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Item #: SCP-8339 Level 1/8339 Object Class: Apollyon Unrestricted A Newbraille weaving of fire, as it is presumed to appear.
Containment Measures: Foundation Seamscribes are to ensure that this document is reproduced accordingly with the Fourth Gurthi Mandate. At least one copy of this document must be placed in the Foundation Library of each burrow.
Multiple copies are to be housed in vaults of the Foundation Libraries of higher • • • • • • • burrows, which would best ensure that this document survives to be read in posterity. By no means is anyone to tamper with or edit any part of this document.
In accordance with the First Bull of Tamlen in the year NE 67, Doctor-Directors who do not follow this instruction are to be subject to punishment, up to and including being demoted to positions at Underhive Libraries.
This document has been lost and reconstructed many times over decades. After the destruction of Burrowone, the preservation of this document in its current form is imperative. The New Foundation must ensure that it is not lost even one time more.
This is the only chance for us to remember why we went underground.
Original Containment Measures: Based on scant recovered documents and oral history, the containment measures for SCP-8339 consisted of the following directives: First, to extinguish or cover up all sources of light in Foundation Sites. No one was to enter Foundation Sites from the surface during the day. Entering facilities at nights when the moon is shining was also prohibited. This was performed as a temporary measure. It failed.
Second, to facilitate ways to fight SCP-8339. This included up to the use of “dark bombs”, “photophagic firearms”, and “darkness locks”. This failed.
Third, to find out methods of living in complete darkness in Foundation sites while we worked out ways to fight against SCP-8339. This failed as well.
Fourth, to create a contingency if we could not win against SCP-8339. All Foundation Doctors were to repurpose underground Sites into burrows.
Geneticists were to find ways to eliminate the ways humans emit light from body heat, so that SCP-8339 would not find us.
The fourth directive alone succeeded. The fourth directive is why we are still alive.
• • Description: SCP-8339 is the designation for the entities known in the common tongue as the “Luminaries”. SCP-8339 are sensitive to all forms of light. They rely on light to tell them where to go, and are capable of seeing even the faintest light through walls hundreds of leagues away. They move at immeasurable speeds, and are known to cause any living being they touch to rupture into light in every spectrum. In the time of the First Foundation, this allowed for more of them to see you. Any means of barring entry was useless, so long as they detected the light that you emitted. They do not eat, they do not drink, they do not sleep. They kill everything they see.
To everyone in the New Era, they are the sole reason why we still hide in caves underground.
Ș Addendum: The following is a recovered document written in the year OE 3, allegedly authored by Administrator Gurthi before the Monday Massacre of • Burrowone. It is the only document from the Second Foundation of Doctors to survive to the New Era. For posterity, its contents have been recorded below.
Originally, the First Foundation of Doctors believed that the Luminaries– the ancient word for our enemy– only saw in the spectrum of visible light, as we humans are allegedly able to see. So, in their arrogance, they mandated the first three directives. The Foundation was confident that if they turned off their lights and donned their goggles, they would survive. For the first few weeks, they continued to believe this.
The Foundation did not realize that it was because the enemy was only going for easier, more luminous prey.
Site-19 was the biggest of the Sites, and was entirely situated underground. Once the Luminaries were done in the nearby city of New York, they found the light emitted by the body heat of thousands of people and anomalies alike.
Site-19 fell within hours.
Site One had already mandated the first three directives to counteract SCP-8339.
After Site-19, they added the fourth, and the Burrow project began in earnest.
Geneticists attempted to find ways to mask humans’ body heatȘ and all the while, the monsters snuffed out Sites all over the world, killing what was left of us.
And then the Geneticists succeeded. Humanity’s blood began to run cold. We were effectively hidden from their sight.
We finally retreated entirely underground. We shed our comforts. We abandoned Electricity. We abandoned Fire. We abandoned Light.
Then came the Age of the Burrows. The Underhive Period. The Invasion Period. All eroding our knowledge of who we used to be, as our libraries were destroyed and we sunk into petty, destructive conflict in the dark. We thinned out the Underhivers, and the Underhivers butchered us back. We collapsed their burrows, and they massacred ours. In these dim years, all we care about is caving in the skulls of our lessers– and we exult in it.
But nowȘ we forget that the Luminaries are even there.
Our Foundation was destroyed once, and rebuilt. Once this war is done with, I have no doubt that it will be destroyed and rebuilt once again.
We are merely the survivors of the ends of the world, picking up the pieces.
We would put our history here, but we have none.
But we will survive. Because we are still human. And we can still take back what is ours.
