S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters
No one said a word.
Everyone was still trapped in the emotional aftermath of the Pioneer's final message.
> "It wandered the stars alone for 1.3 billion years… just to deliver that one message?"
Natasha Romanoff stared blankly at the screen. Warm tears traced down her cheeks. She didn't even realize when she started crying.
She couldn't begin to imagine what the Pioneer had endured during its eternal voyage across the cold void of space.
She was also silently grateful to Leon Lake—for being the one to answer the message. For giving the Pioneer the peace it waited an eternity for.
> "Boss?"
> "Hmm?"
Nick Fury snapped out of his own daze, subtly wiping at his eyes.
> "Nothing." Natasha smiled faintly.
---
The scene faded.
Leon closed his notebook and walked out of the information room.
As the screen dimmed, a system prompt appeared:
> [Dr. Leon Lake has been reprimanded for bringing personal emotions into an exchange with an anomalous object. He has been placed on administrative leave.]
That snapped everyone in the livestream out of their grief.
> "What the hell? Hahaha—are you serious?"
> "I thought I misread that! But no—he really got punished for being emotional."
> "'Tell the truth,' she said. That line will haunt me forever!"
> "Leon's got guts. The man hung up on an O5 and lived to tell the tale."
> "Moral of the story? Never piss off your boss—especially if she's a high-ranking psychic bureaucrat."
---
Foundation Cafeteria, Site-17
Since Leon was placed on leave, the next scene found him in the cafeteria with Lois Keller and Zyn Morgan.
Time had clearly passed.
Zyn looked more mature. Lois had grown a thick beard. But Leon… Leon looked exactly the same.
> "When I heard someone at Site-17 pissed off an O5 again," Lois said, throwing an arm around Leon's shoulder,
"I knew it had to be you!"
> "So? What was it this time—leaked files? Breached containment?"
Leon shrugged him off calmly.
> "Too much emotion during anomalous communication."
Pffft—
> "Hahahaha!"
Lois and Zyn burst out laughing.
> "That might be the funniest thing you've ever said," Lois chuckled.
"That's definitely going in the Foundation's unofficial political comedy archives."
He raised his glass.
> "To Leon. Cheers!"
> "Cheers!"
---
The atmosphere was warm, and even the livestream audience smiled watching it.
But then Zyn asked the question:
> "Are you still working on memory-related projects?"
Leon nodded.
Nick Fury, watching from the S.H.I.E.L.D. war room, narrowed his eyes.
> Memory? Again? That's what Dr. Kondraki said before too...
On screen, Leon replied again with a nod.
Lois sighed, setting down his glass.
> "You still feel like you've forgotten something important?"
Leon's nod came slower this time.
The audience went silent.
---
Leon pivoted.
> "I heard you've been assigned to something strange lately?"
Lois pulled a face.
> "Strange? Try nonsense. It's not a project—it's a prank."
> "Prank?"
> "Yeah, no one even knows where this file came from. It's chaotic, unreadable, a mess—someone dumped it in the archives and ran."
> "Serial number?"
> "Hmm… think it was SCP-3999."
That got everyone's attention.
---
> "Mind if I take a look?"
> "Be my guest. Everyone else has read it and came out more confused than before."
Lois left briefly and returned with a thick stack of documents. He passed them out.
Leon examined the cover.
Instead of a standard heading, the first line read:
> Let's go, you don't have my job.
[When the Eleventh-Day Empire is swallowing up the sky]
[Like a human figure melting like a clam on the breakfast table]
Leon frowned, silently pondering the strange prose.
> Is this… poetry? Or corrupted metadata?
Then came the file proper:
---
Project Name: I Am in Everything
Item #: SCP-3999
Object Class: Apollyon
---
The live audience exploded.
> "Apollyon?! That's a new class!"
> "Wait, Apollyon means… uncontainable, right?"
A system explanation followed:
> [Apollyon-Class SCPs refer to anomalies that are either uncontainable, guaranteed to breach containment, or pose an unavoidable doomsday threat. Typically tied to K-Class end-of-reality events.]
Silence gripped the feed.
> "A doomsday-level entity… again?"
> "This world's gonna collapse before Thanos even gets to snap."
---
[Special Containment Procedures: SCP-3999 is currently uncontainable and is triggering a ZK-Class End-of-Reality Scenario.]
> ZK-Class?!
Even Nick Fury visibly flinched.
There was barely time to digest the horror before the file continued:
> [The most viable solution is for Researcher Talloran, believed to be SCP-3999's anchor point, to isolate himself indefinitely from Foundation personnel. Possibly terminate himself in a remote area to nullify the anomaly.] (crossed out)
Lois pointed at the page.
> "See that? Someone wrote that… and then crossed it out. This entire file is like that—revision after revision."
Zyn nodded.
> "Look—'Stop x', 'Controllable x', 'A little bit left x'… All discarded. It's like someone was desperately trying to describe what 3999 is, and kept failing."
---
Leon flipped ahead.
> "It's not just corrections," he said.
"It's… like it's being rewritten by something else."
He pointed to one paragraph:
> [Researcher Talloran's family members are to be executed in sequence…]
> [Mother. Father. Sister. Roommates. All eliminated.]
> [Bodies nailed outside his office. Doused in gasoline. Burned. He is to kneel before them.]
The livestream fell silent again.
> "That's… not containment."
> "That's sadism."
> "What the hell is SCP-3999?"
Leon stared at the document. His voice dropped.
> "This doesn't feel like a protocol. It feels like a war… against one man."
---
To be continued...
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