TALES FROM THE NOBODIES AT THE SCP FOUNDATION
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Tales From the SCP Foundation and no profit is earned.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: There is always more behind the scenes than most realize. An organization like the Foundation has more moving parts and support personnel than most businesses and some countries. What goes on behind the scenes?
CH. 1: THE ARCHIVES or CHILD'S PLAY
Eduardo Silvas swiped his badge and entered the office, nodding to Grace Loomis as she glanced up from the report she was finalizing. She nodded and hit a few more keys to send the report on its way and log out of the system.
"Morning, Grace. Anything exciting over night?"
"Hey, Eddy. Happily, no." A boring shift at the SCP Foundation was a good thing. Always. Then she smirked. "Unless you count your visitor." She nodded to an open manila folder and the bound sheaf of papers inside, sitting on a chair as far from the door to the physical archive as it was possible to get and still be in the archives' administrative office.
Eddy glanced at the papers and stopped in his tracks, staring. At first glance, it looked to be an ordinary SCP casefile of the sort normally submitted for archival storage, but a stamp across the top page, in neon pink, proved that assumption incorrect. It read 'Tippy Top Secret.' He suppressed a groan.
'Vida, what are you doing out of containment?" He glanced at Grace, and she mouthed an assurance that security was already on the way. He knew he was supposed to refer to Vida as SCP-4546, but it seemed mean to address what was basically a little girl in such a way.
The text on the page shifted slightly from the case file format, to include a more detailed narrative about the SCP object's discovery. The described discovery suddenly involved a little girl named Vida playing hide and seek.
"I see." He gave up and sighed. "You know you're not supposed to leave your containment chamber. Do you want to spend the day in the Canterbury Tales, again?" Vida hated middle English. While familiar with several modern languages, Vida seemed to have a lot of trouble with the archaic ones. Technically, the object should have been labeled SCP 423-2, but no one wanted her and SCP 423-1 to know about each other. It was part of the containment procedures that they be kept apart. Hence the designation of SCP 4546.
"I think someone's got a crush," Grace teased. The neon pink 'stamp' seemed to almost glow for a moment. Grace got up and retrieved a file from across the room. "I've got to drop this off at the director's office before going off shift. See you around." She glanced at the stack of papers. "Vida, don't even think about it. You're in enough trouble, and you don't want to know what the director will do if he finds you in a report on his desk." She walked out, passing a security guard arriving to collect the wandering SCP object. She nodded in passing and cocked her head toward the open door and the paperwork visible on the chair.
The man stepped into the room and scowled at the papers. "Again?" He quickly put the file currently housing the anomaly into a lockable metal file box he had brought for that purpose. At this point, that box and a couple like it, were kept on standby in SCP-4546's containment chamber.
"Grace thinks she has a crush," Eddy noted with a chuckle.
Agent Grontz did not look amused. "How did it get here?" He emphasized the pronoun.
"No idea. Grace prepared a report, but I haven't read it yet. She's already sent it to you and Dr. Mann via email."
"As if the other one wasn't trouble enough," Grontz muttered.
"Maybe she rode out in a shopping list or the care instructions on someone's lab coat?" Eddy offered. Grontz stared. That would, based on what they knew of the anomaly's abilities, be a new trick, though, not entirely unprecedented for the mischievous SCP.
SCP-4546 was not like SCP-423, the first instance the Foundation had discovered of this strange lifeform. It was more versatile. For one thing, it could, through a means no one understood, hear people talking if they were within two meters of it. Obstacles like walls, doors, and steel boxes seemed to hamper the ability to hear, just as it would for a human. It could also put itself into pieces of printed material that were not narratives, though not for long and 'Vida' as she called herself, didn't seem to enjoy it. These differences made containment problematic. Eddy knew that for a fact, as he was the one to discover and name her.
"The director will not be happy about it if you're right." Grontz said, preparing to leave. "If this keeps happening, the director will either fire you or make you a containment specialist."
"Not sure which I'd prefer, to be honest," Eddy admitted. No job at a Foundation site was risk free, but some definitely had a higher mortality rate than others. Grontz turned and left, not particularly caring about Eddy's preferences one way or another. On the one hand, Silvas' presence made the little nuisance's escape attempts predictable and easy to foil. On the other hand, Silvas had brought said nuisance to the Foundation in the first place and inspired most of the escape attempts.
An SCP with a crush. Good God.
OOOOOOOOOO
Dr. Everett Mann read the report about SCP 4546's latest escapade with a mixture of annoyance and amused resignation. Containment procedures would need to be revised. Again. Apparently, the young SCP had slipped out on a grocery list or receipt. Then, hopping from book to file to book, had managed to transfer herself to a casefile headed for the archives. They didn't understand the nature of the first one they had in containment, and now they had two. The site director, wisely Mann thought, had forbidden any interaction between the two. They didn't even, as far as he was aware, know of each other's existence.
SCP 423 hadn't been able to tell them anything useful about his history. He had just become aware at some point. Since the passage of time didn't really register with the object, at least not the way it did for humans, it hadn't been able to tell them how long it had been around, only that it had moved through hundreds, maybe thousands of different books.
They hoped to learn more about the nature of these beings from SCP-423-2. SCP 4546, he corrected himself. It was an important protocol, at least for the moment. The creature was clearly younger, based on speech patterns and behavior. It had also shown a preference for children's stories.
He opened the file on SCP 4546 and began to type up notes for the revised containment procedures and potential tests to confirm the hypothesis suggested by archivist Silvas. SCP 4546 had demonstrated the ability to 'squeeze' into documents that were not narratives. The time it could spend there was limited, but it added a new and irritating quirk to containment.
The fact that it could also hear words spoken within a certain distance of the work it was inhabiting was also new. While not the strangest thing he had seen while working at the Foundation, it was still a curious development. He had ideas about how to proceed and what experiments to run, but he decided to pass it to one of his junior researchers, one that needed the experience.