminded him. "Also, double-check that the Doormaker is okay to do this. We can't afford anything to go wrong with this."

"Ah. So this would be a bad time for me to speak up, then?"

Rebecca's mouth twisted like someone had just force-fed her a lemon. "Ms Ajimu." She said without turning. "Do you have something to contribute?"

"Please call me 'Anshin'in-san'." Ajimu smiled. "I think we know each other well enough for that now."

Legend, for his part, turned with surprise. "Wait, that's Ajimu Najimi? She was here the whole time and you didn't say anything?!"

"Oh, don't act so surprised." Ajimu said. "She did tell you all about our little conversation, didn't she?"

Legend glared down at the sitting girl. "What other people do in their own space is none of your business."

Ajimu stood up. "It is when they are making rather stupid decisions that directly affect you."

Rebecca turned so that she could properly glare at Ajimu as well. "Stupid how?"

"You don't dig up an unexploded bomb and then bury it again." One of Ajimu's fingers wiggled, even though that hand was still screwed to her shoulder. "You make sure it won't hurt anyone else by making sure it explodes."

"Even if this 'Chaos Tide' was simply ordinary mud, the rate she produces it at would cause major ecological damage to the planet." Legend said. "The fact that it isn't makes it exponentially more important to get her off this planet as soon as physically possible."

Ajimu shook her head. "Oh, I'm not saying you should keep her here. I'm saying she can't be left intact."

"'Intact'?" Legend blinked. "Don't you mean 'alive'?"

Ajimu giggled. "You really don't know your mythology, do you? Tiamat's been dead since before the dawn of man."

Legend and Rebecca shared an uncertain look.

"It's really quite tragic." Ajimu continued. "That creature that's on its way to slay us all isn't actually 'Tiamat, mother goddess', but rather 'Beast II, the discarded womb'. She's a 'creator of life' who was banished from this world by her own children, the gods, once her job was complete."

"I don't understand." Legend said, and Rebecca agreed with him. "Are you saying that Tiamat is somehow 'undead'?"

"Gods don't die." Ajimu said. "Not really. Instead, they are forgotten. But something has woken up Tiamat, a dead god of a dead religion, and she's returning to redo her role like a painter reusing their canvas."

Something clicked for Rebecca. "That's what the Chaos Tide is." She realised, Legend looking at her in surprise. "It's her way of wiping the Earth clean of life and recreating it from the ground up."

"Well, from below the ground as well, but otherwise correct!" Ajimu smiled. "Now, what do you think will happen if you point such a drunk, dimwitted painter to an empty canvas?"

"She'll fill it with life." Rebecca breathed. "Even if we send her to a completely empty world, won't she?"

"She will." Ajimu said. "And like any creator, Tiamat wants her next creation to be better than anything she's made before! Really, I admire her enthusiasm."

Legend looked back and forth between the two women. "So, banishing her to an empty Earth is less like a quarantine procedure and more like giving Nilbog's mother all the time and space she could ever want to work in?"

Ajimu smiled. "Correct again! So, heroes, you now have an important question before you!" She spun around lazily on one foot. "Are you going to go ahead with your existing plan – which, incidentally, will keep her occupied for maybe two hundred years or so – or are you going to act on the unconfirmed word of your enemy and stop her while it's still possible to do so?"

Rebecca felt the bottom of her stomach drop. She knew the correct answer to this. She'd been making decisions like this ever since Doctor Mother appeared to her in that hospital. But she knew that Legend would never go for it. He'd never had to make hard decisions like this – they'd kept those from him, knowing that one of them had to have the innocence to lead…

Legend opened his mouth to respond -

"Just kidding!" Ajimu giggled again. "Like I'm going to leave that choice up to someone else!"

For the first time, Ajimu's smile left her face. "If you don't destroy Tiamat within twenty-four hours of her appearing, I'll upend this chessboard and move her back to Earth Bet."

With that, Ajimu and Hanten disappeared, leaving Legend and Rebecca alone to stew in their despair.

There was utter silence in the Cauldron Compound as the security footage finished playing.

The Triumvirate was all present once again, and so was Number Man (and presumably the Custodian), but this time so was Doctor Mother and Contessa.

Doctor Mother blew a tuft of hair out of her face. "Merde." She swore, softly. She then looked back at Contessa. "Any luck?"

"Against Tiamat, or against Ajimu?" Contessa said blandly.

"Either, at this point." Doctor Mother replied.

Contessa frowned. "Against Ajimu, my power is… I think it's timing out against her." She admitted.

Doctor Mother's eyebrows rose to meet her hairline. "It's what?"

"I set it to find a way to defeat Ajimu Najimi, and instead of responding immediately like it usually does, it was quiet for about five minutes before returning to what it was saying before, as though I had never asked the question." Contessa explained.

Legend scratched his head. "Maybe it's having trouble crunching through seven hundred million people's worth of variables?"

"I don't think that's it." Contessa said, dubiously. "If it's only seven hundred million, Path to Victory could easily handle that many variables."

"And Tiamat?" Doctor Mother prompted.

"That works, but I'm still refining the search." She responded. "So far, all the plans against her have involved ceding large portions of humanity to her as bait."

Doctor Mother cursed again. "Well, short of a last-minute deliverance from Path to Victory, what other options do we have?"

"We could try calling Ajimu's bluff." Eidolon suggested. "She said her goal was to keep the world from being destroyed, right? Why would she fail her own goal?"

