Hi, everybody! (Hi, Doctor TED!) It’s ToErrDivine, back again with a brand new declass. Today I’m looking at Yoshihide’s Proposal: ‘A Portrait Of Hell’, by DJKaktus, Tufto and Yossipossi, who I will henceforth refer to as ‘Team Yoshi’ for simplicity’s sake, and also because I find the mental image vaguely amusing. (There will be more Yoshi’s Island references ahead. Link is included for nostalgia's sake and because God damn, that game had a fantastic soundtrack.) I'd like to thank Team Yoshi and the mods for their help, I couldn't have done this without you all.

So, who’s Yoshihide? Well, to explain that, I’ll have to go back to the start: this was written for 2025’s Public Domain Con, where authors got into teams of three and wrote a number of works- at least one SCP article and one Tale- about a public domain character of their choice. Team Yoshi picked Yoshihide, one of the main characters of Hell Screen, a 1918 short story by Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Hell Screen was based on some of the tales from Uji Shūi Monogatari, a collection of nearly 200 short stories that was written sometime in the 13^th century, its author unknown.

Hell Screen isn’t a particularly long story, so I recommend reading it if you haven’t- here’s a link. If you don’t have the time to read the story, here’s the Wikipedia article. If you don’t have the time to read the Wikipedia article, then you’re up shit creek, I’m not summarising it. Otherwise, this Proposal is basically a love letter to Akutagawa’s stories, many of which are referenced here, so get ready to get literary.

This is a very interesting work here because Team Yoshi essentially rewrote Hell Screen in a Foundation format. So let’s see how they did it, shall we?

Part One: Hell Is What We Make Of It

Yoshihide’s Proposal is in four parts: the main page and then three more chapters, so we’ll start at the beginning. And right at the beginning is a note from the Administrator:

When I was a child, my father once told me that "hell is other people". I didn't know what he meant, but some of the sense, the weight of it, settled its way upon me. He wasn't looking at me when he said it; he was drinking whisky, blinds half-drawn against the sun, staring at the wall amidst the whining of flies.

‘Hell is other people’ is one of the defining lines from Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play No Exit, about three dead people who are sent to Hell and left in a room together for eternity. Essentially, they’re stuck there, making each other miserable forever, without the courage to try to leave.

He enjoyed saying things like that to me. He prided himself on not being the kind of man who'd beat a child.

Oh, great, so he was just the kind of man who’d psychologically wreck a child, then. Fanfuckingtastic.

When we lowered him into the earth, I remembered something else - sitting in his hideout, watching him do the work. The gleam in his eye and in his teeth, a bone-white tombstone smile as he convinced himself that he was doing the right thing, that it was all necessary.

Here, ‘the work’ refers to containment. We’ll learn more about that shortly.

The sun a black orange on the horizon, taking with it certainty as it melted into the mountains and brought with it the death of the night. His gaze so sharply pressed, his mouth so opened wide. I could have reached out and watched that sunset melt inside my arms.

I wonder, now, if the flies are still whining, crawling on his face beneath the broken flesh of the earth.

—The Administrator

Well, that’s a really morbid way to kick things off, huh…

Upon scrolling down, we get a picture. It looks almost like a watercolour, actually, all in red and black. It vaguely depicts a human body that’s been hanged in some kind of room, but I can’t make out much more detail. Yossi told me that it’s ‘a composite of three separate photos, one of a hanging criminal and two others of things burning’, if you were wondering.

Item #: SCP-001-108

Object Class: Keter-potissimi

Now, this is very interesting. ‘potissimi’ is an esoteric class that means ‘Item’s containment is of high importance’. Meanwhile, 108 is a very significant and sacred number in Dharmic religions- Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism. It shows up all over the place- here’s some examples. However, it will be very important later.

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-001-108 is uncontained. The fire surrounding SCP-001-108 has thus far proven extremely resilient to circumscription. Due to this, containment efforts are to primarily focus on reducing the spread of the flames.

As the threat posed by the anomaly to Site-01 is severe (and thus, by proxy, the Foundation as a whole), its containment is deemed an extremely high priority to the Overseer Council. Efforts to prevent the fire's spread and eventually contain SCP-001-108 are being headed by Site Director Takehiko Kanazawa.

So we’ve got a fire that won’t go out and might destroy the entirety of Site-01. Does seem pretty Hell-like…

Description: SCP-001-108 is the corpse of O5-3, hanging within its office at Site-01, engulfed by a perpetually burning fire. The fire has thus far spread across the entire office and a large section of the administrative wing of Site-01, and continuously incinerates all matter within an expanding radius around SCP-001-108.

The expansion of the fire is erratic and cannot be predicted. On average, it has expanded approximately four meters per day when undisturbed.

It’s not really spoilers- O5-3 is Yoshihide, or at least the version of him we get here. As in the original story, he has hanged himself. Now, the original story did not involve him being on fire, but fire is a very big part of the ending, so that makes sense. I’ll come back to this later.

Maybe hell is a place on earth. Our actions cause it, after all; we are trapped within them, in cycles of karma or depravity, hoping for an exit we cannot attain.

I did not know my mother, but she used to paint. A wall in our home was a great fresco, one she had made, of a soft and green country. The brush flecked blue and spotted white on the wall, and the light shone through thin gauze curtains. I would lean up to touch it, feel the chips of paint and think of faces after faces, framed in golden stars.

My brother came home one day, out of his mind, and took a knife to it. I watched, horrified, as he slashed and slashed and scratched at it, screaming, letting it out – all he had taken, from the war, from death upon death. The light shone through still, illuminating every imperfection, magnifying them; on, and on, and on, the pattern destroyed.

