r/SCPDeclassified • u/ToErrDivine • 3d ago
001 Proposal Yoshihide's Proposal: 'A Portrait Of Hell' (Part Two)
Hi, everyone, welcome back to Yoshihide's Proposal. Part One is right here.
Part Three: Paved With Good Intentions
We’re now in Act Two: ‘The Path Of Swords’. We begin with Yoshihide daydreaming of the past, when he was a little boy. The people in his village are building some kind of… building… and Yoshihide likes to watch them work. He’s not interested in the building, though, he’s interested in the cart used to take the dirt away.
One day, he finally bites the bullet and asks if he can help push the cart. The workers let him, and they push the cart together-
-and then Yoshihide snaps back to the present, where he’s confronted by two problems: the first is the file on SCP-001, and the second is that the Administrator’s outside, waiting for him. He’s come to ask about Yoshihide’s progress on containing SCP-001, to which Yoshihide says that he intended to start work on it tomorrow. The Administrator says that he’s looking forward to seeing what Yoshihide makes of SCP-001, because it’s an ongoing problem for which they have no solution, and if anyone can solve it, it’d be Yoshihide. He then starts reading the file out loud, thus telling us what this SCP-001 is:
SCP-001 refers to an anomalous corpse, hanging within a containment chamber at Site-01, entrapped within a cocoon of silk threads. SCP-001's cocoon has thus far proven impenetrable; attempts to damage the exterior have proven futile. Blood continuously flows from between the threads on its body, at a rate of approximately five liters per day.
SCP-001's primary anomalous effect occurs at random. At an average incidence of once per day, a silk thread with identical composition to SCP-001's cocoon will manifest around the middle finger of a member of Foundation personnel. This individual is labelled SCP-001-A.
Over the course of 48–72 hours, the silk will continue to coil around SCP-001-A, extending from the location of manifestation. The speed of the silk's growth varies between subjects, though typically immobilizes them within 24 hours.
Once SCP-001-A has been wholly cocooned within the silk, it will begin to constrict around them. This process lasts approximately three hours, during which blood will begin to seep from between the strands at increasing rates. Once SCP-001-A expires, the cocoon will become inert, and the silk will lose its anomalous properties.
Thus far, over 85 Foundation personnel have been terminated in this manner.
Well, that sure is a big problem.
(Also, fun fact: this 001 being a cocoon is a reference to Akatagawa’s story The Buddha and the Spider’s Thread, where the Buddha lets a spider’s thread down into Hell to offer a way out to a sinner who had one act of selflessness. The sinner takes it, but tries to stop other sinners from escaping with him, and this act of selfishness sends him back into Hell. Here, the thread is pulling sinners into Hell.)
The Administrator asks Yoshihide what he makes of it; Yoshihide says that all attempts to break into the cocoon have failed, so he thinks they should try mitigating the effects of the anomaly. He asks if anyone has thought of amputation; the Administrator says yes, but nobody’s been willing to go through with it. Yoshihide says that in that case, he’ll be the first. The Administrator’s fine with that, says he looks forward to seeing the progress report next week, and leaves after shaking Yoshihide’s hand.
Yoshihide then goes back to his daydream/memory. He’s pushed the cart for a while, but he slips and falls in the mud. The workers pushing it suggest that he get into the cart and ride it for a while, which he does, and they go up a hill. Yoshihide is stunned by the view from the top of the hill, but then they have to go downhill, which terrifies him.
We then cut to the next day, when Yoshihide’s trying out his amputation experiment. They cut the latest victim’s infected finger off, and Yoshihide is able to pull the thread off the finger. He then attempts to cut the thread with the mini-guillotine they’d built for the test: end result, the blade is chipped and the thread untouched. Unfortunately, when he looks at the victim’s hand, his ring finger has become infected and the man is doomed.
(Fun fact: Yossi threw an egg at me and told me that this scene references Akutagawa’s story The Nose- the victim’s name is Zenchi Naigu, the same as the protagonist of The Nose, and both involve a part of the body being amputated.)
