December 25th, 20██.
01:35 P.M.
Somewhere in Antarctica.
While most families around the world were celebrating Christmas, on the cold Antarctic continent, a handful of men were going against the snow, the polar winds and the extreme cold. Five members of Mobile Task Force Xi-11 ("Polar Bears"), along with Doctors Castillo, VanDerGauss and Cygnus, were moving in a small snow vehicle toward an old abandoned base.
The objective of their mission: to capture an anomalous entity that abducted children and took them away after leaving a pile of charcoal at the scene. The vehicle stopped, they had arrived.
In front of them rose an old research base, abandoned for decades, partially buried by snow and time. Inside, however, a small reddish glow could be seen coming from one of the windows. At last they had located their prey.
Four of the men moved forward armed with assault rifles, followed by Dr. Castillo and Dr. Gauss (to determine its biological and dimensional nature), while Dr. Cygnus and the team captain remained in the vehicle, along with the container they were going to transport the creature in.
The six of them stepped through the door, made their way down the dark corridor, lit only by the faint rays of the polar sun that shone through the openings of that dark enclosure. They swept the base inch by inch, finding various signs of their prey. Small coal, limping footprints. Children's clothes stained with blood made them shudder, thinking about what their final hours might have been like.
They had split into groups of two, leaving Castillo and Gauss alone in the main corridor, while the rest searched other areas of the facility. Suddenly, screams and gunshots were heard from one of the rooms. Gauss ran in, pulling a gun from his fleece coat, while Castillo radioed for backup. Upon arriving, the men were met by a grotesque humanoid creature, six feet tall, black-skinned, with disproportionately long arms, and a bulging belly covered with black and white clothing, as it stood on a pile of small infant bones, slowly strangling two of Xi-11's members. A smirk came across his grotesque face as he squeezed their throats tighter.
Desperate, they unloaded their weapons on the creature, causing it minimal harm, but enough to make it release the men. At great speed, it lunged towards the men, throwing one of them several meters away and sending him through an old wall, while the other one was left lying on the ground, seriously wounded. Extremely nervous, Gauss grabbed one of the rifles that had been left on the ground, and used it as a blunt weapon against the being's head, while Castillo took the wounded man to safety.
"You're not going to take me easily, schelmisch!" Gauss shouted while striking the creature with the weapon, delivering the occasional swing with his 'Swiss Army Knife'.
From one moment to the next, the entity lifted the unfortunate Dr. Gauss, who was thrown several meters away; Castillo pulled out an FN Five-Seven, firing at the creature's legs and making it fall. On its knees, it began to crawl slowly towards them, digging its claws into the blood and frost-covered floor. Being only a few centimeters away from grabbing Gauss, who was lying unconscious on the ground, Dr. Cygnus arrived with a flamethrower and discharged it on the creature's face. Three of the task force's men regained their strength and joined the fray against that monstrosity, until it finally collapsed inert on the cold ground.
A few minutes later, with Dr. VanDerGauss already recovered and the wounded safely inside the vehicle, they were getting ready to take a sample of the creature, in order to determine its nature, when they were met with a rather unpleasant surprise. As soon as Dr. Castillo inserted the needle, the creature shattered into small fragments of black charcoal. As best they could, they took the remains in a bag and resumed their journey back to their base. At first, Gauss insulted Castillo and Cygnus for having ruined an interesting specimen, but when he saw a small children's storybook lying on the floor alongside the remains, he realized the nature of that entity.
The eight men returned home, wounded, tired, with over 300 kilograms of coal and a lesson that made them take some things seriously, such as that it was the last time they would read a Christmas story to SCP-239, especially about Santa Claus and what he did to naughty children…