The Breach
The old world kept its anomalies hidden in sites across every continent. Then, all at once, it couldn't. Containment failed everywhere in the same season: power, walls and procedures gave out together, and what had been locked away for generations got out. People call it the Breach. Nobody agrees on what started it, only that it ended the old world. Governments, cities and the old sites fell with it.
The Blackout
When the old sites fell, the Foundation lost its memory. The Archive (every anomaly file, every procedure, every designation) went dark in the Blackout: servers burned, vaults flooded, couriers never arrived. What survived was the Foundation itself, its people and its command, with nothing on file. Every anomaly it had ever contained was out there again, and it no longer knew what any of them were.
One file came through. SCP-001 was found intact at Site-01 after the Blackout, sealed beyond every clearance. Nobody has opened it, not even the O5 Council. Its number is reserved, and the new Archive counts from SCP-002.
That is why the new Foundation numbers its files from the beginning, and why Site-01's motto is Quod scriptum est manet, what is written remains. Never again will it lose what it writes down.
The Surfacing
Anomalies did not all come back at once. They surface one at a time, and still do:
- a dormant one wakes,
- a buried one is dug up as the zones push outward,
- one carried in from the Outskirts shows itself at the wrong moment,
- something walks in out of the Wasteland.
Each arrives without a name. The Foundation has to find it, watch it, test it, contain it and write its file from nothing, and give it a new number. Some of these may be anomalies the old Foundation once held under another name, but the old files are gone, so nobody can say which.
The Return
Since the Breach, death does not hold. People who die come back: shaken, aching, empty-handed, but themselves, and they remember dying. Nobody knows why. The Foundation counts the Return among the anomalous facts of the new world and studies it like any other.
Where people come back seems to follow where they belong. Personnel return to their posting. Registered Citizens return to their home zone. The Unregistered come back wherever the world leaves them, often at the edge of the Wasteland. It is one more reason people register.
Only one thing seems to make death final: a Foundation termination order. Those who are marked for termination and die do not come back. Nobody outside the Foundation's highest command knows how it works.
What this means for people
- Citizens: something new can surface anywhere, so report anything strange to the nearest Foundation post.
- Personnel: every anomaly is a first encounter. There is no file to check, only the one you are about to write.
- The Archive: it is being rebuilt by the people who serve the Foundation, one file at a time.