It was 1948, in Villa Blanca, Guatemala. As night fell, two young boys - Carlos and
Miguel - played a game of soccer in the street. It was a quiet town full of humble, hard-working
people, and they were about to come face to face with a monster. Typically, when something like this happened,
you’d know exactly who to call: The SCP Foundation. Problem is, while these days we can generally
depend on the hard-working agents and researchers of the Foundation to save us from any anomalous,
supernatural threats with their tactics, expertise, and equipment, it wasn’t always this way. There was a time before the SCP Foundation
became the titan of anomaly-combatting prowess it is today, and it’s that time that we’re
focusing on today. It all comes back to a strange and violent
creature wandering the darkened streets of Guatemala. Or, as Dr. Charles Odgen Gears proposed we
call it, SCP-001 - The Prototype. SCP-001 is a topic we’ve covered in a number
of videos, but even then, we can never quite capture the full scope of this wily designation. “What is SCP-001?” is probably one of
the most loaded questions you can possibly ask as a member of the SCP Foundation, and
it may be your last, as the majority of the files under the SCP-001 umbrella are highly
classified for pretty much everyone under Level 5 clearance. 001 covers a large number of potentially anomalous
items, entities, and concepts, from the dreaded Scarlet King, to the awe-inspiring Gate Guardian,
to the very SCP Foundation itself, through the eyes of the charmingly incompetent Unusual
Incidents Unit of the FBI. Perhaps they’re all real, perhaps only one
of them is, and the rest are in there as a smokescreen. Perhaps they’re all fake, red herrings laid
down to hide the trail to something even more secretive and fantastic. All we know is that 001s seem to be gathered
around a collection of loose themes - The beginnings of the Foundation, events or entities
that could end the Foundation or even the world, and key formative moments in the Foundation’s
history. Dr. Gears’ proposal for SCP-001 lies firmly
in the latter camp. And if you keep watching and listening closely,
you’ll see exactly why. Back to Carlos and Miguel, the pair of eleven-year-olds
playing soccer on the quiet back streets of Villa Blanca. They were kicking the ball back and forth
when they heard a strange screeching noise in the distance. At first, they thought it was some kind of
injured bird, squawking desperately for help. Being good kids, they didn’t waste a second
running into the action, heading further into the outskirts of town. However, the creature they encountered on
that rural road was certainly no bird. When they first saw it, hunched over a few
meters in front of them, they thought it must have been a horribly injured man. He was deathly thin, with gray-brown skin
that looked either bruised or burned. It was twitching and weeping, its chest heaving
in heavy, labored pants. Its limbs were jerking wildly, as though the
creature was being electrocuted. “Hey mister, are you okay?” Carlos called out in Spanish. In that moment, what they had wrongly thought
was a man just froze up, finally registering their presence. Immediately, the two boys knew something was
wrong, as the creature slowly rose to its full height: Well over six feet, towering
over the two of them, even at a distance. They noticed something was wrong with its
limbs: They were too long, well out of proportion with its human-sized torso. It didn’t have hands and feet - At least,
not in the way that humans do. Instead, its slender ankles terminated in
long, black spikes, and its wrists each split off into three equally black claws. But worst of all was its face, if you could
even call what that monster had a face. Its head was split in the middle by a huge
mouth. At first, its gnarly lips were pursed, but
they soon slid open with a low, rumbling roar. The boys could feel their knees shaking as
they saw the monster’s mouthful of long, rotten fangs. Something started sliding up the dark passage
of the monster’s throat: A translucent, milky-blue sphere. Was that thing an eye? It made the two boys feel sick to even look
at it. That’s when the “eye” started to glow,
and the space around the monster began to shimmer slightly, like some kind of terrible
sorcery. As the two boys felt a strange force pulling
at them, trying to tug them into the creature’s embrace, they were suddenly jogged from their
frightened paralysis and decided to finally make a run for it. There was no doubt about what had just happened:
They’d encountered a demon in the flesh, intent on taking their souls straight to hell. When the two of them told their parents, they
were met at first with disbelief. Two young boys saw something that frightened
them in the dark - perhaps an animal, if anything at all - and they’d let their imaginations
run wild. It was typical of children. However, things didn’t seem quite so simple
when more sightings started popping up. People all across the town of Villa Blanca
started seeing this monster, all with matching descriptions: A huge, emaciated beast with
a mouth for a face, its glowing blue eye nested inside. The natural excuses circulated at first: Perhaps
the creature was a local prankster in a costume? This would be comforting to believe, but how
many pranksters in costumes can completely disappear before your very eyes. The monster’s eye would glow, and just like
that, it would simply vanish. As fear and paranoia began spreading through
the town, people suggested that perhaps it was a case of mass hysteria - Fear and panic
taking over rationality. But by this point, things had gotten worse:
Carlos and Miguel, the two boys who’d first discovered the demon on the back road, had
become sick. They were experiencing severe nausea, vomiting,
headaches, and diarrhea. Their bodies weakened. Lesions began developing on their skin. As their conditions deteriorated, and it seemed
as though nobody was capable of helping them, a rumor spread that the monster was somehow
