OK, I’ve read a lot of descriptions of Jesus, but none of them had him as an indestructible bird guy with fangs in his hands and feet, a ball of superheated gas in his brain and the ability to turn dust into gold.
Hi, everyone, ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-6109, “Melitzah [3:13.30:33.14:43.20:30.97:19]” by FLOORBOARDS. (Original Reddit posts are here and here.) I’d like to thank FLOORBOARDS and the mods for all their help, I really appreciate it and I couldn’t do it without you all. Before we begin, I’ve got the usual disclaimer for you- this isn’t my work, I didn’t write this and it’s not going to be a perfect representation of the author’s vision, sorry. Also, due to the nature of this SCP, this article is going to get pretty sacrilegious. Sorry about that. (Disclaimer: the writer of this SCP is Jewish; I am not.)
Before we begin, some background: this SCP was written for GoblinCon. What’s GoblinCon, I hear some of you wondering? Well, long story short, there was this weird glitch that affected five different SCP slots, making them so they couldn’t be filled by an article. These slots then got dubbed ‘slot goblins’. Once the glitch got fixed, GoblinCon was held to find an article to officially fill them. Each slot was given a theme, and people wrote an article to suit that theme. This article (obviously) won the 6109 slot, where the theme was ‘battle royale’.
One more thing: This is the first installment in FLOORBOARDS' series The Father, The Son and the Holy Spirit. You can find the hub for the series right here. Check it out, by all means.
And with that, let's get going. This article has a very interesting start: instead of the usual article format, there’s just a big box of text headed by ‘Special Containment Procedures’, and then there’s a collapsible. Now, the text may not seem important, but it is actually very important for later. So, let’s take a look!
Part One: I Know That We Are Young, And I Know That You May Love Me…
Special Containment Procedures: I'm glad we're breaking up. You're not the guy I wanna marry anymore.
Well, that’s a hell of a way to start this note, especially since as far as we can tell, this has precisely sweet fuck all to do with the Foundation. (Unless someone’s dumping a researcher, that is. If they are, the researcher probably deserves it, let's be honest.)
Generally, one can interpret ‘You’re not the guy I want to marry anymore’ in two ways: one, the writer wants to marry someone else, or two, the person they’re dumping is a cunt. Let’s see which one it is, shall we?
There are a lot of regrets, yeah. I know there are some things I could've handled better. Some things I shouldn't have said. Lines I shouldn't have crossed. But I hope you understand that I only did it because I was scared of you.
Yep. Definitely a cunt.
I don't like feeling cornered, and now you make me feel cornered. I wish things were different. I wish I could be the person that could handle what you need handling. I wish I could take it. I wish I had the space for you. But at the same time — meet me in the middle here — I wish you didn't yell in public. I wish you didn't start crying when I asked you not to do something. I wish you didn't tell me all that stuff about you days after we moved in together. You call me a closed off liar with a terrible secret world but what you've got in you is way worse. I always told you what I could, but you were proud of what you did.
*prolonged wince* Ouch. Yeah, this dude’s an absolute cunt.
So I'm glad you're calling the whole thing off. I wish I had done it sooner. But at the same time, every time I start to miss it, I just gotta remind myself that being with you… really fucking sucked.
So we're never gonna have the big proposal ever again. That's cool with me, believe me. But I hope one day, maybe in 20-30 years from now, if I ever run into you again? I hope that day, I can get on one knee and ask my own question…
The question is the collapsible. So, what question might that be?
Are We Cool Yet?
*punches the air* Yes!
Sorry, sorry. This one might need a bit of explaining.
So, back when I first started reading SCP stuff, it was… a really long time ago. A really, really long time ago. Like, back when the questions you had to answer to get in asked you who people like Dr Rights were. Basically, it was when a lot of GOIs were in their infancy.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Are We Cool Yet? is a GOI of pretentious, sociopathic artists who like to make art that kills and maims innocent people. …OK the last bit isn’t actually their oeuvre, as such, they just don’t really care if people die because of their works, so while not all of their creations involve people dying, a lot of them do (both intentionally and unintentionally). You might recall them from such works as ‘put an anti-shark in a swimming pool to make a point about panic because the ensuing chaos killed more people than the anti-shark did’ and ‘short abstract films that rewire aspects of your personality’.
