SCP-026: Afterschool Retention

SCP-026: Afterschool Retention Object Class: Euclid SCP-026 starts with an abandoned school that doesn't match its own blueprints. Hallways seem too long. Rooms won't stay counted. The building is already a bad place to wander around before anyone finds the sleeping students. Some of those sleepers are former pupils or staff who disappeared after the school closed. They cannot be woken inside. Carry them off the grounds and they wake briefly, then die from rapid dehydration and decompose. The investigation keeps changing. Early tests suggest the impossible layout is a problem with human perception. Later exploration establishes that some physical spatial anomalies are happening too. Writing moves between surfaces. Notes brought inside can lose their contents, with the text appearing elsewhere in the school. Visitors who fall asleep become trapped in classroom dreams. Some exposed personnel later disappear and turn up among the sleepers. Agent Walker's interview makes this much worse. She describes a classroom that looks new, with a teacher and classmates she somehow recognizes. Everything is black and white except her own hands. Over time, the dream returns. Her hands become grayer. It takes longer to realize she is dreaming. Walker hid her symptoms because she was afraid of what would happen to her. She'd already seen one of the sleepers die during an attempted rescue. Knowing the Foundation exists doesn't mean you feel safe telling it something is happening to you. That part gives the story someone you can understand. She isn't casually ignoring danger. She's trying to work out which danger to admit to. By the time she asks to leave fieldwork, she's been living with the dreams for months. The final note says she receives an amnestic and goes back to work. There's no comforting scene afterward showing that she's all right. Schools are useful settings for this kind of horror because most people already know how it feels to be somewhere you aren't allowed to leave. You wait for the bell. You need permission to get up. Somebody else decides whether you belong in that room. Put that familiar routine inside a dream and even recognizing the problem becomes difficult. You can accept an awful lot while dreaming. A person you've never met can feel familiar. A completely wrong room can feel like somewhere you've spent years. The shrinking bit of color in Walker's hands gives her one way to tell the difference. Then that starts going away too. https://t.co/AxJxOluCy4