And now's your chance to be a big shot.
If you can access this file, you are taking part in a joint RAISA-EC investigation into SCP-L997. This file was recovered in a substantially damaged state, with the destruction considered to be purposeful given the contents. The reconstruction below draws on partially recovered physical fragments and redundant digital backups where possible. Additional notes by RAISA staff are attached for relevant context outside of the file itself.
Item #: SCP-L997
Object Class: Thaumiel
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-L997 is held on each Foundation Site in an assigned liquid tank. Any shipment of SCP-L997 to a facility for the purpose of refilling is to be immediately sent to the tank. No personnel in these facilities besides those in Project Daredevil or with Level 5 Clearance are allowed to know about the anomaly’s existence.
SCP-L997 is to be administered orally to individuals selected for Protocol Big Shot through a beverage can without their knowledge, and are to not be informed that they have done so under any circumstances. Should SCP-L997 be accidentally consumed by an unintended target, they are to be immediately transferred onto a high priority task.
Every two weeks after initial consumption of SCP-L997, a mandatory medical screening of the SCP-L997-1 instance is to be performed to detect early signs of SCP-L997-2. The medical screening should be performed weekly after the fourth week post consumption, and daily after the sixth week. When a SCP-L997-1 instance begins to show any symptoms of SCP-L997-2, it is to be immediately transferred off its current project and detained until the SCP-L997-1 period ends.
Once a SCP-L997-1 instance becomes a SCP-L997-2 instance, it is to be administered a high dosage of Class F amnestics and brought to a random city. SCP-L997-2 instances are then to be dumped in a dumpster with no documentation. Post-release monitoring of SCP-L997-2 instances is not required1. No distinction is made in disposal for SCP-L997-2 instances showing violent behavior. Civilian and municipal response to SCP-L997-2 instances poses a negligible risk of attribution to the SCP Foundation, as SCP-L997-2 instances are treated like any other homeless person by the unaware.
Description: SCP-L997 is a blue-tinted liquid with the taste of a commercial electrolyte beverage. On initial recovery, SCP-L997 was called “Stanley’s Big Shot Success!” SCP-L997 shows no anomalous properties outside of ingestion orally2. SCP-L997 does not register on standard toxicology screens and metabolizes extremely quickly without a physical trace, making detection in a subject impossible.
Upon ingestion, a person turns into a SCP-L997-1 instance. For a period lasting approximately six to ten weeks after initial consumption of SCP-L997-1, the SCP-L997-1 instance will succeed at any task it actively pursues, regardless of its prior skill, experience, or the objective difficulty of completing the task. This is not an enhancement of skill; all testing has indicated that SCP-L997-1 does not increase a subject’s underlying talents, intelligence, or physical capabilities. Instead, outcomes are altered directly, with the success generated through pure circumstance and timing. For example, a SCP-L997-1 instance assigned to a containment task will succeed at that task even where its performance, in isolation, would not warrant any sort of success. SCP-L997-1 instances also experience great personal fortune and gains in social status, which happens without active pursuit of these goals.
In cases where an SCP-L997-1 instance's actively pursued goal is not achievable under known physical law, the instance does not fail outright. Instead, the pursued goal shifts, without apparent awareness by the instance, to the nearest real-world equivalent3, which is then pursued and achieved with the same certainty as any other task.
These effects draw on a finite personal resource, termed “potential,” which SCP-L997 liquidates in its entirety over the SCP-L997-1 period. Once exhausted, the instance transitions into SCP-L997-2 status. This transition is considered permanent and cannot be reverted by any tested intervention, including usage of other anomalous items.
SCP-L997-2 instances are incapable of any sort of meaningful personal success, skill acquisition, or sustained achievement for the remainder of their life. This incapacity is not attributable to any measurable cognitive or physical defect, as SCP-L997-2 instances test normally on standard Foundation health and aptitude metrics.
SCP-L997 additionally removes the subject’s capacity for impulse control over the same period it liquidates potential. In 94% of recorded cases, this manifests as the sudden onset or acceleration of a dependency (alcohol, narcotics, gambling, pornography, et cetera) within days of reaching SCP-L997-2 status, including in instances with no prior history of relevant behavior. In the remaining 6% of cases, the instance will fixate on its loss of SCP-L997-1 status, and take extreme actions to try to regain its lost prosperity. This latter presentation has been termed SCP-L997-2b.