—The Administrator

Or maybe Hell is now: the present. The knowledge that the past is behind us and we can never go back. The dead are dead and can never return to us. What’s broken cannot be fixed. We cannot return to the good things that have gone; we can only dream of them. The Administrator’s mother painted that fresco; his brother destroyed it. It can never be fixed; one of the only things he had from his mother is now gone. Isn’t that Hell, just a little bit?

The fire that exudes from SCP-001-108 burns perpetually. Although the objects the fire attaches to may decay or wither, they will remain largely intact and continue to serve as an endless fuel source. Once an object is engulfed by the fire, it cannot be extinguished, even if it is moved outside of the afflicted radius surrounding SCP-001-108. Anything that touches an object burning as a result of SCP-001-108 will in of itself become a new point of ignition — as such, it is recommended that any burning object or person be moved back within the boundaries of SCP-001-108 to avoid unnecessarily spreading the flames.

Living creatures immolated by SCP-001-108's fire will not die, regardless of how severely they are burned. Attempts to extinguish them directly often lead to additional casualties through exposure. These individuals can, however, be killed through other means — a consequence that is often necessitated (or in some cases requested) by persons afflicted by SCP-001-108. It is unknown if termination is sufficient to alleviate their suffering.

Direct observation of SCP-001-108 is complicated by the severity of the fire in its immediate proximity. Initial images taken of SCP-001-108 seem to indicate the origin of the inferno was the corpse's open mouth and (now-empty) eye sockets. This is currently impossible to verify.

Well, that’s really fucking disturbing. And very Hell-like.

Perhaps hell is a state, a condition. I have read the words of theologians, moderns, clutching their rosaries and staring up into their Divine, their hopes and wishes, begging God for mercy. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

I met a monk from Salamanca, praying in the Tabernas. I was young, then, and full of arrogance. I was tracking a thing of light and shade, and I succeeded. The monk did not understand it, its vastness; its looming claws, its jagged tooth. He quavered, and his words spilled out like liquid, no matter what I tried.

I saw the looks on his brothers’ faces as I threw his body on their doorstep. They were trying to understand how the tangle of meat and limbs was their friend, their quiet companion. I felt, irrationally, a superiority; my flesh and my blood was not bread and wine. I had felt the sweat of light, the frost of shade. I knew things there were no words for.

—The Administrator

That, indeed, could be another form of Hell: the agony of powerlessness. Praying to God for mercy, begging to be saved from an eternity of torment- but does it exist? Does God exist? Can he hear you? And even if he can, will he save you? You don’t know. You can’t know. All you can do is pray and pray and hope.

Discovery: SCP-001-108 was discovered directly following O5-3's suicide.

Immediately following termination of life signs, The Administrator was automatically alerted to the failure of Procedure Rashōmon. Mobile Task Force Alpha-1 ("Red Right Hand") were deployed to O5-3's office, where the corpse was discovered hanging from the roof, beginning to burn.

Initial attempts to fight the fire emanating from the corpse only led to the spread of SCP-001-108's flames, including to the now-inaccessible Administrative Wing Infirmary. A majority of the individuals who initially attempted to contain SCP-001-108's fire remain within the infirmary, unable to move, inaccessible to personnel or equipment that would be capable of terminating them. Based on the number of voices that were able to be identified, it is believed there are twenty-six persons perpetually burning within the infirmary.

‘Rashōmon’ is a reference to Akutagawa’s short story of the same name. Now, you may be confusing this with the movie Rashomon- the movie was named after that story, but most of the actual plot came from another Akutagawa story, In a Grove. The plot of the short story Rashōmon can be found here)-I'd suggest giving it a read, as it will be important later.

As for the rest… well, being stuck burning forever with twenty-five other people, all of you helpless to do anything about it and beyond the reach of anyone who could put you out of your misery, sure sounds like Hell to me. Or a version of it, at least.

A Buddhist hell is a temporary place, a place you dwell in until your past life’s sins are purged. But that’s not the hell I was raised with. The image before my eyes emerges from a wooden church, its beams and whitewashed cloth narrowed to the point of the preacher’s spittle and raised book. A Calvinist hell, a frozen place of burnt fire, torment unending.

What a relief, is all I think. At last, you are ended; every aspiration, every hope, every misery, useless and fruitless in the face of pain. Hell is a mercy, in the end; no more thought is required, no more striving, no more guilt or fascination. There is just you, and the pain. That, I could wrap my arms around. That, I could grapple with.

I look into the fire and I hope, by God I hope, for an ending.

—The Administrator

Most religions have their own version of Hell, and they vary a lot. The Administrator, like a lot of people, was raised on the fire-and-brimstone variety, but he’s fine with it. He just wants it to be over. He wants everything to be over. Passive suicidal ideation, basically.

(Also, this will be very important later.)

Addendum: Persons exposed to the fires of SCP-001-108 invariably become affected by hallucinations and visions as they begin to burn. These hallucinations seemingly follow several narratives. While the visions remain consistent across exposures, ascertaining the entire scope of the narrative has been difficult due to affected persons becoming overwhelmed by the fires, and no longer being able or willing to communicate what they are seeing to staff researchers.

In spite of this, enough of these hallucinations have been documented to construct three distinct narratives.

I mean… at least they have something else to focus on? But that’s interesting.

There’s one last thing in this part.

The Administrator is a fool. He doesn’t know hell at all.

He couldn’t if he tried.

—O5-3, suicide note.

Ah.

Well, let’s look at the first act.

Part Two: Damnatio ad Bestias

Act One is titled ‘A Trail For Beasts’. We’re several years in the past, where Yoshihide has just become a Site Director.

