Does the Black Moon Howl? No. Not yet. See the boy. He was born in a time before
names; there weren’t enough humans around to need them back then. He was one of a handful
occupying a coastal village, using a tongue long since dead. They eked out a simple life
- hunting, gathering, fishing. The only thing on most of their minds was surviving to see
the next sunrise. Yes, a simple life, free of complications. Until The Hermit appeared. The Boy would remember this man for an eternity.
Haggard and thin; skin weathered by time and pain. A man that, emaciated, walking with
a long, gnarled cane that honestly looked healthier than he did, shouldn’t be alive.
Even the Boy, who had scarcely seen beyond the bounds of his village, knew that the Hermit
was unnatural. An aberration. An anomaly. He walked into the center of the village,
sat down on a large stone, and waited. Nobody dared ask his business, nor what the Hermit
waited for. Then, a few days later, the Black Moon howled. The Boy saw the village’s youngest hunter
freeze one evening while out on a walk. Not simply stand still, but freeze. Then, for
an instant, he became solid black. A coal statue. And as soon as he’d changed, he
was gone. Obliterated. Not a trace of him remained. Such is the power of the Black Moon. It can
make any conscious being disappear in an instant. Turned black, then wiped from our plane of
existence, never to be seen again. Its choice of victim seemed, at each instance, to be
utterly random, but it would come for all who lived eventually. This is known to some
as the howling of the Black Moon. Later that same night, the Boy found himself
talking to the Hermit, who asked with small, frantic eyes what he had seen. When the Boy
told him, he let out a deep, rattling sigh. The Boy, curious, asked him if he knew about
the nightmare he’d just witnessed. The Hermit looked up. He’d been the first one, in the
Hermit’s millennia of pursuit, that had ever asked. In that moment, he knew he had
found his successor in the hunt for the Death of Ages. The Hermit told the Boy it went by many names.
The Great Finale, the Pale King, but most common of all was the Black Moon. The entity
existed beyond the veil of our reality, a creature of pure energy, though nobody could
really be sure of its true nature. The Hermit had been tracking it, learning about it, and
trying to destroy it for thousands of years. And yet, it only took him four pathetic minutes
to tell the Boy everything he knew. The Boy, knowing still that something about
the Hermit was unnatural, asked how he came to be in this position. The Hermit told the
boy he was the Counterbalance, a kind of chosen one, destined to face and perhaps even defeat
the Black Moon someday. The Counterbalance receives a number of truly extraordinary gifts
for inheriting the responsibility: Eternal life, eternal youth, near physical immortality. But they will be haunted by their purpose,
doomed to watch everyone they love die around them, as they continue to hunt their only
true equal and opposite, the Black Moon itself. The Hermit, in his own eyes, had failed at
his duty. He had grown weary, and now, he needed to pass the duty of Counterbalance
onto another. That other would be the Boy. He felt a sudden and profound change, along
with the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again. He was no longer just the
Boy. Now, he was the Counterbalance. He watched the Hermit give him a slight nod
out of respect, and then crumble into dust before his eyes. The Boy, the Counterbalance,
looked up at the sky and saw the stars twinkling. So bright, so beautiful. Little did he know,
his battle with the Black Moon would outlast every single one of them. Does the Black Moon howl? Not without blood. The Boy grew into a man, as his village aged
and then died around him. Decades passed, then centuries, then millennia. Tens of thousands
of years, watching humanity develop and grow around him as he continued his pursuit of
that one elusive foe. As science and diagnostic technology gained
ground, absorbing and then evolving beyond all the old superstitions, the Counterbalance
gained a better understanding of the Black Moon - though even then, it still remained
essentially a stranger. The entity was entropic, a being of pure randomness and chaos without
consistent form. It didn’t exist in our universe, but it could exercise its influence
here with so-called “Obliteration Events” - much like the horrible fate that befell
the young hunter from the village. But that was only the proverbial tip of the
iceberg. The Counterbalance tracked and noted obliteration
events. They were exceedingly rare, at first. Something that occurred once every thousand
years or so, like a terrible curse. But he couldn’t help but notice a concerning trend emerging. It started happening
once a century...then once a decade. He could feel the terrible
future stretching out in front of him. How, over their shared eternity, the Black Moon
would gain more and more ground. Would there come a day where it took someone
once a year? One a month? A week, a day, an hour, a minute, a second? It’d spell the
end of all conscious life. A total victory for the Black Moon, the End of the Universe,
the Death of Ages. A complete existential obliteration. He was swept up in a sobering realization:
He couldn’t win this fight alone. However, while his hunt for the Black Moon
