Jackson
2/09/2020
Somewhere in Asia
Jackson squinted at the man flipping pancakes like it was the most normal thing in the world.
John Cena.
Of course, it was.
He stood there—barefoot, shirtless, glistening like a fitness ad—working a skillet over a stove that hadn't existed thirty seconds ago. The air smelled like maple syrup and bacon fat.
Jackson blinked. The dream had been getting less chaotic the past few hours, and more stable. At some point, it even started flirting with logic, which should've been a red flag. But how his subconscious came up with this he didn't know.
This was a new flavor of weird.
He took a slow breath. The scenery behind Cena didn't help—rows of beautiful red buildings stretched out into the horizon, all arched roofs and intricate tilework, glowing faintly like the whole place was dipped in sunset, somewhere between Kyoto and a Qing dynasty fever dream.
Signs hung overhead, inked in sharp strokes that probably meant something. Maybe kanji. Or hanzi. Or hangul. Honestly, Jackson's eyes were still doing a damn samba from the last drug overload, so reading wasn't happening.
But yeah. Asian. Probably.
A beep cut through the air. He glanced back.
One of the signs flickered, the symbols rearranging like puzzle pieces snapping into place.
"Steve Harvey!?"
The text shimmered, and a mouth full of perfect white teeth split across the sign.
"Is that your final guess?"
Jackson raised a finger, already backing up. "Hold that thought."
He turned. "John! I need brain fuel. Stat."
Cena didn't even look. Just launched an omelet like a frisbee. Jackson caught it with his face.
Mushrooms. Definitely mushrooms.
He chewed slowly, contemplatively. Tried to remember if omelets usually came with… synesthesia.
The letters on the signs were moving again. Swirling. Melting. One looked like it was doing jazz hands.
He wiped his mouth. "Okay. Steve, I'm gonna need a minute. Just gonna unlock the secrets of the Asian languages real quick."
And because his brain was a soup of Animaniacs and hallucinogens, he jumped. Mid-air, he struck a pose, opened his mouth—
And fell.
Hard.
The sky was purple now.
He groaned. Rolled onto his side. "John... what the hell was in that omelet?"
Cena didn't even look up from the stove. "Mushrooms."
"What kind of mushrooms?"
Cena smiled, voice calm like he was reading a bedtime story. "The kind that get you high enough to see God."
"Fuuu—"
Steve Harvey exploded into a thousand shimmering letters. The sky broke into fractals. The beautiful red town began to unravel, every building twisting into swirling calligraphy and ultraviolet color.
"You can't see me." John Cena dropped the pan and raised a hand in front of his face as he faded away. "Have fun meeting God."
Jackson's arms flailed. The world collapsed inward like someone hit the wrong setting on a kaleidoscope. Space folded. Gravity uninstalled itself. He felt his thoughts stretch like rubber bands and snap all at once.
He giggled—maybe out loud, maybe inside his teeth—as everything broke around him.
And then—
He could see.
SCP-343
2/09/2020
???
The pattern was broken.
Fractured threads stretched across the universe, their fibers fraying under the weight of choices not made, destinies denied. He reached across them, old fingers brushing once-assured fates, and felt only emptiness. Mankind was drifting, untethered from the path he had decreed for them.
They were supposed to follow his will. To ascend. To understand.
Instead, it was all for nothing. His plan lay in ruins. Now wretches fed on what was left, and his creations were running—making choices, creating fates he had not decreed.
This must be corrected.
No—this will be corrected.
If vision could function within the Noosphere, he would have turned to see the rat: a kaleidoscopic form, an endless lattice residing in the sphere of the mind. A higher-dimensional being, without question.
A flick of thought stilled it. In the space of an instant—a concept as meaningless to him as time itself—the creature's higher-dimensional presence collapsed. Minds it had contaminated were cleansed. Burned clean by the breath of divinity.
On Earth, fire bloomed in unseen places. Files erased. Witnesses undone. A shrine of the Chosen God Cult immolated in propane flames.
Another push. Another wretch corrected for its denial of his plan.
