SWN001-1-CH00 DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE

DATE: 31 October 2018
FROM: Maura Castaldo <ten.pcs.atap|odlatsac.m#ten.pcs.atap|odlatsac.m>
TO: Penelope Panagiotopolous <ten.pcs.atap|suolopotoiganap.p#ten.pcs.atap|suolopotoiganap.p>
SUBJECT: SWN001-1-CH00 DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE

Penelope,

We've been trying to identify "self-inserts" of the SWN001-1 entities for a while now, and I think we've been going about it wrong. So far we've been assuming a one-to-one correspondence — each "author" has a single "author avatar" that acts on its behalf in our narrative layer — but I think I've found some evidence that contradicts that theory.

The following is a collection of personnel files from Foundation precursors, going all the way back to ancient Rome. I believe that all these individuals were "self-inserts" of the same SWN001-1 entity, which I have tentatively designated SWN001-1-CH00 — based on naming patterns, I believe that the entity's nom de plume may be a reference to the Star Wars character "Chewbacca", probably stylized "Ch00bakka"¹.

The first document comes from the Cura Praetoria Sapientae Occultae, or Praetorian Office of Hidden Wisdom, an organization that was definitely not as similar to the Foundation as this document implies. I've reproduced the original below, and a translation follows.

RECOVERED DOCUMENT SWN001-1-CH00-A: PRAETORIAN OFFICE OF HIDDEN WISDOM PERSONNEL FILE
Circa 125 AD. Fragmentary papyrus, Alexandria, Egypt. Latin/Greek. Translated by Maura Castaldo, 2018.

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Name: Caius Hostilius Bacchus "Double-Nothing"

Security [Clearance?] Level: 4

Titles and Offices: Head Researcher of the Praetorian Office of Secret Wisdom; Tribune of the Plebs; Prefect of Libraries and Archives for the Emperor Hadrian.

Degrees and Honors: Doctor of Augury and Haruspicy, Roman Priestly College; Silver Star of Valor, Praetorian Office of Secret Wisdom.

Objects Studied:

ΣΚΠ-MMCDXVIII — Hadrian's Well²

ΣΚΠ-MMDCCLXVI — The Caligulan Waters³
ΣΚΠ-MM[illegible]

ΣΚΠ-MMMDCCCLIII — Imperium⁴

As you can see, we're already in the realm of the absurd. All of the items on the list of "Objects Studied" that haven't been damaged are definitely objects currently contained by the Foundation—they even have the right numbers! The CPSO never referred to anything as "SKΠ"—that's just a transliteration of "SCP" into the Greek alphabet!

The next document comes from the Holy Vehm, the witch-finding courts of the Holy Roman Emperor. It does fit better with the historical record, but it's still got some issues that identify its origin in an SWN001-1 instance.

RECOVERED DOCUMENT SWN001-1-CH00-B: HOLY VEHM WITCH-COURT TESTIMONY
July, 1532. Parchment, Cologne, Germany. Latin and High German. Translated by Maura Castaldo and Joseph Rosenbaum.

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On the 12th day of July of the year of our lord 1532, the Ancient and Holy Vehm convened in the Archbishopric of Köln to come to a decision on the fate of seven persons suspected of witchcraft, heresy, and treason. The presiding judge was Dietricht Königsmann, accompanied by Brother Athanasius of the Benedictine order. Testimony was given by Inquisitrix-Sister Charlotta Oberst-Bakken of the order of Saint Catherine the Protector.

"I came to the Archbishopric in April, following a network of heretics who I had previously hunted down in Mainz. These heretics hold to a gnostic heresy known in Georgia from the time of Saint Constantine, replacing the host of the eucharist with a certain mushroom⁵ that causes them to experience false visions and to imagine that their family members—of which these heretics usually have few, if any—have been removed from the world by God.

