SCP-263

SCP-263 SCP-263 turns on to a game show called Cash or Ash, and switching on the television is enough to make you the next contestant. There's no audition, no chance to read a release, and apparently no option to decide you'd rather watch something else. It's an old black-and-white television with a Thomson logo, although it doesn't match a known model. The studio and the host both look like they belong in the early 1960s. He's cheerful, constantly smiling, and treats everything that follows like a perfectly normal game show. The rules sound easy. Three questions. Forty-five seconds to answer each one. Get all three right and a prize appears in front of you. Get one wrong or run out of time and you catch fire. The fire fully surrounds the contestant within seconds, can't be extinguished by any method they've tried, and leaves no remains when it disappears. The host then expresses disappointment and starts talking about the next person having better luck. What makes the questions interesting is that they depend on where the TV is. Inside a building, the host asks about the building, its history, or the people who own it. Outside, he asks about the surrounding area's history, geology, weather, and ecosystem. Put it inside a Foundation site and suddenly the questions can involve SCPs and restricted records. Some are simple enough for low-level personnel to answer. Others involve obscure details buried in highly classified documents. According to the file, the information is in the Foundation's records, but that doesn't mean the person in front of the screen knows it or can find it in forty-five seconds. There's also a very particular set of cheating rules. Somebody speaking or whispering an answer to the contestant gets them killed. Leaving the area directly in front of the television does too. Using a computer larger than twenty-seven centimeters counts as cheating, but a small phone, PDA, or appropriately sized computer doesn't. That loophole changes how the Foundation runs the tests. Contestants can be given unrestricted access to a complete synchronized copy of its databases on a permitted device. The system is designed to return records in no more than 200 milliseconds. They're effectively trying to beat a supernatural quiz show with a fast search tool. The condition attached to that access is that the contestant is terminated afterward. Even surviving the show doesn't get them out of the Foundation's information-security rules. Observers also have their notes taken and receive amnestics, while recordings are reviewed and censored where necessary. The prizes aren't even ordinary cash. They've received incredibly detailed miniature sculptures, jade pieces shaped like dollar bills with the host's face on them, a little clockwork creature, and miniature figures of humanoid SCPs. Some have substantial appraised values. The host clearly knows enough about the Foundation to reproduce things it keeps locked away, but he won't answer questions about himself. That combination is what sticks with me. The host keeps smiling through the deaths, the prizes keep appearing, and the Foundation builds an entire controlled testing process around a game where even a successful contestant isn't allowed to walk away. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-263