SCP-249

SCP-249 SCP-249 is a plain, windowless door covered in faded white paint. Open it and you can come out through another door somewhere within eight hundred and fifty meters. Whatever walls, rooms, or obstacles sit between those points don't matter to the connection. The destination is random. You can't just tell it which office you want. While it's open, SCP-249 takes on the appearance of the door it's connected to. From the other end, the destination door appears to open by itself, and whatever passes through the anomaly seems to materialize out of thin air. Close SCP-249 and the connection ends, with the original door returning to its usual appearance. Most of the time, that means you have an unpredictable shortcut around a fairly limited area. The Foundation allows access but requires a destination log, and it keeps other SCPs at least a thousand meters away unless someone with the required clearance approves an exception. That's a sensible precaution when a door can create a connection through barriers that would otherwise separate containment areas. There's also an order moving all the restrooms out of range. The file doesn't spell out the incident behind that order, and it really doesn't need to. Randomly connecting to whatever door happens to be nearby creates some obvious privacy problems even when nothing physically dangerous happens. The bigger complication appears roughly once every five hundred uses. At that point, the distance limit stops applying and the door connects to a random place somewhere in the world. There doesn't even have to be another door at the destination. Counting uses gives the researchers some warning, so ordinary use is stopped as that point approaches and the next destinations are tested instead. One agent disappears and is found weeks later in eastern Canada. Other recorded connections open into what appears to be the Sahara, a warehouse in a destroyed city, and Madagascar. Those results would already make stepping through without checking a very bad idea. Then one opening releases a huge rush of water into the site. The agent holding the handle manages to close it before the place floods. A fish left behind is identified as a species from the Mid-Atlantic Deep Sea Trench. That gives them evidence that the door can connect to somewhere deep underwater, with the water coming through as soon as the connection opens. The same entry also records approval for using it during an infiltration mission, which succeeds. It doesn't explain how the team selected or handled the random destination, so there's only so much to say about the operation itself. The point is that the Foundation is willing to use it despite the risks. It's a compact idea with a useful distinction between its ordinary behavior and its occasional failure to follow that behavior. Hundreds of nearby connections could make using it feel familiar. The next opening might put a desert or the deep ocean on the other side. Keeping count helps, but the moment the door opens still matters more than what you've gotten used to expecting from it. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-249