"I tracked the heretics to a house on the outskirts of the city, sending my sisters around to guard the other doors and prevent any of them from escaping. Then we threw burning brands through the windows, catching the house ablaze. As the heretics fled from the building, we captured each one, binding them with chains of iron to prevent any witchcraft or sorcery. We returned to the cathedral, and each heretic confessed to their sins under torture.

"Four of the heretics you see before you have repented, and should be executed by beheading or hanging so that their death is not painful; the remainder have refused to recant, and should be burned at the stake as is fitting for unrepentant witches."

Inquisitrix-Sister Charlotta's recommendations were followed; the mushroom in question was officially designated as Heretical Object Two Thousand, Five Hundred and Seventeen.

The order of Saint Catherine the Protector doesn't show up anywhere else; and take a look at those initials. We also have no evidence that the Holy Vehm ever catalogued more than a few hundred heretical objects, and most of those were just different translations of the bible, not anomalous artifacts. And again, the number matches the SCP designation of a mushroom with identical effects.

We're jumping to the 20th century, now. This one is actually a Foundation personnel file, dating from the late 60s. It fits with the other SWN-001-1 "self-insert" files we've seen.

RECOVERED DOCUMENT SWN001-1-Γ: SCP FOUNDATION PERSONNEL RECORD
1967. Discovered in Storage Site-23 internal documents archive. English.

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Name: Dr. Charles Oswald Oglivy Bakken

Security Clearance: Level 2

Position: Anomalous Document Storage Specialist, Storage Site-23.

Curriculum Vitae: BA in Classics, Deer College, 1956; MA in Library and Archival Studies, University of Chicago, 1960; Assistant Archivist, Site-23, 1961-1964; Anomalous Document Storage Specialist, Site-23, 1964—present.

Containment Files Authored:

SCP-1066 ("Instant Education")⁶

SCP-2573 ("Fifth International Communist Party")⁷

Administrative Notes (Human Resources Eyes Only): Displays loyalty to the Foundation, despite Communist sympathies (subscribes to several Socialist and Communist periodicals, which led to initial identification of SCP-2573). Possibly a homosexual, definitely a transvestite; as a result, does not qualify for Clearance Level above 2.

Notably, 1066 wasn't contained until the 21st century, and 2573 didn't manifest until the fall of the Soviet Union. This individual doesn't show up in the main personnel records, only in a paper file in Site-23's archive.

The last document I have for you is the most recent. It's the Hisser bio—a Dark Web alternative to Twitter used mainly by anartists and the Serpent's Hand—of a user with the handle "@ch00_bakka".

RECOVERED DOCUMENT SWN001-1-CH00-Δ: HISSER BIO
2018. Recovered from http://hisser.com/ch00_bakka/bio

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Hi! I'm Griffin, but you can call me ch00bakka. I'm trans & I use she or they pronouns. I'm an antifascist, an anarchist, a discordian, and a chaos magician.⁸

I write reviews of anart and other weird shit! Here are some of my most popular reviews—more are on the way!

hERPes - (CW sex) An STI you can get from Neverwinter Nights? (3.5/5 stars)⁹

Death of the Artist - (CW Suicide) Suicide made into performance art. (4/5 stars)¹⁰

Rubedo Reserve Oinopoeic Sublimator - It makes blood into wine and costs 3,000,000 bucks. (1.5/5 stars)¹¹

I'm fairly sure that this last one is the most true-to-life of SWN001-1-CH00's author avatars—I've developed a psychological profile of the entity, which I've attached to this email. Creating these profiles for all the SWN001-1 author entities should help us identify other cases in which one entity has multiple "self-insert" characters.

Dr. Maura Castaldo
Lead Psychologist
Pataphysics Division

Footnotes

1. This is SWN001-1-CH00 (better known as ch00bakka) speaking. I'm pretty sure that characters can't see footnotes, so this is where you're gonna get all the sweet, sweet author commentary. (In case there's any confusion, I am not S Andrew Swann and I didn't write that 001 proposal—I just think it's neat.)

