 It is said that one of their meetings in the gymnasium, Scipio and Hannibal had a conversation on the subject of generalship, in the presence of a number of bystanders in that Scipio asked Hannibal whom he considered the greatest general, to which the latter replied, Alexander of Macedonia. To this Scipio assented since he also yielded the first place to Alexander, then he asked Hannibal who he placed next, and he replied, Paris of Iparus, because he considered boldness the first qualification of a general, for it would not be possible he said to find two kings more enterprising than these. Scipio was rather netled by this, but nevertheless he asked Hannibal to whom he would give the third place. Hannibal replied, in a different world, one where I had not touched the face of darkness, I might have said myself, or even as a young man I conquered his spania and led an army across the Alps, the first since Hercules. With this Scipio smiled and asked again, so then who stands after Paris of Iparus? The men who felled Hyperion. Excerpt from SCP-3813 Welcome to Object Class Explained. In this series I do a deep dive into the lore of a particular SCP related topic and try to give you an abridged version of the story, twist, or even just the details. This series is produced in partnership with the SCP Declassified Subreddit, my patrons, and viewers like you. If you'd like to check out other declassifications you can check out a link to the declassified subreddit in the description below, and if you'd like to support this kind of content on this channel definitely head on over to Patreon and become one of my patrons. For as little as a dollar a month you can help ensure that this kind of content keeps getting made and there will be a link to that in the description below. In that vein I'd like to thank Samuelism who has pledged for $10 and Faye who has pledged for $5. Let's get started. SCP-3813 is a massive mechanical superstructure located beneath the Tyrrhenian Sea near Rome, Italy. While the majority of the superstructure is buried beneath the seafloor, a significant percentage can be accessed by divers. The interior of the structure is a partially submerged network of corridors and passageways. The description of SCP-3813. So this is a giant elephant that has been held together for two millennia by sheer force of will, and the man at the center of it all is Hasdrubel, brother of Hannibal. But the machine itself has roots that go back further and perhaps deeper than you might expect both in history and on the site. You see the genesis of the ideas behind SCP-3813 can be found in the collaborative work of DJ Cactus and Twisted Gears in their 001 proposal, The Broken God. If you're familiar at all with that SCP you might recognize some elements of it in SCP-3813. I mean they're both about giant mechanical monsters, there's a link to Robert Bumaro, and obviously the Church of the Broken God is involved. But SCP-3813 differentiates itself in a couple of important ways. First of all it's rooted in an actual recorded historical incident. Hannibal might not have attacked Italy with a giant mechanical elephant, but he did attack Italy. And the battles between Carthage and Rome were legendary and storied. So while Rome did eventually come out on top, Hannibal's forces actually came very close to conquering Italy. However, in the world of the SCP Foundation, part of the early success of that attack was the usage of SCP-3813. There are some hints as to the source of the anomaly throughout the work, but little true explanation in the work itself. This is my design. Some of the earlier drafts of the article included information about where Hyperion came from, but I felt that the explicit nature of the information spoiled a little bit of the mystery. Also, I suppose it's important to mention here that I'm one of the co-authors of the article. What's on the page is what's on the page, and you can draw your own conclusions from that, but I can tell you that there's a reason why Bumaro is the person these documents were recovered from. The Church of the Broken God has, after all, been around for a very, very long time. Now this colossus sits in the sea, waiting for the arrival of an army from the north. The garrison has erected catapults and entrenched the shoreline, but what might do men have in the face of such unstoppable hate? Xaitis. An excerpt from SCP-3813. The thing about SCP-3813 is that it needs people in it to continue to function. This is a pretty basic thing that's not explicitly described in the article itself. When it was first created, of course, it was more than capable of independent operation without literally integrating those who were operating it. But as it sustained damage and over time, people on board began to die. Machines began to claim bodies of the dead, and eventually, those of the living. Hasdrubal was the man in charge of the beast and had a place near the central power core. In the closing lines of the article, you start to get a good sense of what's going on, but it's impossible to really determine more without the foundation sending in more people, and they definitely don't want to do that. Hasdrubal, by the by, as