SCP-075: Corrosive Snail

SCP-075: Corrosive Snail SCP-075 looks like a snail small enough to fit inside a fairly ordinary container. It's only about twenty centimeters long. Then the file gives its weight: roughly 860 kilograms. Even before the corrosive secretion comes into it, that's a strange thing to picture. Its muscular foot resembles a clawed hand with six fingers, and when active it can move and jump at remarkable speed despite that mass. The normal assumptions you'd make about a snail don't give you much help here. Keeping it almost completely dry puts it into a dormant state. That is the only known way to contain it reliably. The chamber's humidity has to remain at or below the file's stated one-percent limit, and water-based testing is prohibited. When active, it attacks prey and covers it in a corrosive alkaline secretion. Calling it acid would be inaccurate. The substance is described as a base, and the Foundation hasn't found an ordinary material that fully withstands it. That means the corrosion-resistant container isn't a guarantee that an active specimen can just be left inside indefinitely. The environmental controls are doing essential work. If moisture gets introduced during testing, the response can involve sealing the area and drying it out without allowing the remaining personnel to evacuate. The addendum does provide one unusual exception to the material problem. Researchers obtained a cup of the secretion through SCP-294, and that particular cup survived. They still don't know why. It gives them something to investigate without establishing that the wider containment problem has been solved. This is a compact entry, but the physical details do a lot. A small animal, an unexplained weight, a sudden burst of movement, and a secretion the surrounding equipment can't completely resist. You can understand why the procedure is so rigid about moisture. Everything depends on keeping it in the one condition where it stays dormant, before anyone has to find out how well the next barrier will hold. https://t.co/y4IT3KKvOp