| Item #: SCP-099-INT |
LEVEL 3/099-INT |
| Object Class: Keter |
Classified |
Special Containment Procedures: At the time of this file's writing, no direct means of containing SCP-099-INT has been devised. Containment efforts will focus on anticipating or mitigating damage generated by SCP-099-INT.
Three meteorological satellites have been placed in orbit to detect instances of SCP-099-INT. Foundation personnel will be dispatched according to the anomaly presented by each instance of SCP-099-INT. The general protocol to be followed is called "UMBRELLA":
- If possible, evacuation of civilians from the area where SCP-099-INT will appear.
- Control of the damage caused, containment of anomalies generated or humans affected and suppression of information.
- Obtaining samples of the precipitation generated by SCP-099-INT.
- Creation of an information cover-up to conceal the effects of SCP-099-INT.
Description: SCP-099-INT is a migratory atmospheric phenomenon that affects clouds by giving them anomalous characteristics (classified as SCP-099-INT-1, SCP-099-INT-2, etc.). The main visible change in clouds is their coloration, and a correlation of this with their anomalous capabilities has been confirmed. The appearance of SCP-099-INT additionally causes a change in the electromagnetic spectrum of light, manifesting a color related to the cloud. SCP-099-INT has a certain behavior and its migration pattern is not chaotic; moreover, a kind of communication has been observed between the instances by means of electrical discharges, which can become thunderstorms. It has been hypothesized that they could be hive-mind related organisms or are the result of an intentional and controlled disturbance.
SCP-099-INT-1 are a group of red cumulonimbus clouds present in Yunnan, China. During storms generated by SCP-099-INT-1, sounds between 60 and 120 decibels have been recorded in the area where the anomalous activity occurs. There is usually no pattern in the content of the recordings, and the ambient sound recorded during a random storm is the voice of an unknown woman pleading for help who was estimated to be in her 20s and 30s at the time of the recording. For more information see Addendum A.
SCP-099-INT-2 are a group of light green nimbostratus clouds in the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve, Mexico. SCP-099-INT-2 produces moderate green precipitation (6.5 to 16 mm/h) between 0:00 and 12:00 hours. SCP-099-INT-2 rain has a mutagenic effect on the biota of the region, mainly on the flora. Another effect detected has been that the shadows generated by SCP-099-INT-2 have the capacity to mitigate soil erosion and provide biological material. For more information see Addendum B.
On December 16, 1956, the salesman of Miaozhuang Supply and Marketing Cooperative in Yunnan returned from a trip out of this village Miaozhuang to buy sugar and found the entire village empty. The clothes of old and young people, men and women were scattered all over the place, but there was no items missing, no signs of villagers fleeing, and the livestock kept in pens were still there. Also, the blast furnaces set up for steel making in the village had been extinguished in some unknown way, and there was still a large amount of unburned fuel left in the furnace chamber.
The salesman immediately reported the emergency to the local government department, saying that “the great mountain god ate people”. The local Staff immediately took control of the salesman (hereinafter referred to as SM), intercepted the information and forwarded it to the Foundation. In the afternoon of the December 22, the Foundation took SM’s testimony in Chongzhen and dispatched an investigation team to Miaozhuang.
SM’s testimony contains a great deal of local folklore, most of which has been verified to be explained items. Throughout the whole interview, SM remained steadfast in his belief that the disappearance of the Miaozhuang villagers was caused by the anger of the mountain god as the villagers cut down trees recklessly to make steel without the permission of the mountain god.
SM said that at dusk on December 15, he was on another mountain, and the straightline distance between the mountain and Miaozhuang is about 10 kilometers. At that time, he had seen a weird red cloud wrapped around the village. Other skies showed no hint of reddish clouds, only the one at the top of the village hill. SM described the enviroment as follows: "The cloud was so red that it looked like fresh pig blood, while the rolling black smoke from the steelmaking was entangled with the red mist, forming a terrible, angry face".
The findings were generally consistent with SM’s description. During the inspection of the steel-making blast furnace, the furnace had continued to emit a strong smell of burnt meat within a period of time, thus the Foundation investigators initially suspected that the missing villagers were killed en masse and then put into the blast furnace to destroy their bodies. However, the subsequent sampling survey results showed that the slag did not contain any human or animal remains. In addition to the unburned firewood and its coking part, there were only inorganic salts, a small amount of iron slag, and a large amount of water containing sulfur and mercury compounds.
It was the first collective disappearance caused by the red cloud phenomenon that can be confirmed to have occurred within the territory of China in the 20th century. From 1956 to 1962, many cases of disappearances of different scales occurred throughout China.
