The sun began to set, painting the Gobi sky in orange and purple. Aris's portable scanner, usually reliable, was flickering. He cursed, tapping the side of the unit. "Come on," he muttered. He was in a newly found underground chamber, a natural fault line that opened after a small earthquake. Lena wanted to explore it for unique minerals.
The air in the chamber was still and smelled of damp earth and something metallic and sharp. Aris had already collected soil and rock samples. His faulty scanner showed them as "normal," which wasn't comforting. The special vial with the anomalous dust felt heavy in his pocket.
As he went deeper, his scanner flickered more, then froze. A low growl came from the darkness ahead. It was a large, organic sound.
Aris froze, his heart pounding. He turned on his headlamp. The beam showed a pair of glowing red eyes staring back from the shadows. They belonged to something massive, vaguely reptilian, with scales that seemed to absorb light. It was hunched, partly hidden by stalagmites, but it filled much of the chamber.
His mind, already reeling from the SCP Foundation, knew this wasn't a normal animal. This was an anomaly. The air grew colder, and the growl deepened, vibrating through the rock floor.
Just as he thought about running or trying to get a sample, his radio crackled. It was Lena, her voice urgent.
"Aris, do you copy? Big problem. Get back to base, now!"
"What is it, Lena?" he whispered, his voice barely audible over the creature's rumble. He couldn't take his eyes off the red eyes.
"The equipment! All of it! Solar panels failing, satellite dish offline, generators sputtering! Losing power fast! And... the water purification unit just died. We can't talk or maintain life support. We need to check the damage and fix it now. Get back here, Aris! Move!"
Her urgency was clear. A real crisis. The red eyes stayed, but the creature didn't move, just watched him. Aris knew he couldn't fight it now. He was alone, not prepared, and his main duty was to his team.
"Copy that, Lena. On my way," he said, his voice steadier than he felt. He slowly backed away, keeping his headlamp on the creature until its eyes vanished into the darkness. He turned and ran, scrambling out of the chamber, the growl echoing behind him until he reached the fading daylight.
He ran, the desert wind hitting his face. The immediate threat of the creature was overshadowed by the serious problems at base camp. Power failure, water issues, no communication. This was a crisis his team thought they could handle. But Aris now knew there was a deeper danger, not just geological.
The Gobi was replaced by the hum of a plane, then the busy chaos of an international airport. Aris Thorne was back in America, but it felt more like a jarring displacement than a homecoming. The air, thick with coffee and hurried footsteps, felt strange after weeks of dust and silence.
His "scientific research" trip was cut short. The official reason was "unforeseen logistical and equipment failures." This was a believable cover for the power outages, water system collapse, and communication blackout at their base. Lena was furious, Anya frustrated, and even Battar, usually calm, showed worry. Aris, however, knew the true reason. The anomalous reading, the glowing eyes – he couldn't prove it, but he suspected the SCP Foundation had subtly stepped in, maybe to contain the creature or just to get him out of a situation beyond normal science.
Now, weeks later, in his small, cluttered apartment near the university, his normal American life felt fragile. His geological samples, carefully cataloged and delivered, were in a university lab. They would never show the true nature of the micro-traces he secretly took.
The red pill bottle of SCP-500, once in a dusty bag, was now in a locked, fireproof safe behind a loose brick in his wall. It was a constant presence in his mind, a real link to the incredible, terrifying world he'd found.
His laptop, the gateway to the Foundation's secrets, remained a source of dark fascination. He spent late nights, hunched over the screen, reading incident reports, containment protocols, and secret documents. He learned about Keter-class threats that could destroy reality, Euclid-class anomalies that made no sense, and the tireless work of Mobile Task Forces. Each entry deepened his understanding and his isolation. He was a founder, an insider, but he couldn't tell anyone. The weight of that knowledge was huge.
He even visited his university lab, pretending to check other projects. He saw Lena talking with a department head, probably about new expeditions. He saw Anya studying seismic charts, completely unaware of the unseen forces that ended their last trip. He greeted them, made polite small talk about fieldwork challenges, and felt like a fraud.
Aris Thorne was physically back in America. But a part of him, the part that swallowed the red pill and became a founder, was still in the Gobi, staring into the glowing eyes of an unknown anomaly, forever tied to a secret war for reality itself. The world looked the same, but to him, it was irrevocably, terrifyingly different.