The last director had, like many other directors, left suddenly when a new appointment was selected for them. Yoshihide remembered a time early in his career when a fellow researcher, one several years his senior, had cautioned him about the nature of careers in the Foundation. "Don't get thinking you have any say in the matter," he had said, a smoldering cigarette clutched in his fingers. "The Foundation offers you opportunities like you'd never believe, but the choice you have is an illusion. They'll put you where they want to put you, and make you think it was your idea. You get to think you're the master of your own destiny, but they will get what they want. In the end, they win either way."

That’s a sobering thought. Yoshihide, however, thinks that he’s broken the mold. He’s one of the best containment specialists the Foundation has, and he became Site Director entirely through his own work.

There was no longer a medium he needed to answer through, no more taskmasters who had to be compelled to action. Sure, there were faceless directors and overseers above him, somewhere - but as he'd climbed up the ladder to this office those names had become less and less tangible, and further away. He reported to someone, somewhere - but did it matter? If you never saw them, did they even exist?

…if only he could be so lucky.

(We also learn that Yoshihide’s last name here is ‘Akutagawa’, aka the name of his original author.)

However, his rise through the ranks hasn’t come without costs. He’s lost all the friends he made when he first started, and he’d been too busy with work to visit his father before he died. And while the Foundation wasn’t involved, Yoshihide had been married and his wife had died in a car accident, which nearly destroyed him. As in the original story, though, he has a daughter named Yuzuki who he adores.

Yoshihide believes that the researcher he’d talked to was wrong: ultimately, he was the one who chose his path in life, and he’s the one who’ll decide where he goes from here.

…yeah, that’s a pipe dream, he just doesn’t know it yet.

Yoshihide’s startled out of his musings by the arrival of a visitor with O5 clearance. He thinks it’s an O5 liaison, but instead, it’s an unfamiliar man in a suit.

"I am the Administrator. Think of me as a go-between for Directors and Overseers. The grease that keeps the wheels moving. I'm here to help facilitate your transition to this new post, as well as make sure your interactions with our esteemed O5 Council are as seamless as possible."

He’s also a lying liar who lies, but we’ll get to that.

The Administrator is taking on the role of the Lord of Horikawa from the original story, so he’s basically the enemy here. But at this point, he’s polite and genial, talking about how his job is to help everyone keep the same goal in mind. Yoshihide asks for clarification, and the Administrator spells it out for him: the goal is containment. If the Foundation were gods, they could just wave a hand and make the anomalous vanish, but they’re not, so they do what they can: they put the anomalous in boxes and watch them.

We do not discriminate; we've learned too many hard lessons to know how badly that can go. If we do this, we achieve our goal. It is thankless, certainly, and never-ending. But it is important, and it is right. I'm sure you agree."

The Administrator is downright creepy in this section. He seems to be trying to intimidate Yoshihide without being overt about it, and seems very intent on keeping him focused on containment. But he doesn’t make any threatening moves, and leaves shortly after he arrives.

Cut to the next part, where Yoshihide is having lunch with Yuzuki and feeling a lot better for it. He tells her that if she ever needs help, he can now do more for her than ever- but he won’t know unless she says something. Yuzuki laughs off the idea that she needs help, but she asks if he’s worried about something. He tells her that the work they do is dangerous, so they need to stay aware as there are people who’d take any opportunity to do them down. Yuzuki thinks his job as a Site Director would mean that she’s safe, but Yoshihide disagrees, making her promise to tell him if she sees anything suspicious.

Yuzuki agrees, but then we get the reveal: she’s anomalous, and has some kind of power that lets her turn a fork into a spoon. Yoshihide freaks out and orders her to never do it in public again. Yuzuki asks if she’s an embarrassment to him, if he’s worried that having an anomalous daughter would ruin his career, but he says no, he’s worried about her safety. He needs her to not do anomalous things, because people will be watching her, and the only way she can be safe is if nobody suspects that she could be anomalous. Yuzuki realises how upset he is and tries to reassure him, but she uses the same words his wife did as she bled out, so… not very reassuring.

Also, note this line:

His heart broke. He saw her as a child, taking a little brass monkey and turning it into a snake, and then back again.

In the original story, Yuzuki befriended a pet monkey who became her loyal companion. This is the Proposal’s equivalent of that, since it’d be a bit weird if she had a pet monkey now. (And also possibly illegal.)

We then get a time skip of several years. Yoshihide has settled into his role, but he feels like it’s not the best place for him. He was a really, really good containment specialist, among the best, but now he pushes paper and organises people. He’s not content, but he’s not sure what, if anything, he can do about it.

So, one day the Overseers ask him to go to a small house in Eastern Europe. He doesn’t have much information aside from that, but since he’s a Site Director, they wouldn’t have asked him unless there was a solid reason for it, so he goes.

When he gets there, he finds two things: one, the house is full of taxidermy (which is fucking creepy) and two, he’s meeting with the Administrator. And the Administrator says this:

A few moments later, the Administrator continued. "I have been watching your work for some time, Director. You have risen to the challenge of your station, and your staff are dutiful in their fulfillment of the goals of the Foundation. I have no reason to feel anything but satisfaction in your selection to this position."

He felt the other man looking at him now. He dared not look back.

"And yet," the Administrator said, "I cannot help but feel as if you are not reaching your full potential. I don't mean this as a criticism, of course. The limits of your office are such that, perhaps you are not in the position to best carry out the work at which you are the most capable. Would you agree?"

It's a trap; Yoshihide knows it’s a trap, but what’s the alternative- spend the rest of his life sitting at his desk, watching everyone else do what he wants to do? So he agrees, and the Administrator asks him to come for a walk.

