Inoculation

Link to article: Inoculation.

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text= In the brackish water, he saw the reflection of a temple. As he looked up, the temple was there, in all its decaying splendour.
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**Author:** [[*user Heck_Tech]]
**Original:** [http://fondazionescp.wikidot.com/inoculazione Inoculazione]
**Translator:** [[*user Heck_Tech]]
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[[tab Chapter 1]]

The man laid [[[http://fondazionescp.wikidot.com/scp-191-it | in a hospital bed.]]]

Tubes went to and from machines on either side of the bed, almost blocking the view on the sides of the room. The man was over ninety, but he had stopped keeping track of time. Every day was the same as the first, immobilized by old age and illness in that bed, but made healthy by drugs just enough so that the flesh on his back did not rot into sores and his heart continued to beat. In the prison of his emaciated body, his mind was still alert, despite the torpor of his existence.

Every day was the same as the first, except for Sunday, when the //man// came to visit him. That was //his// goal, to stay alive for his weekly visit. In the monotony of those six days, the old man had no escape other than memories, even though he knew that he paid for each trip in his mind by exchanging boredom for pain and fear. But even this time, lulled by the noise of every machine that measured heartbeats and breaths and that pulsated fluids in him, he abandoned himself to them and once again, he remembered how it all began.

[[/tab]]

[[tab Chapter 2]]

It was the 1960s.

He was just over thirty years old and after a doctorate and a couple of monographs that listed his name among the authors, he was ready to make a name for himself in the academic world of archaeology.

One day in June, he was invited by the director of the Department of Archaeology, Prof. Carli, to a lunch to discuss his future and his prospects. He had been his mentor, the person who had cultivated his love for history and had brought him to his first excavations, introducing him to what he then thought would be his career, his world. That day too, they were having lunch at the trattoria "La Botte" where they had eaten together for the last four years and between one drink and another, Carli asked him a question.

"Filippo, what do you know about the Roman cults practiced in the marshes of Northern Italy?"

The young archeologist almost choked on laughter, while he was drinking a glass of house wine.

"Professor, I imagine I know what you and other scholars of Roman history know about it: legends passed down by medieval authors, disavowed by the Illuminists, and revived in pre-Romanticism."
He put down his glass. "Why are you asking this?" he asked.

"The Department is considering research projects based on minor historical sources, in particular a ninth-century manuscript on Valerius Gallicus, a quaestor who died in the fourth century." He picked up the bottle and filled the glass halfway. "Based on what has been reported, there is almost nothing new compared to other transcriptions of texts by the same author or that has not already been covered by writers and officials with, shall we say, greater literary talent. However, there are a few fragments that my colleagues and I found decidedly interesting."

Filippo stared at him curiously: what connection was there between a semi-unknown author and that area?

The glass was placed empty on the table. "In this manuscript, fragments have been reported that mention, let's say quite spiritedly, several cults based on apotropaic rites dedicated to the goddess Febris.".

"Febris? The goddess mentioned at the beginning of Seneca's Apokolokyntesis?" asked Filippo.

"Exactly." replied the professor. "The goddess of malaria fever. If you've never heard of her, I don't blame you: in terms of sources and findings, we have very little of her cult. What we do know is that, in addition to a few temples in Rome where the sick and the worshippers flocked, there were very likely minor cults near marshy areas, given the connection with malaria."

He looked him in the eyes, smiling. "And if these texts are as reliable as we assume they are, we could confirm their existence." He placed a hand on his shoulder. "Think about it; finds, perhaps ruins, just waiting to be recovered from a meter or two of stagnant water. The discovery that would enshrine our names in the history of Italian archaeology in this century."

Awards, honors, recognitions. Filippo could imagine this and more, his soul kindled by the words of his mentor.

"For now, it would be interesting to carry out a survey, but the funds currently do not allow for the formation of a team to send into the field," Carli continued, "But your experience would help us to begin to-".

Filippo interrupted him. There was nothing else to add.

As soon as he left the restaurant, he would rush to his apartment to prepare the necessary equipment for the expedition and find out the train schedules.

If only…

[[/tab]]

[[tab Chapter 3]]

The journey had not been comfortable, but he could not have cared less; he had spent the whole time reading and studying the notes provided by the department. The swamp was large, but he was used to rough conditions during his latest excavations and had no fear of getting lost or suffering anything: malaria was now a memory of decades ago and a few mosquito bites would not discourage him.

