Adjustment Period

Link to article: Adjustment Period.

 :root {
    --header-title: "SITE-137";
    --header-subtitle: "HISTORY WEIGHS ON OUR SHOULDERS";

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:root {
--header-title: "SITE-137";
--header-subtitle: "HISTORY WEIGHS ON OUR SHOULDERS";
[[/module]]

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[[=]]
++++ [[[scp-9993 | SCP-9993]]] | San Antonio del Monte
**06:12**
[[/=]]

You wake up to the sound of an engine. That's what they told you it was. An eldritch machine, full of metal tubes that somehow burn black liquid to help heavy things move by themselves. It's all magic to you. You haven't gotten used to them and you doubt you ever will.

The persistence of the sound propels you out of your cot, and into your measly kitchen, where you eat a bit of stale bread and something new called "chocolate." It's sweet. The first time you ate it, you spent two days with a stomachache. You eventually got used to it. Soon after, the entire town was munching on it.

You grab your shawl and get out.

The wind of the Monegros desert carries white dust into the white streets of the town. Your neighbors are already working. Berta is sweeping the floor in front of her house. Luisa looks from her window, and then throws the bathroom water out into the street. Alberto is sitting on a stool in front of his house, weaving a basket. All of them politely bow their heads when you pass them.

[[=]]
[[image Adjustment%20Period%201.jpeg]]
[[/=]]

More people are out and about, wandering, touching the newly installed lights. It's wonderful that in the future people are able to magically open and close lights during the night, without having to start a fire. But you realised something after you woke up in this new world. You couldn't see the stars as clearly, as if the lights on the Earth were snuffing out the lights on the skies.

Then your street ends. For all your life, that was where the town ended. Not anymore. You turn back and ascend towards the church.

-----

[[=]]
**08:29**
[[/=]]

The town square is full of sheep and three shepherds of bone and light. They are the newest innovation, brought to you by [[[scp-2940 |Light Courier Enterprises]]] from the far off year of our lord of "unknown" and they love sheep. They tend to them, whacking them with cattle prods. On their first day //now// they tried to skin alive Florinda, a three year old girl who lives in the outskirts, just because she was wearing wool clothes. The Foundation people stopped them and somehow made them channel all their violent instincts into herding sheep.

You watch them go by, sitting on a bench. Alfonsa Ciervo, mother //superiora// of the church of San Antonio hobbles towards you inbetween the ruminants. She moves like a decrepit old woman, like you, yet she is only 18 by your count. She says she spent 70 years trapped in time. Your mind refuses to understand how that can happen.

"Hello Juana," she greets you, once she's out of the herd of sheeps. She sits beside you. "How are you?"

"I'm good. It is a good morning." You smile.

"Are you here to confess some sins?" she asks. Her unique perspective had made her the perfect candidate to become the town priest after the last one turnt out ugly and murderous. She was now the spiritual leader of the community, though half of the town had turned to stranger, more esoteric beliefs born from things that slip between the cracks of time. "What have you done?"

"I am old, sister, I'm past the age of sinning." You grab your cane tightly. "I've partaken in more food than normal. But can you blame me? We've never had this much food come winter."

[[=]]
[[image Adjustment%20Period%202.jpeg]]
[[/=]]

"It is not my place to assign blame. I am merely an observer." You do not find this reassuring and she knows it. You frown. "You're one of the eldest among us, you are allowed to indulge once in a while. If God cares about how much chocolate you've eaten, that's her business. Just remember to brush your teeth."

"I don't have many of those, anymore."

"Exactly why I say it." She laughs. You laugh dryly with her.

"Speaking of old people. Have you seen María lately?" you ask, because María is the only one in town who surpasses you in age.

"No." The priestess voice sounds sad. "She hasn't been the same since his son died."

You recall the events. The invasion of men with black attires and dangerous guns. The priest screaming at the top of his lungs. Or was it the //hidalgo//? There were corpses in the streets and warriors with horses screaming at the top of their lungs while they shot arrows. There were machines walking and slashing and buildings exploding. And you were trapped under rubble. And you were executed publicly. And you ran through burning fields out of the town... Memories bleed over themselves and your head starts to ache. Then, with a loud pop, it's over, your memories go back to their rightful place and reconfigure back into you conforting María, who has her dead son in her arms. You look at Alfonsa again.

