SCP-3999, I am at the center of everything that happens to me.
It's sometimes said that perception is reality, and for our typical existence, that might
often be the case.
The SCP Universe has a tendency to change our rules however, and reality is a much more
fluid concept there.
SCP-3999 is a complicated piece, about both perception and reality, and what might happen
when an entity can control both.
This SCP is not like most others, and something will quite likely get lost in summarization,
but let's begin.
SCP-3999 is not written like a normal scp report, and glancing through it will show
partial sentences, ramblings, strikethroughs, and few clear answers.
Before we go through the bulk of the report, it's probably best if I spoil the ending first,
to give context to everything else.
SCP-3999 is an entity capable of bending and changing reality to a high degree.
This entity was somehow contained by the foundation, and placed in an airtight cell at the bottom
of a kilometer long shaft lined with acid resistant plates and scranton reality anchors.
A researcher, James Talloran, was assigned to scp-3999, and disappeared almost immediately
afterwards.
His body was later discovered at the bottom of the containment cell, although no one had
any knowledge of 3999's existence, and none of the foundation databases showed any record
of it.
The bulk of the scp-3999 document was found as a text file on talloran's phone.
So, 3999 is a highly powerful reality bender, but where is it, why did talloran die, and
why does no one remember it?
The answers are in the document, but not exactly cleanly spelled out.
The report is basically evidence of a battle between the entity and talloran, as this reality
bender decided to take a special interest in this specific researcher.
Let me read some text at the start to give you an idea.
a'SCP-3999 cannot be contained at the present moment, and currently poses a ZK Class End-of-reality
scenario.
The most advisable course of action is for Researcher Talloran, believed to be the focal
point of SCP-3999, to remove himself from contact with all Foundation sites and personnel
to avoid further collateral damage to Foundation property.
It is theorized that if Researcher Talloran is contained in an extremely secluded area,
then the destructive capabilities of SCP-3999 will temporarily cease"
Cease is crossed out however, followed by stop, be contained, and preserve some remnants.
It goes on to say that talloran should be removed from all human contact, followed by
suggesting talloran to commit suicide, but that's also crossed out.
Then it says Talloran cannot leave the foundation, which is also crossed out and replaced with
saying Talloran should remove himself from contact with all animal life.
Like I said, this is not typical of an scp document, and it's easy to be left confused.
These statements are the beginning of the process by which the entity is torturing talloran.
The entity is capable of bending reality to suit its whims, and it's conceivably powerful
enough to accomplish anything it wishes, but it has set its sights entirely on talloran.
It proceeds to force talloran to suffer, die, and watch others die, over and over for its
own amusement.
It describes sending trained foundation agents to execute talloran's mother and father, along
with his sister.
It discusses how talloran was forced to watch as his sister was nailed to a wall and lit
on fire.
All of his colleagues that have had contact with talloran are summarily executed or poisoned,
including the 05 council.
The report then goes into containing 3999 in another scp, 2432, an anomalous hotel room.
This results in the creation of a dimensional anomaly that leads to an infinite hotel.
A number of strange organisms exist in this alternate dimension, such as armor plated
wolves, large cephalods called behemoths, and crabs using gutted playstation 2s as shells.
Exploration teams also found an entity superficially resembling a human called researcher talloran,
but they executed it after it asked about scp-3999.
3999 is removed from 2432, causing the alternate dimension to disappear, and the report continues.
It continually alternates between keeping talloran with 3999 and keeping him away from
it, and occasionally having him terminated.
Talloran has an interview with a foundation doctor, but claims that he feels likes hes
in a dream.
He says that reality is starting to feel less real.
When he asks the doctor his name, the doctor apparently just makes a noise with his mouth,
and talloran becomes increasingly confused, wondering how a word could be redacted in
a normal conversation.
Talloran continually battles with 3999, attempting to remove himself from the situation or otherwise
nullify 3999's power, but he's unsuccessful.
The situations that 3999 involves Talloran in become increasingly strange, involving
characters from Harry Potter, candy, the church of the broken god, other SCPs, Patton oswalt,
buddhism, and cats.
At one point, Talloran is shown in 3999's containment cell from the format of a screenplay,
as he slams on the door begging to be let out, saying that he's trapped.
He finally says, that he's trapped in whatever this place is with this thing, and there's
no outside reality anymore, but he struggles to understand exactly what this thing is.
It seems that talloran is starting to gain some awareness of his predicament, and slowly
gaining more control.
He attempts to contain 3999 using a strange recursive joke resembling the start of an
aristocrats joke, but it seems to fail.
The text begins to show more attempts to contain 3999, using a melon, or a grave, or a roach
motel.
These attempts are all striked through and fail.
Talloran continues to be tortured with tapeworms, executions, family deaths, inflation, and
more nonsense.
Talloran attempts to define 3999 as something besides a reality bender, proclaiming it to
be things such as mike pence, several moldy blankets, scp-055, a murderous penguin, gary
gygax's kidney, a pillow, papaya and mango salad, brutalist architecture, and so on.
These are all nullified.
SCP-3999 is contained using the same procedures as scp-2845, the deer, with all of the containment
personnel being talloran.
The report descends even further into nonsense, repeating the word only a great number of
times.
Then we finally get an interview log between talloran and scp-3999, and talloran claims
that he's finally in charge.
We don't get to see 3999's dialogue due to data corruption, but this is the most control
we've seen from talloran so far.
We learn that 3999 has been torturing him for over three millions years, but he's survived,
as opposed to 3999 who he says has never lived at all.
Talloran is numb to the horror and pain, and is prepared to keep fighting.
It ends apparently with talloran killing himself, which manages to kill 3999 as well and reset
things back to normal.
The foundation has no idea what 3999 is or was, and no record of it exists.
So, we have a powerful reality bender that took a perverse interest in a specific individual
and tortured him for three million years before the cycle was suddenly broken.
This is certainly enough for an SCP, and isn't that dissimilar to the plot of I have no mouth
and I must scream, but scp-3999 also carries another angle with it, a meta angle.
Essentially, 3999 represents the author themself, going through the process of horror writing,
subjecting characters to countless whims but erasing them and trying something different,
over and over.
We get the best look at this angle in a box towards the bottom of the report, written
from the author's perspective.
They describe a few different scp ideas they toyed with involving talloran, but nothing
was sticking.
They couldn't get talloran out of their heads though, spending weeks thinking about ideas
until eventually they had an incident involving sleep paralysis.
They hallucinated talloran rising up at the foot of their bed, laughing and clutching
a dagger.
He was joined by a multitude of other horrors that the author had been thinking about for
the last year, all various scps.
They asked the author why they spent so much time bothering with idiotic horror creations.
Talloran then took the dagger and disembowled the author, and they woke up, followed by
immedaitely writing scp-3999.
This is meant as a swan song for the author, the last thing they write for the scp-wiki
in order to break free from an addiction, just as 3999 was addicted to torturing talloran.
Meta concepts run all the way through the report, and I'd be lying if I said I understood
them all, as many are unique to the author.
SCP-3999 is undoubtedly a unique scp, both in concept and form, and it has its share
of both fans and detractors.
There is an argument that it's less of an SCP and more of a tale, but its rating on
the site speaks for itself either way.
Lordstonefish certainly poured themselves into this work, to a far greater degree than
most scp authors, and that seems to have worked out, at least as far as popularity is concerned.
The SCP-wiki is filled with grotesque horrors and nightmares, and fans continually crave
more, making us not that much different than scp-3999 either.