 I begin this entry with newfound life. It's felt like centuries since I've taken a breath with my own lungs. For the past 20 odd years, if you can really call it that, I've been nothing more than a number, a blot of ink, a mechanism used by the foundation like so many before. 92, 61, 41. That was my official name. You'll never find a scrap of paper with anything more than that provided the foundation did their job, and they always do their job. There were 10 of us when we started. Rachel, Israel, Gene, Ralph, Brendan, Yusef, Michael, Tay, Stephen, and Sophie. It's funny. Even after we've come this far, those words hardly carry any thoughts with them. Our names, our past lives, they were all taken from us. Now, you know what? Taken is the wrong word. At the time we were willing, we were naive. We sold our identities for trite sentiments, pride, glory, comfort, respect. I think we valued that sort of thing. Nothing could amount to what we lost as we shuffled those failures and paradoxes into depths of oblivion, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Operation Undertaker. That was our first and only assignment, and I doubt a single one of us could really even begin to understand the extent of what we were getting ourselves into, but how could we? We were drunk with the ambition of youth, stumbling into the shadows of theory, hired by the foundation to assess and correct temporal anomalies, whether they were the product of failed experimentation or dangerous SCPs, but this was no great honor achieved from years of dedication or any tribulation to capital defiance. We weren't courageous heroes. We weren't groundbreaking theorists. We were utterly averaged despite our educations. And I guess that's why the foundation chose us. You see, we weren't zealous enough to exploit our findings, nor were we as defiant as the class D personnel. We were just honest workers. Nothing more than that, so they thought. And we accepted our task with grace. Our families were treated with the strongest amnestics at the foundation's disposal. Our birth records, transcripts, everything was expunged. Not that there was much to us anyway, but it was as if we'd never cried out to this world, drenched in blood, scared out of our minds, screaming with life. And from that moment on, we were just units of vague maths waiting for the day that they'd be computed. And then deleted. Some of us didn't even make it that far. The few 05s that knew about us did a damn good job at blotting out the miscalculations. Israel took the best subway ride of his life. Rachel decided that she never wanted to be back again. And Jean, Ralph, Brendan, and Yusef, well, they all took a long walk on a historic pier. We all made use of our time, I guess. But that's for the rest of us. We just carried on. We grabbed shovels and continued to pile up travesties. Until one day, the handles snapped and we were no longer capable of digging. And it was the day we found it. That everything changed, though. I can hardly remember which day that was. We were passing by a small town on route to another research target when Stephen saw it. I mean, on the outside, it was just a shitty little chemical factory. Nothing special. But that's what caught our eyes. After all, narcissists had a captivating gaze and I think we found a reflection of ourselves in it. We notified our superior responsible for keeping track of us, told him that we'd come upon the temporal abscess a little unexpectedly and that we'd relay information accordingly. That was Tay's idea. We were all enthralled with this factory because something was just off about the entire place. At the time, we couldn't quite explain it, but there was something alluring about the whole thing, like coming home after years away. Sophie was the first to find it, the huge generator below the observation room, in mint condition, letting off this faint glow. And naturally we grabbed the necessary equipment and scanned the object. The foundation had taught us a lot along the years, including how to operate their nifty gadgets. Maybe that's where they went wrong. They trusted us and they trusted our inclination to be average. Never thought we'd create anything for ourselves. Hell, we were created for just the opposite reasons. Our equipment found a questionable amount of radiation emitting from the generator, though any amount of radiation. In this particular instance was questionable. Michael, our barely engineer, began investigating the hardware of the generator. And this was R, maybe anyone's first encounter with this particular SCP, the one that would go unreported, unnoticed, along with us. Further inspection concluded that the generator was physically incapable of creating radiation, so something was definitely wrong. Stephen confirmed our suspicions. We'd been in the factory for at least four hours, yet our watches indicated that only 12 seconds had passed. No matter where and what we checked, our conclusions were the same. Time wasn't working properly. Not that I think it ever had. Because we were used to that, crazy enough though it sounds. This enigma was different. It was beautiful. And it was foreign to our eyes. And even to the foundations. But it was ours. We decided not to leave the factory. Instead, we invested our time into the generator. Now it might have had a mimetic effect on us at first, but I like to think at some point it became a willing participant. There were many things in the factory that emitted similar radiation, and they seemed to alter the core SCP to contribute to its functioning. It was as if we were just meant to be here, to finish this machine. Michael and Tay did just that, though none of us could really conceive of what we fell upon. Sophie and Steven noticed the other capabilities of the generator. It didn't just alter the relation of time around it, it altered the property of time itself. Ford, backwards, sideways, anything we could imagine. It was pure control. It was the collection of strings that bound us to the puppeteer's hold. And our experiments, our obsession with this device, it nurtured our nostalgia. It was me who was first to propose that, you know what, we're tired of all the shoveling. We could feel it in our bones, in our hearts. We'd missed our pasts. We missed our parents. We missed our family, and however mundane they were, they were ours. And that's all that really mattered. And now, now we had found something to let us climb out of the pit the Foundation had thrown us into. We hypothesized that if we got the calibrations just right, we could go back to that day where we'd hoard ourselves out of the Foundation. We'd have a chance to win back our lives. We'd be given amnestics, of course, to redact their visit, and then we'd have our world again. Our efforts have paid off. Five burning souls. That's all it took to destruct time to correct our mistakes, and to completely rework everything. Michael's calling now, and I suppose I should probably wrap this up and let Sobie have her turn. We'll keep these logs as a sort of security in case anything bad happens. Soon we will begin our trip. And finally breathe again. Michael primes the machine. Tay checks the math. Sofie finishes her final log on the computer. Stephen stands in the corner of the room praying. Sofie turns calling out my name. We are prepared to shed our numbers to become flesh once more. Right as four men rush in. I'm shot in the back of the head for the 176,680,132nd time. Again, Stephen is shot as he prays. Again, Sofie cries as she dives underneath the desk. Again, Tay and Michael plummet to the ground filled with metal. All of this I witness. Once more his blood pours from the back of my head. A stray bullet damages the equipment. The task force begins to fret, but there's no saving it now. They found us. I suppose it was only a matter of time. They thought they could stop it. How wrong they are. Now we're trapped together. Thank you very much for listening. I'm kind of sick right now. I don't know if it's not it's not it's not the Rona. Don't worry about that. But I'm just not feeling very well and I didn't feel like being on camera for today. I'll be back on Thursday. I thought maybe I could start doing readings like this to give myself a little bit of a break every once in a while. If you like the video, scroll down and hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos. And then if you really want to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com forward slash decimarian like everybody here on the screen already has. Including Manuel Noltorp, probably a wizard and definitely not a scientist, and Lawful Evil. Lawful Evil is a new $40 backer. All three of these guys have pledged $40 just to get their names read out on the on the video. Thank you very much. It's nice to know that I'm not alone out here. I'll see you all again on Thursday.