Anomalous Solutions to Magical Problems

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Overlord or Tales from the SCP Foundation, and I earn no profit in writing this. It's just for fun.

Chapter. 1

Having given the rather loopy Skip a temporary designation and filed their reports, the agents that had brought him in happily handed him off to the containment specialists of Site 19. The 20-something man had been very drunk when they caught him weaving his way down a, fortunately, deserted street in the quiet Los Angeles suburb. His intoxication was not the agents' primary concern. That could have been left to local police. What got the Foundation's attention was the fact that he had caused nearly a dozen lamp-posts and street signs to sprout multi-colored flowers. That, they had found somewhat troubling.

A call from an embedded agent in the LAPD had led to a Foundation team being dispatched to deal with the problem, instead of the ordinary police. The initial assessment of his abilities indicated a low-level reality bender. That being the case, after an uneventful capture, he was sent to the containment site best able to deal with him. It would be up to the containment specialists and the researchers to figure out the details.

The man seemed a relatively amiable drunk, before he passed out, so the containment specialists tried to be gentle with him and hope he was more coherent and cooperative in the morning. The report the agents filed indicated that the man's abilities had been easily negated by a single Scranton Reality Anchor. He had waved at the backdoor of the armored van several times, telling it to 'go away' and had accomplished nothing. Another team was already dealing, quite easily it seemed, with the altered lamp posts and signs. The changes simply faded after a time, and that could be rushed along with a little elbow grease.

John Doe, he had no ID, otherwise known as SCP 6699, wasn't viewed as much of a threat.

OOOOOOOOOO

Dr. Jack Bright dashed down the corridors of Site 19, wanting to swear loudly about the multiple breach alarms going off but needing to save his breath. He took a sharp right, flattening himself against a wall as a security team rushed past, and practically dove into his office. He brought up the appropriate systems on his computer and stared at the readouts. The sheer scale of what he saw was impressive and terrifying.

There were more than a dozen SCP objects out of containment, with classifications ranging from safe to Keter. The good news and the bad was that they weren't running riot through the facility. They were just gone.

"What the hell?" That simply didn't make sense. He typed in a series of commands to pull up the relevant camera feeds and security protocols. Then, he raised the containment specialists responsible for the areas in question. "Bright, here. Talk to me. What's happening?"

After a moment, the senior specialist spoke for the group. "Noguchi here, sir. We're still trying to figure that out, sir. All of the containment cells are still intact. Nothing has been disturbed that we can see. The SCPs are just…gone."

"Shit."

"Yes, sir," Noguchi agreed.

Bright thought for a few seconds. "Pull together everything that we do know. Something specific triggered each of those alarms. A change in weight, displaced air, a power fluctuation, cameras going offline, something. Find out what, and then, get back to me ASAP." He didn't wait for an acknowledgement. There were about a dozen things he needed to do immediately, and they weren't going to do themselves. The entire site was already locked down. If any of the SCP objects were still on the site, they weren't leaving. Jack had a sinking feeling, though, that all of them were already long gone.

OOOOOOOOOO

Toby, or SCP-6699 as the Foundation had labeled him, walked through the last Way he needed to traverse to take him home. Jerry greeted him as he arrived. The older man was a thaumaturge or type blue as the Global Occult Coalition or GOC called them. The easy smile and jovial manner made it easy to underestimate just how powerful Jerry was.

"How'd it go?" the mage asked. He settled back into the chair in front of his computer, after determining the new arrival was a friend.

"Easy as pie," Toby assured him, "and we accomplished everything we set out to. The Skippers'll be weeks figuring this one out."

"It never pays to underestimate the Foundation," Jerry reproved mildly, "but I suspect you're right. We covered as many contingencies as we could."

"As predicted," Toby said, grabbing a soda from the fridge, "I couldn't control all the Ways, but I managed to direct our primary anomalous targets as planned. Now we just have to hope that the parts of this that we can't control fall into place."

Jerry nodded. "Regardless, the Hand will be pleased. This will solve quite a few problems for us and allow us to advance other projects."

OOOOOOOOOO

The 05 Council began the meeting with a minimum of irrelevancies, getting straight to business. They all knew why they were meeting, they all knew the gravity of the situation, and they all knew that the very tightest of security was in place for this meeting, even given that some of them were attending via video from different parts of the world.

"How many sites were hit?" 05-3 asked after verifying everyone was ready. "Do we have a final number?"

"Seventeen different sites," 05-6 replied promptly. "You should have a complete list of what was taken momentarily."

"Damn," 05-7 said after a moment of studying the document he'd just received. "This job has Serpent's Hand written all over it."