When the Foundation intervened to investigate, they found that most of the unidentified mass disappearances had the same characteristics: no traces of violence, no missing property, the missing people often lived in the mountains with inconvenient transportation, and the mass disappearances usually occurred on a village or small-town basis.
Other historically recorded SCP-099-INT-1 events:
In the winter of 1982, clusters of red clouds were observed several times by several observation stations in southwest China over natural areas that are rarely inhabited, such as forests or oceans. The sights were noted by the vast majority of coastal resident meteorological observers.
On November 16, the research vessel Dongfang set sail for home after a short stop at the ██████ base in the Xisha Islands, and disappeared after entering the area affected by red fog again, only one onboard researcher who was stranded due to her illness was spared.
Later in the interview she recalled, “The sea was red and foggy, and we were completely enveloped in an ominous orange-red color. As we had to sail under the red cloud, I felt intensely unease, like… something was peering through the window… As I looked out the window, suddenly, panic and fear tightly gripped me… it felt like… it was that red color that was warning us, warning us don’t snoop, don’t come any closer.”
On January 1, 1990, a sixteen-member scientific research team disappeared after entering a red cloud-affected area south of Sichuan, China.
On March 6, 2002, an observer who was a former member of the Abnormality Institute wrote a handwritten letter and submitted it to the superior. The letter said that red clouds were the sign of a disaster year and there would be some major disasters in the following year, thus the Foundation was expected to prepare accordingly. However, the response letter politely declined the request, indicating that due to limited resources, they were unable to intervene in the relief of the many disasters without anomalous factors that were happening all over the world at all times.
Over the next four months, the researcher’s behavior became increasingly aggressive, sending several harassment emails daily to various related and unrelated departments with a view to obtaining approval for action. Upon review, the Foundation ultimately determined that the researcher’s mental and psychological health was no longer adequate for his position, and ordered him to be suspended from his position and placed on mandatory leave. However, in the last month of his life, the researcher appeared to be under extreme mental stress, and when he was unable to submit his research findings to the Foundation through the usual channels, he finally chose to take the extreme action of self-immolation in the streets and died.
The researcher’s unusual behaviors were judged by the Foundation’s local organization as a case of suicide caused by work-related stress, and his personal property was redistributed according to the Foundation’s standard procedures due to the lack of inheritance.
In 2007, the disappearance of a Person Of Interest named “Rohan” proved to be related to the red cloud phenomenon. The Foundation routinely followed up on the case because his spouse was a former Foundation employee. A critical notebook collected from the civilian investigator’s home eventually helped the Foundation, after a 51-year chase, to unravel the anomalous nature of the red cloud phenomenon and to successfully perform containment within the regional scope：
Biographical and Investigation Record - "Rohan"
Rohan was a very famous person in Chinese thundercloud chaser community. He had an obsessive love for thunderstorm clouds, and as soon as he heard that there might be a huge thunderstorm somewhere, he would immediately pack his bags with various tools and head there.
He was also the president of the association of Chinese non-governmental thundercloud chaser observation organizations. The entire association was formed around him, so when he disappeared during one of the organization's events at Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan, everyone wanted to know what had happened to him.
According to the recollection of other people who lived in the same observation station with Rohan at that time, before it rained, the mountain was foggy and communications were almost cut off, and the phone could not be reached. But the communication signal of the observation station was always bad, so they did not pay attention to it. After a while, the fog floating down the mountain turned red.
Tiger Leaping Gorge is famous for its magnificent colorful morning glow and evening glow. Therefore, people only thought it was some kind of local landscape, but once Rohan saw the scene through the rain curtain, he immediately rushed out of the observation station carrying his photographic equipment. People around him did not even have time to react before he disappeared into the red mountain fog.
Since then, no one has seen him again.
After the rain stopped, people found Rohan’s clothes and equipment in the mountain forest not far from the station, and a human leg bone was found about 600 meters away from the scattered clothes. Based on DNA testing, it was certain that the bone belonged to Rohan. The surface of the bone was very clean, with no myoideum or ligament tissue remaining, which even the best butcher could not do. The medical examiner recalled that the state of that bone was close to what it would have been after being cleaned by the insecticide method used to make the specimen, but that was something that could never have happened at the scene, either from the environment condition or from the time condition.
Since no critical evidence could be found to determine whether he was dead, Rohan was declared missing. One year after his disappearance, the local public security bureau where Rohan was registered declared him legally dead, and his friends and family buried the human leg bone along with some old clothes, holding a symbolic funeral for Rohan.
Rohan doesn't have any close relatives left in the world. Although the bizarre disappearance was a local sensation, his disappearance soon faded into oblivion due to the lack of follow-up news. It wasn’t until 2012 that strange urban legends about missing people all over China suddenly became popular on the Internet, and Rohan’s strange disappearance was once again unearthed by netizens, with the story spreading widely and eventually gaining the attention of the news media, with some media even filming a special issue of “Approaches To Science” to introduce the “Mystery of the Tiger Leaping Gorge Red Cloud” in detail.