Nowadays, you don’t see quite so many AWCY skips, as I understand that the GOI as a whole is now considered pretentious, maybe a little outdated, and… well… not cool. (That’s as far as I know- I’m hardly up to date with the current trends.) But back when I first started reading skips, AWCY were in their prime.
And, like… to be honest, AWCY are exactly my bag, mainly because the intersection of art and murder/body horror is something I love reading about. (Before anyone asks, no, I didn’t watch Hannibal, but I did read a lot about it and I really admire how creative the writers got with the murders. Some definite points for artistry there.)
So, while this particular skip doesn’t involve artistic murder, I’m just really thrilled to be declassing an AWCY skip. Makes me feel like a teenager again.
…fuck, I’m old.
Anyway, here’s the description:
Description: SCP-6109 collectively refers to 3 13 30 33 an unspecified number of identical skeletal remains that have been definitively proven to be those of Yehoshua Ben Yosef, the historical individual who would be mythologized as Jesus the Christ. Instances of SCP-6109 have been discovered in several locations across the world.
Well, this is interesting. I’m not exactly a historian, but for anyone who doesn’t know, historians basically agree that the person we now call Jesus Christ was a real man who existed and was crucified, it’s just that the other facts of his life (and that’s not even getting into the whole God part) are up for debate. So here we have a fuckton of skeletons that are all of Jesus, and have been discovered all over the world and in different time periods.
(…OK, it would be pretty fucking funny if it turned out that all the dead Jesuses are another case of 4107 again.)
Also, note the numbers: they all have a three in them somewhere, as in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Nice little Easter egg (pun not intended) there. (They’re also the first four verse numbers in the title of the article.)
The remains possess the same anomalous qualities in addition to sharing physical and genetic characteristics. These include:
Indestructibility;
Anatomical resemblance to the pneumatic bones of avians, including hollow cavities inside osteons;
Ontokinetic activity within the back of the skull; typically manifesting as a five-pointed, or star-shaped, ball of superheated gas which is visible through the eye sockets;
Teeth growing out of large punctures in both palms (except for canines);
Teeth growing out of large punctures in the bottom of the feet (except for canines);
Instant conversion of dust into gold particles upon contact;
Presence of a second, smaller ribcage inside of, and disconnected from, the larger ribcage;
An ambient Akiva radiation rating of 14.43, one of the highest levels of Akiva radiation ever recorded.
OK, I’ve read a lot of descriptions of Jesus, but none of them had him as an indestructible bird guy with fangs in his hands and feet, a ball of superheated gas in his brain and the ability to turn dust into gold. (I’ll file that one in my ‘contender for the weirdest thing I’ve said in my life’ competition folder.) And apparently he’s definitely Jesus, so that’s a good thing to know.
As for Akiva radiation, here's a quote I found:
A form of non-electromagnetic radiation that is directly correlated with the amount of religious faith a person holds. Capable of being measured (normally in terms of centiakivas.) The focus of the faith does not appear to be important. Affects “demonic” anomalies negatively and is positively correlated with the presence or attention of certain powerful anomalous entities.
Makes sense that they'd get a high reading from Jesus. And note the rating- it's another number from the title.
A note tells us that all the Jesuses (Jesi?) died between 2030 and 1997 years ago. We then get a table arranged by birth year, with the locations where the Jesuses were found and the Foundation’s best guess at the cause of death. They vary a lot, but it should be noted that he got crucified twice, and both of these times, he wound up in a cave with a box of scraps in Jerusalem.
The Vatican City's Relic Recovery Office located the first 13 corpses between 1962 and 1965. Soon after the Second Vatican Council's conclusion, Pope Paul VI turned the anomaly over to the Foundation for safekeeping. The existence of further instances was unverified at the time, but because of persistent legends surrounding Yehoshua Ben Yosef's travels, further research continued up until December 1997, when the number of instances found exceeded the abilities of the designated containment team.