2. Love me some ancient gays <3. There was a legit ancient rumor that Hadrian killed his boyfriend to cure him of some illness and this is an SCP for that. I think the MCD report isn't as good as it could be. I do like the poem I wrote in the SCP article and I think I should've written it in Latin also because poetic composition in dead languages usually impresses people. Also the name is a pun on Hadrian's Wall because, well, duh.

3. The inspiration for this one was that I visited the upper end of the Aqua Claudia while I was studying abroad in Rome. It was the first appearance of the CPSO, which can get a tag if two people who aren't me use it in articles. Please. I want this.

4. Hnnnnnnghhhhh i want this to have more votes I don't know if I just posted it at a bad time and nobody saw it or if it's too long and nobody's finished it. Anyway I think it's good. It's literally just that the title "Emperor of Rome" is anomalous because Augustus fuckin sacrificed himself. That's pretty metal.

5. SCP-2517 - This One Time I Saw God On Shrooms

Subtitled "God Was On Shrooms, Not Me".

This one was inspired by a really intense mushroom trip during which I saw the fnords on my ceiling. It's heavily based on qntm's Antimemetics Division stuff, but it shouldn't require prior knowledge of that canon. It’s a hallucinogenic mushroom that acts as a mnestic and also cushions your mind from harmful memetic effects; it lets you see the Fifth Church's God/SCP-3125, an extradimensional meme-based organism that kills you and everyone with a similar mind if you perceive it. The mushrooms protect you from being erased and stop it from noticing you if you don't use them regularly, but don't protect your friends and family.

"Megatyphro" means "Big Cheese" in Greek, so Saint-Archon Horatius Megatyphro is Celebration "Big Cheese" Horace.

6. I wrote this one in 2011, when I was 15 years old. I'm gonna be bitter forever until it's not my highest-rated article. I just don't think it's very good. It used to like….. fuckin' kill you hardcore, like everyone would come back injured in a ~thematic way~, but I took that out pretty quick. I snagged this spot right after Series 2 got opened before some asshole could try to put a Norman Conquest SCP there.

7. Actual title, "I ain’t never heard of no commy Fifthists or nothin'."

This was just me writing an SCP based on that exact line from the Fifthist Hub. I don't think I executed it well but it's like at +25 which is ok. Roll that frog footage.

8. Yep. This is accurate so far. Yes, even the chaos magick. Ask me about my magickal practice some time!

9. SCP-2607 - Herpes ERPlex

To quote the Wikipedia page on phone sex, "A key advantage of phone sex, compared with physical intimacy, is that it cannot transmit a sexually transmitted infection."

The inspiration for this was a post on the OutOfContextSite19 tumblr, "Terrible SCP idea: an STD that is somehow transmissible by reading erotica." If you were the person who said this in #Site19, this is your child. Congratulations.

10. SCP-3337 - Death of the Artist

I wrote this one after going to MoMa in New York while in the depths of a depressive episode. I was up on the top floor looking over a balcony and started having suicidal thoughts (the usual) and then i was like "wait, what if i got one of those gallery labels and stuck it to the wall and THEN jumped" and then i was like "wait what if that was an SCP". At first it was just the tag, which summoned a jumper like once a day, but then i switched it, which i thought worked better.

it got a shoutout in the LostAndFoundation podcast which was pretty cool.

11. This one is dedicated to my stepdad, who loves wine and hates reading instruction manuals.

I honestly haven't decided whether these wine bottles actually come from Alagadda or that's the marketing angle MC&D have decided to use. I might write a MCD-format article that explains that, either as the result of a (possibly millenia-long) trade agreement with one of the Masked Lords or as a clever marketing trick to spin some boring old blood rituals into something more exotic.

Originally this actually was going to be about a millenia-old relationship between MCD and Alagadda, but then Enzo appeared and I decided to cut all the ancient stuff about transport amphorae and ancient Roman religion. Thanks Enzo.