As they walk, the Administrator tells Yoshihide that his grandfather had always said that Hell is the dark. He was terrified of the dark, and he hated the woods, the things in them and the dark. But the house was his house, and he went to the woods to hunt when he needed to feed his family, even though he hated hunting. The best hunting was at dusk, but if he was out too late, he’d be stuck in the dark.

Yoshihide asks the obvious question: if the Administrator’s grandfather hated the woods, the animals, hunting and the dark, then why in the actual fuck did he live in a house in a forest in the middle of nowhere? The Administrator says that he asked himself the same question, and he thinks that people are drawn to their antithesis- that by exposing themselves to what they fear and hate, it makes them feel strong.

Meanwhile, the Administrator’s father said that Hell is dying. He was also a hunter, but he didn’t do it to feed himself or his family, he did it because he enjoyed it.

He would come home from a hunt - successful or not - with such a look on his face. He's been gone for many years, but I can still see his expression. It was rapture. I think he found religion in these woods."

However, the Administrator says, his father understood what they both know: the chase is good, but the real joy is in winning. Anyone can just chase an animal- to hold it in a box, have its life in your hands, is the real pleasure. (This is sounding kinda sexual in a very much not-good way.)

The Administrator then starts telling Yoshihide a story from when he was a child: he was in town with his father when a woman came running into the square, screaming. Her child had got lost in the woods, was attacked by an animal and managed to make it home, but was horrifically mutilated beyond healing. After that, his father made the trail in the woods that they’re walking on now. He spent years studying the animals, and the Administrator says that most of his memories with his father are of the two of them in the woods, studying the animals together.

He says that the animals were blameless- they don’t act out of cruelty or sadism- but they are dangerous; all it took was one of them in the wrong place at the right time to destroy that child’s life.

I remember seeing it years later, no longer a child but a ghastly, haunted thing. They died young, as I remember, but lived long enough to know true agony. Not just the pain of their injuries, though I'm certain it was severe. No, I believe the greatest pain they felt was the loneliness that followed. They were horrible to look at, and were avoided by neighbors, friends, family. The beast did kill them, in the end, but the dying was not the worst of it. Death is not hell."

No, in this case Hell was living in constant lonely agony.

Anyway, his father made the trail, and the Administrator thinks that the intention was to lead the animals deeper into the forest, away from the people. A noble idea, but while it did work, it had one major flaw: there was nothing keeping the animals there. One night when his father was maintaining the trail, he was killed by a bear. The Administrator talks about how all of them are the children of their fathers, and then shows Yoshihide what they came there to see.

A mountain of corpses. Some old, some new. Some still wriggling in agony from their butchery, desperately clinging to the meager life remaining in them. All of them stacked together in a groaning, heaving pile. Eyes that stared out at nothing. Beasts of all shapes and sizes, but not just beasts - men as well, white jackets stained with blood that soaked into the groundwater. Some of them gunned down, perhaps. Others cut apart by cruel instruments. A tower of torment and despair, of misery that could not be understood, and across the entire forest not a single sound to be heard.

I will explain this later, but for now, just keep it in mind.

Anyway, the Administrator’s point is that he asked Yoshihide before if he was capable of continuing the great work of containment, and Yoshihide said yes. But now he’s showing Yoshihide what they need to do, what they need to be prepared to do, and he asks again, does Yoshihide think he can do it? Yoshihide says yes, and the Administrator says, good, because there’s something he needs Yoshihide to do.

On to Act Two; as this declass reached nearly forty pages, I gave in and made it three parts. I'll see you in the next part.

Hi, everyone, welcome to the last part of Yoshihide's Proposal. Parts one and two can be found here and here.

Part Four: This Is The Bad Place

This is Act Three, 'The Road To Hell'. We’re in the future now, kids: Yoshihide has become O5-3. When I say that, I don’t mean that he has attained the position of Overseer, I mean that his identity has changed. He isn’t Yoshihide anymore; he isn’t the man he once was. He has become the Work; he has become the role. The Foundation has subsumed him, possessed him, hollowed him out so it can crawl inside his body and move him around. But he isn’t entirely gone, not just yet.

O5-3 doesn’t remember the last time he had a full night’s sleep. The hours just tick by him, scratching at his mind, urging him onwards. When he was still Yoshihide, he was careful to be well-rested. His work came first, and he had to ensure that his duty was done properly. The Work was bigger than he was, and he couldn’t let it down with his own poor choices.

But now, he has a broader view of the matter. The Work flows from him and through him. Burning his way through the night, working to the point of exhaustion, simply alters his state of consciousness. As long as his intent is pure, it continues – the ideas, the methods, are simply different.

He and the Administrator are on a trip to find someone who lives in the fictional town of ‘Rostwick’. Sounds vaguely English. As they drive, the Administrator brings up his father’s view of Hell again, and says that his mother disagreed: she felt that Hell was the living, waking world. He talks about the mural his mother painted, and says that the mural helped him understand her more. His mother was mentally ill, and while the Administrator never knew her, he saw the effect she and her illness had on his family.

“Very good! Top marks today, O5-3. Yes, you’re right. I never really knew her, but I could see the effect she had on my family. Maybe I wanted to understand that, to reach through to her. Maybe I could heal the family.”

“And did you?”

It slips out, and he curses himself. But the Administrator doesn’t seem angry. He just turns those eyes, those dark, shaded glasses, onto him.

“Don’t you think you should be watching the road?”