"So that we're all on the same page," 05-1 began, "why don't we lay out the timeline of events as we know it right now?" They agreed, even though some felt it a waste of time.

"Alright, then," he began. "At 2118 local time, in Los Angeles, CA, a minor reality bender designated SCP-6699 was apprehended by local agents after they received reports of a drunk making street signs blossom. We've been unable to identify the man as he had no ID, and a search of public records has, so far, turned up nothing. The agents quickly located him, and by 2145, they had him in custody and under the effects of a Scranton Reality Anchor."

He paused and looked at the others. All of them nodded, as this fit with their own information. It would have seemed a low-risk situation to the containment specialists. As low risk as a reality bender of any type could be, anyway. Clearly, that laxness needed to be dealt with.

"Given the nature of his abilities, SCP-6699 was transported to Site 19. He gave the agents transporting him no trouble, being an amiable drunk. He soon fell asleep and stayed that way until he arrived at Site 19, just after midnight. Once there, he was processed with no difficulty and placed in a temporary holding cell with a Scranton reality anchor."

"I believe it started before that," 05-3 interjected as he typed away at his laptop, pulling up several different graphs representing sensor data from one of the affected containment sites. "Difficult to say how long, though."

"The other sites," 05-2 nodded. "Some of our thaumaturges are looking into it, but nothing is certain yet."

"There would have needed to be some kind of link between SCP-6699 and all of the sites affected," 05-3 said. "The mystical conduit created would have to be strong. The sites hit are all over the world."

"We're still waiting for solid information on that point," 05-1 admitted. "All we can say right now is that it is a logical conclusion." He consulted his screen and continued. "Just before 0600 local time, nearly a dozen containment breach alarms sounded at the same instant at Site 19. The alarms were triggered by different conditions, but in each case, the cause was the same. The SCP being monitored had vanished. Unsurprisingly, SCP-6699 was among them. To add insult to injury, he took the reality anchor with him."

"Our thaumaturges have confirmed the use of specifically targeted Ways in each instance. We're waiting word on where they all went. We might be able to track and retrieve some of those SCP objects."

"For some of these," 05-6 noted, "I have to wonder why we'd want to."

"They are our responsibility," 05-1 said flatly. "Our failure in this matter is inexcusable. We don't know what the Serpent's Hand plans to do with them, but any damage they do will partially be on us for failing to contain them."

There were reluctant nods around the table. 05-6 grimaced, but joined them. As much as he would like to be rid of some of the SCPs on that list, 05-1 was correct. Whatever plans the Serpent's Hand had for them probably weren't benign.

"Some of these humanoid anomalies won't pose much risk to human life or to Foundation secrecy," 05-4 pointed out, "as they'll want to keep a low profile, but do any of us really think they plan to just turn loose SCP-96 and SCP-173?"

"We can only pray they aren't that stupid," 05-2 answered. He thought hard for a moment, considering various scenarios involving those anomalies, before shaking his head. "I can't imagine why they should wish to, but the members of the Hand aren't always the most, ah, grounded of individuals."

There were grimaces and nods around the table. They all knew that was true. The goals of the Serpent's Hand were nebulous at best. Far too little was known about the group's ultimate goals. Even the nature of their command structure remained a mystery. That wasn't the only mystery. Some of the items taken were entirely harmless, if a bit creepy. Perhaps they had been taken to obfuscate the ultimate goal? 05-2 dismissed the pointless speculation.

"We have placed all sites on heightened alert and modified various web-crawlers to look for specific keywords and even oblique references to each of the missing anomalies. It would be embarrassing if the missing objects started turning up on eBay. This document," he entered a command on his laptop, sending the file to the others, "contains a proposed list of specific additional steps we need to review, including a proposal to alert the GOC to the nature of the problem." There was some grumbling over that, but no one objected. "We'll review this point by point, and if anyone has objections or can think of additional steps we should be taking, now is the time to speak up."

Over the next three hours, the document was reviewed and revised. Steps were added and modified based on new suggestions and resource limitations not previously considered. Orders were passed down to the various site directors and to specific researchers as needed. By the end of the meeting, they felt certain they were doing all that was currently possible. Research into how exactly such a massive breach had occurred was ongoing. More information became available over the following days. It seemed things were better and worse than the 05 Council had originally feared.

OOOOOOOOOO

Adam Swenson had discovered his talent for the art of thaumaturgy while still young. His father, a moderately successful practitioner, had begun training him as soon as he decided Adam was old enough to take the matter seriously. When it became clear that his son's talent for the art far outstripped his own, he had directed him to others in the community capable of properly nourishing that talent.