Honestly, the mental image of any Pope as a Foundation agent is pretty damn funny, even if that’s not exactly what we’re looking at here. Anyway, we’ve got a lot of Jesuses. A fuckton of Jesuses. The Foundation is up to its eyeballs in dead Jesuses.
Since then, containment has been moved from active to passive — the Foundation will investigate and acquire more manifestations of SCP-6109 if the anomaly is brought up by an outside group, but the Foundation itself will no longer actively track the anomaly.
Makes sense, given the sheer amount of dead Jesus we’re talking about.
As of Wed Oct 04 2023,
13543 new SCP-6109 entities have been recovered through these means.
So, the date is obviously whatever date it is that you’re looking at the article. And the number? Every second that you have the page open, it goes up by ten. So we have enough dead Jesuses to sink the Titanic.
Due to the consistent rate of which SCP-6109 instances are recovered, concerns have been raised over the possibility of retrocausal manipulation. Since each cadaver is proven to belong to Yehoshua Ben Yosef, but they all appear to have died along different timelines, the fact they are all existing in the present day may suggest a temporal anomaly.
Well, obviously something fucky is going on here, and a temporal anomaly seems as good a guess as any, whether it’s something travelling back in time, something travelling forward in time, or different timelines getting jumbled together. At present, there’s really no way to tell what it is.
Subsequently, the former containment procedures have been reenacted, with the Department of Temporal Anomalies placed in control of the project (see Special Containment Procedures).
Except we can’t see the Special Containment Procedures, because they’re taken up by some pretentious artist’s post-breakup letter.
Anyway, the Foundation usually bans anything that involves trying to interfere with Jesus, because, y’know, he’s kind of important to the course of human history, but since someone else is already doing that, they’ll let it slide this one time. They decide to send someone to investigate, and pick a guy called Muhammad al-Taqi, who was a former Director of Tactical Theology, knows a ton about religious history and is fluent in multiple dialects of Hebrew. Sounds like a good choice to me. They send him back to one day after Jesus is crucified, along with rations and supplies to last a year, and then wait for him to achieve his mission.
We then get an addendum: there’s a report of another dead Jesus in the basement of a house belonging to a woman named Diane Duyser, in Florida. (Fun fact: Diane Duyser is a real person, and here’s why she was mentioned in the article.)
Anyway, when the Vatican’s relic officers investigate, they find no dead Jesus, just a papyrus scroll that’s been carefully sealed between two panes of glass. It was created nearly 2000 years ago, and is written in both Biblical Hebrew and Judeo-Yemeni Arabic. They took the scroll to examine it, discovered that it was either made by or associated with the Foundation, and then the Vatican got pissed.
Despite attempts by the Foundation's ambassador, Sheldon Katz, Esq., to quell discontentment, the Office threatened to use the scroll as evidence against the Foundation's competence to the wider normalcy-protection community. In order for the Foundation to retrieve the scroll and stop its publicization, they issued the following demands:
The release of all information pertaining to the Foundation's investigation into the life of Yehoshua Ben Yosef;
The return of the body of the SCP-6109 instance who was killed in 34 CE;
A private, formal apology addressed to the Pope.
Bird-Christ, you send one guy back in time to investigate Jesus and the Pope gets all mad about it. What a whiner.
The O5 Council deferred these demands to the Department of Temporal Anomalies. After three days of discussion, Temporal Anomalies acquiesced to the demands with no alterations.
The requested SCP-6109 instance is on-route to Vatican City by helicopter. Sheldon Katz, Esq., was given the scroll to personally present to Temporal Anomalies, and is currently drafting a message to the Pope.
I feel like this is the one time in history that ‘I’m sorry if you were offended’ would constitute a valid apology. I mean, for fuck’s sake, the Foundation is up to its eyeballs in dead indestructible bird-man Jesuses and the Vatican’s mad that they want to know what the fuck is going on? It’s not like they told al-Taqi to fix the problem by killing Jesus!
