SCP-1730 - Site-13 Saga and Epic Battle Aftermath

A light shines above a metal table, with a chair positioned on either side. This is the isolated, hermetically-sealed interview chamber of Provisional Site 23. Outside the room waits two shell-shocked human Mobile Task Force members, another with invisible ghost legs, three powerful cyborgs, and a scientist from another dimension.

They're all here to talk about one thing: The nightmare that unfolded at Site 13, also known as SCP - 1730. Everyone thinks they know the story: A mysterious site suddenly appears in Texas, seeming to exactly match the blueprint for an abandoned site that's supposed to be in Nome, Alaska. What started as a simple anomalous location turned out to be an epic horror from another dimension.

The task forces sent in by the Foundation were either massacred or trapped inside, and those who survived reported seeing unspeakable carnage inside the base including a death machine designed to destroy anomalies. And that's not all - as a result of the mysterious Thresher machine, the entire location had been transformed into a shifting, spatial anomaly filled with creatures straight out of a nightmare - from giant, telepathic leech monsters, to huge, multi-limbed Demi Gods that would eternally punish the site's murderous director, Elliot Emerson.

It was only through the combined might of three different Mobile Task Forces - including the legendary Samsara - and the sacrifice of brave Captain Hollis that this cursed location was finally flung into a different dimension, neutralizing the threat it posed to our reality. But for the SCP Foundation, the story doesn't end with neutralization - there's still plenty more questions that need answering.

That's why, today, we're going to tell you what they found out after the neutralization of SCP - 1730. Not only will we discover what's become of the many people involved, we learn about what happened in the last moments before the neutralization took place. And perhaps most importantly of all, for the sake of our universe, we will find out how Site 13 came into existence - and how Site Director Emerson went down such a dark path.

It's time to get some answers. Welcome to the final part of the SCP - 1730 Saga, as we close the book on one of the most deadly locations in the Foundation multiverse. First to sit down in the interview chair was Captain Ephram Ross, leader of Mobile Task Force Apollo 3 also known as The Game Wardens. He was a shaken man, looking far older than his 35 years, his eyes heavy with the weight of the horrors he'd seen.

He and his team were among the first to venture into the bowels of Site 13 and witness the atrocities that'd gone on down there like the Body Pit, full of fleshy slurry, or the countless containment chambers that marked their occupants for vivisection and termination. Captain Ross was haunted by the things that had happened to his team under his watch such as the anomalous transformation of Houston's legs and the nightmarish warping death of Noah at the hands of a stretchy, reality-bending anomaly.

He compared the state of chaos going on down there to something like Jurassic Park, where all hell had broken loose and the monsters ruled. He also remarked on the Olympia Containment Cells, each the size of a football stadium, capable of containing things far beyond the scope of this universe's SCP Foundation.

His interviewer was the hard-nosed Dr. Peter Vincent, who thanked Captain Ross for his contributions, and called in the next interview subject: Agent Liam Ohalo, a Game Wardens Task Force member working under Captain Ross. He had a thousand yard stare, and even the untrained observer could see that Agent Ohalo had left some part of himself back in Site 13.

When Dr. Vincent attempted to interview him, he mostly remained silent, only volunteering one grim sentiment: "We should've died in there. This isn't real. This isn't real. We were supposed to die in there."

Next to be interviewed was Captain Irantu of Mobile Task Force Tau-5, aka Samsara. His interviewer, Dr. Isha Saint Claire, questioned him about the nature of the mission, and the cybernetic soldier was even-keeled about the matter. He said that, in spite of regrettable losses of life, he was still satisfied with the outcome of the mission overall.

The high-value targets were rescued, the anomaly was - for all intents and purposes - neutralized, and the degree of loss was actually better than their pre-mission predictions. It seems that the weight of death doesn't weigh quite as heavily on those who will probably never have to experience it, as the Samsara team are capable of simply being rebooted into new bodies if terminated in the field. People like Captain Hollis weren't as lucky.

Next, Agent Cotter Houston of the Game Wardens was both interviewed and medically evaluated by Dr. Ian Harris. Agent Houston had his legs dematerialized after he tripped into a rising tide of anomalous liquids - which he described as looking like a moving, physical computer glitch.

However, in spite of this, Agent Houston is still able to stand and move of his own free will. It seemed to Dr. Harris that Houston's legs were somehow trapped between dimensions. Houston told Dr. Harris that he didn't experience any kind of pain when his legs were removed, but to this day, he occasionally feels something furry brushing up against them.

Perhaps, wherever his legs are, they aren't alone... Next, the stoic Agent Munru of Samsara was interviewed by Captain Elliott O'Neil of Mobile Task Force D-26, also known as Time Cops. Captain O'Neil had a bone to pick with Munru - namely, that he'd allowed Captain Hollis to run off and sacrifice her own life, despite having a clear directive to prevent the human task force members from endangering themselves at any cost.

