Agent Curren was your typical SCP Foundation
field worker. While sometimes she spent her days infiltrating the hideaways of dangerous
Groups of Interest such as the Chaos Insurgency or the Serpent’s Hand, or protecting a small
town from a monstrous anomaly set on devouring each and every inhabitant, the vast majority
of her work was routine. And with that mundane workload came boredom. Filing papers, filling
out reports, and running to get her supervisor's coffee were just as much a part of her job
as keeping the anomalous secured, contained, and protected from the outside world. As a
result, Agent Curren had a lot of time on her hands, and one way she enjoyed filling
it was with a good book. She loved to read, sometimes even more than she loved her real
job. Sometimes she thought about taking a position observing the Wanderer’s Library,
where she could have a multiversal bibliography to pour over and more free time than she’d
know what to do with. It makes sense, if you had to face dangers as frequently as an agent
of the SCP Foundation does, which is usually on a weekly basis, then you’d want an escape
from real life too. For Agent Curren, that’s what reading was, and she liked being able
to say she actually read all those literary classics that people pretend to have read
to sound smart. One aspect of Agent Curren’s job was inspecting
areas around the location she was stationed at for potential anomalous activity. This
included keeping up with local news, checking second hand stores for anomalous objects that
might have unknowingly gone up for sale, or simply hanging around town and waiting for
something interesting to happen. Most of the time, it didn’t. Agent Curren was located
in a medium sized Texas town, where the most exciting thing that happened on any given
day was a sale at the local supermarket. This left her with a lot of reading time, and thankfully,
the town had a bookstore. It was a second hand shop, selling used books and old newspapers.
For someone who’d read all the mainstream staples of literature, this place was a treasure
trove of interesting finds. Books she’d never heard of, books she wasn’t sure were
ever printed on a high enough run. There were some truly valuable and rare finds in this
shop, and Agent Curren made it a point to visit the store whenever she had the opportunity
to. The most difficult part of her daily patrol was not spending all of it inside the shop,
pouring over each and every new and interesting book she came across. But one day, she found
something new. Something that intertwined her love of literature with her career focus
in containing the supernatural. She stumbled upon SCP-423. While walking down the aisle of stuffed bookshelves,
she found a copy of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer sitting on the floor, piled atop a stack of
books, and almost inviting her to pick it up. Tom Sawyer was one of the first books
she read on her own as a kid, and Agent Curren had a fondness for the novel ever since. She
picked the book up and thumbed through a few pages out of habit, not expecting to see anything
she hadn’t. And at first, she didn’t. But one single sentence caught her eye, in
which Tom was described as talking to another child by the name of Fred. Now, Agent Curren
was a well-read bibliophile, and she knew Twain’s masterpiece like the back of her
hand. There was certainly no Fred in Tom Sawyer. Intrigued, she read on. The following pages
depicted an extended conversation between Tom Sawyer and this mysterious Fred, regarding
the types of snakes that live in the woods that surround the quiet town of St. Petersburg,
Missouri. Agent Curren was taken back completely. Was this a part of the book she had forgotten
about? Sensing a potential oddity, she decided to purchase the book, and compare it to the
various copies in her expansive, personal collection. While she didn’t find any new
books to read on her trip to the store that day, she did find something to occupy her
mind, and for Agent Curren, that was enough to make the quiet days pass. When she returned back to the Foundation facility
she was stationed at, located in Sector 28, Agent Curren immediately began cross referencing
the copy of Tom Sawyer with other copies that were available to her. She rented out as many
as she could from the public libraries in the area, and even used the Foundation’s
printed works archive. She found as many printings as possible, even multiple of the same printing