had been largely fruitless, the Counterbalance had discovered many other things along the
way, Strange creatures, objects with extraordinary powers, and events that couldn’t be explained
with rational science. Perhaps something among these oddities, these anomalies, would hold
the key to defeating his timeless enemy. And it hadn’t just been these objects, entities,
and events, he’d also discovered some truly exceptional people on his travels. Minds and
skills that rivaled even his own, despite his age. Perhaps they would be the ones to help him
win. With the thirteen most brilliant and trusted
people the Counterbalance ever met, he decided to form a Council. And from this Council,
they forged and directed an organization dedicated to understanding and counteracting the strange
in all its forms, with the secret hope that their search into darkness would yield the
answer to the Black Moon’s downfall. He called it the SCP Foundation. They would
Secure the anomalous, Contain it, and Protect all of humanity from its
influence. The Counterbalance also took on a new title, befitting of his new role: The Administrator. And even the
Black Moon itself was given a moniker, in hopes of robbing it of some of its frightening
power. SCP-001. Does the Black Moon howl? Only at the blind. The year was now 1987. The SCP Foundation
had been operating for over a century, and thanks to their secret possession of anomalous
wisdom and technology, their own advancement was thousands of years ahead of the rest of
humanity. While there still wasn’t a silver bullet solution to the Black Moon, and its
deadly howls were becoming all the more frequent as the decades went on, the Foundation did
have some irons in the fire to combat it. Their ability to gather intel on both the
entity itself and its obliteration events had improved considerably, thanks to their
new global information network. Their top minds were also working on a highly classified
device known as the Singular Conceptual Bunker, which may one day come in handy for combating
the extra-dimensional entity directly. But the most valuable piece of information they
ever gathered about the Black Moon was this: It couldn’t howl when it was being watched.
The very act of engaged observation defanged it. The problem is, how can you observe something
that doesn’t technically exist inside your own reality? In order to pull this off, the
Foundation would need to get extremely creative. Thankfully, creative solutions to strange
problems are the Foundation’s specialty. Flash forward to 1993. Enter Dr. Moto, a brilliant
young scientist and conceptual engineer working for the SCP Foundation. With The Administrator’s
consultation, he started the KEY Project, an arm of the wider Project Oromasdes - the
umbrella initiative for using modified anomalous objects in the battle against the Black Moon. The goal of the KEY Project was relatively
simple: If people couldn’t observe the Black Moon directly, then the Foundation could make
proxies of the Black Moon that could be observed, almost like a kind of voodoo doll. These new
anomalies would only need to satisfy three criteria: The inability to operate when being
observed, a hostility to conscious life, and the ability to end conscious life of their
own volition when not being observed. Through conceptual engineering, a link theoretically
could be forged between these objects and the Black Moon, allowing observation of them
to stop the obliteration events. However, despite being a good idea in theory,
Dr. Moto’s efforts were marred with errors and tragedies. One object wasn’t deadly
enough, simply appearing behind people in a threatening pose when they weren’t looking.
Another one killed purely through collateral damage - a giant sculpture of a human head
that immediately attempted escape by barging through Site-01 - the center for Anti-Black
Moon operations - and killing nineteen people in the process. Another one of Moto’s objects,
a huge black sphere, simply immediately exploded, killing twelve people. And in the most horrific misstep of all, one
of Moto’s objects caused a mass death event in a nearby hotel, where 142 people were spontaneously
incinerated when the object - a series of interlocking stalactites and stalagmites - was
left unobserved for 0.2 seconds. Almost all of Moto’s objects were terminated in the
aftermath, either being too useless or too dangerous to keep around. The young scientist
felt a deep shame, but forged on. He made one truly brilliant creation that
satisfied all the criteria: A sculpture, incapable of moving while being watched, but would snap
the neck of the nearest conscious entity if left unobserved for even a fraction of a second.
Its relatively minimal killing left it easy to contain without causing mass deaths, and
despite all the other deaths that had sadly occurred during the KEY Project, Dr. Moto
believed that the lives saved in the long run by stopping the Black Moon’s howls would
justify the sacrifice. The problem is...the KEY Project didn’t
stop anything. Not long after this, there was the first recorded
double obliteration event in Rome, where a young tourist couple had both been obliterated
simultaneously. All the deaths in the KEY Project had been for nothing. The Black Moon
was only getting more powerful. The shame and the guilt was too much for Dr.