"I hope she's alright." That's all you can say.

"Me too."

-----

[[=]]
**11:20**
[[/=]]

The town library is a new development. It was built out from the house of Don Mariano de la Vega, the local //Hidalgo//, who had been imprisoned for causing a battle in the middle of the town. As the man had liked reading, he had a small collection of books, which had since expanded with new things, such as more books and more strange gadgets.

You are looking at the little ants that move throughout a page. You have never understood how reading works, but you try hard anyways.

There is someone else in the building. Everyone calls him "Chueco". You don't know his true name, but he's Basque and came to the town one day to work and here he stayed. You look at him fiddling with the little mirrors that light up. Before, he was never good at working the fields or tending to the animals, but he adapted to the new objects of the future better than most.

You enjoy his quiet presence for a second and then turn your eyes down to the page, where the inkblots are dancing. Your eyes can't focus on them. You close the book and take a deep breath.

-----

[[=]]
**13:51**
[[/=]]

Lunch is served in the inn. It never had a name, as it was the only inn in town and nobody ever came. Pedro, the innkeeper, was never around either. He used to spent most of the time tending to the chickens and screaming in the wastes.

But now it was the bustling center of the community. Pedro had come back to it, reopened the place and named it "Klepsydra". It is a weird name in a language you didn't know. But it is exotic, unmistakeably interesting.

The place is full, today. Maybe something of importance is happening somewhere. Or maybe people with infinity on their hands have decided to give this time a try. A woman with metal threads coming out of her head is eating soup and drinking wine; a sparrow that calls itself "The Second Wandswoman of Ebutapakht" flies overhead, perching on a beam and starts eating some bread; three cloaked people have a boardgame on a table yet none of them make a single move and, from the back of it all, some Foundation agents surveil the situation.

You eat a spoonful of the broth, and as it travels through your mouth you feel that it tastes different. You mull over the flavors for a second. They're not the ones from the usual garlic soup, as there's a new substance to it. You smell it and come to the conclusion. It must be fish. Somehow they're bringing fish to a desert, a hundred miles from the nearest sea. You take another spoonful. It tastes good.

-----

[[=]]
**16:51**
[[/=]]

On the main square, people from the Foundation have set up their engines and machines around a ball of light that floated right in front of the church.

"Juana, I think you should stand back a bit," says the first Foundation soldier, everyone calls him Agent Groundhog.

"Why?" you inquire, slowly hobbling forward.

"Extranormal Temporal Event in progress, sorry."

"What is that thing?" you point your cane at it.

[[=]]
[[image Adjustment%20Period%203.jpeg]]
[[/=]]

He sighs, lifting his head from the contraption he has in his hands.

"It calls itself "[[[scp-3201 |Archivist]]]" and it likes collecting stuff from all over time. That's why I said you shouldn't come closer. It might be collecting old ladies, for all I know." And he places a hand on your shoulder to push you a bit backwards.

"UNALLOWANCE. ARCHIVISM. TOWN." You hear something scream. "EXTRATEMPORALITY. LEGALITY. BOUND." It's Dr. Ak, a short human covered in fur who screams with a raspy voice. You were once told it was a parasomething, an intelligent being who wasn't human nor angel nor demon but akin to an animal. You didn't understand it then, and you continue to not understand it now. It's standing under the sphere of light, waving some papers. "DOCUMENTATION. SIGNAGE. POSTERITY. TRAVEL. AGREEMENT?"

"He's saying that that sphere can't be here, that it has to leave as per an agreement we have with it." Another Foundation man says. You nod and move on out of the way.

-----

[[=]]
**18:26**
[[/=]]

You walk down your street towards the edge of town. You've been avoiding it for a while, but today you feel like you ought to walk the fields once again.

There's a building in the distance. A square thing made of grey uniform rock unlike anything you had ever seen before. That was were the engines and the machines and the Foundation people come from. Everyone calls it "Outpost-137".