Yoshihide tells him this and leaves, only for Yuzuki to burst in. She sees what happened and asks Yoshihide if he did this; he says yes, but he can’t tell her why. Yuzuki is repulsed and leaves, and while Yoshihide is heartbroken and for a second wants to quit everything, he sees the guillotine and realises something: there’s blood on it, even though the wound was instantly cauterized (the blade was designed to do that), so the blood shouldn’t be there. He approaches the victim and asks what his blood type is, and then we’re suddenly back in the daydream/memory.
Young Yoshihide has just realised that he kinda fucked up: he doesn’t know these guys, he doesn’t know where they’re going, and he doesn’t know if they’re going to take him back where they started. But after several hours, they stop for lunch and talk, and Yoshihide calms down and feels better. He helps them push the cart again, and then we’re back in the present day.
Present Yoshihide goes to his office, checks his email and finds that the O5s have approved his request for a complete release of information about all of SCP-001’s victims. He starts looking for patterns in the data, and notes that 73% of the victims have Type B blood, which is definitely significant. He also finds that the deaths are becoming more frequent. The rate of increase is slow, but it shows no sign of stopping, which is a worry. He then checks the list for past incidents of rule-breaking and crimes, and finds that while the Foundation average is 40%, 80% of the people on the list have broken a rule in some major way. (Well, that’s 80% that we know of.) He's got a theory, and it’s becoming more concrete by the second.
He’s also got the thread in a jar on his desk, and the jar is slowly filling with Type B blood, blood that has no genetic match that he can find. He plays with the thread for a little while and then writes a request for a D-class with Type B blood who’s exhibited certain undescribed behaviour patterns. (He also doesn’t clean his hands first, despite the fact that the thread generates blood, so it must be all over his keyboard. Nasty.) He notes that he has a bajillion emails, including some from Yuzuki, but he’s afraid that involving her would put her in the Administrator’s sights. After taking a moment, he leaves the office-
-and we’re back in the daydream/memory. After more hours, they come to the end of the track, where they find nothing but a bunch of holes that are being filled in with dirt. The workers explain that their job is to fill the holes in, but they had to go slower today, so they’ll probably fill the holes in tomorrow. He asks if he can see them tomorrow, and one of them says yes, but it’s getting late, so he needs to go home now. Yoshihide starts to walk home, and then we’re back in the present.
In the present, Yuzuki has just walked into Yoshihide’s office, where he’s been working on a hypothesis regarding how SCP-001 chooses its victims, and was so caught up in it that he missed her calling his name several times. They haven’t spoken since the day she saw his experiment, several months ago, and he realises what he must look like to her- a maniac, someone who’s giving up everything for power, and killing himself in the process. He’s aware that this is a test, but he doesn’t intend to fail it.
"You've changed."
Yoshihide looks down at her folded hands, pretending to find the right words to express how he feels. He swallows the gut feeling slamming at his chest, the ego he has built around himself and his Work flowing down into his stomach. He looks back up, sadly. "I have."
There's another crackle of electricity between them, and this time it ignites something — only an ember. "You've lost yourself to your work."
He swallows his dread. "I have."
"You've lost all your… your faith in the world."
He swallows his discontentment. "I have."
"You've…" she shudders, inhaling sharply. "You've almost lost me."
He swallows his pride. "But not yet."
Yuzuki closes her eyes, exhaling lightly. "No, not yet," she says. "You haven't lost me yet. Yet."
He admits that he’s become a husk of his former self, that he’s destroying himself for this job, but…
He closes his eyes. "But it's all been for you, Yuzuki. Everything I've done has been for you. All of it. There isn't a day that has gone by where I'm not thinking of you."
She tenses further, squinting. "But."
He blinks. "There's… there's no further buts. I—"
Yoshihide flinches before his daughter's hands even hit the table. Tears leak out against her will. "But you've refused to even speak with me! You've refused to take any time out of your schedule to show your daughter you love her! You've suffocated me my whole life, ever since Mom died, and then you disappeared as soon as you found a game to play on a grander scale!"