that the copy she had bought from the book store was supposedly from. But when she began
her research, she found that every copy of Tom Sawyer was missing the conversation about
snakes. There were no characters by the name of Fred in any printing of the books. She
read the entirety of the copy that she purchased from the store, and on top of the strange
conversation, she also found several other mentions of this Fred character, who was apparently
a boy that Tom Sawyer went to school with. Fred was an incredibly minor character, but
still interacted with the protagonists on occasion, and was even mentioned a few times
by Tom and his other friend Huck while he wasn’t present. For someone with as little
of a role as Fred, the characters sure seemed to pay him a lot of attention. Though it was
definitely weird, Agent Curren didn’t find anything particularly anomalous about the
book, at least at first. It could’ve been a practical joke between people with a very
strange sense of humor, or simply the work of someone wanting to see if they could get
away with editing a copy of a literary masterpiece and selling it in hopes that some poor sucker
would discover it and set off a craze about a misprinting. Whatever the answer was, it
was decidedly ordinary, and that didn’t sit well with Agent Curren. She wanted answers,
but she knew deep down that getting them was going to be a tall order. But during her research,
she discovered something that would earn the object an SCP classification. One day, while sitting at her computer terminal
and pretending to work, she was reading a copy of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Less
than a meter away sat the strange copy of Tom Sawyer she had bought at the bookstore
a week earlier. Before her eyes, the words on the pages of Moby Dick started to disappear
or alter themselves into new ones. The book felt heavier, and Agent Curren swore she felt
new pages being added to it. When all the rapid alterations slowed down, she took another
look at the pages of Moby Dick, and her jaw nearly dropped to the floor in shock at what
she was reading. The book now described a sailor by the name of Fred, stationed on the
Pequod, the ship that was hunting the giant sperm whale given the name Moby-Dick. The
book once again did not describe Fred as doing anything particularly noteworthy. He was in
the background of the story, said some dialogue to Captain Ahab about the ship’s upkeep,
and was mostly regulated to standing around and watching, even during the scenes that
described whaling. By now, Agent Curren was positive the book wasn’t just a strange
misprint, it was an anomalous object, just as she originally suspected. She reported
the find to her supervisors, and a research team was brought in shortly after to analyze
the book. First, the team observed the anomaly’s method
of transmission, which was the placement of a character named Fred, who took the form
of an unimportant, minor character in the story, between book to book. The anomaly was
able to move between narratives if they were placed within a one meter radius of one another
for more than 3 minutes, like when it jumped from the copy of Tom Sawyer, to a copy of
Moby Dick, and later, when the research team initially tested it, to a copy of another
book. One the anomalous effects were established, the anomaly was given the designation of SCP-423,
nicknamed the “Self Inserting Character”. SCP-423, as we just described, does not have
a physical form. It’s the character Fred, who is always an incredibly minor character
with an overall lack of narrative importance. Fred is usually not physically described in
the story, but when he is, he appears as an adult male of average height and middle age,
but the Foundation quickly discovered that this could change. In narratives focusing
primarily around children, such as Tom Sawyer, Fred was a child. In others that featured
non-human characters, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Fred was an animal. Whatever
the story called for, SCP-423 fit the constraints of the narrative. Other characters, when they
address or acknowledge SCP-423, do not see its inclusion as odd or unusual, and the story
proceeds as usual with minor alterations to the text. The Foundation discovered that SCP-423, if
transferred to a journal, has the capability to communicate via writing back and forth
between a researcher and the anomaly. This allowed the Foundation to discern SCP-423’s
nature easier, and figure out how exactly the anomaly works. But more on that later.