Munru deflected, claiming that when Hollis separated from the group, he assumed that she ran off with intentions that never included her own demise. O'Neil and the Foundation found this answer unsatisfying, and decided to move on to their next interview with Onru - the last person with Captain Hollis before her death.

The interviewer, Dr. Darian Arnold, probed the elite Samsara operative on why she turned off her camera before she and Hollis reached the Thresher - the machine that Hollis overloaded to annihilate Site 13 from our dimension. She gave a more compelling answer than Munru: When she and Hollis entered a server room on the way to the Thresher, they encountered what may have been the ultimate cognitohazard: It was a vision of a terrifying alternate dimension with billions dead. A poisoned star like the biblical wormwood fell from the burning sky.

A Nightmare God, like the one torturing Elliot Emerson, wandered among fields of crucified people, covered in deadly, cognitohazardous runes. Just looking at it burned the SCRAMBLE technology out of Munru's eyes, and she turned off her cameras to avoid potentially frying the brains of mission control. Hollis wasn't so lucky. The things she witnessed broke her sanity, and when she finally overloaded the Thresher machine, she was laughing and crying.

Finally, in perhaps the most enlightening debriefing interview of them all, Site Director Willam Vesterland interviewed Dr. Mohammed Scott - The highest-ranking researcher of Site 13, and confidant of the now-infamous Director Elliot Emerson. The question was simple: just what had happened for Site 13 to become so messed up? And Dr. Scott answered in detail, with a tale of corruption, alternate realities, and the perils of unchecked power.

In his home dimension, Site 13 was originally created in Nome, Alaska to house the corpse of a giant sea creature that beached itself on the border of India and Bangladesh in 1964. It became the largest and most secretive Foundation containment facility in the latter half of the 20th century. However, disaster struck in 1994, when a Marxist extremist used an anomaly to level the Willis Tower in Chicago.

As a result, the Foundation lost a lot of its funding and international support, leaving it in dire financial straits. Enter the true villain of the Site 13 story: Paul Manafort. If that name sounds familiar to you, it's because he was an associate of President Trump in our universe who got into legal trouble for shady international dealings.

However, in Dr. Scott's universe, he was a powerful staffer for President Bob Dole - who in that reality had beaten Bill Clinton in the 1996 Presidential Election. Manafort was made the new Secretary General of the Global Occult Coalition - The UN's answer to the SCP Foundation, and one of their leading competitors, with an ethos geared towards killing rather than containing anomalies.

Manafort and the GOC co-opted the struggling Foundation, providing them with money in exchange for control. The Foundation had no choice but to accept this deal with the devil. Slowly, Manafort replaced the Foundation old guard with toadies and loyalists. The Ethics Committee and the O5 command were dismantled.

Dissenters were dragged out of their offices and shot point blank in the head, execution-style. Site 13 had originally been directed by Dr. Bright, but Bright was arrested and contained under false pretences so Manafort could install a new director: A mid-level researcher by the name of Elliot Emerson. Emerson is often painted as a sadistic monster who took pleasure in torturing anomalies to death and flushing them down the body pit.

The reality is both simpler and more grim: Emerson, it turns out, was just an eager yes man. He was put into his position to follow Manafort's orders to a tee, and those orders were simple - Kill. In a perfect example of the banality of evil, Director Emerson converted Site 13 into a brutal slaughterhouse, just as his overlords at the GOC had ordered him.

But things were quickly getting out of hand, and one of the most vocal critics of the new regime was one of Emerson's old lovers, one Dr. Vera Hadley, Assistant Director of Anomalous Biology. Dr. Hadley was disgusted by the inhuman acts Emerson was carrying out and couldn't stay silent, and for this she faced horrific consequences. Corrupt guards stripped her and beat her to within an inch of her life in front of her co-workers.

In that moment, she swore her revenge. She sabotaged the containment procedures and had the engineers rig the already unstable Thresher device to overload. As Emerson watched the anomalies break containment he began to fear for his life - both from the anomalies themselves, and from the punishments of his superiors at the GOC.

Dr. Scott revealed that Emerson was no evil mastermind. He was a lapdog for the GOC. A dirty coward, all the way to the very end. And he was desperate. He held Dr. Scott at gunpoint and ordered him to activate the Thresher or die, and the rest is history. There would be no redemption for Dr. Scott's former friend, as Emerson ended up chained to the rune-covered, platform head of a Nightmare God for all eternity.

So ends the debriefing of the Site 13 survivors, and closes the book on that terrible place - for now, anyway. The story of SCP - 1730 is anything but simple, and there are so many angles from which this dark tragedy of cruelty and corruption can be approached. And ultimately, it was all for the same two things at the root of every evil: The desire for money and power.

But the pursuit of these base desires can lead to some truly nightmarish consequences, and nobody knows this better than former Director Elliot Emerson - who'll be paying for these sins until the end of time, and perhaps even beyond.