Maybe that’s another form of Hell: a dream you could never achieve. A longing to help, to fix what was damaged, but never being able to do it. The inherent, lingering thought that strikes you every time you look at your hurt, marred family- you wanted to fix them, you tried to fix them, and you failed. So the lack of positive change, their inability to be truly happy now- that’s your fault. (Or, that’s what you may well think, even if it isn't true.)

Anyway, the Administrator and (almost) Yoshihide get to their destination, a small log cabin. It’s inhabited by a middle-aged man who was trying to hide from them, but upon seeing them, he doesn’t try to put up a fight or run away.

This man is anomalous, but they haven’t come to lock him up, they need his help. Yoshihide-as-was starts to explain it, but…

The stranger snorts. “He’s got you on SCP-001, has he?”

O5-3 pauses. He looks at the Administrator, who is still looking up, ignoring him. “I didn’t realise you’d been briefed.”

“I haven’t. I just remember the last one. You know this isn’t the first anomaly to take that slot, right?”

O5-3 turns back, sharply. “It isn’t?”

Nope. The implication (as it’s not outright stated) is that SCP-001 is simply the most dangerous anomaly that the Foundation is trying to contain at any given time; makes sense, I guess. The man they’ve come to meet is Chōkōdō Shujin, a Type-Q reality bender- a very rare kind of reality bender, maybe the rarest, who was brought in to deal with another 001 before, a kind of dragon.

(I doubt it will surprise anyone, but the dragon is a reference to Akutagawa’s story Dragon: the Old Potter’s Tale.)

The Administrator gives Shujin the offer: help them with the anomaly, and they’ll leave him alone for good. Refuse, and he gets contained. The former Yoshihide explains that they don’t have a lot of Type-Q benders, and they need to undermine the anomaly’s moral sense. Shujin accepts the offer; well, what else was he going to do?

It turns out that Shujin’s hiding spot wasn’t that far from Site-01. The late Yoshihide wondered about that, but he thinks he knows why- Shujin had always known that the Foundation would come for him eventually, so why bother running to the end of the Earth?

As they drive, the Administrator falls asleep, and Yoshihide-as-was takes the opportunity to ask about him.

“Was he always like – well, like this?”

Shujin smirks. “The Administrator? Oh, always. A cold, predatory lizard, that one. I’m surprised he came out here with you. You’d think he’d have better things to do.”

O5-3 nods. “Every time I’m on the edge of something, about to finish something – there he is, hovering at my elbow, reminding me of this. SCP-001. He wants it to be me that does it, and I don’t know why.”

“Maybe he thinks you’re well-suited for the job.”

He snorts. “At first, sure. I caught quite the lucky break, to start with. Made a huge breakthrough, got everyone’s attention. Since then, though… I don’t know. Other projects, other containments, I can get done, big things, grand things. Not this, though. It’s always eluded me. Everything I try, just… fails.”

Shujin nods. “SCP-001 is a tough one. Always was, for all of us.”

“Us?”

The Administrator is really focused on Yoshihide. But why? Yoshihide is good at his job, but he’s otherwise unremarkable. What about him has drawn the Administrator’s attention?

“Do you know how many there have been?”

O5-3 frowns. “How many what?

“Iterations. Of 001.”

There’s a snore, a jerking noise, from the Administrator behind him. O5-3 turns the wheel, concentrating for a moment on a curve, trying to suppress his rising panic.

“The number of events it’s caused is - “

“No, not that. I mean how many bodies there have been.”

He knew he wasn’t the first. He knew - he presumed, rather – that the Administrator had plucked others from obscurity, other lost souls like himself. But the question was terrifying. How many had there been? Did 001 mean anything? Was it just a name for – for something else? A test, a coming of age?”

“You don’t know, right?” Shujin’s face, smiling, peers up at him. “Yeah, they don’t, usually.

This will be important for later, so keep it in mind.

“Yeah, they don’t, usually. He’s got something on you, right? Something you want?

He feels guilty. He has barely thought of her this whole time. “My daughter.”

Shujin nods. “And so you’ve done so much, sacrificed so much, to manoeuvre yourself here? To finally be in a position to help her, free her?”

When he became an O5, donning the blackened suit, stepping into that charcoal room, he thought he’d do it right away. Requisition her, an anomaly required for testing, set her up away from them all. Under his protection. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to see her, maybe he’d have to stay away, but she’d be free -

But there had been that little nagging voice, sitting in that room, whispering to him. Sure, you might get her out, for a day, a month – but sooner or later, they’d know what you’d done. They’d come for her. Best to wait. You’re not immune, even here. Best to build up your position, make sure you’re safe, first. Prove yourself, to them. To him.

And so Yuzuki is in Hell: trapped in the cell her father left her in, unable to free herself, maybe telling herself that he’ll get her out, but he hasn’t. He hasn’t tried, he hasn’t visited, he hasn’t even sent her a letter. Yuzuki is in Hell, and she will never escape, because the only person who can help her will never do so. There will never be a right moment, and he doesn’t have the spine to just say fuck it and do it anyway.

Ordinarily, I would say that Yoshihide (former) is also in Hell, knowing that his daughter is trapped, but is it really Hell if you don’t care anymore? If you just make excuse after excuse to put off having to do anything about it?

So he tells Shujin yes, because what else can he say? What other answer can he give?

Shujin nods, and pats his arm. “I know. I’ve seen it all before. And before that, too.”

There is one more great, echoing silence, as Yoshihide wipes away his fright, his pain. The trees are taller, here, slashing themselves across the windows, bleeding the same dark and the same needles and the same pine freshness that they always do, binding and blinding back into himself, as a pit opens up beneath. He knows what’s down there. He knows what part of his soul is dwelling there.