Addendum L997.1: Discovery
SCP-L997 was acquired by the Foundation in the early 2000s after the recall of Stanley Consumer Products’ “Stanley’s Big Shot Success!”, a popular energy drink in Massachusetts with approximately █████ consumers. All its civilian consumers gained personal and professional windfalls4 after becoming SCP-L997-1 instances. When these SCP-L997-1 instances turned into SCP-L997-2 instances, all of their gains were lost and they were rendered irrelevant, dramatically hurting Stanley Consumer Products (and thus SCP-L997’s) consumer base. Within six months of “Stanley’s Big Shot Success!” being launched, Stanley Consumer Products had gone bankrupt as its employees, management, and CEO were also consuming SCP-L997.
The company was acquired by a Foundation front company following standard corporate-front acquisition protocol for reasons unrelated to SCP-L997, as the company possessed the needed SCP initials in its name. SCP-L997 was discovered after a Foundation staff member consumed a bottle of SCP-L997 and underwent the SCP-L997 cycle.
RAISA Note: The Foundation front company which bought Stanley Consumer Products and the individual who consumed SCP-L997 on initial discovery are not named in any recovered materials. It is unknown why the party behind SCP-L997’s data loss would move to hide this information.
Addendum L997.2: Individual of Note to SCP-L997
Stanley G. Stanley, founder and CEO of Stanley Consumer Products, is confirmed to have personally consumed SCP-L997 prior to the product’s public launch, reportedly as part of an internal promotion exercise. During his SCP-L997-1 period, Stanley Consumer Products grew from a regional beverage operation to a corporation attracting acquisition interest from several multinational conglomerates, and Stanley himself became a recurring subject of local business press coverage prior to his company’s collapse. Of note is that Stanley remained in the SCP-L997-1 phase for far longer than anyone else on record, with it lasting approximately a year.
Foundation review of his subsequent status places him clearly in the SCP-L997-2b subtype. Stanley has not been formally interviewed or classified as a Person of Interest, as all observation indicates he has no knowledge of how SCP-L997 works or the circumstances of his fall from grace. As of the most recent unconfirmed sighting, Stanley operates a series of unsuccessful investment solicitation schemes in the vicinity of [REDACTED], Massachusetts, presenting himself to passersby under his own name. He appears to be acting as if he was still courting the acquisition offer by a multinational beverage conglomerate5 that collapsed with his company. Sources indicate he lives in a dumpster behind a computer store.
Stanley’s atypically extended SCP-L997-1 state (approximately a year, against the typical Foundation range of six to ten weeks) was flagged during initial characterization as a significant outlier. Comparative analysis against civilian SCP-L997-1 cases, whose durations similarly extended into multiple months, led to the working hypothesis that SCP-L997-1’s duration is a function of both the magnitude of potential possessed by the subject and the demands of the outcomes being pursued - with high-stakes, high-difficulty goals depleting potential at a substantially faster rate than the personal or commercial success pursued by Stanley and other civilian consumers.
This hypothesis directly informed the “top quartile preferred” ranking weight later adopted under Protocol Big Shot’s candidacy requirements (see Addendum L997.5 further in the document below). Given the severity and difficulty of the tasks typically assigned under Protocol Big Shot, candidates are selected for possessing sufficient reserve potential to sustain the SCP-L997-1 period without exhausting mid-task.
RAISA Note: The sighting referenced above remains uncorroborated. No confirmed information on Stanley G. Stanley's status exists beyond his disappearance following Stanley Consumer Products' shutdown. This is the only document within the Foundation’s internal systems that references Stanley G. Stanley in the context of an anomaly.
Addendum L997.5: Protocol Big Shot Candidacy Requirements
As part of Project Daredevil, the Overseer Council has mandated that each Foundation Site and Branch expand its quarterly reviews of staff to contain a much wider variety of information. While most of this information is only usable for Fire Suppression policy (as per Project Daredevil’s cover-up policy), certain parts of it are usable for Protocol Big Shot candidate selection.