By studying the fragments of Valerius Gallicus's chronicles and comparing the little useful geographical information with the maps of the place, he was almost certain that he could delimit an area with the greatest probability of being able to find signs of a past Roman cult. He marked all the paths and the safest and currently practicable routes near some of the banks of the swamp and drew an additional outline of the area potentially indicated by the Roman praetor; with a red pencil he marked the overlap between the two areas.

This was the area where his search would focus.

Finally, his journey finally brought him to his destination: the swamp was there, stretching across the plain. Before arriving, he had stopped for a couple of days in the surrounding villages to try to discover some clues in the local stories, but the results had been more disappointing than expected: of all the inhabitants who had agreed to answer his questions, not one had any idea or memory of a possible Roman presence in that specific area; on the contrary, they all knew the same legend.

A dragon that lives in the deepest and most remote part of the swamp, a dragon whose breath is capable of killing a hundred knights and which even Saint George - and by this point, everyone was making the sign of the cross - would have been afraid to face.

Overall, he reasoned, this could still be a clue. Valerio Gallico had mentioned in passing a //monstrum// to which gifts were offered and although it seemed extremely unlikely to him, perhaps it had not been a waste of time. He would not have been surprised if, by dredging those waters, they would have found some horribly sketched statue or a fossil that the pagan religion had interpreted as a divine sign or a vestige of the times of the Heroes.

Further encouraged by this reasoning, he headed towards the swamp.

He had worked tirelessly, scanning the water and mud and marking crosses on his maps and with a small boat rented from a local, he had begun to move towards the deepest parts. He was sure, sure that he had to find something, even if it was a mouldy shard; he felt it in his bones, ever since he had crossed the borders of the vegetation, that something was hiding there.

One afternoon, near the shore where he had camped, he began to study his maps again, his notes, when suddenly he began to feel heavy-headed. Maybe it was the thick, hot air of the swamp?

He tried to get up, but his legs gave out and he found himself on all fours in the water.

[[/tab]]

[[tab Chapter 4]]

In the brackish water, he saw the reflection of a temple.

As he looked up, the temple was there, in all its decaying splendour. Filippo thought he was going crazy: for a moment he thought about rubbing his eyes, but he realized how stupid he would look, there in the middle of the swamp. The temple was there, real and existing like any other ruin he had seen in his life, except that it rose directly from the surface of the water as if it were solid ground.

He couldn't move; his thoughts were twisting in his mind without any order. He had found a temple in the middle of the swamp. //He had found a Roman temple that floated on the water as if the marble were balsa wood. He had made one of the most important discoveries of the last few decades. How the fuck does that temple float on the water. God help me because I've gone mad and I'm never coming home.//

A roar cut off his train of thought and terror invaded his chest. Filippo instinctively turned, and his terrified mind was shocked by another inexplicable vision.

[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-178-it A dinosaur.]

The creature opened its jaws to attack him, but a voice stopped it immediately.
Filippo did not understand what it said or where it came from, but to his great joy, the creature began to retreat, then quickly walked away from him. //I'm dead I'm crazy I'm dead I'm crazy I'm in hell.// His mind was once again tangled in the absence of an explanation and he felt that something was about to shut down, that everything was about to vanish around him.

"You."

That voice brought him back to the swamp and he turned in the direction it came from.

He saw a woman sitting on the steps of the entrance to the temple. She smiled at him, stood up and raised her arm towards him.

"Follow me." Her voice reached the young archaeologist's ears again like an unreal, otherworldly sound. The shock of the last few minutes had made him doubt all his senses and he was no longer sure whether that voice was human or not.

"Follow me, Filippo" the woman repeated, pronouncing his name slowly, like resin dripping from a tree.

Somehow, she knew his name, but he did not ask himself how or why. By now he was convinced that he had come to a place where no man should enter and all this madness was a world incomprehensible to him: if the old English ballads about the woods where the fairies punish intruders and Rod Serling on television said so, perhaps there was a grain of truth in it.

Slowly, he began to advance through the water and mud, heading towards the temple. When he reached the steps of the entrance, he climbed up and managed to climb the first few; when he stood up, he clearly saw who had called him. She was a thin woman with unnaturally pale skin; her brown hair fell to her back and was slightly darker than the undefined color of the worn dress that covered her. But what struck him was her eyes, from which green reflections came; he could not look away from them.

"Who are you? How do you know my name? What is this place?". He felt stupid to shout those questions, but in all this unreality, he could not find other words to say.