mentioned earlier, is the brother of Hannibal, and he did in fact die during the Second Punic War. The actual historical circumstances of his death are much different than what is stated in the article, but given the suppression of information about the giant robotic elephant he commanded, this is hardly a problem of historical accuracy. What drives him to madness and eventually destruction is the death of his son Hyrum during a battle. It is a singular event that leads to Hasdrubal's reckless charges into Roman lines and into Roman camps. While the Romans could not take out this monstrosity in a straight head-on battle, attrition was enough to lower its effectiveness over time, using it as a battering ram against the Roman forces after the death of his son, eventually caused the thing to start to fall apart, and when it did try to retreat to the sea, its legs were tangled up in ropes and cables, and it stumbled, and then it sank to the bottom of the ocean, and it, the dead it carried, and the living two stayed there for almost two thousand years. They say Hyperion has descended upon Rome, and Rome will welcome him. As Apollo did to Helio, so shall the might of our Republic do to this bastard god. Marcus Claudius Marcellus. It is at this point that the foundation comes to learn about this object, before any of its real history was understood. It didn't recover the documents immediately, after all, it was just some partially submerged metal object in the water off the coast of Italy. The foundation sends in three people from an MTF stationed in Rome, this, by the way, for a variety of reasons is a serious mistake. First of all, the object is still alive, and secondly, so is Hasdrubal, and he still hates Rome. The internal structure of SCP-3813 is a maze of machinery and submerged passages, and along the way the foundation divers run into machine monsters that swarm them, and they try to run away, and somehow they end up even more lost. When they finally find a way out, it's far too late. This thing has been down here for two thousand years. It's not about to let the newest living beings that it's seen get away, so it drags them back in, and one of them comes face to face with Hasdrubal, and, well, you know what, I'm going to play the audio from the ending right now. Noscarum, Lestorat Manasi. Noscarum, Noscarum! I don't know what you're saying! His flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels and gave a roar as if of earthly fire, that scared away the meek ethereal hours, and made their dove wings tremble. On, he flared. The Fall of Hyperion, a dream, by John Keats. So I remember when we were first starting to write this, and the concept was we just wanted to create as complete of an article as we possibly could, as much of a multimedia article as we could, and I think it succeeds mostly. I mean, it's at plus 130 right now, and while that's nothing to sneeze at, I think most of the folk involved in its creation were probably a little disappointed that it didn't do better than that. I mean, the authors for this piece are myself, DJ Cactus, Zang, and The Vulgan. Most of the primary writing was done by DJ Cactus and went sitting, and then I did a ton of editing, rewriting, and additional writing. The art in it, which is incredibly detailed, and just incredible in general, was done by Zang, and the voice acting was contributed by Vulgan and myself. Now both Zang and Vulgan were part of the process of creating the article, but we did run into some serious issues with the wiki, and heck, even some of the wiki staff, because of the scope of the collaboration, as the kind of thing that hadn't been really done this way before. And there's a strong undercurrent of devaluing, non-writing-based contributions to articles. I mean, if I were to say that Zang had contributed nothing but art, which she didn't, by the way, or that Vulgan had only contributed acting, which he didn't, by the way, there would be a pretty good chance that people would be outraged that they were somehow listed as co-authors and given equal billing to myself and Cactus. And in fact, that's actually visible on the discussion page, even when myself and Cactus made it pretty clear that both of those people had contributed. You can still see lots of people still angry they were listed. I even got two messages from different members of staff trying to get me to tell them exactly what their contributions were, in a way that very much seemed like they were trying to evaluate if we had listed them as co-authors correctly. I'll only bring this up because I know a lot of writers like to watch my videos and plenty more aspiring SCP writers also watch. You need to value non-writing contributions equally to writing. Acting is creating, and making art is creating. They are neither more nor less valuable than putting words down on a page. Anyway, that's all for today. If you'd like to see more videos like this, hit the subscribe button, and then hit the notification bell next to that so you will be notified when I post new videos. And follow me on Twitter at D. Samarian for updates as well. Finally, become a patron at patreon.com forward slash D. Samarian. Thanks for watching.