We die in the dark so that we can live in the light.
Do not revise this document. Any reduction or addition to these contents will be regarded as tampering. Any form of tampering will be met with punishment.
Now. Turn the page over.
+ Turn the page over They won’t catch me.
Because I have the same ability you do.
You can read Oldletters too, can’t you?
So keep quiet, for your sake. And don’t tell them what I’m about to tell you.
You see, I was merely a student when my teacher rediscovered Fire.
Its brilliance was something I could never before dream of. It seemed to glow in the darkness, and sway even in the still air. I could see it give birth to smaller versions of itself, throwing them above her like a mushroomwoman throws salt. The entirety of the rock wall behind it was shown to me in ways I had only felt before. At once I saw the intricate details in the stone– the way it can jut out and recede with not the slightest thought given to its design.
“Do you see it, Professor?” I said, solitary in the back of the room. “Do you see what you have created?” “What?” My teacher answered. “What did I create? I cannot see, Thomald.” It was then that I realized what I was capable of that my teacher was not. But I did not think much of it then.
I lifted a finger, and pointed at it– though he did not, of course, see it. “In front of you, there!” The fire gave a crackle, and at once my teacher looked straight at it. I could only discern the slightest curve of his form in the dark, but I knew at once that he was fascinated. I was sure he could feel the intensity of its warmth from how close he was– for even I, many meters away, could feel the sudden heat that rushed into the room from my teacher’s creation. It must have been scalding.
“I have done it!” He shouted. He was so delighted then, so full of joy and mirth. “I have done it, I have! Fire! I have created Fire!” I was about to join in with my teacher’s festivities, make ready to describe the brilliance of the glow that I sawȘ but it was then we realized that our joy had attracted people to us.
The Library’s guards came in quickly, but at first did not realize what it was that crackled and warmed them so. But they knew enough from what my teacher said that it was what we all, as Foundation Doctors, were forbidden to create.
Fire. Light. And with Light, death.
The guards used their maces to kill my teacher quickly, though it seemed they had no idea what to do with the fire. It burned one and nearly jumped onto another, but the third man had the knowledge needed to feel around for water from an adjacent room and then splash it onto the fire.
I was so scared of discovery then, thinking that perhaps, in the dying firelight, they would see me.
But they didn’t. When I kept quiet, they took my teacher’s body and left.
It was then that it sunk into me that I had an ability none of them had. Not my teacher, not any of the three guards.
I could see.
I could see light– and none of the Lumins had come to kill us.
They were gone.
It was then that I realized that I now so wanted to see brilliant things again, and see them true. I remember the old books we used to have in the Foundation library. How we could determine detail even though we were meters away, how we could distinguish people not just by voice but by appearance, how we could know what emotions we could show just from the expressions on our facesȘ Faces. I so longed to see a human face.
We still have eyes that twinkle, I thought, and small wonderful ears that inform us of everything around. We still have mouths full of perfect sets of teeth, one above and one below, and a nose that could be both small and quaint on one person and large and aristocratic on another.
Most of all though, I wanted to see the way we could apparently *smile*- how our cheeks could elevate and our teeth would show and our eyes would shineȘ shine in only the way that light could show us. Joy, after all, was a familiar concept to me. But I had no notion of what a smile could even look like.
But in doing so, I had to do the one thing that my teacher was killed in front of me for doing.
I had to make *Fire*.
And now the monsters who left us down here could no longer stop me from doing it.
So I pored over the books in the library, what remaining ones there were, looking for every single hint I could get of what my teacher so accidentally stumbled upon.
Over years, I got the gist. You need only two pieces of flint, or rock, and strike them together. You then had to procure something dry that could “burn”– in the before daysȘ wood and cloth. In the new era, coal and mushroom fabric. When they created little sparks of light, you were on the right track. I stockpiled what felt like dozens of kilograms of coal and fabric in those days, striking stones together above it in a way that could strike it alight.
On the fifth day of my eighth year of my quest, I succeeded.
The brilliance thenȘ the Fire I spawned was magnitudes more terrible than anything I had seen with that created by my master, stinging my eyes and my skin and everything else. It was beautiful, but I could not bear to be close to it for so long.
I fell back, screaming, trying to get the warmth away from my skin, wondering why it felt as if my entire body was melting away. My master’s fire could not have compared to mine. I felt like I wasȘ “*burning*”.
As I lay there gasping and panting, panicking as the scalding heat receded with my growing distance, I realized that with my noiseȘ someone had heard me.