So, we now get the translation of the scroll. It’s from al-Taqi to the Director, it’s set out like a Bible verse, and it’s a record of what he says is the answer to the dead bird-Jesus question.
(I played bass for The Dead Bird-Jesus Question.)
He starts by saying that he followed Jesus for two years across three countries. Finally, he cornered Jesus at a dock. Jesus planned to sail somewhere, but he wouldn’t tell anyone where he’s going. He rented a ship from a guy who wanted to know his destination…
Yehoshua laughed in return, and spoke: "I will tell you when I return." The fisher nodded, and He continued, "<unintelligible>?" The fisher patted His shoulder in acceptance.
The ‘unintelligible’ part is a link to the AWCY hub, so you heard it here first: Jesus was a pretentious artist.
al-Taqi says that he now understood the purpose of the anomaly, which is more than I can say, but he didn’t get the method, so he kept following Jesus.
So, Jesus then goes to the nearby village to get a crew, and al-Taqi straight up asks to join him on the journey. Jesus asks if he understands what Jesus’ purpose is here; al-Taqi says no, but he wants to join him regardless. Jesus at first says no, but then he suddenly changes his mind and says that al-Taqi can join him, but Jesus knows he’s not a true believer. That will change in time, he says, but for now, Jesus is fully aware that al-Taqi is not one of his flock.
Jesus finally amasses a group of 13 followers including al-Taqi. So basically, the Twelve Apostles 2.0, plus one time-traveller.
So, the good ship Jesus Was Cool sets sail. al-Taqi wants to inspect Jesus’ possessions, but he discovers that Jesus is sleeping on the bow of the ship. al-Taqi is understandably confused by this, but he doesn’t have time to think about it- Jesus wants his new crew to get him to his secret destination as fast as possible.
Cut to several months later. They’ve been going the whole time, and Jesus has been working alongside them. al-Taqi says that Jesus was as kind as all the texts say, but he seems weirdly detached from them, and sometimes goes below-decks and vanishes entirely. One time, he goes below-decks and isn’t seen for several days straight. The weather gets really misty, but they think they’re on the right course. The next night, al-Taqi goes to sleep and wakes up in the Void.
…OK, not literally, but this section gives me serious Dishonored vibes.
Basically, everything seems to have stopped, nobody else is around, and the ship has become strange, unfamiliar, simplified. al-Taqi explores for a while and finally makes it back onto the deck, where he finds Jesus, staring out to sea, and also notes that there’s a huge amount of mist in the distance. Jesus calls out to him, telling him to come join him at the bow, and then he asks, what can al-Taqi see? al-Taqi says he can only see the mist. Jesus nods and says that mist is just water, millions of droplets rising into the sky, and the same is true of him. And then this happens:
19 What I saw was this — He spread His arms across the bow of the ship, stepping almost out into the air, and split in twain, then again, then again, then again, then again, and out in the distance I saw more ships emerging from the mist. They too split in twain, then again, until the sky and sea and land beneath were covered in Him and His ships, sailing to a billion shores, a billion coasts.
20 His voice, from Above, told me this: "There is no where I have gone and no where I have been. My presence is derived from absence. Where you walked I did not walk; I leave no footprints, for I do not traverse. There is no where where you can find me, for from there, I will disappear, too."
21 "I walk on water, indeed, I do, for the ocean is a place with no memory. The sea does not look up at its traversers. It looks down into the blackness, its inky emptiness, and it forgets. There are no footprints on waves. Where light does not touch, beneath the waves? There is no where, and that is where I will be."
22 He fell down — all of Him, in a heap, and the flags on the ships became matted and black and the ships became empty. With no one to steer, my ship drifted off into mist, narrowly sliding between a flurry of sister-ships, identical in their dilapidation.
So in other words, Jesus committed mass mitosis.