The ranking criteria for Protocol Big Shot in order of weight are as follows:
- Current performance rating (top quartile preferred)
- Isolation from Foundation support networks, except in cases the network can all be used for Protocol Big Shot
- Lack of anomalous properties
- Presence of a low-visibility vice
- Projected career length (this criteria is primarily used to select between similar candidates)
Candidates are drawn using a mixture of these criteria with the help of Pipi.aic. Pipi.aic will select around ten candidates per Secure Facility and send it to Project Daredevil Selection Officers for manual review. This is done in case Pipi.aic selects someone for Protocol Big Shot in error (such as if the individual is notable in their Secure Facility or across the Foundation).
Site quota: There are to be no fewer than two, no more than five concurrent SCP-L997-1 instances per Site at any time. This is done to minimize risk of the SCP-L997 cycle being noticed.
Note: Selection Officers have raised concerns that top-quartile personnel are, by definition, the Foundation’s most difficult to replace. However, applying these concerns poses the risk of the SCP-L997-1 instance not having enough potential to solve a task. Ranking criteria will not change.
RAISA Note: No roster of Project Daredevil Selection Officers, past or present, survived recovery. A fragment recovered alongside the main document appears to be a part of a personnel list, but only a single line is eligible: “… transferred to Site-17’s Daredevil roster with approval from Site Director Thomas Graham.” The identity and current status of this individual cannot be discerned. The Ethics Committee has investigated Site Director Thomas Graham, and found no connection to the current SCP-L997 investigation.
Pipi.aic was an .aic designed by AIAD for the Administrative Department’s HR section. Pipi.aic had free access to all personnel records below Level 5 Clearance across the Foundation, including the Foundation’s regional branches. Pipi.aic only had access to these personnel records to prevent context drift. Right before SCP-L997’s documentation was recovered, Pipi.aic suffered critical damage from an unknown source, rendering it inoperable and its memory banks heavily corrupted. AIAD personnel are attempting to recover any data possible as part of the investigation into SCP-L997.
Addendum L997.12: Records Sanitization Policy
Upon an instance’s transformation into SCP-L997-2, RAISA is to purge and replace all internal documentation connecting the instance to the Foundation, regardless of its clearance level prior to reclassification. This is separate from, and is in addition to, the amnesticization of the SCP-L997-2 instance. While RAISA HiCom members of Project Daredevil have raised concerns with this policy to the Overseer Council on concerns of information loss and the risk of normal RAISA staff discovering missing information, it has dramatically lowered the amount of Ethics Committee inquiries on unknown staff turnover.
Departments outside of RAISA HiCom, Project Daredevil, and the Overseer Council are to be unaware any sort of sanitization has occurred. Standard staffing-gap explanations are typically sufficient to explain the disappearance of the SCP-L997-2 instance. Class C amnestics are recommended to remove the memory of the SCP-L997-2 instance’s existence from its coworkers if the personnel involved keep pushing for answers on what happened to the SCP-L997-2 instance.
RAISA Note: The specific individual(s) in RAISA’s directorate who raised concerns are unnamed in surviving documents. All members of RAISA’s past and present directorate, in interviews relating to the SCP-L997 case, act as if they knew nothing about the anomaly. No evidence can be found to link any individual within RAISA to SCP-L997. As such, RAISA Director Maria Jones has moved to prevent access to the SCP-L997 file to RAISA members outside of the RAISA-EC joint-investigation team to prevent risk of data loss.
Addendum L997.24: O5 Level Survey of SCP-L997-2
The Statistics Division estimates that SCP-L997-2b, while only accounting for an estimated 6% of total SCP-L997-2 cases, may account for as much as 2% of the world’s chronic homeless population. This has been derived from referencing behavioral markers against anonymized shelter data, and is likely extremely inaccurate.
Baseline SCP-L997-2 instances present no behavioral marker distinct from non-anomalous chronic homelessness and are thus not resolvable against any available dataset. As baseline SCP-L997-2 instances occur at a substantially higher rate than SCP-L997-2b, their contributions to the chronic homeless population are expected to exceed the 2b figure by a considerable margin.
Standard records sanitization as per L997 Protocol use prevents any sort of cross-data verification against Foundation documentation, as the needed documentation no longer exists. No change to SCP-L997 usage and SCP-L997-2 disposal policy is recommended.
The material below was not part of the SCP-L997 documentation as originally recovered. It has been appended separately by RAISA following the events described within.