Space distorted somewhere off in the desert that surrounded the facility, before spitting out Michael alongside his rescued villagers.
Falling down to the sand, Michael breathed a sigh of relief. It'd been close, but he’d managed to get the remaining people out. He’d done something very few explorers could claim to have done; he didn’t completely fuck over a group of people inhabiting the land he was exploring.
'Well, partially at least,' Michael thought sourly, thinking back to the people the Manager had killed.
Standing up, Michael instructed everyone to sit and wait, the foundation would be here to pick them up soon and it was best for everyone if they didn't go wandering off into the desert.
Not fifteen minutes later he was proven right when foundation vehicles pulled up, ushering him and the IKEA survivors into vans like it was just another normal day. Though Michael did note that what little friendliness the guards had during his past retrievals was all but gone as they brought them back to the facility.
Then once he was back and safe inside the walls of the facility he was ushered back into his holding cell.
'This is getting old,' Michael thought, watching the guards walking away.
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Michael almost didn't need to wait before Dr. Hearthgrieve barged into his room, a complicated expression on his face.
He sighed, laying down papers atop the desk in the room in a heap before sitting down.
“Mr. Stevens, you really messed up this time.”
Michael had an idea of where this was going, but decided to ask anyways.
“And what did I mess up exactly?”
Hearthgrieve slammed his hands down on the table, “Don’t give me that shit. How in the hell did SCP 096 come running out of the infinite IKEA? We lost dozens of guards before we managed to contain it!”
The researcher rubbed his forehead in annoyance, trying to calm himself down as Michael watched on impassively.
“Listen, the higher ups are really on my ass about this. I’m going to need a really good excuse from you, or things are going to get worse. For both of us.”
Michael had thought it over before coming here, he would tell Heathgrieve most of what happened inside the IKEA, but he wouldn’t say anything about the key he was gifted or about him being an apostle of Order. The rest would keep their attention well enough.
He’d keep the key secret as a way to escape the foundation if he ever needed to, and he wouldn’t ever be telling them about the apostle thing if he could help it. Who knew what implications that had.
So with that, Michael began to tell Hearthgrieve what happened, leaving out those key details.
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After Michael had finished retelling what'd happened, Hearthgrieve sighed.
“I can work with this, this seems more like a one time fluke than a problem caused by you specifically. We can still get rid of anomalies through you. As long as you don’t go wandering into another god’s backyard that is.”
He eyed Michael, who shrugged indifferently.
“This power doesn’t exactly have a steering wheel, but I’ll do what I can,” he said.
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Off in a broken dimension, a creature with countless hands sat. What once was a grand being now was withered and broken. It sat there in silent contemplation, for it knew Order was approaching. He’d made his choice the second he’d touched that apostle, and it sadly hadn't panned out for him. He used most of his strength constructing that crown and he’d never even got to use it. Time sensitive rituals really were such a pain.
It wasn't long before space parted before the creature, as a tall figure wrapped in shadows stepped forwards. It had a certain aura to it, like it embodied strength and will.
“So I hear you killed one of my apostles," Order asked in a deep, commanding tone. "You know deities are prohibited from harming my people, right?”
The god spoke reluctantly in its dead language, “Please Order, I ca-”.
“No, stay your tongue. I should honestly thank you, that apostle is much more interesting now than he was before. Though nevertheless you broke my rule, and I can’t be seen showing leniency. Not for you, not for anyone. For without order, there is nothing in these worlds. Don’t you agree?”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
If the entities expression could be seen, it would've been one of horror, “Please, I ca-”
Ignoring him, Order placed his hand upon the crumbling deity and the god screamed in pain, perishing in but an instant, with its body separating into thousands of pieces.
“Ah, he made an interesting one indeed,” Order said with a chuckle.
Space then once again parted for him, as he smiled an impossibly wide smile.
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Michael held a blank piece of paper, trying to think of anything that would make the shifts any easier.
Honestly, he was having trouble. He had just about all the conventional weaponry he could realistically want, and he didn’t want to weigh himself down out in the field.
What he really needed was more anomalous items, but he doubted the foundation would just lend them to him. Unless they wanted it gone that is.
Which led him to the next problem, he needed furniture to trade to the IKEA Manager.
'Well, you never know until you ask I guess,' Michael thought with a shrug.