Now, the word ‘absence’ links to an Unreality tale. I don’t know much about Unreality, nor do I actually understand it at all, so I’ll just let what FLOORBOARDS told me speak for itself:
but essentially Yehoshua is made of the same Unreal Stuff. He's going back to unreality when he disappears - this doesn't mean he stopped existing or anything, just he's changed the world around him through his absence
al-Taqi calls out to Jesus, asking where he’s going. Jesus says again, 'No where’.
My disheartened eyes must have met his, somewhere in the sky, as, his final words to me were this: "<unintelligible.>"
I wanted to answer no, but in my heart I believe we were.
I mean no offence to any believers, but Jesus’ last words being ‘Are we cool yet?’ is genuinely hilarious.
29 I know not where I sail to next, only that I will arrive there, and I will arrive with a corpse. This is a delivery — all these ships, deliveries, merchant ships carrying cargo.
30 I know not where He wishes to be delivered, only that I will have to follow him.
31 I will implant this in the dirt wherever I may arrive. I hope this is of use to you.
32 Muhammad al-Taqi, forever —
33 Secure, contain, protect.
And that’s the end of the letter. Note the next line.
The whereabouts of Muhammad al-Taqi are unknown, but scouting missions across the known SCP-6109 sites have been authorized.
See, what we get after that is a blank space. A really big blank space. FLOORBOARDS confirmed for me that there’s nothing hidden, encoded or anything along those lines there- it’s just a big ol’ empty space. But then we smash cut to this.
Interviewed: Muhammad al-Taqi, PoI-6109
Interviewer: Sheldon Katz, Esq., ambassador for the Office of Tactical Theology
Foreword: Before PoI-6109 was released back into civilian life, he was given the standard intake test a second time to see if anything had changed since his mnestic treatment.
Whoa, whoa, hang on. al-Taqi’s whereabouts (and whenabouts) were unknown, and now he’s suddenly been found? And he’s not working for the Foundation anymore, he’s a POI and they’re releasing him? When did that happen? Something’s fucky here, people.
So, basically, the interview consists of Katz asking al-Taqi a bunch of questions that are Foundation code phrases. al-Taqi doesn’t seem to recognise any of them, so he’s released, and that’s all.
Closing Statement: PoI-6109 was recovered in a confused state at his home in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Despite enhanced interrogation, followed by mnestic treatment, PoI-6109 does not recall his employment with the Foundation.
The word ‘home’ links to SCP-1551, the house in a constant state of disrepair that forces people to break up with their partner, move into the house, try to repair it themselves, and then they eventually kill themselves. I’ll come back to that later. But note that we have no idea how or when he got back there.
Governmental and internal records diverge heavily on PoI-6109's personal history — it appears he continued to live a civilian life during the years where he should have been the Director of the Department of Tactical Theology. Records recovered from "reality restructuring" resistant databases indicate that this civilian identity is the true chain of events; effectively, the only evidence of PoI-6109's Foundation employment comes from the Foundation itself.
So things got really fucky, and now it looks like the al-Taqi who worked for the Foundation has essentially been erased from the timeline. The only possible explanation I have right now is that the wrong al-Taqi came back, but I don’t know how, or if that’s correct.
PoI-6109 is under protective surveillance for the time being. The building across from his home has been purchased and renovated by Foundation agents to facilitate this.
Since his recovery, no further SCP-6109 instances have been found. The instances already in containment have begun to show signs of structural decay.
The Vatican has returned the body of the crucified SCP-6109 instance on the grounds that they do not believe it is authentic. All instances in Foundation custody have been moved to Acroamatic Abatement.
So, since al-Taqi came back, there’s no more dead Jesuses turning up, and all the dead Jesuses are no longer anything special, they’re just normal corpses, so the Foundation’s going to destroy them with magic.
Anyway, that’s the end of the article, excepting another really big blank space, which I’ll come back to later.
Part Two: She’s Not Broken, She’s Just A Baby
Before we get into the deeper meanings, there’s one last thing to mention: the title. I’ll kick this one over to Wikipedia.