And between there and here, new happenings have sprung up. Things had always been weird since the time witch had made the past disappear and the present appear around all of you. Orosia's eldest daughter, Alfonsa, had lived for as long as you had, even if she only appeared like a young woman. Vessels hailing from unknown places landed on the shrubbery beyond, offering trinkets from a time that would never come to pass. You once had to live for a week with a woman who looked like exactly you, answered to your name and shared all your memories. She had then disappeared into the aether. These were just another of the things that you were learning to accept as normal.

After all, they weren't as weird as the thousand new types of cloth that existed nowadays, the onyx squares that the Foundation people used to talk to each other and the wondrous fruits and vegetables that didn't exist back in the day.

So, now, in the outskirts of the town there were new things that appeared and disappeared like the clouds in the sky. At first, the Foundation peoples had been scared of them. They wouldn't tell you, but you knew. You've seen many people and you know how to read the creases of their faces and the light of their eyes. They didn't trust the apparitions of the desert and captured many of them in nets and cages.

Eventually, as the days passed, they let things slip. Lizards the size of dogs now run around out near the fences, hunting rabbits and pigeons. Apparently, they came from an antediluvian time. There were weirder things still. Men with dark skin, turbans and queer outfits camped there for some weeks, before galloping out again. One night "an ascetic believer in Aeternum" had come walking and now lived in the bell tower. An animal, bigger than anything you had seen before appeared once, dying of a thousand punctures on its blubbery skin. It was scary and it stayed there for weeks, becoming the food of a thousand flies and mosquitoes. Now only its bones remain.

The afternoon wind draws patterns of sand around your feet as you walk towards Outpost-137. The sun slowly descends in the sky.

"Hello Juana," says the man at the front gate. His name is "Agent" Dualeh, and he once said he came from Somalia, in Africa. Africa is a far away place, which you had only heard about from people speaking about the wonders and horrors of the southern continent. You would have never imagined you'd meet someone from there. And that it would be a normal man.

"Hello," you answer.

"What do you need?" he asks, smiling.

"I came to say hello. Do you need a scarf? It might not seem that way but it gets cold in winter here."

"Did you truly come here just for that? It's a long walk and you're not that bored yet."

You smile, and take Dualeh's arm.

"Oh, of course." He obliges. "Yeah, I'll walk you back."

"It's good to know that young men are still kind in this day and age," you muse, as you walk across the field.

"There's people and people. Always has been."

"But there's more of us now. Right? Father Narváez used to say you live in cities with thousands upon thousands of people."

"That's right." He nods. "The city I come from has two million inhabitants."

"And you don't know them all." The question is implicit. Dualeh smiles.

"No, of course not."

"And isn't that scary? I say, walking down the street, not knowing who is around you..."

"Well, I am used to it." The path winds around a building that appeared one day. It has been boarded up by the Foundation, but lights and sounds sometimes escape from the cracks. "It's just the era I was born in. We have bigger cities, it's a bigger world."

"Isn't that also scary?" you ask. "Every day I wake up and there's new people in town. And they come and go. Where do they come from? Where are they going? Why are they here? In my home?"

"People move from one place to another constantly. Well, here they also move through time, but its the same thing. The same principle." He seems unfazed by your line of questioning. He is a soldier, but in his time living in town he has become the visible face of the Foundation here. So he's used to having to answer the questions you and your neighbors have about the present. You continue walking beside him.

"Before, in my era, I could predict the world. The only things we couldn't foresee were harsh winters, and the will of kings that brought us to war..." There are some flowers that wilt and regrow rapidly on the side of the road. You stop to look at them. "Now the world is faster. Everything is new and everyone moves constantly." There's a silence as the flowers die in silence. "The future is uncertain now."

Both of you walk quietly through the things left behind by a hundred time travelers. The sun has set and the lights of the town are slowly coming on.

"Well, isn't that beautiful?" Dualeh says. And you don't know if he's answering to you or admiring the town.

-----

[[=]]
++++ [[[scp-7532 |Site-137]]]
**19:41**
[[/=]]

"Is there any reason why we are having meetings this late in the evening?" asks Diego Orbach, doctor in Parahistory and supervisor of Outpost-137.

"It's difficult to wrangle all the people needed for this matter," answers Milena Bosch, Director of Site-137.

"We are only six people," points out the historian.

And it's true. The room is a refurbished library, with a mahogany table in the middle and blackened windows that look out to a cloister bathed by moonlight. There are many chairs aranged in a circle, and most are empty.