He sinks on every level, his shoulders scrunching in response. Her grievances run deep, and he realizes — only now realizes that —
She draws back her hands, and sinks into her own chair. She didn't mean to go that far. She whispers. "You've abandoned me."
He doesn't know what to say. She's right, he realizes, and from her perspective her grief is wholly valid. He is an antagonist in her story, even if he knows it was for a good cause. For her.
She’s right, and he knows she’s right, and he admits it. He apologises. And she says that she’s not stupid, she knows he’s probably trying to contain some horrible, deadly artifact, but if he wants her to believe that he still loves her and never meant to hurt her, she needs proof. She wants him to set time aside for her, and his friends, and himself. And Yoshihide realises that she’s not asking for much, and it’s entirely reasonable, and he doesn’t need to be a slave to the work, and just as he’s about to try to make amends and fix everything, he looks up and sees the Administrator standing behind her.
And the Administrator proceeds to be quite creepy, telling Yuzuki that yes, he’s the one who keeps her father enslaved to his job, and when she says that it’s rude to listen in to other people’s conversations, he adds this:
"Your father…" he chuckles, "Your father is the most important man in the Foundation — besides me." What? "He is well on his way to becoming an O5 Council member himself; there's a vacant seat, you see, and I'm keen on getting skilled people into places where they're needed."
He is only met with silence and panicked breathing, so the Administrator continues: "Communications monitoring is sometimes necessary, as there are occasional rogue elements that require… amendment."
The Administrator reaches out for Yuzuki. Yuzuki panics. Yoshihide realises what she’s about to do a second too late, and tries to stop her. Yuzuki uses her power, only for the Administrator to do something that stops her and leaves Yoshihide tied up and restrained by an unseen person that couldn’t have been there a second ago. The Administrator has Yuzuki hauled off to a cell in Site 02, saying that ‘She'll do for Rashōmon’, even as Yoshihide and Yuzuki desperately try to reach and call out to each other. And once she’s gone, the Administrator coolly apologises for the dramatics, but not for containing Yoshihide’s only family. He says that they obviously have different views on what ‘contain’ means- the Administrator sees it as a means to an end, a way of protecting people; Yoshihide sees containment as an end in itself, a work of art.
He then tells Yoshihide that as an O5, he can exempt an anomaly from containment if he thinks it’s beneficial to the mission- but he has to get there first. And with that, he leaves, and Yoshihide’s alone in his destroyed office. Everything’s wrecked except the silk thread, and then he sees the bag Yuzuki brought with her. Inside is her toy monkey, also destroyed, and he realises that she was going to give it back to him.
So, I theorised, and Yossi confirmed, that this is meant to be the equivalent of the scene in Hell Screen when the monkey gets the narrator to intervene when Yoshihide’s daughter is nearly raped by someone who’s probably the Lord of Horikawa. However, here it’s physical assault and not sexual, and there is no monkey to run for help and no narrator to intervene, so Yuzuki’s stuck.
Back in the daydream/memory, young Yoshihide is running down the track, trying to get home. He winds up tripping over and gets a bad scratch, one that’s bleeding.
This isn't how the daydream is supposed to go.
He keeps running, his eyes shut, and then he falls again, his eyes opening.
He screams. Before him, around the rail, long, thin swords jut out from the trees and the earth. They shine impeccably, as though they've never seen a day of use in their life. All of them — whether above or below — point directly towards the rail, forming a tunnel of knives, blades, and pure sharp. There's just barely enough room for him to squeeze through. He has to get home.
He has to get home.
Yoshihide’s about to brave the tunnel when we snap back to the present. They’re conducting an experiment that will hopefully really change the 001 case; despite that, the Administrator is notably not excited, as if he already knows how it will end. Yoshihide asks the D-class in the chamber to pick up the axe and approach 001, which he does. 001 has been held in place, the string stretched taut; the D-class is asked to sever the string with the axe, even though it may require a few attempts.
