SolaceSea

Tale: Amplifying Amulet

It was delivered quietly, found on some small mission easily forgotten. The team handed it off to the Acquisitions Department and it was left, forgotten in a storage room. That was less than two years ago.

A few months later, the department took its annual stock. I was actually the first one to dig it out. The thing looked innocuous enough, but we've all seen the tapes. Safety is a bygone concept here, things don't have to walk around to shred through D-class like paper.

Taking it out of the box, it looked like any regular necklace. Granted, it had a big, gaudy cross hanging from it, but I figured it was probably raided from some cult. Still, the higher-ups had to run the basic tests on it. Surprise, surprise, they didn't find anything. A week later, we boxed all the inventory back up, and that was the end of that.

Our first clue something was up came when the Site managers ordered some more testing on the necklace. Out of everything we had, why was that special? Regardless, the matter was out of my hands. It was outside of my paygrade, not to mention my clearance level. The department sent it off to the Site council, and from that point on, I forgot about it. At that point, it was nothing special to me.

I didn't see it again until it was already too late. Since the breach, I've had full run on the Site. Everything from here on out is what I can glean from documents I should've been killed for reading. After we sent the package up, the Site council tested that thing with everything they had. Soon enough, they found out what it did: whatever something we contained did, the necklace made it better. Or worse, I guess. For some reason, it didn't do jack to anything in anomalous storage. Only stuff with SCP designation got the brunt of its effects.

For how smart the lab techs like to say they are, they sure didn't question higher command when they ordered them to start cross-testing. Even I was told that's a big no-no. The Site council shouldn't have even considered it. To this day, I don't know what made them come up with that plan. Some of the last warnings the Site put out talked about some "malicious organization infiltrating higher positions", but nothing kept here is giving me any clues. For all I know, that's the Foundation trying to cover themselves.

Whatever happened up-top doesn't change the facts, though. They called it Operation: Fortification. I'm sure a lot of people thought they were genuinely helping somebody, but it looks like they're the ones with egg on their face now. It started with those pills. They wrapped the necklace around one and passed it off to a D-class that med wing found something serious in. The prognosis was less than a week. After popping it, they made a full recovery in a few minutes. Par for the course. Thing is, the D-class didn't stop. Reached the peak of human health, and kept going. For the next ten minutes, just touching the "subject" would make the researchers healthier. No more wrinkles, better digestion, faded bruises. After ten minutes, the D-class started to heat up and vibrate. He didn't even notice, saying he felt better than he ever had before, til he just poofed away. No trace of the poor guy, they gave up looking after a few weeks.

999 was up next on the chopping block. Guess they figured that, since whatever that thing did made you happy, doing it more would make it even better. It sucked the necklace right into its body, and started lighting up like a candle. Everybody in that entire facility started laughing like idiots for hours until they got a robot in there to remove the thing. They had barely gotten back on their feet before something almost broke out.

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