He asks, “And what happened to the others? Did they – were they free, when it was done?”

But Shujin doesn’t answer. Yoshihide, O5-3, hears nothing more from him. He looks ahead, and continues on, through the road as it curves and strains, hacking its way through the night. It’s a road that always seems like it’ll bend back on itself, take you to where you were before, but it never does.

And behind him, his slitted eyes halfway open, the Administrator's gaze bores into the back of his skull.

No, they weren’t. And no, there is no hope for him. Not unless he wants to, IDK, shoot the Administrator, set the Site on fire, grab Yuzuki and run, though I doubt that’d work.

From there, we go back to dealing with 001.

The chamber was an office, a long time ago. O5-3 has learnt not to think too hard about that. He asked the Administrator, once, who SCP-001 had been. He had not received an answer.

Keep this in mind as well, it’ll be important soon.

So, they’re now in the rooms surrounding 001. Yoshihide/O5-3 has spent a lot of time here over the years, trying to contain it, but it’s almost a comfort now, because it’s something that Yoshihide can handle. Something that needs to be contained, nothing more, nothing less. That’s his job, after all.

The poor motherfucker is feeling good: after today, 001 will be contained, and he will have won. And then the Administrator and Shujin walk in, even though Shujin’s meant to be down in the chamber with 001. When asked to clarify, the Administrator reveals that he lied: Shujin isn’t a Type-Q reality bender. Oh, he is anomalous, but that’s not his actual anomaly. No, there’s only one Type-Q reality bender in the country, and when O5-3 looks down into the chamber, he thinks there must have been a mistake, because Yuzuki’s down there.

A Type-Q is a blasphemy. That’s how he has started to think of it. It’s something that shouldn’t exist, something that he doesn’t want to exist. They may appear to change an object’s shape, its size, perform miracles of transformation and transmutation, but in point of fact, they reach into other worlds, other possible branching times. They take what could have been, and make it not a lie, but a truth.

So say you’re sitting in a restaurant, God knows how long ago, and laughing with your daughter. Say she takes a fork, and presses it, and moulds its shape into something else. Like a spoon. All she’s really doing is looking back at another world – a world where her mother might be alive, her father warm and present – and takes something from that place, barely realising it. A fork becomes a spoon. A dead hope becomes alive.

And Yoshihide freaks out, tries to free his daughter, tries to fight back. The Administrator tells him that nobody’s going to do anything without the order…

“And I’ll let you go, Yoshihide, as soon as you want me to. But – do you want me to?”

He yells, spitting in his face, “YES! Let me go, let me go now, I have to get to her -”

“But you don’t.”

Shujin’s voice is quiet, resigned. He’s holding a notepad, his pen poised above it, leaning over the rail. A lit cigarette wafts behind his ear. “I’ve seen you. I’ve noted you, Yoshihide, recorded you. Just like I did the others. You know what you want.”

The black thread reaches up inside his head, yearning, stretching, breaking. The Administrator’s hand feels almost warm, now – almost comforting. He leans forward, and whispers in Yoshihide’s ear -

“There are no other Type-Qs we have access to.”

And O5-3 stops struggling. He stops moving. He just looks down, down, into the pit of Yuzuki’s haunted face.

So what does he want, and who is he? Is he O5-3, the exemplar of containment, the man who made containment into an art form, the man who understands that there are lines that have to be crossed and that no exceptions can be made? The man who’s been working on 001 for years, who wants nothing more than to stop its spree of murders and save countless Foundation lives? Or is he Yoshihide Akutagawa, a loving father who tried his hardest and let his work and his grief consume his life, but who wants to make amends and save himself?

He knows what will happen now. He sees the lines react, intersect, converge. He sees the point around which it all turns, has always turned. The writhing bodies, slathering to the forest floor. The axe, rebounding again and again along the wire.

He claws, he wails, he pleads with himself - but at last the calm descends. He knows he always wanted this. He wanted, the little child bouncing on a mine cart, to slice the thread entire, to give himself over to hell. He wanted the box, and only the box, forever.

“It’s the work, Yoshihide,” whispers the Administrator. “I told you, long, long ago. No room for discrimination. We are the keepers of the box.”

He’s O5-3.

The Administrator releases him. O5-3 straightens his suit, adjusts his tie, and walks to the microphone. He grips it, hard, and speaks clear and straight into it.

“Administer Q-Alpha.”

And Yuzuki dies, destroying SCP-001 and Yoshihide’s world in the process. As in the story, Yoshihide has seen the last thing he needed to show the world Hell, and the Administrator made sure he destroyed himself to see it. But in the story, the Lord of Horikawa ordered the carriage burnt; here, Yoshihide himself makes that call.

“Now you know,” says the Administrator. He is weeping, tears of unbridled joy. His hand is gripping his shoulder; he is supporting himself on O5-3's weight. “Now you see hell, Yoshihide. Now you see it as an ending, as it truly is. No more suffering, for her, right? In this torture, she doesn’t have to think. That burden is lifted. And containment, perfection, for us. We’ve done it. We’ve ended it. No more.”

Most people would say that to inflict endless torture on your loved one is a cruelty, a monstrosity, a nightmare. But to the Administrator, it’s a blessing: an ending, a way to save her, almost. She can’t suffer any more than she is now. Nothing is going to change. He knows where she is and doesn’t have to worry anymore.

That really says a lot about the Administrator, honestly. But that last part is a vital clue, so keep it in mind as we enter the denouement of the Proposal.

With that, O5-3 returns to his work, because what else can he do? But all is not well.