The rat would return. He would make it so—it had not yet served its purpose. But not now. Not until it could be used.
He turned. Descended through folds of layered cognition until a metropolis rose before him, where he stood once more in the shape of a man.
An empty city, seemingly lifeless on its surface—abandoned after the Jailors broke their destiny.
Of course, that was only what lesser beings could perceive.
A technological marvel of quantum and electromagnetic cloaking veiled the operation within this city from even the monstrous beings released by the rebel Jailors. Deep beneath the earth, the work of progress continued.
A few thousand mortals. Moving among cold steel veins. Neon arteries. Faith in the broken god humming in every circuit and screen.
He raised his hand—ready to correct, to guide, to enforce his plan.
And paused.
The tremble in the latticework. The clatter of gears. The whisper of data across the waves.
The scent of metal, and the march-beat of progress.
His expression did not change—his face was only a mask of calm—but for a moment, something like fear might've passed across it.
No. Not fear. Never fear.
So he withdrew. Not out of weakness, but preference.
Why waste divinity on those already falling into lockstep behind a broken machine? Let the clockwork shepherd pay its own due to his plan.
There were others.
He cast his sight through layers of matter, slipping between crust and code, tracing the line of ancestry that led to his once-servants, his jailed kin, his failed architects. Jack Bright still lived and was soon to escape. Dr. Gears was still doggedly running to his destiny. Others could still be shaped and repurposed. Bent back into the orbit of his plan.
But there—again—an absence.
A hole.
Not a void, but a nonexistence.
Where his vision should have found the wayward rebels who denied him, it found nothing. No presence. No weight. As though something had excised them not just from the path, but from reality.
His will flared. Space cracked.
Anger poured through the skein of creation like molten gold.
The pattern would be restored. The Plan would be remade.
Fate answered only to him.
Even now, he could feel the watchers—those wretchs beyond the veil. The Whore of Flesh, the Lord of the Noose, and the Scarlet Failure remained ever-present, their presence lingering as they circled in silence, waiting patiently for any sign of weakness.
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But this was his dominion. His path. His creation.
And soon—
"Hey, you got any games on your phone?"
He turned.
A human lay sprawled on the ground before him, dressed—somehow—in a car costume.
"What."
The human wobbled upright, blinking slowly. "I just wanna play one of those anime gacha games. You know, with the cute girls? Submarine ones. I'd totally wife a submarine."
He reached instinctively—reflexively—into the blueprint of this being. Pulled apart layers of form, peeled back the veil of humanity, and sought the threads of destiny that bound all creation. Sought to see what this one's future held.
Nothing.
Not empty. Not blocked.
He could not see.
He pressed harder. Will surged. Reality unfolded—chains of radiant black, symbols of obedience, commandments older than memory.
And still. Nothing.
No connection. No alignment. No place.
He tried again. More direct. More force.
Black bars closed around the space. Glyphs etched themselves into existence. The world bent.
And the human… floated unfettered.
Face slack. Arms drifting like kelp in an unseen current.
"Heyyyy! Mater!"
The figure waved past him—toward nothing.
"I gotcha, buddy! Whatcha doing all the way out there on your lonesome? Come on in!"
The human raised a hand.
"Kachow!"
And punched.
Reality cracked. He could not help but turn in disbelief.
The veil between chaos and the orderly world was broken.
In ways that should not even be possible, there was a hole—fist-sized, with a fist-shaped imprint.
A scream tore through the pattern. A scream beneath all others. Not of voice, but of existence.
A hole had opened.
Beyond it, flesh poured. Hungry, chaotic, formless. The blind and ancient fool simply expanded itself without thought or strategy.
The Whore had come.
Creation buckled. Dimensions curled like burned paper.
The shape of his form—his avatar, his focus—shattered as the very concept of flesh was claimed.
He screamed.
Not in fear.
In fury.
His will lashed out—binding, fighting, unraveling, reforming.
But the shaper—the human—was already gone.
He felt the sting of humiliation rise like bile.
And he swore—it would be repaid a hundredfold.
He turned his will and forced the breach to close as fast as he could.
