They shed blood for the Scarlet King, but Site-42's true God was Silence.
The Scarlet Ichor
by Rez De Chaussee and Uncle Nicolini
SCP-9828 Amnesty Program
Individuals Present:
- Foundation Researcher Dr. José Gabriel Machado
- Former CI2M Captain Carlos Augustin Pinilla
Machado: You fed this thing until it developed an appetite. Why?
Pinilla: We needed a replacement for the Sangradores. Those rogue blood mages were a strategic liability! Crazy mercs who would just as soon kill us as kill for us!
Machado: And that's why you built the Red Block. No need to hire child soldiers when you can just make your own.
Pinilla: We didn't build the Red Block. We found the Red Block.
Machado: Excuse me?
Pinilla: Something or someone put it there. We thought it was an alchemical engine. We thought the Scarlet King would bless our forces if we fed Her.
Machado: And the wanton slaughter, was that a fringe benefit?
Item#: 9828
Level4
Containment Class:
keter
Secondary Class:
{$secondary-class}
Disruption Class:
{$disruption-class}
Risk Class:
{$risk-class}
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-9828 is to be surrounded by a fifty-square-mile Exclusion Zone under the supervision of MTF Eos-4444 ("Blood Angels").
Image of the SCP-9828 Exclusion Zone.
The interior surfaces of SCP-9828 are to be sterilized daily with a multi-stage biocide sourced from living human tissue. All sigils must be repainted with two coats of a Hematite-based mixture with the blood of a freshly exsanguinated calf. This calf should be butchered at dusk, the definition of which is to be determined by a specialist's assessment of meteorological conditions. Staff given these responsibilities should undergo rigorous screening for any unhealed wounds, and any possessing such is to be denied access.
All unauthorized individuals found in the Exclusion Zone are to be terminated without exception.
Pinilla: Oh, and the Foundation has clean hands? Tell me, what did you do with the wretches you "saved" from the Red Block?
Machado: We practice necessary cruelty. And there are lines we don't cross unless the need is truly dire.
Pinilla: Most of the time, that's what a murderer thinks they are.
Machado: Fine. There are only murderers in this room, but you didn't just kill them, did you? The survivors all remember wishing you had.
Pinilla: Hmmph.
Machado: So tell me, Captain. What dire need was worth what you did to those people?
Description: SCP-9828 refers to the Red Block at the former location of Site-42, a CI2M filtration camp for civilian and military prisoners.
SCP-9828 is a large cube-like structure two stories in height. The surface of the object is a dark shade of red and covered with sigils of an unknown origin. The sigils were originally black, but have since changed to a gold color with a texture resembling liquid mercury.
The interior of SCP-9828 is home to the Ingestion Process, a hemomantic ritual with unclear repercussions or purposes. Walls within the object are covered with hundreds of holes with a 30 cm radius and 10 cm in depth. A 13-meter-deep well has been excavated into the floor, with the concave surface consisting of an unidentified obsidian-like composite.
During the First Occult Proxy War, the height of Site-42's operation, SCP-9828 was the Ingestion Center for 90% of its inmates. According to CI2M documentation, SCP-9828 consumed upwards of 50 individuals a day.
Pinilla: We discovered that the artifact was a blood magic catalyst, but the energy was irretrievable. It covets blood. Those who tried channeling its power were drained to dust on the spot. And we could not hire Sangradores to take their place. If they learned what we were doing, they would never work with us again.
Machado: For the record, are you saying it was all for nothing?
Pinilla: <Clears throat.>
Machado: I'll remind you again of our agreement.
Pinilla: It was all for nothing.
Machado: So you butchered thousands to learn you were wasting your time?
Pinilla: No. We learned that after the first dozen.
Machado: You knew? You knew?!
Pinilla: <Inaudible>
Machado: And you just kept feeding it?! Why?
Document 9828-A: Excerpts from Survivor Testimony
TESTIMONY 9828-A
In S-42, pain was life. Pain meant they needed something from you.
They shackled me to the floor in a coffin-sized cell because they thought I had something they wanted. They gave me two spoonfuls of rice and a cup of acorn soup every day so I don't die before they wring me dry. They burned me with chemicals and beat me with hoses and shocked me with live wires. I learned how pain could make you wet yourself.
They beat me for that, too.
They punished interrogators who killed prisoners. One time, my interrogator made my gums bleed while breaking my jaw. They had him flogged on the spot. It was a waste of blood, they said. It was a 'loss of mastery’.
Eventually, my neighbors were taken away. Some let themselves be taken. Others fought and were broken in front of me with fists and iron bars. Either way, they left the prison limp.
When my pain stopped, it was only for a doctor to mark my arteries with a cold marker before they dragged me into the Red Block.
When I saw what awaited me I begged to go back to the torture.
Pain was life.