Melitzah (Hebrew: מְלִיצָה) is a medieval Hebrew literary device in which a mosaic of fragments and phrases from the Hebrew Bible as well as from rabbinic literature or the liturgy is fitted together to form a new statement of what the author intends to express at the moment.
The numbers in the title are clearly meant to reference specific verses. I initially thought this would be from the Torah, but it’s actually from the Bible, and there’s a good reason for that. The specific verses are in the title, separated by periods, so let’s see what we’ve got here, shall we?
First up, James 3:13:
13 Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.
Second, Proverbs 30:33:
33 For as churning cream produces butter, and as twisting the nose produces blood, so stirring up anger produces strife.”
Third, Mark 14:43:
43 Just as he was speaking, Judas, one of the Twelve, appeared. With him was a crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and the elders.
Fourth, John 20:30:
30 Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book.
And finally, Psalm 97:19…
…which doesn’t actually exist. I’ll come back to that later.
So, with that done, let’s get introspective, shall we?
There are two big clues to what’s going on here: the first is the letter that’s in place of the special containment procedures, and the second is this bit from FLOORBOARDS’ author post on the discussion page:
Dealing with heartbreak is a messy, awful thing — especially for anomalous artists. Sometimes you just need to corrode the image of an all loving figure to get your own head back on track. Just make sure not to go too far when you're fucking with the past. You don't always know who will end up getting hurt…
I was able to put a fair amount of this together from what we got here, and FLOORBOARDS kindly clarified the rest for me. So, who wants to know what the fuck’s going on here? I knew you would.
So, our sad tale begins with two artists in AWCY, who for the purpose of this article I’ll call Matthew and Leah. They date, form a relationship and get engaged, but Matthew winds up dumping Leah. The thing is, while Matthew was a shitcunt (as Leah’s note at the beginning established), that doesn’t mean that everything’s magically fine just because they’re not together anymore. Leah’s still heartbroken, and AWCY doesn’t exactly go in for stuff like ‘therapy’ or ‘reasonable responses to personal tragedies’.
There’s a critical element here that needs to be mentioned: both Matthew and Leah are very religious, but Matthew is Christian and Leah is Jewish. So, because she’s heartbroken and mad and lashing out, Leah decides to get back at Matthew by attacking something he values (more than her, anyway): his religion. And she does this by essentially trying to prove a whole bunch of myths about Jesus right at once (I believe the train of thought was something along the lines of ‘If you want to believe that this is right, I’ll make all these myths right at the same time- they can’t all be right at once, and yet they are and I hope your brain breaks trying to contemplate that, you bastard’), instead of just locking herself in her room and crying her eyes out while listening to the same boygenius song on repeat for three hours like the rest of us.
See, there’s a whole bunch of stories about where Jesus went in the ‘lost years’, a period of about 18 years between his childhood and when he took up doing his thing. There’s all manner of myths and stories about where he went, including Tibet, India, England and many more. So, that list of Jesus corpses found? They all correspond to a myth about where Jesus went. But proving all those myths right means a lot of dead Jesuses. A ton of dead Jesuses. Enough dead Jesuses to sink the Titanic.
(However, FLOORBOARDS did clarify that Leah didn’t turn Jesus into an indestructible bird-man- apparently he was just naturally like that. Quoth the BOARDS, “I tried to give a biological basis for some of the miracles he performed in both canonical scripture and apocryphal text”. The rest are explained by Jesus being a reality-bender, and should that become known to the Foundation, we will probably get a Tale where everyone has to talk Clef out of shooting Jesus.)
So, because all the dead Jesuses are screwing with the Veil, the Foundation eventually sends a guy in to investigate. Doing so winds up destabilizing the whole shebang, but Leah never intended it to go on forever, so that’s OK. But because it was destabilised, the universe itself stepped in to correct the temporal issue. I can’t tell you what actually happened or what it did, but it probably resembled something from one of the trippier anime. End result: no more dead Jesuses, the dead Jesuses that already exist lose their indestructibility, and al-Taqi reappears- but not the same way he left.
