GabrielCF

Site 92's rescue effort post SCP 3521's containment breach

Opening statement: Following the radiation detected by Site-17 and the lack of organized response by Site 92, MTF-Beta 7 ("Maz Hatterz") was tasked with reconnaissance and rescue of staff. The following is a transcription of protocol voice diary kept by Team Captain Alfredo Miller.

Mission Log, Captain Miller: 04:36 AM, Day 1 : We have confirmed visual on the Site, ship's sensors seem to be a bit off but we're counting some seventy survivors up on the surface. Franz pointed out that it's possible to see cracks on the bottoms of the facilities' walls.

Mission Log, Captain Miller: 06:21 AM, Day 1 : A total of 177 staff were rescued and a further 10 were declared dead on the spot; All of them due to trauma caused by accidents while the place was going to hell. Apparently what destroyed the site was bananas flying everywhere with such a strength that they could break bones and reinforced glass, there's bananas clogging everywhere from floor to ceiling and they say it's much worse down there, Franz is claiming that, if there are so many bananas as they claim, then the cracks on the walls could be the weight of all of them straining foundations of the place. We still don't know what's causing all of the radiation…Jesus, what happened here?

Mission Log, Captain Miller: 07:11 AM, Day 1: Sun's up at this point, Ernest is trying to get power back online and Dr Seacole has organized a makeshift hospital on the place's Cafeteria to deliver first aid to the endless supply of injured staff that we keep finding underneath the various piles of bananas, the rest of the Team is with me just digging out bananas off the main stairwell and trying to get as many people out as we can. All of the place's downwards ladders are full of bananas and getting them out is hard work, we've dug a pit upstairs but it's filling up fast.

Mission Log, Captain Miller: 10:34 AM, Day 1: Apparently all of the skips were being contained in the lower levels of the facility so their storage must have been overrun with goddamn bananas, thank God this is a safe only site. The acid command sent us to dissolve the bananas is working wonders, now we're in business. Command has sent us a list of all the anomalies being stored in here so we know what we're dealing with for but we haven't found no signal of them yet.

Mission Log, Captain Miller: 06:55 PM, Day 1: We've descended 6 floors downstairs, checking into each of them for survivors. Ernest is back, no luck on getting power back on, anyway, the acid we've got is quite powerful, nothing that could damage our suits, but we can't just dump all of it otherwise it would injure the survivors. We've had a bit of a pattern going on were we'd yell out and people stuck underneath some bananas would yell back, we've got a lot of staff this way but neither floor -5 or -6 had any conscious survivors, people we find down here are way more beat up as well, I'm thinking the next floors will be even worse, I suppose we must be nearing the source of all of these goddamn bananas.

Mission Log, Captain Miller: 09:41 PM, Day 1: What in the actual fuck? We kept descending the main stairs and the Geiger sensors kept creeping up, then at floor -8 we got to it: A slurry; Just a pool of bananas mashed together. It was very dense, Humphrie got his leg stuck on the damn thing and it was like quicksand, for a solid couple of minutes it looked like we weren't going to be able to get him out. The radiation skyrocketed, it was so bad that even our suits couldn't handle it , we had to back up. The men are exhausted and I've ordered them to withdraw back to one of the offices at floor -4 for the night, I have no idea what we're going to do about the pool.

Mission Log, Captain Miller: 11:11 AM, Day 2: The vents, they're not very spacious but they do fit one of us with no problems, we've ripped them out of the walls, welded them together into one continuous tunnel and got them wrapped over several layers of our extra radiation uniforms, we're sticking them in the free space between the ladders, we've also reinforced them to prevent it from bending as we push it down, the team is spread out between every floor surrounding the shaft, we already started pushing it into the slurry, amazingly, the thing went in as smoothly as imaginable, if fact, if we all let go of the vent, it slowly sinks, the real deal is getting it out, when we tried pulling it back up just to see if we could, nothing happened, the entire team started pulling it up with all our strength and it didn't budge a single inch, it really is like quicksand. After we get through this layer of liquid-y bananas we're hoping that the lower layers are solid enough for us to be able to descend through the shaft then dig through them, only one way of figuring it out…

Mission Log, Captain Miller: 00:59 PM, Day 2: The tunnel, that's how we're calling it, hit the bottom of the stairs, after about 90 feet in we started feeling some consistency and by the end we had to actively push it down to get through, so the bottom of the pool is relatively solid, we've welded the tunnel into everything we could, this bad boy ain't going nowhere, McKean agreed to be the first to go down and check it out, we're sending him down with a cord, then we're going to start descending empty buckets for him to clean off the inside of the tunnel and ascending the full ones, hopefully it doesn't take too long.

Mission Log, Captain Miller: 04:11 PM, Day 2: The damn cord snapped, no one knows how it fucking happened, but it did, McKean sunk right into the slurry for about 30 feet before he managed to hold unto one of the pins we put every 10 feet to help measure the thing, he managed to get a good grip on it at least, his radiation suit didn't let the slurry in, plus he also had an air canister inside, we sunk in another cord and started pulling with everything we had, we barely got him up a few inches before the belt of his suit snapped right off, we sent Gracie down with the acid and she managed to get him off, when we got him out he had a bad case of hypothermia, but now he's safely into the cafeteria drinking hot coffee. The bucket strategy was taking too long anyway.

