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SCP Articles
Written by: Calibold
"I am filled with grief to report that the Soy Mi Amante has been struck down by unknown forces. She and her crew will be remembered as the mighty bread basket of our holy kingdom."
Written by: Calibold
"The conditions are set, the contestants are ready, and the bake-off starts… now!"
Written by: barredowl
"Hello, there, all of you individuals. I'm the Dissector, and if you're about as sick and tired of the garbage Xzollywood is pumping out these days, you might have come across 'Captain of Agvofala.'"
Written by: Greyve
"I've seen the other side. You don't want to know what sort of things exist there."
Written by: Greyve
"In 2013, SCP-5932 volunteered to participate in Project ASTEROIDEA, a Foundation effort to develop humanoid personnel with superior regenerative capabilities."
Written by: Angryman22
"SCP-5398 reported pain following the procedure. Research team requests painkilling medications for current and future use on demand."
Written by: Calibold
"Motion Passed"
Written by: HarryBlank
"We get along well, you and I, but your fixation on this one element of my personality is really beginning to grate on me."
Written by: Calibold
"After the House disbanded, Tower of Babel joined 2b2t.org, the oldest anarchy server in Minecraft, under the username 'Babel_Tower.'"
Written by: Rhineriver
"It was more complex and beautiful than anything we'd ever seen from them before."
Written by: Starch Tuber
"This newly discovered aspect of these entities, along with their increasing rate of manifestations, would imply that SCP-6533 itself constitutes a PHK-Class Multiplanetary-Attack Scenario."
Tales, GoI Formats, & Other Pages
Written by: Calibold
"You're a member of the the most powerful council in the world. Start acting like it, don't come to me for answers."
Written by: Calibold
"KTE-8686 itself was successfully intercepted by SCP Foundation agents, who convinced it to enter Foundation containment, under the pretense that it would be kept protected from the GOC."
Written by: HarryBlank
"Dan, this is the worst plan you've come up with in ten years."
Written by: Calibold
"I'm happy to know that our work continues to prosper and even inspire in your time."
Written by: Calibold
"Calvin Bold is afraid."
Decommissioning Dept. logo.
The Decommissioning Department is relatively young compared to some of the Foundation's other departments, but its roots extend many, many years before its inception, almost to the Foundation's creation.
Initially, the Foundation was far more decentralized than it was today. Sites and research groups would have their own rules and customs, including when it came to actually containing or researching the anomalies themselves. This was before the founding of the Ethics Committee as a central body, and Site directors or lead researchers mostly only answered to O5 Command. This meant that certain unwise or even unethical procedures were often practiced, with very few repercussions.
One such practice was decommissioning. While the Foundation's focus has always been on containment, particular scenarios do not always lend themselves well to this dogma. For some anomalies, containment isn't a viable option. Some are too dangerous or too unpredictable to continue persisting.
Of course, had decommissioning been utilized more rarely, and only as a last resort, there would be little issue. However, the lack of accountability meant that the barriers to decommissioning were far too lax. This was made only more evident by the fact that the Foundation was still very young, and almost never dealt with anything that would necessitate destruction.
Unfortunately, decommissioning was rarely performed responsibly. Oftentimes, anomalies were destroyed out of fear, laziness, or even personal or political reasons. This carelessness, of course, lent itself to numerous problems; these attempts would often fail or go poorly, resulting in breaches, damage, and even death.
Eventually, this culminated in Incident 083-D, the infamous decommissioning of SCP-083-D by Dr. Kondraki. The attempt to terminate was not just sloppy and mismanaged, but deliberately engineered to cause a containment breach so that Kondraki could fulfill his own personal fantasy. At the end of it all, 8 SCP objects were destroyed, 3 breached containment (including SCP-682, which likely warrants its own chapter in the history of terminating SCP objects), 33 personnel were killed, and over six million dollars in damages were accrued. Kondraki was let off easy, on account of personal bias and political conniving.
Shortly afterwards, decommissioning was all but wholly banned, with the termination of SCP objects requiring a unanimous approval by the O5 Council. This almost complete shutdown of the practice persisted until the founding of the Ethics Committee.
The Ethics Committee's primary job is to ensure the general well-being and ethical treatment of both personnel and anomalous objects, while remaining in line with the Foundation's primary mission. While it has been the subject of much controversy in the past, it has at least, to some degree, grown and fine-tuned its policy-making and situation handling abilities.
