“Twenty-three… bust” the dealer says before
scooping up the cards from in front of the man who appears to be growing increasingly angry as
his stack of chips increasingly dwindles in size. Making matters worse for the man, are the cheers
of excitement coming from the nearby craps table, where it seems all of the luck that he
has lost has somehow been transported. As the blackjack dealer once
again reveals an ace and a king, another burst of noise comes from the craps game.
“Seven again” the croupier cries before placing a huge stack of chips in front of the young
man playing craps who seemingly can’t lose. The young man on the hot streak collects his
winnings and walks happily through the crowded casino floor right past the fuming man at the
blackjack table. The young man cashes in his chips and counts the large stack of hundred
dollar bills given to him before tipping one to the woman working inside the cage. And this
night is far from a rarity for this young man. For his entire life, it’s been as if he couldn’t
lose. He’s not strong, fast, or especially smart, but he’s always managed to excel thanks to his
one incredible gift - his never ending good luck. The young man soon recognized his ability to
consistently beat games of chance and went to the one place in the world best suited for his
skills - Las Vegas. And Vegas has been very, very good to him. He lives in an expensive hotel
room right on the strip, drives fancy cars, and treats himself nightly to lavish
dinners and shows. It’s all possible because no matter what the game
is, it’s as if he can never lose. The young man is in the middle of another hot
streak, or rather, continuing his never-ending hot streak, this time at the roulette table. “How
does he keep doing it?” someone in the crowd asks as the man hits another number straight up,
paying out thirty-seven to one on his bet. The crowd cheers and slaps the man on his back
as a crowd has formed who are following along with his every bet, piggybacking on his luck as
much as they can. The man is just about to place another large bet when he’s suddenly interrupted
by a strong hand gripping his upper arm. The young man turns to find a large, toothy grin staring
back at him. The smiling man continues to hold onto the young man’s arm as he explains how
impressed the casino is with his skill. He must be the luckiest man they’ve ever had the pleasure
to have visited their casino, and the fact that he’s been able to sustain that same run of luck
night after night has been truly awe inspiring. The young man thanks him for his kind
words and tries to turn back to the table but finds that the man won’t let go of his
arm, gripping it even tighter now than before. “We’ve been so impressed,
in fact” the man tells him, “that the owners of his casino have
requested the chance to meet with you.” The young man looks down at the
huge, powerful hand holding his arm, and even though he’s unaware that it
belongs to a former heavyweight contender, he’s still able to recognize that
this request isn’t an optional one. “Sure,” the young man tells him, “just
let me grab my chips and - “ but the man begins to pull him away from the table,
telling him that there’s no need to worry, the casino will take care of his winnings. “After
all, we have cameras everywhere, who would steal?” The young man is soon pushed through a
doorway into a space that looks like a police interrogation room with just a
single table and a couple of chairs, one of which a small, older man is sitting in.
The ex-boxer wrenches the young man’s arm down onto the table and holds it in place there. The
young man screams as the boxer grabs a hammer with his free hand and raises it into the air,
ready to bring it down on the young man’s fingers. “Well?” the old man sitting across from him asks. The young man has started to cry a little but
between whimpers he manages to ask “well what?” The old man wants to know how the young man
is cheating. No one wins the way he does, over and over, night after night, no matter
the game. The young man insists that he isn’t cheating, he’s just lucky, he always
has been, but the old man isn’t buying it. He nods to the boxer who raises the hammer up
again, but still the young man doesn’t admit to anything. “I’m just lucky. I’m just lucky,” he
keeps repeating over and over in between sobs. The old man stands up and pats him on
the shoulder. “Maybe you are,” he says, before slipping something into the man’s
pocket. The police then enter the room and immediately take a set of loaded dice from
the same pocket. He’s in real trouble now. The young man is shoved into a holding cell
at the jail and looks around at the other men, wondering if his luck has finally run out. He squeezes in on one of the benches lining
the wall and accidentally bumps the man sitting next to him, waking him up from his nap.
The man is angry at having been disturbed, but grows even angrier when
he realizes who just woke him, it’s the man who seemed to take all the luck. The
young man doesn’t seem to have noticed that he’s upset him at all though. What he has noticed, is
that there’s a penny on the floor in front of him. The young man bends to pick it up just as the man
next to him throws a haymaker. His fist slams into the wall right where the young man’s head just
was, shattering many of the bones in his hand. The young man jumps up with a fright and runs
across the small cell as the other men being held also leap to their feet, some crying out in
confusion, others cheering on the violence. The young man cries out to the guards for help but no
one seems to be coming to his aid. He looks around the cell but there’s nowhere for him to hide.