— Lucía Montalvan
SCP-9828 Survivor
TESTIMONY 9828-B
You could smell Red Block miles away. Just before we were separated, my sister was complaining the air tasted like sucking a greasy coin. It smelled sweet and earthy to me. If you’d led a peaceful life, you wouldn’t even know what you were smelling.
It was blood. It was all from Red Block, nowhere else. Not a drop could be found outside of Red Block, but the air was thick with it, the land bowed under the sanguine condensation of dozens of dead and dying a day. The stone of the Red Block bled and breathed.
“Let there be light,” the guard next to me shouted.
And there was light, but all I saw was hell — bodies, pinned to the walls. Dozens upon dozens of them, drenched in dripping dark red streams that ebbed in elegant curves over their bodies and rib cages and legs. The bodies covered the walls so densely that each row spilled over the next like shingles on a roof.
My limbs were bound with strips of rawhide that choked my veins. My hands and feet turned purple, carried by four sets of hands into Red Block. A circular pool churning with restless fluid yawned in front of me, and the scent of iron pinched the air and stuffed my lungs.
Sweat, rot, metal, blood — I saw the silhouettes of thrashing limbs, expected to hear screams.
It was quiet. Not silent, but there was an aural fog of whistling and clicking and gurgling, like someone was trying to scream in the water.
All my dreams sound like that now, even when the dreams let me leave.
— Andres Gilberto Yoset
SCP-9828 Survivor
TESTIMONY 9828-C
"Please, don't hurt me! Please, don't hurt me!" I remember babbling that sentence again and again as they cut the clothes off of me. So stupid. They'd done so much already. I wasn't thinking.
Then someone punched me in the stomach, and the wind was driven from my lungs. Kicked me to the ground. I was on my knees. Tried catching my breath. Couldn't find it. I think I was still trying to talk because something smashed me in the back of the head to shut me up.
They pulled my head back. They wanted me to see, I think. I looked at the bodies, heard their wheezing. I heard the men place bets on whether I'd piss myself. I was so out of my mind, I don't know whether I did.
Everyone's skin was peeling apart like fraying fabric. I saw someone's finger fall from their body, tumble into the pool, and disappear. And beneath all those bodies, stacked like shingles, spilling on the ground ran a thousand slender rivers of blood, trickling from all those bodies split with wounds.
I think it amused them to watch what my eyes did when I saw it all.
I heard the creaky grating of someone pulling a dagger from a blood-shrunk sheath.
There was a woman in front of me, and I tried to lose myself in her eyes.
But there was my future, staring into my eyes.
Bare tissue.
Bleeding.
Spikes.
And where her throat should be, a jagged bloody gash and blood and air gurgling through the hole.
Her eyes were hazel, like my mother's. She could have been her. There was not enough of her face left to be sure. And the wheezing from the holes in her throat was too impersonal.
That was my future.
So I screamed, screamed hard, stretched my voice till they cut it out of me. Screamed while they sawed into my throat, cutting and dragging. My screams gurgled into wet sighs and red mists. Soon, the sound of their tools cutting into my body meat was louder than me. I felt my gutted voice join the charnel choir, and I finally understood what they were all saying because there's really only one thing to say when you're in hell:
"Why?"
We just wanted an answer.
We wouldn't get one.
— Eloísa Herrera
SCP-9828 Survivor
Discovery: The Foundation contained SCP-9828 during the First Occult Proxy War. As part of an ‘amnesty for information’ agreement, CI2M defectors informed Foundation operatives that SCP-9828 at the defunct Site-42 had become dangerously volatile due to 'overfeeding'. The Foundation secured the facility before the anomaly could achieve a critical state.
The defectors alleged that CI2M was attempting to use the extreme thaumaturgical damage of such an event to cover up the crimes at Site-42.
Among the sixty survivors recovered at the facility, thirteen were found in the Red Block. All were in varying states of physical decomposition by that time, and the worst affected were given the option of euthanasia via a painless neurotoxin.
Machado: For the record, I want to highlight some details that you left out of your debriefing.
Pinilla: I already told you—
Machado: In plain Spanish.
Pinilla: Is this necessary—
Machado: You mangled their tracheas and cut out their tongues so nobody would hear them scream.
Pinilla: Sir, I—
Machado: Nailed them into the walls in stacks. Flayed their body parts if their veins were too thin. Left them there to melt.
Pinilla: <Inaudible>
Machado: And you did this despite knowing your 'research' was fruitless. Why?
Pinilla: The purity of our cause.
Machado: Excuse me?
Pinilla: Site-42 would have been easy propaganda for our fascist adversaries. We needed to erase everyone who knew of Site-42's existence. The Red Block just happened to be the most efficient means of doing so.
Machado: But if your project was a failure, why did high command continue to send you prisoners? Unless…you never told them.
<Silence>
Machado: You butchered five thousand men, women, and children just to cover your ass.
Pinilla: It was easier than stopping.