"AFFIRMATION," adds the artificial voice of Dr. Ak, a time-traveling paranthropus with a nebulous position within the Temporal Anomalies Department. The Director rolls her eyes.

"We have an important visit, and this was the best timetable for all of us."

"It does not matter. We are here for very specific reasons. I have a packed schedule and I would like to get going as soon as possible." The person who speaks is Factotum Versailles, when they open their mouth, all the others keep quiet as they represent a member of the O5 Council. Their porcelain skin and dark glasses glow unnaturally in the dim room. "We are here to discuss the matter of SCP-9993. The O5 Council has been notified of the ongoing lax attitude towards containing persistent parachronic anomalies in SCP-9993. My observation has determined that this is caused by the lack of capabilities from Outpost-137 to contain the breadth of phenomena present onsite, and the limited range of activity by Delta-t caused by the event known as ETE-9993-Omega."

Dr. Ak lets out a prolonged wordless wheeze. Dr. Orbach just nods.

"This is why the O5 Council, at the behest of Philip Verhoten," Versailles points at the last member of the meeting "is considering the matter of reclassifying San Antonio del Monte as a Nexus. I am here to gather the opinions of the personnel on the ground."

There is a moment of silence, only punctuated by the typing of the Director's secretary.

[[=]]
[[image Adjustment%20Period%204.jpeg]]
[[/=]]

"I was the one to bring up the continued issues that 9993 poses to the [[[o4-s-summit |O4 Council]]], after which I suppose the O5s were notified. They told me about the reclassification to Nexus, but what would that mean, exactly?" Asks Bosch.

"Nexuses are inhabited communities which inherently house anomalous phenomena," pontificates Verhoten, the most prominent nexologist on the Foundation, from his corner of the table.

"And San Antonio qualifies as a nexus... why?" Asks Orbach, trying not to look in the direction of the Overwatch envoy.

"I would think it's pretty obvious," smiles Philip.

"TIME. INSTABILITY."

"The Australopithecus is right. SCP-9993 or, how it could henceforth be known, Dunwich class Nexus 137 is a hotspot of temporal anomalies tied to a single location," continued Verhoten. "I'm not privy to the hypothesis of what's happening there, but I've been reading the files, and you undeniably have people coming from the past and the future, mostly aided with time machines, and also temporal rifts that spit out extinct animals and also people experiencing time in distorted ways. These are all anomalies attracted and spawned by this location. Thus, this falls into the classification of a Nexus."

Versailles holds up a gloved hand.

"Of course, there is a philosophical aspect to it. Changing the classification from a "classic" SCP object to a Nexus has clear connotations in terms of Foundation politics. It's an alignment with facilities that allow certain new containment philosophies. But, if my records are correct, Site-137 also has a Free Port under it's jurisdiction..." The Factotum is too focused on their own talking to see the look in Director Borch and Dr. Orbach's faces. "...which means that you already know what that entails. Regardless, there are also budget benefits to monitoring a Nexus."

"Important benefits," adds Verhoten, and he gives some documents to the Site Director, who looks them over.

"I want it to be clear that this is a Site faithful to the Foundation and to its mission. But given our history, we see the benefits of reclassification to a Nexus," she says. "I suppose more details will be sent to us if the Council votes to allow this reclassification."

"Yes." The Factotum seems satisfied.

"Then, if everyone is in agreement..." Dr. Ak and Dr. Orbach nod. "...then I think the request for reclassification can go through to the Council."

-----

[[=]]
++++ [[[scp-9993 |Nx-137]]] | San Antonio del Monte
**20:29**
[[/=]]

The day has come to an end. Your supper consists of the last of the stale bread, with a bit of cheese and a small cup of muscatel. You walk to your cold bed that’s too big for you and lie down. With a practiced movement, you snuff out the last candle in the room, at an arms reach from your position, and lie in darkness.

You are more reassured as you fall asleep. For a while you've been living in a world where you don't know what tomorrow will bring. Perhaps, like today, it will bring good things.

-----

[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]]
> **Filename:** All images in this article
> **Author:** [[*user diogene_s]]
> **License:** CC. BY. SA. 3.0
> **Additional Notes:** I made all of these images
[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]

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