Thin Ice

Thin Ice

The SCP-507 with the tribal scarring and the ragged coat was not having a very good day.

Four hours earlier, he had risen at dawn, as he always did, and prepared for his outing. It was the time of year when the blizzards slowed down ever so slightly, when he could leave the cave and the hot spring for more than twenty minutes at a time. This morning, he was planning to trek across the glacier to a nearby town and look for supplies to bring back. As far as he could tell, the big freeze that had happened while he was gone had been pretty much instantaneous, so there wasn't much need to worry about food going bad.

U-I523M had been pretty standard, from what 507-I523M had seen of other Earths with their other Foundations. He still had no idea what had gone wrong. After spending a month in a world occupied by some sort of intelligent coral, he had shifted back to find his quarters buried in a snowdrift. He had recovered a thermal blanket and barely made it into the caverns, eventually finding shelter in the geothermal springs. Since then, he had adapted. Every time he shifted, he recovered things to bring back; his fur coat, several books, plenty of rations and water filters. Some worlds were happy to help, but he'd also gotten into trouble more than once, as his scars could attest. Nevertheless, he always shifted back; he'd been spending more and more time in the cave, shifting less and less often, for reasons he wasn't entirely sure of. But he was used to it.

Rubbing absently at one of the particularly deep lesions on his arm, he pulled up his hood and stepped out of the cave. The thick layers of snow and ice were nearly blinding even with the minimal sunlight hitting the Earth's surface, and he squinted behind his sunglasses.