In accordance with this, the Ethics Committee was placed in charge of decommissioning, and for some time, it seemed that this was the right place for the policy to be handled. However, as time passed, it became apparent that the Committee suffered the complete opposite problem to the old guard: it was too strict, too attached to the Foundation's dogma of containment over all else. Even when destroying an SCP object was clearly the correct and efficient choice, the Ethics Committee would pursue containment over all else, only terminating the object if containment was literally impossible. SCP-2845 and similar anomalies are some of the most extreme examples of this. Between its founding and the creation of the Decommissioning Department, the Ethics Committee approved the termination of exactly nine SCP objects.
Eventually, the Foundation discovered SCP-4456-D, a fairly simple but powerful anomaly. Unless it was supplied with over half a million dollars worth of silver daily, it would begin summoning alternate versions of itself at an exponential rate. Unlike most SCP objects which had been terminated before it, SCP-4456-D was not particularly dangerous, and it could even be contained reliably. But the sheer expense and potential threat to normalcy meant that action had to be taken.
Dr. Calvin Bold, the lead researcher for the anomaly as well as a reserve Ethics Committee liaison, was initially denied his termination request by the Ethics Committee, and so he took his request to the O5 Council, along with the pitch for a potential new way to handle anomaly termination: the institution of the Decommissioning Department. The Ethics Committee was able to handle concerns of ethics, but it was still too strongly tied to a certain aspect of the Foundation to be able to handle this particular duty. Bold claimed that a separate — but not altogether independent — department would be the best course action; it would enforce centralization, accountability, and necessity, without being as restricted by philosophical ties.
Fortunately for his idea, this pitch was made at a time when the Foundation was in a state of partial decentralization and general administrative overhaul. Several new departments and divisions were being instated at the time to account for the Foundation's steadily increasing growth. The inception of such a department was somewhat controversial, but there was little outright disdain, and eventually, the motion passed.
This leads us to the present day. Altogether, the Decommissioning Department has proven to be adequate at its job. There have been some failures, naturally, but its successes have outweighed those flaws… at least so far.
It's still very young, of course. There are still many more challenges for it to face. So as of right now, we're still waiting, and hoping that we made the right decision. Because we may very well have not.
What is this about?
In case it wasn't clear from the preamble, long-winded history lesson, and the name itself, the Decommissioning Department is in charge of the intentional destruction, or Decommissioning, of SCP objects. They are very much tied to the obsolete Decommissioned object class, which currently denotes an object that was terminated deliberately by the Foundation.
More than anything, the Decommissioning Department (or "DeD" for short) is an exploration of a concept. The Foundation is all about containing SCP objects, and in general it's rather discouraged to write about the Foundation wanting to destroy something; it's just not how they roll, that sort of stuff is more of a GOC thing. But sometimes, it's pretty clear that some things are too dangerous or powerful not to be destroyed.
This is what DeD is meant to analyze: the situations where the Foundation is backed into a corner and needs to push harder, fight back; the situations where they have to divorce themselves from their mission statement for the greater good; and just as importantly, the situations where they make such a decision… and it turns out to be the wrong one.
How do I write for it?
First and foremost, DeD and modern decommissioning are very much different from the decommissioning of way back in the day, like you might find here. Back when decommissioning first started, it was basically a way to shame poorly-written articles. DeD is tied to old decommissioning mainly through the lore that was set down by them, as seen in the History tab. It's meant to be a revival and renewal of the concept from an in-universe point of view, without the mean-spirited intentions from when it was first introduced.
Next, do not get DeD or anything else involved to try and destroy your SCP because you think it would make it cooler. It wouldn't. This advice (and frankly most of the advice on here) doesn't just go for DeD, it goes for any time you think an anomaly should be destroyed, whether it's DeD or the Ethics Committee or Dr. Clef doing it.
Terminating an SCP can be used to explore several different themes. Sometimes it's about why it poses such a threat to normalcy or to life. Sometimes it's about the struggle of making the choice to destroy it, especially if the SCP is someone the audience or the other characters care about. DeD is a tool for exploring these ideas and others, particularly from the perspective of the Foundation.
That perspective is a particularly important part; many folks assume that the GOC or a similar group could easily take the role of DeD in some stories, and in some cases they're right. Sometimes DeD is just a tool or a device that's not focused on, but is used to push the story along, and maybe it just makes more sense to use a Foundation group for that purpose than a GoI. But viewing this kind of termination and the choices that come with it from a Foundation perspective offers more nuance and diverse conflict than simply having another GoI take care of it. Basically, it's not just about the fact that the thing is getting destroyed, but why and who.
Of course, if you just need a group to take care of the dirty work in this story, DeD's there for you too.
Is there a canon?
Not really! There's definitely some founding articles to this, and some "established lore" to it, but how you interpret DeD can be taken rather liberally. Even the history tab on this very page is more of a guideline than anything, and you're not required to follow it or any other article.
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