The angry man, now madder than ever with a hand that is rapidly turning purple and blue approaches
him. He lifts the young man up with his good hand, holding him in the air by his throat. “I’m going
to kill you!” the man cries before the door to the cell opens. The young man watches as the TASER
prongs fired by the jail guards appear on the man’s chest, and he drops the young man to the
floor before falling backwards from the 50,000 volts coursing through his body. The young man
would learn the next day that the angry man was dead before he even hit the floor, the result of
a congenital heart defect, and a lot of bad luck. The young man stands before a judge who
is listing off the charges against him, which include cheating, a felony in this
state that can result in a sentence of up to five years in prison. “But this isn’t
your first offense, is it?” The judge asks. The young man tries to explain that
those previous times were all mistakes, he’s never cheated in his life, but
the judge doesn’t want to hear it. The young man is sitting in the hallway outside the courtroom when his lawyer emerges from
his meeting with the judge and prosecutor. “Boy are you a lucky guy,” his
lawyer tells him. He goes on to explain that even though the
case against him is airtight, the charges are going to be dropped, provided
he admits himself to a special program. The young man assumes it must be some
kind of gambling addiction program. In no way is he addicted to gambling,
but what choice does he have? It’s either that, or prison, the choice is easy. As the young man exits the courthouse
he is approached by a man in a suit, who leads him to a black van parked nearby. The
young man is placed in the back and immediately notices that there is a cage separating the back
from the front seat, like a prison transport van. The young man is growing nervous, where are they
taking him? This all seems like it’s happening so fast, can it even be legal? And what about his
things that were taken at the jail? “Excuse me,” he asks the driver, what about my
things? I don’t even have my wallet. “Don’t worry about that,” the man driving the van
tells him. “You won’t need any of that anymore. You’re a D Class now.” The man doesn’t have any idea what that means, but he can tell it isn’t good.
His luck may have finally ran out. The young man, who once lived the life
of a professional Las Vegas gambler, was given a new name - D-87465. But as you’ll
see, that name wouldn’t last very long, and soon would be known as SCP-181… or as the SCP
Foundation staff liked to refer to him… Lucky. SCP-181, was first noticed by the Foundation following his being arrested for repeatedly
defrauding the Nevada Gaming Commission. He was originally made a member of
the Foundation’s Class D personnel, the guinea pigs of the SCP Foundation who
are used for various tests with anomalies in order to better understand their
properties. However it soon became clear that the man’s ability to consistently
beat the odds had nothing to do with cheating. In his first experiment, which took place at
Armed Reliquary Containment Area-02, where he and several other Class Ds were exposed to an SCP that
is known to to incite extreme anger and murderous tendencies in those who come into contact with it.
Just as expected, one of the other D Class members became enraged and began rampaging, killing all
of the other Class Ds present… all except for one. Through what appeared to be a stroke of good luck,
the frenzying D Class seemed to miss D-87465, who had laid down on the ground amongst the other
bodies and was playing dead. An armed response team soon entered the experimentation cell and
put down the rampaging D Class, sparing D-87465. He was next submitted to a test with SCP-075,
a creature that resembles a large snail with a muscular foot shaped like a six-fingered,
clawed hand. SCP-075 is much heavier than its small size makes it seem like it should,
weighing approximately 860 kilograms. Despite this, it is able to
move at an extremely high speed, quickly leaping towards anyone who comes near it
and spraying them with a deadly corrosive liquid. D-87465 was placed in a cell with SCP-075 as part
of a test to measure its speed and reaction time, but despite SCP-075 having immediately
killed all prior D Classes during tests, D-87465 somehow managed to keep
avoiding its leaping attacks. He was always able to guess which direction
to move in order to dodge the deadly snail, like a soccer goalie who always picks the
right way to dive to stop penalty kicks. Having now survived not one but two experiments
that exposed him to Keter class anomalies, researchers needed to find out
if D-87465 was himself anomalous, or simply a statistical anomaly. In order to test this, the D Class was
placed in the containment cell of SCP-082, better known to most as Fernand the Cannibal,
a grotesquely huge humanoid with ogre-like features who often dresses like a Victorian
era aristocrat, and will regale his guests with outlandish stories before inevitably eating them.
But there was something different about D-87465. After a full month of survival in 082’s cell,
a length of time that had resulted in all the previous test subjects being consumed, SCP
researchers suspected that this D Class’s incredible ability to survive was much
more than just dumb luck, but they needed to test him even more to see if his powers
extended beyond just the ability to survive. D-87465 was removed from regular D Class
duties and researchers began performing various tests on him, watching as he
flipped a coin fifty times in a row, with it coming up heads every single time.
Similar results occurred when they had him roll pairs of dice that would always
total up to seven, or when they had him pick random cards out of a deck and he was
able to pull all thirteen hearts in a row. Foundation researchers were now convinced
that this man was more than just lucky, he seemed to possess the ability to
create an unnatural effect on probability, though researchers suspected that he was
generating this effect without being aware of it. At this point, D-87465 was reclassified
and given a new designation - SCP-181. Further testing confirmed that SCP-181 is able
to affect causal probability and that it really does occur through no action of his own. However
there’s more to SCP-181 than simply being lucky, as researchers soon found out. In an audit of
death and injury rates at Bio-Research Area-12, where SCP-181 is contained, it was discovered
that both had increased dramatically in the time since he was brought there. It seems that
SCP-181 doesn’t simply create his own good luck, he in some way saps it from others simply by being
present. It now appears that every lucky moment he experiences results in the opposite happening to
someone else. For every seven he rolls on a pair of dice, someone else gets snake eyes. And for
every death defying escape he makes, someone else must die. There’s no telling how far his ability
might scale. Could he survive a nuclear blast? And if he did, what would be the result in
order to “even out” the odds so to speak. In light of these new discoveries, SCP-181 was
removed from his low level containment cell where he was allowed to occasionally interact with
D Class personnel for entertainment purposes, and was moved to Site-27, where he was placed
in solitary confinement and classified as Safe. All interactions with staff are now limited to
the bare minimum in order to ensure his survival and security, without risking any events
that might result in him “getting lucky.” Now go and watch another entry from
the files of Dr. Bob, like SCP-007 Abdominal Planet, another humanoid SCP
that is even stranger than this one, and make sure you subscribe and turn on
notifications, so you don’t miss a single anomaly, as we delve further and further into the
SCP Foundation’s classified archives.