Mission Log, Captain Miller: 06:11 PM, Day 2: It arrived, command sent over a huge fucking pump and a team of technicians to operate it, the smell of bananas has gotten even worse, I thought I had gotten used to it but clearly not, it feels like I'm breathing more banana than oxygen at this point. Once the inside of the shaft is all pumped out, which is going to take awhile since every 10 minutes they have to turn it off and take out all of the peels clogging up the thing, me and the boys are going tunneling, they're already off gathering wood and other building supplies from the place.

Mission Log, Captain Miller: 10:48 PM, Day 2: We thought the shaft had gone all to the cement of the facility but as the pump's hose started getting close to the bottom of the building, the banana slurry started coming out darker, after we turned it off the technicians started finding bits and pieces of people and uniforms inside the pump, we sent Hills down the shaft to check and he found that the shaft was actually resting on the pulped remains of a bunch of staff, they must've have all died while climbing the main stairwell and their bodies were slowly consumed by the thing until they sank right to the bottom. We started extracting the bodies one by one and managed to pull out 27 bodies from underneath the shaft, they were all encased in the solid-y, brown banana that's here at the bottom.

Mission Log, Captain Miller: 01:14 AM, Day 3: Goddamn, that was an explosion and a half…some of the blast doors we've dug up down here at the lower floors were blown wide open, also, we've actually found people alive here, the radiation is the only problem, down here it's not as bad as the more liquid-y pool up top but still enough to get you radiation poisoning, everyone we got out was suffering from it but I trust the medics will fix them up. No survivors on the main halls or anything of the sort, those guys were crushed dead instantly, we sometimes find their crushed remains encased in the banana, only people who survived were those in smaller, side rooms. People here are claiming that it all happened in a minute, some of them didn't even know what happened, only that ground shook, the emergency lights went up and the doors wouldn't budge. I couldn't tell you how many people we've saved as we're operating multiple tunnels right now but it's been over one hundred by now. The shaft is way too small to carry out the skips so command says to just leave them alone and to wrap this up as fast as we can so they can start doing their own thing, so that's what we're going to do, get staff out and be done with it.

Incorruptible

Time has a cyclic nature to it. It's amazing at first, after a while it becomes boring, then it's just amusing.

The life inside of Mu-3 is unlike what other MTFs are used to, there are as many military drills as there are meetings with eccentric millionaires in luxury apartments and wild bohemian parties. It is this life that has gotten us our infamy: "the high class of the Foundation".

Very few people, if any, know the names of all our Probes, and it is necessary evil if they are to have any hope of staying undercover, however necessary, it still remains a double edged sword, this amount of liberty and lack of supervision, together with the environment they inhabit can only have one result: Corruption, some, allured by the carnal pleasures that only the power over the paranormal can invoke; others, by the sheer quantity of money that their privileged position can direct inside their pockets.

All and all, it works out in the end. Whether or not a handful of agents are hiding money in some offshore secret account, or the occasional anomaly and a few lovers in some hidden apartment in downtown Hong Kong, is inconsequential to the overall objective of the Foundation and warrants as little attention as it gets.

Besides, having agents acquiring their own funds and holding positions of power within the underbelly of high society is always handy for as long as they can be reasoned with, even if their loyalty sometimes gets sketchy.

However, should you keep your ears to the street, you hear the occasional reports…about how one of the operations failed due to a faulty engine which had always worked fine or how, in another, the Profilers had somehow managed to give agents the wrong address several times over. The untrained eye looks at these as mere coincidences, but the trained is not so easily tricked, or so they think.

It's all a mater of time until one particularly bright and righteous agent shows up at the current commander's desk with a file, reporting how all of these accidents had affected Foundation's operations only in what was expected to be MC&D's wildest and most profitable auctions and events, their report will also mention how Mu-3's Thiefs are consistently the ones which experience the most technical problems out of all MTF units, and occasionally might even mention how in successful raids, some of the most precious items or the most illustrious clients reported to have been present are nowhere to be seen. Finally, the report will end with a singular accusation: Corruption.

Tough thing about dealing with corruption is that you never know if you're reporting to good guys. After a few weeks of no satisfactory responses and bothering their superiors and peers alike, that ever so proud agent receives it, a note, inside their locker or slit through their quarter's door, I've even seen it show up inside of a pocket once, God knows who sends those. You can't always tell when they've received it, but you can always tell when they've understood it.

These guys always want for the world to be black and white, they want the Foundation to be the nice guys protecting the planet and everyone else to be the baddies, which is a fine position for you to have as far as the higher ups are concerned, that's what they want you to think. Though thing is that we live in the real world, and in the real world there's bills to pay, and that costs money.

At the end of the day, the Foundation is still a company, we're selling a service here and we're hoping the investors keep paying us for it. And even the most eccentric of millionaires still wants a world to live in. Above all, any company knows better than to fuck with their bottom dollar.

When that most upright of agents finally understands the meaning of that note they always get depressed, sometimes ask to be transferred away, they think they're fighting a losing battle, that they won't ever get the big guys, but some of them finally realize that the world ain't black and white. At the end of the day we're still raiding their auctions and we're still nicking their stuff.

Yeah, we might not ever take MC&D and their associates down, but that's not what we're supposed to do, we're supposed to be the thorn in their side. We're supposed to show the world that the Foundation is not scared of taking on who it takes. The rest of the Foundation think we're its degenerates, I'd say we are its symbol, the Foundation is a company, and we're the ones who show investors what the Foundation is all about, first hand.

What's written on the notes? "Clean your own damn plate."