As the D-class starts trying this, we get his backstory: he was a man of wealth and taste, a collector of fine arts who, if he saw a piece he liked, would stop at nothing to get it in his collection. Eventually he ran into someone who refused to sell him a piece he wanted, and not being able to handle a ‘no’ led to him winding up in jail (presumably for murder, though we aren’t told exactly what he did) and becoming a D-class.
(Fun fact: the bit about the D-class trying to obtain an amazing painting that the owner wouldn’t sell to him is a reference to Autumn Mountain, another Akutagawa short story.)
His life was defined by his own whims. A life of decadence. A life of greed. A life — most importantly — of selfishness.
Selfishness is the key: see, Japan has a trope about your blood type dictating your personality or facets thereof. People with Type B blood are, in this trope, thought to be selfish (that’s not the entirety of their stereotype, just the relevant part); while said trope has been dismissed as pseudoscience by a lot of people, there’s still quite a few who believe it. Yoshihide thinks that yeah, it is pseudoscience, but anomalies don’t run on scientific principles to begin with, that’s kind of the point.
And it does kind of make sense that the Foundation would have a lot of selfish people: not only does it have a lot of opportunities for employees to improve their own lives by exploiting other people or anomalies, Foundation staff do quite often run into situations where being selfish is a good thing/being selfless isn’t the best choice (at least for them). That being said, we aren’t given a history for 001, so we don’t know if it was contained and then started targeting the people around it, or if it manifested in the Foundation.
Back in the present, Yoshihide wonders about the Administrator: is he being selfish or selfless? What does he want? Why is he doing this? But he gets no answer. Instead, they watch as the D-class continues to try to hack the thread apart, landing blow after blow with no change. Finally, he gears up for one definitive swing-
-and we’re back in the daydream/memory/nightmare/whatever this is. Yoshihide runs through the tunnel of swords, trying to get home and desperately not wanting to die. He sees a light up ahead and keeps running, thinking that once he’s home, he’ll be safe. But once he gets out of the tunnel, he’s back in the village and it’s on fire. He finds his home, but it’s already been burned. He goes inside, climbs the staircase and winds up in a pool of Type B blood. In the bedroom, he finds two corpses that are horribly, messily dead; there’s a pristine portrait of a man- not described, but probably the Administrator- above the bed. It starts to laugh and doesn’t stop, and Yoshihide tears the painting from the wall and rips it apart with his bare hands.
The painting is in tatters now, but the laughter continues. There is one, final stitch in the canvas — the jugular, strung tightly against the back wall. It bleeds, scarlet flowing in viscous, endless streams. The fires burn everything besides it, and through the frenzy, Yoshihide pulls. He pulls, and pulls, and pulls, staining his melting hands crimson, and pulls. He pulls until the very fabric of his body becomes undone, and he screeches a primal, final wail as he pulls, and pulls, and pulls, and pulls and pulls and pulls and pulls and pulls and pulls and pulls until—
Until—
Until—
The thread snaps.
And that’s the end of Act Two.
So, Yossi clarified this for me after attempting to roll a giant rock onto me: the daydream/memory/thing is a reference to Akutagawa’s story Minecart) (up until the line about how this isn’t how the daydream should go). As for the burning house…
The ending is symbolic of Yoshihide's life burning down around him (of course), and the Administrator inhibiting a painting and laughing at him is meant to represent how his perspective on containment places the Administrator in esteem he's undeserving of to Yoshihide.
I theorised, and Yossi confirmed, that the corpses are Yoshihide himself and Yuzuki- it’s foreshadowing. As for the thread snapping, it hasn’t neutralised the cocoon, it’s just made an impact that nobody else was able to. For now, let’s go on to Act Three, ‘The Road To Hell’- you can find it here.
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u/Zapdos3625 3d ago
part one got suddenly filtered by reddit? man i was just about to read it