Chilachinchila 2

She’d spent 13 years locked in her cell. 13 miserable years in that filthy, suffocating deplorable box. In her reality she was a revered researcher making great advances in her scientific field. Here she was a prisoner.

In her reality, the KT mass extinction event never occurred and the dinosaurs continued to rule the earth. Through the millennia different species rose and fell, but it was the raptors that were there to stay. In our reality the velociraptor was one of the smarter dinosaur types and some researchers have suggested they might have become the dominant species on Earth. In her reality that hypothesis was proven true, as packs became tribes that became villages that became towns and so on and so forth until they had formed nations of their own. Despite living in a completely different world from us, there is one universal constant across all realities, anomalies, and soon enough organizations where formed to both minimize their effects or exploit them for their own agendas.

She belonged to an organization very similar to our world’s SCP Foundation. They contained anomalies and shielded the world from the truth. She’d been taking part in an experiment involving a reality tear when the accident happened. This wasn’t her project, she was only visiting some coworkers during her break when the tear became unstable. It began to grow and suck up anything near it with a strength never quite seen before in a tear. Her and the whole site were swallowed into it.

As she floated through the inky black darkness of the space between reality she tried to grab onto anything she could. A desk, a wall, a coworker, to no avail. She began to worry she’d be stuck in this place forever, unable to die, but despite the catastrophic event that had just occurred to her she had also been extraordinarily lucky. When the rift became unstable it opened up entrances to different realities, and she had fallen right through one. She’d barely picked herself up from the ground when it closed up behind her. Looking around she realized she was in a forest, not too dissimilar from her own world. She survived in the apparent wilderness, hunting the strange, alien animals that are so well known to us.

She wasn’t accustomed to life in the wild as she’d been a city girl her whole life, and she was very close to expiring when the Foundation captured her. You see, she wasn’t in the wilderness, at least not exactly. She had been transported to Yellowstone national park. There’d been several tourists who’d reported seeing a dinosaur and where at first dismissed, but when a video emerged the Foundation got involved. She was sedated before she realized they where there and taken into custody.

For most of her stay as an SCP the Foundation did not realize she was sapient, believing her to be a wild animal that had accidentally gone through a tear and ended up here. Not knowing our language, and lacking the vocal cords to communicate, she was unable to communicate this. She was given no entertainment or contact with anyone. The most exciting thing that would happen to her would be that at 2 PM every day a tube in her cell would dispense raw beef into a plate that was affixed to the floor.

For years they payed no attention to her, believing her to be just another one of the thousands of creatures, some would say monsters, the Foundation had contained. That was until Stanley Huxtable took notice. Stanley had been responsible for the rewriting of SCP-5031’s containment procedures, and the improvement in 5031’s behavior caused by it and his experiments. His success had rocketed his career and made him one of the most prominent and outspoken advocates inside the Foundation of better conditions for anomalies. His request to assess different anomalies sapience through similar tests was approved.

So after 8 years she finally had contact with another human being. She was one of his most promising examples. He’d believed her to be an example of a species in the early stages of civilization, comparable to us in our cavemen days. That changed when he successfully taught her language and how to communicate using Morse code.

She told him everything, how she had been a researcher at her reality’s own organization, how she came from a universe where technology was at a comparable, if not superior level to our world, information just kept flooding in. She had the knowledge to back that up too, even information that was publicly known in her reality provided breakthrough after breakthrough for the Foundation.

So one day a Foundation agent came to her cell with a proposition. One of their researchers, Dr. Benjamin, had been involved in a failed experiment and they needed someone to replace him. His field of research was niche and there were very few people with the level of expertise he possessed. She was one of them. “Come work for us” the agent said, “and you’ll be free”. She’d accepted obviously, anything to get out of her cell, but she hadn’t realized what she’d signed up for just yet. First came the surgeries.

Those took around a year. Even if she knew the language her vocal cords impeded her from speaking to others. The way the Foundation decided to fix this was with a series of painful and invasive surgeries to completely replace her vocal cords with some robotic implants found after the raid of an Anderson Robotics warehouse. The implants were meant for people with damaged vocal cords, not for anomalous creatures, so several surgeries were done to enable them to work in her unique physiology. It succeeded, but mistakes were made. The pain never went away, she just learned how to ignore it.

After that came the lessons. Those took 4 years. teaching her how to use those vocal cords, how to behave, common human behaviors, etc. It was during one of this lessons that she was told to choose a name, one that was pronounceable by humans. She hadn’t been given time to prepare, simply being given a baby names book and told to choose one. She frantically flipped the pages and chose the first name that she felt she liked, Whitney. Thus Whitney became a free woman. Well, free wasn’t exactly right. She had to work for the foundation, and wasn’t allowed to leave the site unless she was required to. “Its much better than a cell” Whitney told herself. She hadn’t realized with freedom came a whole new set of issues, many of them not even related to SCPs.

In the foundation there were two types of people, those that wanted to utilize anomalies to further the Foundation’s goals and those that wanted to suppress anomalies as much as possible. Both she hated. One treated her like a tool the other like a threat, both not as a person but as an other. The decision to enlist her had been controversial, especially because she was replacing someone that was a friend to many of them.

She hadn’t been the first anomaly to work for the Foundation, just look at Bright, or Moose, or even professor Crow, but she was different. At least that’s what her detractors convinced themselves of. They where human, or had been, she was an other. The truth was there’d been just as much controversy with them. They just disliked anomalies, simple as that. What could you expect from an organization that labeled their own species as humanoid because they slightly deviated from the norm, locked them up and threw away the keys?

But as Whitney dealt with the stares, and the jokes, and the abuse, she realized she couldn’t blame them. For she had been just like them in the past and, unbeknownst to her, in a filthy, suffocating, deplorable box back in her reality sat Dr. Benjamin, thinking of the life he’d lost.