See, al-Taqi’s life gets reset so that he winds up in roughly the same state as before, minus the circumstances that led to him going back in time- the intention was never to form a temporal loop, after all, so his time with the Foundation gets erased. And he’s living in the depression house because the sequence of events that it maintains involves heartbreak, just like what happened to Leah (though I don’t think she had anything to do with him winding up in the house), it’s part of a temporal anomaly, and it’s in Argentina, which is where the current Pope is from.
And that’s where the story ends: Leah has at this point (hopefully) managed to chill out (at least somewhat) and won’t be making any more Jesuses, the Foundation doesn’t have to deal with any more dead Jesuses, and al-Taqi is probably going to wind up dead in the near future, ‘cause that’s what happens when you live in the depression house. (Yeah, I know that’s a depressing note to end it on, but I’m just a declasser, there’s not much I can do about it.)
Which leaves us with three things left to discuss. First, the title and the verses. I gave you the definition of ‘melitzah’ before- a number of fragments or phrases from the Torah (or in this case, the Bible) that are fit together to make a new meaning that relates to what the author wants to express. There’s a couple of other lines from the Wikipedia page that I want to include, so let’s look at that:
In Hebrew the word melitzah means satire, joke or witticism.
If he is successful in his use of melitzah, the author will arouse in the reader a particular set of images and associations which will add a certain texture and tone to what is being described—the chordal accompaniment, so to speak, to the melodic line.
FLOORBOARDS clarified for me that the verses are from Leah’s perspective. So, let’s look at these through the perspective of a bitter, heartbroken artist who’s feeling satirical, shall we?
James 3:13:
13 Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.
As FLOORBOARDS put it for me, "Who is wise and understanding among you" Not my ex! (slaps knee)
Proverbs 30:33:
33 For as churning cream produces butter, and as twisting the nose produces blood, so stirring up anger produces strife.”
I think we can infer this one: “Who stirred up anger and produced strife? My ex!”
Mark 14:43:
43 Just as he was speaking, Judas, one of the Twelve, appeared. With him was a crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and the elders.
And again from FLOORBOARDS, "And as he was speaking, Judas, one of the twelve appeared." Betrayal! Like my ex did! (slaps knee)”
John 20:30:
30 Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book.
This one, I believe, is meant to be along the lines of “Yeah, you believe all that stuff on blind faith? Well, I’ll show you what the truth really is!”
And finally, Psalm 97:19, which doesn’t exist. This segues neatly into the other thing I wanted to discuss, which is one of the big themes here: absence.
You can see it all over the article: the special containment procedures are absent. Matthew is absent in Leah’s life. Psalm 97:19 is absent from existence. Those two blank spaces are absent of anything that might otherwise be included in the article. al-Taqi is now absent from the Foundation. It’s about the spaces that are left when things abruptly exit our lives for whatever reason, how we react to that and what we wind up filling them with.
Finally, there’s one thing left to bring up: as I mentioned before, this article won the GoblinCon slot where the theme was ‘battle royale’. What does it have to do with battle royales, I hear you wondering? Well, I’ll give you what FLOORBOARDS said in the comment section:
A seemingly infinite amount of identical overpowered characters are spawned in, they die in different maps at different times, and the amount of them is overloading the surveyors, ending up in a reboot? That doesn’t sound familiar?
This came with a link to Fortnite video. I have never played Fortnite and know very little about it, but BOARFLOOREDS helpfully filled me in: there was an event in Fortnite in 2019 where the entire map got sucked into a black hole and there was literally nothing left. After about 36 hours, the black hole imploded, creating a whole new map called Reality Zero. And what was the game played in Reality Zero? Fortnite: Battle Royale.
And that’s the article. Thank you for reading this SCP, I hope you enjoyed it. Remember, there are better ways to work out your anger than by warping reality. I'll see you next time.
tl;dr: just go to therapy, for Jesus Indestructible Reality-Warping Bird-Man Christ’s sake.