SCP-024: Game Show of Death

SCP-024: Game Show of Death Object Class: Euclid An abandoned television studio offers you a chance to win a prize. The voice on the intercom is friendly enough, and it gives you a choice: play the game or leave. Leave. This is one of the rare occasions where an SCP actually gives you that option. SCP-024 turns the people who enter it into potential contestants. Anyone who refuses is thrown out and can never get back inside. Winners are also barred from returning. The people who agree to play get an obstacle course, with a different layout and set of rules each time. Some games allow teams. Others allow only one winner. The obstacles get increasingly dangerous, and the announcer keeps talking throughout, offering advice and introducing new rules. It's entirely possible for everyone to lose. Trying to cheat brings out the studio guardians. They remove the offender, who is never seen again. Surviving the course doesn't guarantee freedom either. When the winner is chosen, the other surviving contestants disappear. The prizes are real, ordinary things. Cash, electronics, cars, vacations. Nothing anomalous about them. Afterward, a recording of the game appears outside. It shows an audience that the survivors never saw while they were playing. That last detail leaves a lot of room for an ugly answer. Who was watching? Were they there the whole time? Did they see the same thing the contestants did? The file doesn't settle it, and the story benefits from leaving that alone. The normal prizes make the whole setup feel cheap in a particularly horrible way. Imagine being the person who walks out with a new television while everyone who went in with you is gone. What would you even do with it? Take it home? Leave it sitting on the pavement? Having something tangible to show for surviving would be hard enough without it being a consumer product. There's also something nasty about that first choice. People walk into abandoned places expecting graffiti, broken glass and maybe a security guard. By the time someone explains that they've wandered into a deadly competition, they're already trying to decide whether any of this is real. A warning doesn't help much if you don't believe the person giving it. The whole thing borrows the language of harmless entertainment. The prize is waiting. The host has another rule to explain. Someone has to go home. And somewhere in the recording, people are cheering. https://t.co/Fq4xJccxyu