inducing this sickness. The town doctor didn’t have the expertise
to diagnose it, but the boys were suffering from acute radiation sickness. And they wouldn’t be the only ones. Many of the people who’d reported sightings
and close encounters with the monster started coming down with severe radiation sickness. To the townspeople, it just seemed to be a
demon spreading some invisible plague among them. But the horrors wouldn’t stop there. It seemed that this demon also liked to take
a more direct approach to harming the townsfolk, because not long after the sickness broke
out, people started disappearing. There were never any bodies. The most that would ever be found were tattered
items of clothing left at the site of the disappearances, or blood smeared across the
walls or ground. Before they knew it, seven of their people
were gone. It seemed that, for all intents and purposes,
God had abandoned them. They were playthings of the demon now. Thankfully for the townsfolk who weren’t
yet irradiated or vanished, an organization was forming. One that might be their only chance at salvation. Someday in the future, it would become known
as The SCP Foundation, but it had a lot to learn before it got there. You see, the reason that this iteration of
SCP-001 is known as The Prototype is that - if Dr. Gears is to be believed - it may
be the first anomalous entity that they ever truly faced. So naturally, getting the creature captured
and contained didn’t go quite as smoothly as most of their modern jobs, despite the
comparative simplicity of this old threat. General Machoi, an ex-military operator that
became part of what we’ll once again call The Precursors to the Foundation, led a research
and recovery team into Villa Blanca to hunt down and retrieve the beast that’d been
causing all this misery and death among the townsfolk. However, this proved to be easier said than
done. While its bestial appearance might fool people
into thinking the monster was just a mindless animal, later writings on the creature would
describe it as both incredibly cunning and terrifyingly fast. When a group of armed personnel first tried
to engage the creature directly, they had no idea that they were walking right into
the middle of a bloodbath. They believed they had it surrounded on another
rural back road, advancing with assault rifles, when the creature flipped out and started
killing them. The Prototype proved to have frightening offensive
capabilities. Its three dark claws easily carved through
the armor of the soldiers trying desperately to contain it. The creature moved so fast that none of them
could reliably draw a bead on it, and if any of them could, it was holding their severed
head before they had a chance to squeeze the trigger. But death by the creature’s claws was one
of the more pleasant ways it could kill its victims. At one point during an engagement with Precursor
troops, it opened its mouth and unveiled its glowing, blue eye. At this point, one of the soldiers screamed,
and suddenly seemed to be sucked inside of himself, completely disappearing. The Prototype’s blue eye glowed again, and
it once again just teleported away from the scene. A number of the soldiers who survived this
altercation later needed to be treated for acute radiation sickness. Researchers eventually managed to figure out
what was actually happening with the creature: It had the ability to manifest microsingularities
- tiny black holes that it used to both teleport from place to place, and defend itself from
attacks when necessary. These singularities wouldn’t stick around
for long, a few seconds at most, but they had the terrifying side effect of putting
out massive amounts of radiation. This is why it was making so much of the town
and the recovery team sick via mere proximity. Thankfully, in finding out the creature’s
strength, they also managed to find out its weaknesses. Its powers were dampened by high humidity,
bright lights, and especially intense strobing lights. It was through the use of these lights that
the creature was finally captured and brought into ADRX-19 - a complex that would later
become Site-19 - for containment. There, its containment procedures were devised
by one of the burgeoning organization’s top minds: Dr. Hermann Keter. However, Dr. Keter would sadly never actually
live to see the duration of the Prototype’s containment at ADRX-19 - He was tragically
killed by the monster, though his name would live on as the designation for anomalies that
were particularly difficult to contain. It was thanks to him that his coworkers realized
lead-lined walls, a reinforced steel door, a 100% humidity environment, and the frequent
application of high-intensity strobe lights were the best way to keep the Prototype locked
up for good. To this day, this iteration of SCP-001 is
a fascinating reminder that the SCP Foundation wasn’t always the juggernaut it is today. There was once a time when they had as little
idea of what they were doing as the rest of us. There’s no better representation of this
than the file itself: It was an era before object classes and conventional designation
numbers. The file is written in a sketchy, disorganized
manner, and arranged into “Item designation number”, “Warning”, “Description of
item”, “Detail of current containment”, “Report”, and “addendum.” As with any experience in life, it’s always
worth asking: What can we learn from the SCP Foundation’s experience with its possible
first anomaly, a monster that seems almost nostalgically quaint by today’s standards? Perhaps the greatest message is that everything
is a work in progress. It was only by determination and persistence
that the Foundation could go from an organization challenged by a monster like The Prototype
to going toe to toe with real heavy hitters like the Scarlet King. How very inspirational. Now go check out “SCP-001 Ouroboros Cycle
- The Full Story Compilation” and “SCP-001 - Which is the Real 001?” for more crazy
tales of the mysterious SCP-001!