She laughed. She placed a hand gently on his shoulder. "This is the land beyond dreams, Filippo." She whispered.

"Is it just a dream?" he asked, astonished. Then why had he not woken up after the terror he had felt at the sight of that creature? What was happening?

"Why are you still thinking about the possible and the impossible? Why do you not trust what you are seeing, what you are hearing?" she said, continuing to laugh.
Her laughter mixed irritation with his confusion and he decided to take matters into his own hands: dream or no dream, he was still a professional and he would not accept being treated like that.

"Tell me who you are and where we are, damn it!" he shouted. He tried to grab her wrist, but she was faster, and her hand rose against his, blocking him. Her grip was of an inconceivable strength for her appearance and Filippo tried to stop her, but it was useless. She tightened her other hand against his throat and made him kneel, without letting go.

"Filippo, Filippo..." she warned him with the tone of a mother scolding her son. "Why do you try to discover the limits of my mercy? Didn't I save you before? Didn't I invite you to this sacred place?"

"L-let me go..." Filippo exclaimed, trying in vain to get up.

"I read your heart as soon as you reached these waters. You seek the truth; you seek the shadows of the past. I can show you those, just as I can show you the future."

Her voice began to grow dark and hissing, as if it were no longer coming from the slight woman who stood on those steps.

"Now you will know everything, human. I will give you the past and you will give me the future." And releasing her grip on his wrist, she placed her hand on his face.

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[[tab Chapter 5]]

The sky began to cloud over, and the afternoon light darkened. Filippo was gasping as the woman's hand rested on his forehead.

His mind was falling into endless darkness. He could perceive nothing: one moment he was kneeling, but as soon as the woman had placed her hand on him, his consciousness abandoned his limbs.

Suddenly, he regained awareness of himself and where he was. A long colonnade alternating with braziers. An altar before him.

"What do you think I am?" The woman's voice echoed from the altar as if it were coming from the very stone that composed it.

Filippo felt himself being dragged down by an invisible force, and found himself prostrate, staring at the altar, from which an increasingly dazzling light now came. And he began to see something in it.

"What do you think I am, Filippo?" she asked.
"I am the disease; I am the cure."

//Before his eyes, he sees ancestral seas full of cells that reproduce and multiply, to then be absorbed by larger cells//

"I am malaria and miasma; I am fever and purification."

//An army of sick people in adoration on a stone floor that extends endlessly//

"I am the fear of death and suffering; I am the hope of healing."

//A hand that rests on a dying face in which life and warmth begin to infuse again//

"I am a goddess, I am a character in a satirical play, I am a story to tell children, so they stay away from the swamps."

//An emperor who kneels before a decrepit old woman from whose fanged mouth blackish slime drips//

"I am all of this, I am an infinitesimal fraction of all of this."

//Fog and faces that overlap with other faces, voices that overlap with other voices, infinite names that are shouted//

"I have been there before you thought in your hearts what I should be, I counted your bones even before my name was borne on your lips while you were raising stilts."

//A clearing shrouded in darkness and suddenly, temples and altars begin to rise from the earth and extend endlessly towards the sky//

"And even if my memory were to be erased from history, as happened to my temples and my believers, I would still remain among you together with my brothers and sisters, to torment you and gratify you according to our whims or the will of Fate. And you would not even know it."

The vision was over and the force that held him back was gone, but he could not move.

The woman appeared next to him and approached his face.

"The time is ripe, Filippo. Your kind has discovered the secrets of life and is about to discover even more. Now you are worthy again to receive my Wisdom and use it in my Name. But this time it will be a champion of mine who will guard it."

As she whispered these words, Filippo saw her eyes light up with a green light similar to that of the altar.

"Gods do not fight for gods, but a hero does."

The light increased and her face began to change.

And Filippo screamed.

[[/tab]]

[[tab Chapter 6]]

He woke up with a start on the bank.

Jumping up, he screamed so loud that he scared away every bird perched in the nearby trees.
Then he calmed down. He was alive, he was safe.

Maybe it had all been a dream, maybe it was the miasma of the swamp that had made him faint or produced hallucinations of that sort; he had read about the natural gases used by Pythias and Sibyls to receive the Divine Madness needed to prophesy. He tried to convince himself that it was just that, that it was just poisoning mixed with his suggestion, but there was a feeling inside him that he couldn't shake.

It had happened but it couldn't have happened. It wasn't possible.

