SCP-208: "Bes"

SCP-208: "Bes" SCP-208 is one of the people at Site-17 you would probably be glad to see coming down the hallway. He is friendly, enjoys company, and spends his time helping in the medical wing. Even being near him tends to make people feel better. He appears as a short, stout Egyptian man with substantial body hair and a lionlike mane running from his brow into his beard. He usually wears an Egyptian tunic resembling Old Kingdom military clothing, though he sometimes changes into modern fatigues. Most of the staff call him Bes. His main ability is healing. He can rapidly regenerate and reorganize living cells, allowing him to treat many physical ailments. The file attributes this to an unusual electromagnetic emission from his body. It describes behavior that doesn't follow ordinary electromagnetic models, including an additional degree of freedom, unusual pulses, and a decline over distance that doesn't match the inverse-square relationship. Those are the fictional measurements in the entry, rather than an established explanation for healing in real medicine. Within the story, they give the Foundation something to measure while leaving the underlying mechanism unresolved. Bes naturally releases a small amount of this radiation and can increase it by concentrating. Staff associate the ordinary background exposure with a feeling of wellness and ease. His protective effect goes further. The report says his presence can repel malicious beings, sometimes strongly enough to act as a physical barrier. During a test with a death-row prisoner, brain imaging records an unidentified pattern of neural activity while the subject becomes intensely uncomfortable and tries to leave the chamber. Researchers suspect an induced fight-or-flight response, but they don't establish that explanation, and it wouldn't fully explain the effect on nonhuman entities. That also doesn't give the Foundation a complete scientific test for who is good or evil. The article describes the behavior it has observed and leaves important questions about the mechanism unanswered. Bes himself seems particularly protective of children and anyone he considers innocent. Snakes are the only thing the file specifically identifies as provoking aggression from him. His discovery is much less comfortable than his life at the site. During an unrelated search near the Nile, agents digging in the delta notice a foot protruding from the riverbed. Excavating it reveals a large block of granite with Bes embedded inside. The block is recovered, and a researcher is surprised to discover that the person in it is alive. He is freed, examined, and eventually transferred to Site-17. Because he is cooperative and generally docile, his Safe-class containment is comparatively relaxed. He has a ten-meter-square room decorated in an Egyptian style, with a couch and a stereo stocked with North African music from different eras. He is permitted into most common areas and officially allowed to work in the medical wing. Surveillance still follows him outside his room, so he hasn't simply been given his freedom, but staff interact with him as someone who can help. The file never shows him demanding worship or trying to take over the facility. It spends more time describing his friendships, his protectiveness, and the practical benefit of having him around. His name and appearance give the story its mythological connection, while daily life at the site supplies the character. The last addendum compares his healing with SCP-500 and concludes that the pills remain a more effective cure. Bes responds by pointing out that he tells better jokes. After all the measurements and containment instructions, the file ends with him answering the researchers’ clinical comparison with a joke. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-208