Moto. He left a note in his office, reading, “We've been looking at nothing. I'm sorry,
Administrator. I've failed you, sir.” Moto’s corpse was later found in the sculpture’s
temporary containment chamber, his neck snapped. The KEY Project was, in summary, shut down
and its one surviving creation transported to Site-19 in late 1993, where it was designated
as SCP-173. Another painful failure for the Administrator. Back to the drawing board once
more. Does the Black Moon howl? Not while stars
shine. millennia stretched on. Almost everyone died,
except The Administrator, thanks to his gift - or perhaps curse - as the Counterbalance
to the Black Moon. Science marched on, the SCP Foundation marched on, but all this progress, all this power, was nothing
against the incomprehensible influence of SCP-001. The Black Moon was howling
more frequently than ever, all the way up to the year 3156, when the Foundation launched
the SEEK Project under the support of Project Oromasdes. As more and more people were wiped out in
frequent obliteration events, the Administrator became painfully aware that perhaps the answers
to the Black Moon problem wouldn’t be found on earth. Using state of the art technology,
with a little help from the anomalous, the SCP Foundation began work on an autonomous
space-faring vessel that could search the stars for the key to the Black Moon’s destruction.
It was an awe-inspiring creation, a huge craft powered by artificial intelligence, with a
universal translator, cryogenic units, and hundreds of autonomous drones to perform more
targeted searches. SEEK was waved off into the unforgiving depths
of space. The Administrator could only hope that it would come back with worthwhile answers. The first of the three notable planets SEEK
arrived on was one theoretically capable of supporting human life, except for its brutal
and constant blizzards and snowstorms. When SEEK’s drones were deployed, they did discover
signs of civilization, based around sentient spherical creatures, but no signs of actual
life remained. Records and statues found across the planet seemed to indicate that the Black
Moon was responsible for the destruction of the planet’s civilization, causing so many
obliteration events that the remaining survivors went mad from the fear and stress, leading
to mass death in the ensuing chaos. The next planet was discovered centuries later,
in the year 3499. While this planet could also theoretically support human life, it
suffered from frequent volcanic eruptions that rendered much of its surface a flaming
mess. However, there were still the dormant ruins of a once advanced civilization of conscious
beings. Much like the prior planet, they’d been driven extinct by Black Moon obliteration
events a century before the SEEK even arrived. Unlike the last planet, however, it seems
that they accepted their fate, and went gently into the night. The planet was now overrun
by billions of armored, bat-like creatures that operated on pure instinct, and thus,
were not considered conscious enough to be obliterated. The final planet was reached in 3764, and
was the most fruitful of the three discoveries. This planet was hyper-advanced, fully urbanized
and covered in sprawling megacities, with records and technology over a thousand years
ahead of Earth. Before the Black Moon killed almost all of them, they were a species of
humanoid telepathic fungi, and had developed an awareness of the Black Moon’s existence
that was on par with that of humanity’s. They even had their own equivalent of the SCP Foundation actively
working on countermeasures. And most amazingly of all, SEEK found one
surviving member of the species on the planet, cryogenically frozen. The craft was immediately
instructed to collect the survivor and return home for interrogation. The Administrator
was preparing for what could have been the most important conversation since he met the
Hermit, all those thousands of years ago. Does the Black Moon howl? Only when waning. When the surviving creature, codenamed SAGE,
was returned to Earth, The Administrator was eager to finally speak with it. Like the rest
of its now-extinct species, SAGE spoke through powerful telepathic mindwaves, which only
The Administrator - thanks to his Counterbalance abilities - was able to receive at close range
without being harmed. Incidentally, it wasn’t long until the very
fact of the Administrator’s nature as a Counterbalance came up in the mental conversation.
SAGE could tell, just by being in his presence. They discovered a number of vital truths over
their brief time communicating: That SAGE’s survival had been pure luck, for starters.
The Black Moon is still very much capable of obliterating conscious beings in an unconscious
state. The Administrator also learned that he was merely the latest in an extremely long
line of Counterbalances across time, space, and species, though everyone but him had waived
the duty, passed it on. SAGE had one question to ask the Administrator
in turn, “What is SCB?” The Singular Conceptual Bunker, being worked on and perfected for
thousands of years by now, by the Foundation’s top scientists and conceptual engineers. The Administrator replied, “Victory. But it will take a very, very
long time.” Specifically, so long that he would see the stars go out
around him, one by one. Shocked, SAGE asked him what good victory would do him then. Rather
than say it aloud, he replied with a thought. SAGE paused, and said, “I see. How blasphemous
of you. Hopefully it works.” After this, the Administrator proceeded to
the Singular Conceptual Bunker and entered it, leaving instructions for the Foundation
to be run by a newly formed O5 Council in his indefinite absence. Thousands of years
later, in the year 5011, SAGE spoke one more time, repeating the words, “Hopefully, hopefully”
before turning solid black, and disappearing. The Black Moon had claimed one more victim,
but billions more had gone in the interim. The Administrator had no more answers to give.