1.Anomalous furniture/furniture not from earth.
2.Anomalyous items useful for dimensional shifts.
Once the paper was submitted, Michael continued his workout routine. He was beginning to see some pretty good results with his body. He’d only been working out for roughly two and a half months, but he could already see a stark decrease in body fat and growth in muscle.
Honestly, it was progressing suspiciously quick. He’d been running far longer and lifting things he probably shouldn’t have been able to during the recent shifts.
'I suppose that’s a question to ask the Manager next time he talk to her,' Michael thought to himself, looking at himself in the reflective two-way mirror attached to his room. 'It may have to do with the whole apostle of order thing. Or I could just have a good metabolism. Eh, probably just the second thing.'
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They eventually decided to move Michael back to his original facility. Apparently they wanted more time to reconsider this whole SCP disposal business, plus there were a lot of rooms in this facility they didn’t want Michael to reappear into after a shift. So the move was just logical.
Only a couple of days passed after that decision was made before they ushered Michael back up to the surface, loaded him into a truck and drove him back to the other facility.
The trip was peaceful, with Michael arriving back without incident.
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The foundation wanted to send in two D-Class with him during his next shift, but Michael refused. They had no prior training and the foundation was still refusing to give them any armor or weapons. They would just be liabilities on the other side.
Michael did however say he would take anyone the foundation actually trained and armed. Though they didn’t seem to take the request seriously, apparently he’d lost a lot of good will with the ‘Shy Guy’ incident. Tension between himself and the staff was somewhat high, but Michael was confident it would go back to normal soon. It’s not like he was directly responsible for any guards that got killed, and none of them had worked at this facility specifically.
No, he had several degrees of separation from their deaths. Practically uninvolved as far as he was concerned.
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Two weeks passed in what felt like a very small amount of time. Michael had long since received the answer to his requests, which weren't surprising. Everything was rejected.
Well, he hadn't really expected it to get accepted. From his experiences with the foundation, they covet their anomalies, no matter how useless they are. The only reason they were having him dispose of anomalies was because some of them could rather easily end the world.
For example, with the ‘Shy Guy’, the risk with keeping him contained was readily apparent. If it happened to run through a city trying to get to somebody that saw its face. It would undoubtedly be seen by thousands of people during this process. Then what would happen if someone who'd seen it posted a video of it online, or if a news channel began to broadcast it live. The problem would escalate exponentially, maybe even killing millions by the end of it.
The point was that disposing of the SCP was worth a couple of failures, even if the foundation was a bunch of misers that'd rather keep them all stored away in a box somewhere.
While having these idle thoughts, Michael once again began to feel disconnected from everything, as space wrapped around him and weightlessness took over his body.
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After the shift had ended, Michael gathered himself and scanned his surroundings. He stood in a lush forest and couldn’t immediately see anything too out of the ordinary. It looked to be a normal forest. Maybe he’d finally gotten one of the normal dimensions Tommy seemed to get so often. Not every one of them was supposed to be a death trap.
Michael shrugged, but didn't drop his guard as he began walking. He couldn’t really call himself an explorer if he just sat in one place counting down the minutes until he was rescued. He'd make sure all of this meant something by the end, no matter what.
A few minutes of easy walking passed in the blink of an eye, before Michael came upon a long line of rather unsettling trees. They were large with low jagged branches that had dozens of animal corpses impaled upon them. I looked like they had simply walked themselves into them, with some creatures even reaching the base of the branch. Despite this Michael couldn't see any blood near the roots, even where the corpses looked to be fresh.
Perched atop each tree sat a crow, with the nearest one staring daggers at Michael with its pupils dilated as it looked toward him intensely. Several moments passed before it finally cocked its head to the side in confusion.
The birds confusion didn't last long, as Michael quickly turned it into a fine red mist using his shotgun.
He could guess what that bird was trying to do, simply by it being the only living animal in the tree. Michael scanned the other trees, but none of the other birds were reacting. Apparently they didn’t seem to acknowledge his existence unless he got within range of their tree.
Walking past the wall of trees, and scooping the remains of the bird into a sack Michael grinned.
'If this was just about them hunting prey they probably wouldn't have set it up their trees like a wall.' Michael thought. 'Too much competition to close to one another. Which means they're probably guarding something. I wonder what?'