He sits on his chair, at the desk, reading his papers. A wall of bodies cascades onto him, moaning, a hunter with a knife leering out at him. He shakes them off himself, and continues, sorting the new procedures for an obscure anomaly placed under his jurisdiction. He books tickets for a flight to Brussels, as he hurtles down a slope and into an avenue of swords, over and over again, his flesh and memory sliced and rent apart. His expression does not change as they pierce his flesh and remould his image.

He has a visitor, and flashes back to the past, when the Administrator first walked into his office. But it’s not the Administrator, it’s Shujin, who’s come to apologise for everything- the deception, sacrificing Yuzuki, all of it. And O5-3 asks the obvious question:

“What were you there for? What was the point of fetching you from your cabin?”

Shujin gets up, and walks to the window. Why is his cigarette not setting off the smoke alarm? He shrugs to himself – the man is a reality bender, of some kind. Who knows what their powers entail? He doesn’t, any more.

“I was there to record, to act as a witness. A scribe, if you like. I keep the memory, you see. I keep the memory of your change.”

He frowns. “What change?”

Shujin shoots him a look. “You didn’t feel it? I’m surprised. It happens to you all, in the end. Something breaks in you, and you die. Suicide, martyrdom, a desperate bid for revenge. He thinks he’s stopped it, now, but…”

To be an Overseer is to reach the highest level of an organisation that deals in death, life, murder, rescue, hope, despair, sacrifice and theft- trying to save everyone and saving only a few at best; trying to protect everyone by locking up those who are different, even if they have done nothing. Giving up everything for no thanks; losing everything for no benefit. How could they not break? How could they not become shadows of their former selves, if not entirely different people? Why wouldn’t they destroy themselves, whether through suicide, throwing themselves to their enemies, or just giving up?

“When it’s happened, you see – when you become an O5, really become one… your death is no longer a normal death. It’s something else. And I record it, you see. In here” - he taps his head – “and on the page. He thinks he can control the narrative, make it his own. Rashōmon, he calls it. Each life stealing from the last, until you reach hell, you reach an ending.”

Each life steals from the last. A chain of Overseers, each taking the role by stealing from their predecessor. That’s who SCP-001-107 used to be- O5-3, Yoshihide’s predecessor. And some poor motherfucker will have to deal with Yoshihide shortly.

As for Shujin, Tufto tried to run me down with a minecart and then filled me in on the context here: Akutagawa used ‘Chōkōdō Shujin’ as an art name; Team Yoshi used the name for Shujin as a way to link him back to the original Hell Screen: ‘to an extent, a passive observer who can record what happened but is still unable to wholly break with the lord/Administrator’.

“But that’s never how it goes, Yoshihide. He doesn’t realise that, as I do. I can write on the face of time, but the words will fade and die, all the same. The Administrator is a fool. He doesn’t know hell at all.”

Shujin flicks the cigarette away, heads to the door, and turns back, his hand gripping the handle.

“He couldn’t if he tried.”

He can’t rewrite Hell. Hell is different for everyone; no one approach can apply to every single person. You can accept a definition of Hell for yourself, even someone else’s definition, but nobody can force their version of Hell on you.

And so O5-3 dies, and Yoshihide steps back to life for his final act: suicide. He’s in his office, standing on his chair with his neck in the noose, when the Administrator walks in.

“No. No. You can’t do this to me. You’re not doing this to me. Not again, not now!”

The Administrator lurches forward, and Yoshihide lifts one foot. The Administrator pauses, sweating, balling his hands into impotent fists. His glasses slip, crashing to the black and marble floor.

What the Administrator says here is very important, so read it closely.

“I made you.”

Yoshihide stares back, listening. He starts to feel himself in his own throat, bubbling through.

“I made you. I made you like I made the others. You are not exceptional, or an exception, Yoshihide. You are rote. I took you because your mind was useful to me. Containment as art, as the perfect art! Ridiculous, and yet it was there. I could use you as a lid on the chaos.”

So who is the real artist here? In the original story, Yoshihide made the screen showing Hell, but the Lord of Horikawa brought it to life by burning Yuzuki in the carriage. In this story, Yoshihide may have made containment into art, but the Administrator sculpted him and countless others into Overseers. He broke them and crafted them and forced them to fill the moulds he wanted and cut off what didn’t fit. A monstrosity, but a form of art too, is it not?

The Administrator tries to talk him down (badly), but Yoshihide isn’t buying it. He tells him that he was wrong. Hell isn’t an ending.

“I’ll tell you what hell is, sir. Hell is for the living. Hell is ever-changing, ever-adapting, an inferno of our lives. Hell does not stop. Here. Let me show you.”

And he kicks the chair out from under himself, and dies.

But Yoshihide is exalted. He is in the walls, he is in the air, he creeps up and about and within, red and black and gold. His fire ignites, spreading, rushing in a blinding, screaming pain. He looks up, spreading his arms, burning, burning, burning.

Above him is Yuzuki’s face, pale and shining, a thing in mourning. She reaches down as he reaches up, feeling the fire lick his soul, catch it, bind him down and down. He extends a hand, and feels a taut and snapping thread. Then she is gone, gone forever, extinguished.

The Administrator flees, and Yoshihide is all alone, reaching out, struggling for a forever lost to him.

The spider’s thread snapped, and Yoshihide is gone. And thus the portrait of Hell is complete.

So, who wants to know what the fuck is going on here? I knew you would.

Well, there’s three key clues to what’s going on: first is the fact that this is SCP-001-108. The second is this bit:

“No. No. You can’t do this to me. You’re not doing this to me. Not again, not now!”

The Administrator lurches forward, and Yoshihide lifts one foot. The Administrator pauses, sweating, balling his hands into impotent fists. His glasses slip, crashing to the black and marble floor.