At least, no more answers that anyone but him would understand. He was inside the Singular
Conceptual Bunker now, loaded into a device known as TOME - an experimental memorial module,
meant to pick up and record all the last messages of every dying civilization across the universe,
when the time finally came. All he could do was wait. And wait was exactly what we did. Does the Black Moon howl? Yes. Yes it does. Years pass. Too many to count. It’s a time
after names now, and TOME sits in the very center, drinking in the end of the universe.
The last of all the human colonies across the universe were obliterated by the Black
Moon back in the year 7329, so, so, so long ago, but some of the final messages of fear,
panic, and distress still echoed around the Administrator’s mind. "Hello, is there anyone here? We — we require
assistance! There's … it's … it's taking people every day! We need help! There's barely
anyone left! We need help! Hello? Hello?!" "Cabal 09:43! We have abandoned the false
flesh! We have abandoned the false flesh! The shepherds crook broken 'neath my knee!
Cabal 09:43! Cabal 09:43! Forgive us! Forgive us!" "We're going to leave this on. It's so dark
outside now. It's blotting out the sun. It's … I have to go now." "RESPOND•FIRST•CONVENIENCE EMERGENCY•SITUATION•DEVELOPING
REQUIRE•ADDITIONAL•RESOURCES." "My fault. Your fault. Our fault. My fault.
Your fault. Our fault. My fault. Your fault. Our fault. Rip out my brain now. Rip out my
brain now!" And a small child, the last on Earth, simply
asking, “Hello?” into an indifferent microphone. But the Administrator had to wait, as the
Singular Conceptual Bunker became the Solitary Conceptual Bunker. He was the last conscious
being in the universe, and still, he needed to wait, as the stars went dark outside. Only
when there was nothing outside but black was it finally time for the Counterbalance’s
long game to pay off. There was nothing left of our universe. The
only thing here was the SCB, and the Black Moon itself. With everything else gone, the
Black Moon only had one conscious being left to obliterate. It opened the door to the Solitary
Conceptual Bunker, and stepped inside. This...this doesn’t make sense. How can
the Black Moon, an entity beyond our dimension, beyond physical form, take a step? Good question.
The same question, incidentally, that was going through the Black Moon’s mind as it
entered the bunker. It didn’t look at all how the entity expected: It was like a bar,
a counter with rows of bottles behind it, a jukebox playing in the corner. A man stood
behind the bar, cleaning glasses. The Counterbalance. The Administrator. He said, "Well, there you are! Certainly took
your time. Can I pour you a little something?" This only served to increase the Black Moon’s
confusion. It had form here, dark smoke compressed into a vaguely humanoid shape. It could speak?
It could think? None of this made any sense. The being that’d just wiped out all conscious
life and seen the very death of the universe was truly and utterly confused. The Administrator just seemed to be enjoying
himself, preparing for a confrontation hundreds of billions of years in the making. The Singular
Conceptual Bunker - or perhaps, the Singular Containment Bunker - was a truly ingenious
creation. A place of pure ideas, where everything inside was on the same level. Here, there
were no immortals. No Gods. Just ideas, on the same level playing field. And it was time
for the Black Moon’s idea to come to an end. It was a trap, and the entire universe was
the bait. Without warning, the Administrator pulled
up a shotgun from underneath the table, and unleashed both barrels into the Black Moon’s
chest. The creature took the hit and fought back,
dragging the Administrator to the ground, beating him, strangling him. He could feel
the light fading under the monster’s relentless assault, until he managed to get his desperate
hands on a glass ashtray. He beat the monster over the head with it until its grip loosened,
and he was able to slide out. There, the killer of the universe was on the
ground before him. He grabbed the monster, held it in place, and beat it to death. He
was gravely injured by the battle, but The Black Moon was no more. Here, in the Singular
Conceptual Bunker, he had won. The Administrator, no longer the counterbalance
in the absence of the Black Moon, hobbled over to the jukebox, producing a single, beautiful
coin from his pocket. He pushed the coin into the slot, wheezed a pained breath, and said: “The thing is … this place is only information.
T-There's nothing else out there. Not even matter. The universe closed its doors a long
time ago. But this place can go from information back to matter with just the press of a button.
L-Let's see what happens when we introduce something to nothing…” For a second, it looks as though he might
fall, but he doesn’t. Instead, he slams the button on the jukebox and, with a relieved
laugh, says, “Let there be light.” And there was light. Now go check out “SCP-001 - Which is the
Real 001?” and “SCP-001 EX - A Good Boy” to unravel more of the many mysteries of the
legendary SCP-001!
