In the academic travesty that was early Egyptology, rumors abounded left and right about cursed tombs and dead men exacting their vengeance. Any time a new pharaoh was dug up, you couldn't go five minutes without hearing the tall tales — some fabricated, some not — about remains coming alive, plagues of locusts, droughts, mysterious disappearances, basically whatever captured the imagination that day. Turns out it was a bit of an anything-goes climate for scholarship back in the '20s; you can trust me, I have immortal colleagues!
Foundation, of course, makes all those old mummy stories into pulp and tries to forget it ever happened. But that collective belief must have crystallized, say my partners at Tactical Theology: "don't disturb the remains". Because, our joint thesis is, whenever you do, you're messing with that dead king's whole cosmology; his whole self-held view of the universe, and it's binding. You're denying him his peaceful post-portem stay in paradise. And that almost never ends well for you.
Dr. AARON FAYEK;
Annual Summit of the Department of Archaeology, 2012
Special Containment Procedures: All Foundation facilities based on Mars are to be equipped with mounted Beowulf-Sigurd Rail1 and an on-site arsenal of at least ten (10) missile-mounted thaumonuclear weapons in the event of a direct encounter with SCP-8844. Facilities, in concert with their orbital satellite arrays, are to constantly conceal themselves via thaumic and other anomalous camouflage and stealth protocols in order to decrease the chance of such an encounter.
Veiled astronomical institutions are to believe that detected SCP-8844 instances represent harmless atmospheric distortions to imaging, errors in observation technology, or non-anomalous meteorological phenomena.
Above: An SCP-8844 event near provisional Outpost-750, 80km west of Ascraeus Mons.
Description: SCP-8844 is an anomalous weather phenomenon affecting dust storms on the surface of Mars. SCP-8844 appears not to concentrate around any particular geographic area, prevalent across the entire planet and manifesting more often only in areas of the Martian surface where storms already tend to form with greater frequency. The phenomenon corresponds in general to a marked and drastic increase in velocity of dust particles and general destructiveness when it manifests in a storm, however its distinctive characteristic is the continuous creation of colossal and often aggressive elemental apparitions (hereafter SCP-8844-A) from within the storm for as long as it persists in duration.
SCP-8844-A vary greatly in size but a rough estimate places their average length at 120 meters from head to tail. Instances are composed entirely of Martian sand and concentrated wind, their forms held together by an apparent unknown force. It is similarly unknown how SCP-8844-A are capable of self-propelled locomotion. Despite material composition, their forms are incredibly resilient and resist dispersal or other alteration from even high-impact assaults. In the event that an apparition is partially dispersed, it is able to reform the lost body part given an abundance of viable material in the ongoing sandstorm. In shape, SCP-8844-A uniformly resemble fauna indigenous to the greater Nile river ecosystem, including mythical and other anomalous fauna2, and in particular animals associated with symbolic or religious importance by the ancient Egyptian civilization3. Entities ostensibly display a limited amount of intelligence, comparable to the totemic animals which they resemble, however whether their actions are automatic or the consequence of some type of self-awareness is unknown. When a given instance of SCP-8844 subsides, all associated SCP-8844-A dissipate naturally.
History: Knowledge of SCP-8844 is ubiquitous and long-standing in the oral traditions of all known Martian cultures. Its presence is first felt in the geological and archaeological record approximately 3,700 years ago, at which point characteristic disruptions in sediment and a markedly higher occurrence of city ruins indicating destruction by sandstorm begin to appear; prior to this time, SCP-8844 presumably did not exist. Destroyed settlements and dried-out canal systems during drought are often attributed in indigenous legends to SCP-8844-A's rampages; it is theorized that a prime cause of the historical push toward the present nomadic state of most Martian civilization was that the emergent phenomenon has made sustained agricultural living in one location effectively impossible. The earliest and most reliable available terrestrial sources refer to the cause of SCP-8844's presence on Mars as the “Curse of Khepri”, presumably in reference to the Egyptian deity of the same name4. The significance of this is presently unknown.
Discovery: SCP-8844 first came to the Foundation's attention when astronomers at Site-86 noted a meteorological abnormality on the Martian surface in 1943, though was not thoroughly understood until the Foundation's initial expeditions to the planet forced a series of highly destructive encounters with the anomaly. For more information, personnel can consult the following auxiliary timeline.
Addendum 8844.1: Pending changes
This database entry is currently undergoing edits in response to a request. Requests may be placed to recall outdated information or add new information concerning an object to its file. The standard content review process is presently underway; in the meantime, the archived edit request has been appended below.
If you are a researcher authorized to edit this file and are unable to make changes, please contact a RAISA representative.
— Maria Jones, Director, RAISA
From: Fayek, Aaron // Dept. of Archaeology (ten.pics|keyafnoraa#ten.pics|keyafnoraa)
To: @TOP/8844 AUTHORIZATION
Date: 09/04/1992
Subject: New info on SCP-8844
Hello all,
I know this case is old as rocks — no pun intended, swear it — but it’s been crawling in the back of my mind for forever and I think we just found the missing piece.
You all may recall I told you all those years ago about a Middle Kingdom-era folktale lost to Veiled archaeology, about a pharaoh who insulted the god Khepri and was punished dearly for it. It one was one of our main leads, since it sounds well enough like a “curse” and explained what Khepri’s name was doing in all our sources. You may also remember we don’t know what the pharaoh's punishment was in that myth — for the longest time, the tablet we trace it back to has been broken; we only have the first half. And in the oral legends, it changes every time: we had to figure out what the original punishment was, and there was just no way.
Two days ago my boys were on an expedition into the Bir Tawil pattern screamer — don’t lose sleep if you don’t know what that is, doesn’t matter. Anyway, turns out somebody an awful long time ago had beat us to it, and hidden some of their belongings on the other side of the vortex. We scooped up the artifacts, pieced together one of the papyri and translated — remarkably well preserved, actually. What we got was an awfully similar story about a pharaoh who was denied passage into the afterlife for stomping on a scarab beetle, and cursed to walk the desert instead. In other words, the second half of our myth. Maybe.
See, what we might have forgot about Khepri is that he’s not just the god of the sunrise. A sunrise represented the creation of a new something from nothing — both the sun in the morning and adult scarab beetles apparently appeared to the ancient Egyptians to appear from nowhere. Further, that he specifically represents the renewal of life in the process of rebirth: he can take things that are dead and make them living. He could, in other words, take something bound for the afterlife and rebound it for the mortal coil by renewing its life prematurely — bind it here on hostile terms, if he’s feeling particularly spiteful, sort of like a ghost unwittingly possessing its own zombified corpse.
The storms aren’t Khepri’s curse at all. They’re the dead king’s manifest rage, lashing out in vain at the god who trapped him there. The reason why they say it’s Khepri’s fault, why the martians do, anyway — and I presume their oral tradition is where that old hieroglyphic name we use nowadays comes from — is because he was the one who sent the damned mummy to Mars in the first place. He took his destined afterlife away and broke the iron law of Egyptian cosmology: that everyone has the chance to get their heart weighed. Maybe that’s why punishments for disrupting the dead became so ubiquitous in Egyptologist lore; why all the tombs are “cursed”. When you mess with that sarcophagus, you’re denying some superpowered maniac their promised paradise. And when you do that, somebody else ends up on the receiving end of one hell of a storm.
Best,
Aaron
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