"It's probably her way of forcing us to act." Legend said. "I've seen similar things by parahuman healers whose patients start being reckless with their health because they know they can always be headed. Only by cutting off their source of healing do their patients start taking their safety into effect again."

"I've seen that too." Alexandria agreed. "But the trouble is that you can't bluff about this, or else the patient won't change their behaviour."

"There's another problem too." Number Man added. "The reason Ms Najimi wants to prevent the destruction of the world is to prove that it is impossible, thus proving to her that the world is real. In a very real way, the destruction of the world is the outcome she is hoping for. We can't rely on her working to avoid it."

Doctor Mother pinched the bridge of her nose. "Right. So, back to square one. We have to come up with some way of avoiding the corruption effect of that mud and destroy something the Thinkers aren't actually sure is destructible."

"Not to point out the obvious, but all three of the Triumvirate can fly." Number Man said. "The mud can't corrupt what it can't reach."

"No," said Alexandria "but unless Eidolon pulls something out of his hat, that still leaves us with 'punch it hard and hope that kills it' as our main strategy."

"I'm sure I can arrange something." Eidolon said confidently.

"This is the future survival of seven billion people on the line." Doctor Mother admonished him. "We need to do better than that."

There was silence in the room as those assembled tried to think of a solution.

"I think we'll have to dip into the Donation Box." Contessa said, softly.

The expressions of everyone else in the room grew pained, none more so than Legend. "I can't deny that this is bad enough to warrant opening the Box, but…"

The Donation Box was the nickname of the secure storage unit where Cauldron stored the tinkertech deemed too dangerous for even the Protectorate to keep. It was called that because it's contents were usually confiscated off of Tinkers right before they were Birdcaged. It's contents ranged from 'merely' antimatter bombs to full-blown gravitational singularity generators.

The contents of the Box was so dangerous that it wasn't kept in the main Cauldron Compound, but rather on the Moon – of a version of Earth where the latest in technology was a rock tied to the end of a stick.

The main reason they were so reluctant to open the Box was simple – if they never found that silver bullet parahuman, and the parahuman army didn't work out, then the contents of the Box might be their only chance of killing Scion. To dip into their 'life savings' like this was demoralising to say the least.

"I don't see a better way." Doctor Mother said, and that was that.

The soft knock of a door behind Rebecca broke her concentration on the paper in front of her, and she groaned. "Who is it?"

"My, is that any way to greet your doctor, Rebecca?"

Rebecca blinked, then stood and opened the door. "Doctor Mother?"

The leader of Cauldron strode into the room like she was an actual doctor entering for an appointment, sitting down on Rebecca's bed. "The Clairvoyant 'told' me you were still awake."

Rebecca frowned, but sat back down in her chair. "I've been going over Threat Rating profiles since our meeting. Sorting out which ones might be viable against Tiamat."

Doctor Mother's face remained fixed in a mask of stern worry. "If there was a parahuman we could just point at Tiamat and defeat her, Contessa would have found them."

Rebecca looked away. "I know."

"You also didn't have to go over profiles you've already read." The Doctor observed. "I know full well that you never forget anything."

"I was... hoping I'd remembered it wrong, somehow. That I'd missed something." Though a grown woman, Rebecca found herself cradling Imagine Breaker's profile to her chest guiltily.

"It isn't like you to doubt yourself like this." Doctor Mother frowned. "This isn't about Tiamat at all, is it?"

For a moment, Rebecca didn't answer. Then she sighed. "...I'm worried."

Doctor Mother said nothing, instead patiently listening.

"We say we're an anti-Scion organisation, but at the end of the day what we want to do is save the world. Save all the worlds. What if our single-minded focus on Scion has blinded us to other threats out there? We know about Tiamat, and we've having to burn irreplaceable resources to fight her. But we didn't see the Endbringers coming at all. What if there's something worse, just around the corner, and we're not prepared?"

Doctor Mother gave her a moment to say anything else, and when she didn't, spoke up. "You're right."

Rebecca's mouth fell open in shock.

"There are almost certainly threats out there that we know nothing about. Threats we have no way to fight." She continued.

"However." She said, interrupting whatever Rebecca would have said. "By that very logic, we have allies everywhere, just waiting to be found." She pointed at Imagine Breaker's profile. "Take him. If it weren't for that utter disaster Cross of Venus, we never would have found any of the worlds in the DB cluster, including Earth Mem."

"And they wouldn't have found us..." Rebecca grumbled.

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself." Doctor Mother ordered sharply. "It doesn't suit you. As far as I'm concerned, dealing with God's Right Seat was a small price to pay for our alliance with the Anglican Church and Academy City."

"And was placating the Foundation worth handing over all that we did?" Rebecca snapped back.

"Considering the damage they were doing to our operations and their potential worth as an ally? Absolutely." Doctor Mother abruptly stood up, glaring down at Rebecca. "Rebecca. We are already in an impossible situation against an opponent we cannot defeat. We must not be afraid of upsetting the status quo. Indeed, unless we do so, we are doomed."

With that, Doctor Mother left, leaving Rebecca to stew in her thoughts.

After a moment, she pulled out her mobile phone from a pocket, and plugged it into the socket on her desk that would let it call numbers in other dimensions. She dialled and waited.

{U-um, yes?} A boy answered to the call in hesitant Japanese. {This is Kamijou.}

{Hello Touma.} Rebecca answered in flawless Japanese. {This is Alexandria. Could you please put Index on the phone? I need to know how to destroy a goddess turned beast.}