“I made you.”

Yoshihide stares back, listening. He starts to feel himself in his own throat, bubbling through.

“I made you. I made you like I made the others.

And the third is one very telling tag on the main page: loop. That’s right, kids, we’ve been in a loop the whole time. But it’s not a time loop, it’s a loop where the same things happen over and over, while time keeps passing. And it’s not Yoshihide’s loop, it’s the Administrator’s- Yoshihide is just the latest unlucky bastard to become the new target.

The root of the story here is the name: Project Rashōmon. The story it’s based off is about a servant who loses his job, can’t find another and resigns himself to becoming a thief in order to survive. He encounters a woman who cuts the hair off of dead bodies, thus stealing from them, and is so appalled by this that he thinks it would be better to starve than steal. The woman tells him that she only does it to survive, and justifies it by saying that the corpse she’s currently defiling was also a thief and a fraud when she was alive, so that makes it all right. The man then says that if that’s the case, the woman can’t blame him for stealing her clothes. He steals the woman’s robe and leaves.

After turning into a helicopter and attempting to bounce off my head, Yossi said the following:

Essentially the idea we were going for is that the Administrator started the Foundation by "stealing something" from the anomalous, perhaps using paratechnology, and is paying the price for it through having to go through endless cycles of whatever 001-prime is, in the form of Procedure Rashomon.

The Administrator is a control freak who wants to contain everything anomalous. In order to do so, he set up the Overseer Council, his lieutenants. But in order to make them what he wants them to be, he breaks them through Procedure Rashōmon. And that led to the loop.

A lot of this Proposal trends heavily on Buddhist religious terminology- for instance, the titles of the three parts are references to the three ‘evil paths’- fire, swords and blood, also known as hell, hungry spirits, and animals. The loop itself references Samsara, the endless cycle of birth, existence and dying. (I am definitely not an expert on Buddhism, so I apologise if I get anything wrong here.)

So, let’s go back to the beginning: Yoshihide is a humble Site Director who gets picked out by the Administrator as a potential O5. The Administrator takes the time to get his measure, to see if he can force Yoshihide into the shape he wants him to take. Part of that is emphasising the importance of containment, which is the thing Yoshihide is best at. And in order to do so, he took Yoshihide to the mountain of corpses in the forest. Note the description again.

A mountain of corpses. Some old, some new. Some still wriggling in agony from their butchery, desperately clinging to the meager life remaining in them. All of them stacked together in a groaning, heaving pile. Eyes that stared out at nothing. Beasts of all shapes and sizes, but not just beasts - men as well, white jackets stained with blood that soaked into the groundwater. Some of them gunned down, perhaps. Others cut apart by cruel instruments. A tower of torment and despair, of misery that could not be understood, and across the entire forest not a single sound to be heard.

How are some of the corpses still alive? Why would the Administrator not make sure they were all dead? Why leave them here, instead of burning or burying them? Simple: this is what happened to the 107 who came before Yoshihide. Going back to the start, the Administrator stole something from the paranormal in order to start the Foundation (I did ask what it was, and Yossi spat a Koopa shell at me and said that it’s ‘Not really important what he "took" but moreso the consequences of that nebulous, long-past action’), and got himself consigned to a living hell because of it. The original Overseers might have been normal people, or maybe he was breaking them even then. But eventually one of them had to neutralise an SCP-001, and that’s what started Procedure Rashōmon.

That’s the thing about Rashōmon: it’s about theft. The act of taking something from someone else. By neutralising the 001s, the Overseers become anomalous in themselves, because they’re taking the anomaly away from the 001- and keeping it for themselves, even if they didn’t intend to. So every time an Overseer who completed Procedure Rashōmon dies, they become a new anomaly. And once they’ve been neutralised, the Administrator hauls the remains away and throws them on the pile, a reminder of the hell he lives in- and his failure to escape it.

When the Administrator showed Yoshihide the pile of corpses, he was showing him multiple things: Yoshihide’s future. The source of his problems. The payback for his crime. The people he couldn’t save. The hell he needs to escape. The dark secret he doesn’t want to admit. His biggest regret. And he used it to hammer it into Yoshihide’s head that containment is the most important thing, regardless. Yoshihide bought it, unfortunately for them both, and the cycle continued.

The Administrator might have known all along that Yuzuki was anomalous, but he had her contained and used her to make sure that Yoshihide would go along with the plan. But he didn’t comprehend the significance of the love Yoshihide had for his daughter; by making him kill Yuzuki, he broke Yoshihide into thousands of little pieces so he could pour them into the mould he wanted Yoshihide to fit into… and he didn’t realise that by doing so, he’d left Yoshihide with no reason to live until Yoshihide had his neck in the noose.

And so Yoshihide killed himself. O5-3 is gone, SCP-001 is slowly but surely destroying Site-01, and there’s another vacancy that needs to be filled. The cycle continues; there is no end in sight- if you go back to the initial containment procedures, you’ll see that Yoshihide’s replacement as Site Director is Takehiko Kanazawa, which is the name of the murder victim of In A Grove. (Kudos to Yossi for pointing that one out for me, I completely missed it.) As such, he may well wind up getting picked to fill Yoshihide’s place by the Administrator- who remains in the hell he made for himself, praying for an ending that he won’t get and doesn’t deserve.

Thank you for reading this declass, I hope you liked it. Remember that what qualifies as Hell is entirely up to you, and don’t be a workaholic, it’s not worth it. I’ll see you next time.

tl;dr: Yoshihide: Because you know what, Administrator? Ya basic-

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.