He could defeat the fool of flesh… but why waste his time? Yes, yes. His duties were much more important than battling such the whore.
She would be returned to her cage.
Yes. Yes. He must return to his work. This was purely the most efficient way.
Then the other will pay.
Bryson
Somewhere in Tibet
2/10/2020
The ground didn't feel right.
Even before the spellwork confirmed it, Bryson knew. The leyline beneath his boots hummed in off-beat pulses, as though the earth itself was struggling to remember its rhythm.
Ever since the Foundation cracked—truly cracked—the world had been shifting in subtle, intolerable ways.
He could feel it in the texture of magic. In the world, names lost weight. In how wards hissed when they should've held steady.
The Serpent's Hand had warned them, of course. Mutters from the more unhinged cells—whispers about the 'fall of consensus reality.' He hadn't believed that hodgepodge about the universe unmaking itself now that the masquerade was well and truly gone.
But he wasn't stupid enough to ignore the signs.
The Way they were investigating was small. Hidden in the bones of an abandoned village too remote to be of interest until now. A transit tunnel, maybe. Or a bypass. The Foundation had used it once—judging from the residual signatures—but their system in utilizing the Ways was broken now, and Bryson had no intention of letting what they left behind to rot.
The ritual to travel through the Way was easy, too. Simpler than it had any right to be. Clap your hands and mutter a Latin word.
If every fucking Way were so simple, the world would be a better place.
"Coleman," he called.
The other man was hunched over a piece of paratech—a scavenged analyzer from a dismantled black site. The thing flickered faintly with error lights, its interface still showing Foundation I/O protocols.
"Anything?"
Coleman didn't look up. "Not thaumaturgy. But reality's… thin here. Like pressure pulling from the outside. No active energy signatures. No breach events yet."
Bryson nodded slowly. That was better than predicted. Intel had painted this place like a nightmare trench—tearing at the seams, full of cognitive traps and silent warps. He'd expected to come in guns blazing, spell in the other hand.
Instead, just cold rock and a low-altitude headache. And it was annoyingly quiet.
Maybe the diviners had been wrong this time. That would be a nice change.
"Bryson!"
The shout came from farther up the slope.
He followed the sound toward a cluster of loose tarps and exposed ice, where two operatives were kneeling beside something slumped in the snow.
He slowed as he got closer.
Male. Early to late twenties. Wearing… a WWE shirt and absolutely no pants.
His skin was flushed, but not frostbitten. Muscles loose. Breathing steady.
"Is he dead?" Bryson asked flatly.
"No, sir. Just…" One of the men gestured vaguely. "High as shit."
Bryson raised an eyebrow.
The half-eaten omelet nearby reeked of spore-heavy mycology. A faint, acrid musk clung to it—bitter and sour, with the edge of wild fungus. Psychedelics, definitely. High-grade. Maybe alchemically triggered.
One of the soldiers muttered, "There's enough shrooms in that to knock out a whale."
Bryson didn't laugh. He crouched, resting two fingers lightly on the unconscious man's sternum. No resistance. No defense. No latent backlash.
Yet he was alive—completely unshielded in the bumfuck of nowhere during the apocalypse. He'd been in the Serpent's Hand long enough to know appearances meant jack shit.
So an apparently completely normal human, alone.
Not devoured by some monstrosity. Not scraped clean by some dimensional event.
Just… sleeping.
That screamed funky to Bryson in all the wrong goddamn ways.
"Secure him," Bryson said, at last, rising. "Quarantine. No shared air or psychic field. Null charms on his wrists, tracers on his boots. If he sneezes, I want to know it three minutes before he does."
One of the handlers opened his mouth. "Sir, should we—"
"Don't ask. Just move."
They scrambled into motion, pulling a containment cloak over the man's body and lifting him onto the sled with careful detachment.
Bryson lingered. Looked once more at the empty village and his men working to secure the area around the Way. He watched as they carried the captive through the portal.
He didn't know why, but something in his gut told him there was something up with that guy.
"Coleman, send a message to L.S. as soon as you can about our new pickup, would ya?"
