SCP-013: Blue Lady

SCP-013: Blue Lady SCP-013 is a collection of 242 cigarettes, commonly marked with the handwritten words “Blue Lady.” Smoking one changes the person's perception of their own appearance. They begin seeing an unfamiliar woman in their reflection and gradually perceive their body taking on her features. She has short dark hair, blue eyes, and bright blue lipstick. Their actual body stays the same. The effect is perceptual, and the file describes it as permanent. The cigarettes were recovered from Irvine Rivers' apartment after his death. Investigators found hundreds of drawings resembling the woman, along with a note expressing love, confusion, and a sense of missing her. The article never establishes who she is. It doesn't confirm a ghost, a physical transformation, or another consciousness taking possession of anyone. That distinction is important because it's easy to hear the premise and mentally turn it into a different story. Someone seeing another person in the mirror immediately suggests certain familiar explanations. But those explanations aren't automatically part of this one. There's a particularly strange problem built into the way the effect works. Imagine trying to explain a change that feels obvious every time you look at yourself, while everyone around you keeps seeing the person you've always been. Other people can sincerely tell you that nothing looks different without resolving what you're experiencing. A story using that setup could spend a lot of time on ordinary situations. Getting ready in the morning, looking at a photograph, or trying to describe your own face could become difficult without anything visibly dramatic happening to an outside observer. Then there's the repetition. Every affected person perceives the same woman. That gives the mystery a specific focus. The question becomes why this particular image keeps appearing and what, if anything, connects it to the person whose apartment contained the cigarettes. The drawings and note introduce the possibility of a personal history, but they don't provide enough information to reconstruct it. Filling in a relationship or a complete backstory would be adding to the original article. From a writing standpoint, that's a useful example of how a few details can suggest a much larger story. You don't have to give readers the entire history for them to recognise that something may have happened before the events they're being shown. Here, that missing history is a large part of what keeps the question open. Original entry: https://t.co/Q7X5uCcNZM