In this confusing case of disappearance, a number of netizens even went to the former residence of Rohan deliberately to seek answers. After Rohan’s death, his house was never resold by his relatives who inherited it, and the exact reason for this has been impossible to examine or verify. Probably because of the remote location of Rohan’s house, even if it was listed on the second-hand housing transaction market, few people asked or wanted to buy it.
Through the efforts of all parties, a group of young people who claimed to be investigating the mystery of Rohan’s disappearance was finally able to enter Rohan’s former residence. The house was very clean and had not even collected much dust. In his bedroom-cum-study, they found a notebook full of abstract graffiti.
He only left the first half of this notebook, which describes a crazy story about red clouds. A man suspected of being Rohan wrote on the title page of his notebook. Some time later, Foundation bots detected the following post on a personal blog recounting events related to SCP-099-INT. The post was deleted and logged. Below is a transcript of that account. Investigations into the author of the post are ongoing.
Stay away from red clouds. Red clouds, they eat people.
Red Clouds
June 25, 2007
The rainstorm started in the evening.
Thunderstorm clouds chasers set up all the observation equipment in the hillside in advance. From the sunrise to the sunset, they waited for this moment.
The first lightning bolt fell very close to the observation station, and all those who were hiding in the station had a strange sensation of static electricity diffusing through their bodies. They felt a little numb, a little itchy, as if every single hair on the body were erected, for an invisible gentle hand stroked slowly and coldly over the hair endings.
At this moment, the scene outside the window was gray, with rain clouds covering the forest like a water-soaked wool blanket covered on people’s heart. People can barely breathe, almost suffocating psychologically.
Rohan sat in front of the window and smoked. He was a little disappointed because the rain clouds above them at the moment were grayish-yellow and dark, not even purple, let alone red. Downstairs, other thunderstorm clouds chasers were playing mahjong, and someone excitedly shouted, “Good move! Hu!” Rohan felt distracted, so he put out the cigarette and opened the window to let the sound of wind drown him. He wanted to be left alone in peace. But even so, the noisy shouting downstairs still continued to penetrate through the thin floor slab.
Rohan went downstairs. He was about to tell them to keep their voices down, just then he noticed that the weather outside had changed.
The cold fog floating down the mountain was laced with wisps of red mist, like a wounded giant suffused the mountain fog with blood.
That blood-red fog soon surrounded the whole building. Rohan stared at that fog, and the first thing he felt was not ecstasy, but a terrible chill that rose up from the bottom of his heart, a feeling of being peeped, just like the feeling of being watched from behind by a wolf in the wilderness.
Then he realized that this was what he was looking for, what he had been chasing during his whole life.
That blood-like red cloud.
They do not eat people, they are people.
There is nowhere to verify when Rohan started to chase this kind of clouds, but what is certain is that he was highly active in the area of southern Sichuan between 1998 and 2007. He chased red clouds under the banner of chasing thunderstorms, and most people did not know that he actually had no interest in thunderstorms. By chasing thunder, he carefully concealed his true purpose.
He was looking for the thing that was hiding in the cloud. He knew that this kind of red clouds could talk. Come with me.
This note was recorded in the summer of 1999. Scrolling forward, in a note from 1992, Rohan wrote: “I heard her again. She was in the red mist, desperately calling for me to save her. I’m sorry Wen, I’m sorry.” Don't.
Further back in time, between 1983 and 1989, this notebook was a diary of a young couple. It recorded their journey from love to engagement. In the winter of 1989, they decided to join hands and enter into marriage, despite occasional frictions between the man, an accountant, and the woman, a scientific researcher.
The diary over the next few months mainly described how the couple prepared for their wedding, and on December 16, the diary owner complained about his girlfriend’s mysterious and unreasonable work. Although they were getting married soon, Wenwen’s work caused them to have no choice but postpone their wedding to the next year.
February 14, 1990: “She’s missing. This can’t be. I’m going to find her.”
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SCP-099-INT-2 was detected by a Foundation climatological monitoring station during 07/15/2022 rainy seasons. The nephology division conducted monitoring of precipitation activity and cloud formation belonging to SCP-099-INT. It was concluded that the behavior pattern of SCP-099-INT-2 did not agree with predictions based on its physical characteristics.
After observing the first precipitation of SCP-099-INT-2 and its effect on the biota of the area, samples of the specimens were taken and sent to the Biotechnology Division for analysis.
Biotechnology Division
Analysis of precipitation and morphological and genetic changes in Tehuacan biota caused by SCP-099-INT-2
Luisa Paola Vander Stella*; Alexandra Lambert Pierce.