//"Why are you still thinking about the possible and the impossible? Why don't you trust what you're seeing, what you're hearing?"//

A shrill cry distracted him from that thought; he turned and a few meters away, he saw a newborn baby wriggling on the ground. He turned but saw no one else there: how had he ended up there?

He approached and saw that a necklace had been hung around the baby's neck: an ancient ceramic figurine of a winged woman. He barely touched it and //that// voice pierced his mind.

"Feed my Champion and prepare him for his mission. A fragment of my essence now flows in your blood and with that you will feed his body. But for him to triumph, he will have to find the Wisdom that I entrusted to the fathers of your fathers. When the time comes, I will show him the way to it. Feed my Hero and prepare him, or you will know my wrath."

Filippo suddenly moved away from the child and fell to the ground. It was all true, it is all true.
He curled up in a foetal position and cried.

When it was late in the evening, he slowly got up and walked towards the child, who was still crying desperately on the ground. He took him gently in his arms and began to rock him. Whether he wanted it or not, his life would now be devoted to caring for that child, to raising him, until it was time for him to follow the plan for which he had been created.

He would give up his career, his aspirations, so long as she never returned to him.

He took a small knife from his backpack and cut the tip of his index finger. He let the drops of blood drip onto those little lips and the baby stopped crying. His eyes began to glow with green light.

[[/tab]]

[[tab Chapter 7]]

The door to the room suddenly opened, bringing the man back to the Land of the Present; two figures entered, a young nurse and //that man//.

"Leave us alone, I will take care of the procedure," the man murmured.
"As you prefer, doctor," the woman said deferentially. It was not the first time that Dr. Farnesi, the director of the clinic and [[[http://scp-int.wikidot.com/gruppi-di-interesse#FF |president of the pharmaceutical company]]] that had financed its construction, had managed the therapy of that patient alone, as it happened every week.

The door closed and the two men were alone.

The man standing, elegantly dressed, took a chair, and brought it closer to the bed.
"I don't think there is any need to ask you how you are. Here you have the best that medical science beyond the Veil has to offer." He said, sitting down.
He lit a cigarette and waited for the old man to mutter something. But he responded to his words with an expression of deep and immeasurable hatred.
A puff of cigarette fused with a laugh.

"Every week, always this silence and this expression. And yet, I thought that taking you to our new clinic would bring back your smile," he said. "There is no man, creature or spirit of [[[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/locations-of-interest#goricna | Gorična]]] who would not pay hard cash to receive our care, and look at you, we have reserved for you one of the best rooms, worthy of a VIP."
More smoke went to mix with the air of the room, starting to form a thick leaden pall.

The old man's face continued to be a mask of hatred and contempt.

"I understand. Besides, this chatter should only serve to make everything easier, I find this opposition of yours so boring. I suppose that what flows in your veins makes you partially immune to my anaesthetic, but it was not, is not, and certainly will not be a problem."
The man put the cigarette on a tray on the bedside table and took an old rusty syringe from his jacket.

The man took a tourniquet from the tray and applied it to the old man’s skeletal arm. He wanted to fight it, even just pull his arm back, but he knew it was useless. He was too old, too sick, too weak to do so, and even if he had been healthy, even if he had been the man he was 60 years ago, he still wouldn’t have been able to stop it. He was just a man. The needle penetrated his flesh, and he felt the pain he felt every week, and that he would never get used to. A scream tore through the smoke in the room, as the syringe filled with blood and salt water.

Once it was filled, the Doctor removed the tourniquet from the tortured old man’s arm and, after taking off his jacket and lifting up his shirt sleeve, applied it to his own; after which, he proceeded to inject himself with the contents of the syringe. A languid sigh escaped his lips, as his eyes began to glow with a greenish glow.

"Very well, very well." he murmured to the old man, whose torment seemed to be easing. He buttoned up his sleeve and put his jacket back on, then put the syringe back in his inside pocket. Neither he nor the old man had any marks on their arms to show what had just happened.
The old man's words came out of his mouth with a tone of revenge.

"I am going to die, and you will not be able to stop it either. You will die like me, sooner or later, and finally this horror will end."

But the man next to his bed did not seem to be bothered.

He approached him, leaning close to his face, so close that he could feel his cold breath on his skin.
"In this clinic, the life of every suffering soul belongs to me, and I assure you that as long as I need you to remain strong and powerful on this earth, you will not know the rest of death."
He gave the old man a quick kiss on the cheek, who recoiled in horror.

"After all, isn't that what hospitals are for?"

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