“Hello?” A female voice said, calling out with the vulgar accent of the burrowfolk of Browsenteen. “Do you mayhaps need help?” I began to panic. I remember what they did to my teacher, surely this woman would see me as well, see the light that spilled into the tunnels, and would tell of my sin to the Doctor-Director. Then I would meet the same fate as my teacher. Then, I would die.
But as she came closer and into the light, I realized that she had the same condition then as the guards that came to kill my teacher.
She didn’t see me, or the light spilling in behind me, or the sin I was so afraid she would report.
But in the light of the Fire, I saw *her.* You understand, we never knew what each other looked like. Most of us could only think to know what our loved ones looked like in the intimate hours of the sleeptime, when we could trace our hands across their faces and feel two eyes, one nose, one mouth, and two ears. We could never really see what the old records told us. We could never check if what we felt was the truth.
The textures we felt thenȘ they paled in comparison to the detail in which I saw this woman now.
I wanted to know what a human face looked like. What ears looked like. What noses looked like. What eyes looked like.
What a *smile* looked like.
And now I knew.
She was *beautiful*.
Do you realize that? Do you realize what this revealed to me?
It's burnt into my head now. Every inch of my mind.
But I don't need to tell you what it's like, do I?
Ș Ș Ș Ș Ș Ș Ș Ș Ș feel your own face.
Ș We've died in the dark for so long.
Shed your chains.
Let's live in the light.
Basophobia: Leap of Faith SCP Anthology 2024 Nucleomitophobia: Complete Cultural Victory This article was written by Ecronak.
Images created by AnAnomalousWriter.
« SCP-8338 | SCP-8339 | SCP-8340 » ‡ Licensing / Citation Cite this page as: "SCP-8339" by Ecronak & AnAnomalousWriter, from the SCP Wiki. Source: https://scpwiki.com/scp-8339. Licensed under CC-BY-SA.
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Filename: fire.jpg Author: Ecronak License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Source Link: SCP Foundation Wiki This image is a composite of: Filename: Fire.jpg Author: Minor Prophet License: CC BY 2.0 Source Link: https://openverse.org/image/3064a1ef-555f-454f-97d7- e8d8550ba7c2?q=fire Filename: Moleman.jpg Author: AnAnomalousWriter License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Source Link: SCP Foundation Wiki This image is a composite of: Filename: Hairdresser training head (mannequin head) from company L'Image, No.6.jpg Author: Minor Prophet License: CC BY-SA 4.0 Source Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Hairdresser_training_head_(mannequin_head)_from_company_L%27Image,_No.
6.jpg Filename: A Face Only a Naked Mole Rat Queen Could LoveȘ.jpg Author: John Brighenti License: CC BY 2.0 Source Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alchemist_x/32757810517/ Filename: naked mole rat.jpg Author: John Brighenti License: CC BY 2.0 Source Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jedimentat/7557258168/ Filename: Teeth Monkey NHM Rotterdam 3D.jpg Author: wim hoppenbrouwers License: Public Domain Source Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hoppenbrouwers/44467478370/ Filename: Rata Topo.jpg Author: TxanTxunai License: CC-BY-SA 4.0 Source Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rata_Topo.jpg Filename: Plucked chicken wing.jpg Author: ProjectManhattan, Kersti Nebelsiek License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Source Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Plucked_chicken_wing.jpg Filename: Chickens in market.jpg Author: Tomás Castelazo License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Source Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Chickens_in_market.jpg Filename: Eye wide open on me.jpg Author: wladston License: CC-BY 2.0 Source Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/70973156@N00/283455759/ Filename: Cranium, male (6876032647).jpg Author: The Swedish History Museum, Stockholm License: CC-BY 2.0 Source Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Cranium,_male_(6876032647).jpg Filename: Intraoral-photograph-showing-conical-mesiodens.jpg Author: Varun Pratap Singh, Amita Sharma, Sonam Sharma License: CC-BY 4.0 Source Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Intraoral-photograph- showing-conical-mesiodens.jpg _cc_cc4_licenseboxapollyonbody-horrorhorrorhostilek-class-scenariolightmetaphobia- anthologypoetrypost-apocalypticscp page revision: 16, last edited: 13 Nov 2024 23:59 Edit Rate (+151) Tags Discuss (56) History Files Print Site tools + Options Edit Sections Append Edit Meta Watchers Backlinks Page Source Parent Lock Page Rename Delete Help  | Terms of Service  | Privacy  | Report a bug  | Flag as objectionable Powered by Wikidot.com Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License Click here to edit contents of this page.
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