- Research focused on abnormal meteorological activities and their effects on living organisms and soil.
Members:
Date: July 22, 2022
The Tehuacán area has different types of vegetation due to the altitudes of the region. Mainly the xerophytic scrub vegetation has been studied -with predominant plants of the families Cactaceae and Crassulaceae- and the tropical deciduous forest - predominant plants of the family Asparagaceae and some epiphytic plants of the family Bromeliaceae, mainly of the genus Tillandsia.
Analysis by optical microscopy has revealed a high concentration of ignotins. An ultrastructural review has revealed the presence of RT viruses and viroids. It has been hypothesized that these intracellular parasites are transcribed to the nucleus of plant cells in all tissues-dermal, fundamental and vascular. This causes anomalous alteration of the plant genome and triggers epigenetic processes that allow the plant to alter its morphology. The viral genomes end up binding to the host and the viruses enter and remain in a lysogenic phase.
Tissue alterations are usually homogeneous regardless of the type of plant, possessing the ability to perform CVM photosynthesis, as well as an increased ability to retain greenhouse gases, produce more oxygen and accelerated growth to adulthood. For example, some cacti have been seen to grow up to 3 meters in one day. Once the plant reaches an adult stage, its growth rate will return to normal.
The most diverse alterations are found in flowers. One example from each plant family will be listed below. The other recorded instances can be found in the extended document Flora/SCP-INT-099/30012023.
Cactaceae Family
Fig 1. Floral diagram of SCP-099-INT-2A.
Tepals
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Stamens
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Gynoecium
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Stamens can produce larger amounts of pollen, as well as other secondary metabolites packaged in water-soluble cell membranes. Upon contact with the soil, these metabolites favor the proliferation of endemic soil microorganisms, reverse desiccation and stabilize pH. All species produce fleshy fruits that, when ingested by the fauna of the region, cause slight changes in behavior and give them the ability to reproduce asexually. The progeny of these animals have been investigated and are not usually genetic clones of the parents, with recombination events being present.
During the night, the ovaries of the gynoecium present pores and release gases containing particles similar to those present in raindrops produced by SCP-099-INT-2. Should the plant be attacked by feral fauna or anthropogenic activity, the tepals will grow in size and envelop the plant to protect it. The seeds can form various morphologies to take advantage of wind dispersal and their respective pollinators.
Crassulaceae Family.
Fig 2. Floral diagram of SCP-099-INT-2B.
Sepals
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Petals
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Stamens
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Gynoecium
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The ovules of the gynoecium continuously produce a thick mist that by its density remains at ground level. The gas composition of the mist has not been identified. From it, amorphous entities are produced that travel through the area and degrade any type of waste on contact with it. When inhaled, humans feel a sense of calm and sometimes claim to receive some kind of message, although all have failed to convey the contents of the message. The stamens can grow up to 10 meters and release a spray-like liquid on other plants of this family, causing their transformation to more instances of SCP-099-INT-2B.
Asparagaceae Family.
Fig 3. Floral diagram of SCP-099-INT-2C.
Tepals
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Stamens
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Gynoecium
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The tepals cover the wood of the trees like a membrane and expel large amounts of water that evaporates quickly and leads to the formation of more instances of SCP-099-INT-2. The stamens and ovaries have been seen to give rise to different non-anomalous species in the region; while the fruits can germinate in different plant species. Ovaries and stamens produce sounds at a frequency inaudible to humans and animals, the meaning of these sounds is still being studied.
Bromeliaceae Family.
Fig 4. Floral diagram of SCP-099-INT-2D.
Sepals
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Petals
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Stamens
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Gynoecium
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The inflorescences of epiphytic plants are detached from the plant and carried by the wind for an estimated 3 hours. During this time, the petals will detach and fall on more plants where they normally develop. The gynoecium can produce a blue-colored goo and upon contact with air, will form pollen and viruses similar to those made by SCP-099-INT-2.
During the investigation of the area, the following note was found in one of the instances of SCP-099-INT-2A.
For so long this land lived under the promise of an end at our hands. Yesterday, as I looked up at the sky and the few stars illuminated a land doomed to the end, I wondered, what will become of all that I and my family have cared for generations? I can't stop thinking about how things used to be. The legends of gods who were in charge of providing us with water, good harvest and so on. But they were just that, legends.
Unlike the loss I see day by day in my work here, taking care of this little piece of green land. Lately several have said that the sky has been crying with sadness. That the white has turned blue. And I, who have grown up in this place, can feel it. A moment. A sign.
Let whoever was responsible know, even if your ideas are not understandable, they are welcome. Today under this celestial rain, I thank you for throwing a rope in this time of need.
