CLASSIFIED - TOP SECRET
"I can tell you this. In about 1946, the close of the war, three women met in a diner in Tribeca and agreed to study something in the other’s building’s pipes. They hired contractors, engineers and the like, to rip the place apart, on a favor from their landlord, get that thing out.
We have it on file. Item SCP-Y16 is an abnormally large house centipede capable of excreting chitinous aggregate resembling plumbing fixtures—quit it, I’m not being funny. That’s what it says. Pull it up on fileserv.
They got the centipede out. Contractors wouldn't touch it once they'd seen it, so the story goes it was the youngest of the three who went into the wall herself, in a fur coat turned inside out, with an apple crate and a coal shovel. Put it in a box. Rented a studio above a shoe repair on Lispenard and that's the whole founding, that’s how the National Prevention Laboratory got started."
The National Prevention Laboratory, or "PrevLab" for short, was founded in 1946 in New York City by three college sophomores: Wrenley Wisp, Nazerke Sadykova, and Grace Noel. What began as a scrappy private venture quickly became the premiere, and only, company for extranormal pest control services — for those who could afford it.
Masquerading as exterminators, the Laboratory were granted the ability to condemn and quarantine as they saw fit, secreting paranormalities they found along the way for their own purposes. Their semi-legal, backdoor operations were often overlooked, or ignored, for the sake of public health. By the mid-50s, they had expensive contracts all across America, from the suburbs of California to the docks of Manhattan, working with some of the biggest companies in the country.
In the early '60s, the Nixon Administration forcibly annexed the company into the "Special Collections Program", a top-secret division of the United States Military, absorbing their assets and taking custody of the artefacts and entities PrevLab hadn't yet sold off to the highest bidder. The three founders were fast-tracked into high-ranking Program positions for compensation, with Wisp becoming director of Site-19.
To this day, most of the company's history and exact operations are still shrouded in mystery. The National Prevention Laboratory is remembered through half-forgotten rumours and a hazy paper trail of contracts, receipts and invoices. This documentation sometimes finds its way into the hands of civilians, who congregate to piece together what they can on fringe internet forums.