Some had referred to him as a prodigy, but Adam doubted that was true. He simply found the subject fascinating, and he was willing to put in the hard and sometimes dangerous work. His accomplishments had brought him to the attention of the SCP Foundation shortly after he turned 30, and he had accepted their offer of employment. At the time, he suspected it was their way of containing him; a case of 'keep your friends close and your enemies closer.' He had since proven his loyalty and usefulness, though. Adam had quickly come to believe in the Foundation's mission, and while their methods, especially in those days, had left a lot to be desired, they still did far more good than harm.

The Foundation had changed over his time with them. Their methods grew kinder, when it was possible to be kind. They treated the anomalies better and were less likely to take the shortest, most violent route to solving a problem. They even had an ethics committee these days, which would have, he was sure, astonished the people that started the Foundation. While some, especially the old guard, were dubious, for Adam, it was proof that his faith was well-placed, and his pride in the Foundation had grown.

For nearly 40 years, he had refined his craft and expanded the boundaries of what it meant to be a thaumaturge. His work had saved many lives, both civilians and Foundation personnel. He had even helped save the world a time or two. Adam Swenson had moved from field work to research and then to teaching. These days, he was a consultant that, while mostly retired, was still called in on a regular basis for unusual problems. The current problem was, he freely admitted, a real doozy.

After taking the initial call, Adam spent 10 solid days traveling from site to site, sleeping on the plane and barely ceasing motion from the time that he landed at one site to the time he left for another. Visiting each of the targeted Foundation sites to run what were essentially the same tests had been tiring and tedious, but he had determined, for the most part, what the Serpent's Hand had done, and he even had a pretty good idea of who was behind it.

"Damn it, Jerry," he sighed when he had become all but certain of his enemy's identity. "What are you playing at? You know better than this." He kept his suspicions to himself. Going off half-cocked where that one was concerned, Adam knew, would not end well. Any plans involving his old friend would need to be made carefully indeed. So, he left his speculations out of his final report.

The initial assessment had been more or less correct. All the missing anomalies had been specifically targeted. In the days before the incident, each of the affected sites had received supplies, packages, or letters. Sometimes all three. Regardless of the method, items marked with runes, objects charged with aetheric energy, and magical catalysts of several sorts had been brought in. In each case, there had been some link to one of the missing anomalies. All these items had entered the targeted sites by the most mundane means, delivery trucks.

Every Foundation site needed supplies. They needed materials for building and maintaining the containment cells. They needed the tools to use those materials. They needed lab equipment and supplies for experiments. They needed arms, armor, and ammunition for the security forces. They needed food and office supplies. That was the vulnerability that the Serpent's Hand had exploited. Swenson knew that the 05 Council would not be pleased when they read that part of his report, and he was very glad that he wouldn't be the one dealing with the logistical nightmare that supplying the various sites would become in the near future.

As to what had happened to the various anomalies? That was harder to determine. As theorized, there were connections made between all the containment sites that were affected. There had been nothing suspicious for the Foundation to find beyond random symbols on mundane objects, minor non-anomalous curiosities stuck in low-value containment, a few ordinary objects that had been charged with aetheric energy in a very unusual way, and similar odds and ends.

Encountered individually, they would mean nothing. An elaborate watermark on a shipping form wouldn't even be noticed. A section of metal pipe melted by a near miss from an anomalous weapon was simply being kept out of public view. Items that were charged with aetheric energy looked entirely ordinary to 99.999% of the population. When the nature and location of each was taken into account, however, they formed a pattern that only a very skilled thaumaturge or a powerful reality bender would be able to detect.

When the final component fell into place, the Hand had sent in that 'low-risk' reality bender. It was clear to Adam that SCP-6699 was considerably more powerful than the initial assessment indicated. The man had been sandbagging heavily. Once inside Site 19, he had jump-started the whole process. Activating the prearranged mechanism/array (there really wasn't a good word), he had tipped the first domino, and the targeted anomalies had vanished, first from Site 19, and then from all the others, the most distant still being affected far too quickly for any warning to have been effective.

The matter of where the anomalies had gone was the trickiest bit to figure out. After some thought, he asked for and received permission to contact a colleague with the GOC. They had worked well together in the past when their two groups were forced to cooperate. It would take the combined efforts of both thaumaturges to track the missing SCP objects. It would have been bad enough if they had simple been moved elsewhere on the planet, but it seemed that many of the Ways used to relocate the objects lead elsewhere.

