SCP-088: The Lizard King

SCP-088: The Lizard King SCP-088 is a good example of why putting something in a museum case and deciding it looks dead would be a terrible approach to handling an SCP. The thing looks mummified. It has reptilian features, it's roughly six thousand years old, and it spends most of its time completely inactive. It's also still alive. Keeping it cold is a large part of keeping it asleep. The Foundation uses an airtight acrylic case and a temperature no higher than fifteen degrees Celsius. When it wakes, its secretions can eat through most metals and minerals, poison people, or turn exposed humans into creatures resembling it. The transformation is the part worth slowing down over. A dangerous creature escaping is already a problem. Turning the people responding to the escape into more of its own kind makes the response itself vulnerable. Every person sent in could become another person nobody can safely bring back out. Some heavily exposed victims also defend it, even at the cost of their lives. That raises a much uglier question than whether their bodies can be restored. How much of the person is making that decision? The file shows the behavior, but it doesn't give us a reassuring answer about what remains underneath it. During one breach, affected personnel build it a pedestal before it returns to hibernation. That is such a strange detail to include. They have become protective of it, and now they're arranging a place for it to rest. There's almost a sense of ceremony to the scene, although the report doesn't establish a religion or explain what they're thinking. It was found with twenty-three similar bodies, believed to have originally been human. That makes the containment incidents feel like a glimpse of something that may already have happened long before anyone started keeping records on it. And the current classification is Safe. The cooling and suitable containment materials have proved effective. The word still feels uncomfortable sitting next to all of this, which is probably a useful reminder of what the classification measures. A dependable way to keep a creature asleep can make it manageable. It doesn't make waking it up any less of a terrible idea. https://t.co/07FEe1IBmi