SCP-244

SCP-244 SCP-244 is a ceramic jar that can turn the area around it into the kind of cold you do not want to be trapped inside. It has silver decoration, a matching cap, and an interior that stays at minus thirty-seven degrees Celsius regardless of the conditions outside it. The file gives the internal humidity as 125 percent. Whatever else you do to the room, the inside of that jar keeps those conditions. Uncap it and ice fog starts pouring out. Lay it on its side or turn it upside down and the flow gets faster. The fog spreads through the surrounding area, lowering the temperature and raising the humidity as it goes. How quickly it fills a space depends on the size of the area and the conditions already there. Taking it outdoors doesn't switch it off. Wind, sunlight, terrain, and vegetation can affect how bad the problem becomes, but the jar keeps producing fog. That means the environment influences the spread without giving you a simple guarantee that open air will contain it for you. Once a fogged area reaches the same temperature and humidity as the jar, there's a chance of something else appearing inside it. The longer the area stays that way, the more likely that becomes. SCP-244-2 looks like a denser patch of gray fog. The researchers don't know whether it's actually part of the surrounding fog or a separate entity using it to hide. Thermal imaging reveals that it's much colder than everything around it, which is already at minus thirty-seven. It generally stays still until there's heat nearby. Then it moves toward the heat and surrounds it. People flash-freeze and die. Electronics and machinery ice over. As it takes in thermal energy, the thing grows, and a large enough fogged area can contain more than one of them. There is a limit to what it approaches. A source at six hundred degrees Celsius or higher makes it retreat instead. Burning fuel can repel it, and a sufficiently concentrated burst of heat can disperse it. Ordinary body heat just gives it something to move toward. The amount of heat matters a great deal. Containment tries to stop the environment from ever developing that far. The jar stays capped in a room kept at least thirty-eight degrees Celsius, with its own ventilation and steady air circulation. It sits on an alarmed scale so a sudden change in weight can reveal either the cap coming off or the jar being moved. If it's been active and uncapped for more than four hours before retrieval, a separate emergency procedure is required. The actual details of that procedure aren't given. It was recovered from the basement of an abandoned Chaos Insurgency base. The basement was already full of fog and contained at least two manifestations. The file leaves open whether the Insurgency put it there intentionally or had also been searching for it. The jar itself is small enough to pick up. The trouble is what it does to the space around you, and how that space eventually becomes somewhere other things can exist. You could begin with a loose cap and end up trying to retrieve it through freezing fog while your own body is attracting whatever is inside. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-244