Simon Talbott was, like himself, a professor these days rather than an operative. They had met a few years into their careers with their respective organizations, and had become fast friends despite occasionally being on opposite sides of an operation. Debates over the philosophies and methods of their respective organizations had sometimes grown heated, but their friendship did not waver. Each had been forced to admit, on occasion, that the other group's methods were more effective in some cases. There were certain things the SCP Foundation had in containment that the world would simply be better off without, and no one denied it. There were times when the GOC's dedication to destroying anything anomalous had caused easily avoidable deaths and occasionally, near disasters.

The GOC had been hesitant at first when approached about the current crisis, but when the full scope of the problem was revealed to them, they agreed, provided certain conditions were met. If the opportunity came to destroy certain anomalies, specified by the GOC, the Foundation wouldn't interfere. Given the list they presented, the 05 Council decided they had no objections; although they argued about the inclusion of several of the SCPs simply on principle.

OOOOOOOOOO

Abhay Laghari had served on the SCP Foundation's ethics committee for six years, and in that time, the 05 Council had surprised him repeatedly. He could count on one hand, though, the number of times those surprises had been pleasant. As he reread the document before him for the third time, however, he had to admit that he was truly astonished. Without any prompting or browbeating, the 05 Council was doing the right thing.

Abhay had openly despaired over some of the Council's decisions. They took the easy route far too often for his tastes. Granted, containment of some of the anomalies required the Foundation to do horrible things, and sometimes, protecting the general population's understanding of normality didn't seem worth the cost, but there were far too many horror stories about the price of slipups in that regard.

Upon joining the ethics committee, he had been shown what were referred to as 'object lessons' from the Foundation's most classified files. Many of them involved researchers or security personnel that had tried to show compassion or leniency to the wrong SCP. These incidents generally involved at least one messy death, usually more as a containment breach often followed such an error in judgement. Some of the examples came from alternate realities. One of the best-known examples involved a world where the SCP Foundation had followed the GOC's playbook and begun destroying instead of containing their captured anomalies. That had gone horribly wrong as the file on the infamous Site 13 incident proved.

There were two from realities where the Foundation had suffered a broken masquerade scenario. On the first, the world at large had learned of the anomalous, and various governments, with UN oversight, had stepped in to try to handle things more humanely. The details from that world were sketchy, but the kinder gentler approach had led to the escape of several dangerous anomalies, including SCP-2845. The loss of life resulting from the alien god's escape and the subsequent containment breaches caused by the chaos the thing caused had led to several XK-class events kicking off in rapid succession. Contact with that reality had been lost soon after this last bit of news had been communicated.

In the other reality where the truth had gotten out, the cold war was still in full swing, and anomalies had become the focus of a new arms race. This, Abhay reflected, had gone about as well as one might expect. Using weapons that had minds of their own, often inhuman minds with unfathomable agendas of their own, had led to the start of a full-scale multi-sided world war that no one had won.

Not all the incidents described in the files had been that bad, those had been extreme examples, but they all pointed to the same conclusion. Horrible as the Foundation's methods might sometimes be, they were often preferable to the alternative. That had been a bitter pill for some committee members, himself included, to swallow, but facts were facts. There was truth in the claim that the Foundation was cold, not cruel, and the committee had learned to choose its battles carefully.

Sometimes, doing nothing had been the right course of action, even if it led to suffering for some. In others, the ethics committee had had to force the issue, making the 05s take responsibility to clean up a mess they had created. This had often needed to be carefully managed to avoid putting Foundation assets, or the veil itself, at risk, but it had always been the right thing to do.

And now? The 05 Council was going ahead with an initiative to retrieve the stolen SCP objects. Evidence indicated, according to the Foundation's own Adam Swenson and the GOC's Simon Talbott, that the objects had been shunted into other realities. Quite a few other realities. Retrieving or neutralizing them, per the arrangement with the GOC, was not going to be easy. While they had tracked each object and actually knew a few details of the conditions in those realities, sending teams to them was another matter.

They were prioritizing the most dangerous anomalies. There had been a few times in the past when the Foundation had tried to dump their problems on other realities, but those attempts had usually backfired in unexpected ways. No one wanted 682, for instance, and always managed to send the thing back. That led to containment breaches that had cost the Foundation valuable personnel, to say nothing of money and material resources.

Now, the Council were pushing to retrieve or destroy the most dangerous of the stolen anomalies. Several teams had been prepared, the best they had available for each mission. It was time to get started. A specially formed MTF with elements of a GOC combat team were present and ready to go. With Talbot's help, Swenson opened a Way to the first destination.