From the Foundation’s communications with SCP-423, they found that it prefers fictional
narratives, but testing proved that it can enter itself into any written work that features
a narrative. That means biographies, anecdotes, and even the Foundation’s very own research
notes. As long as the prerequisite requirements for a narrative are present, such as names,
events, places, and the bare skeleton of a story, SCP-423 can supplant itself into it. The process is also confined to physical,
textual narratives. Purely visual or electronic mediums such as television shows, video games,
and computers are all off limits for SCP-423. But testing has shown that SCP-423 is capable
of entering graphic novels and comic books, though when the text becomes altered, it will
only affect dialogue and text boxes. Paneling and art are unable to be alerted, and will
remain the same, but the textual elements around the panels will change themselves to
make way for SCP-423’s inclusion. When SCP-423 is placed before a narrative it has previously
entered, the effect will still take place, but this time the narrative will become slightly
altered once more, differing from the previous time SCP-423 entered the narrative. While
this is possible, communication with SCP-423 has shown that it much prefers to enter narratives
it has not previously seen. As testing with SCP-423 is limited to introducing
it to new narratives, the Foundation hasn’t been able to answer a lot of questions regarding
SCP-423’s capabilities. Does it eat? Does it sleep? What would happen if it died, and
can it? While the answers to these are unknown, SCP-423 has shown it possesses a high degree
of narrative awareness and tends to keep itself out of trouble or situations that would result
in death. At most, SCP-423 has been lightly injured in some narratives. But as soon as
it enters a new book, the injuries it harbored in the previous one seem to vanish entirely. As we mentioned before, the Foundation can
communicate with SCP-423 through a journal. When SCP-423 is introduced to the journal,
which has questions written inside beforehand to coax the entity in. After transmission
has taken place, SCP-423’s answers to those questions will appear underneath. Once the
entity is introduced to a new narrative, however, the answers will disappear entirely, meaning
the Foundation has to record them before conducting any further testing with SCP-423. It is not believed that SCP-423 is a malicious
entity, as Fred has been incredibly cooperative with the Foundation, answering questions and
hopping from narrative to narrative during testing. In her few attempts to talk with
the entity, Agent Curren and SCP-423 got along well, and spoke about various books. Though
Curren was instructed to not make any promises that the Foundation could introduce SCP-423
to any book it wanted. Mainly, SCP-423 has focused its efforts on asking the Foundation
for narratives with lots of background characters, specifically because this makes it easier
to blend in and, in Fred’s words, “watch the good stuff”. Largely, the Foundation
has complied with these requests, under the condition that if at any point SCP-423 becomes
uncooperative, it will be confined inside the journal for an extended period of time
until it starts to listen again. While SCP-423 isn’t dangerous in of itself,
Foundation personnel handling it still have to keep an eye out. If they’re taking written
notes, for whatever reason, within SCP-423’s presence, the entity can transfer itself to
them. As a result, all research done regarding SCP-423 must be electronically recorded. Thankfully,
the inclusion of a Guest Researcher Fred in any seasoned reasearcher’s SCP file is going
to raise some eyebrows, so possible SCP-423 intrusions are easy enough to detect. SCP-423’s
containment procedures are also similarly lax, keeping the anomaly inside a plain, marked
journal with the label ‘423’. Due to the anomaly’s relatively passive
nature, the Foundation has tested SCP-423 with a plethora of narratives, just to see
how it might alter them and if those alterations could garner any new information about the
anomaly. Let’s take a look at some of them. SCP-423’s experiments were authorized by
the Overseer Council and conducted by the anomaly’s research head, the esteemed Dr.
Everett Mann. In all tests, SCP-423 was introduced to an outside narrative, and after alterations
took place, the text was read by Foundation personnel and recorded in the testing log. First up, SCP-423 was introduced to Tolkien’s
“The Hobbit”. A 14th dwarf named Feredor was present in Gandalf’s party of 13 on
their quest to reclaim the dwarves' mountain home from the dragon Smaug. There were small
changes to the text, such as a lack of a ‘lucky number’ being referenced, and the death
of the character Oin in the final portion of the novel. Feredor survives the journey.
Dr. Mann had this to say about the test: "SCP-423's role is larger in this work, allowing
a better look at its effects. The dialog written for the character is similar to that written
for the other dwarves. Other differences in text match Tolkien's writing style as used
in the rest of the book." Another test introduced SCP-423 to J. K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, but to little effect. A wizard named Fred appears,
but very few changes in the actual story were noted, save for a scene in which SCP-423 is
confused for an existing character in the series, Fred Weasely. Dr. Mann noted: "SCP-423 displayed paranormal abilities in
the narrative, though nothing out of note for the fictional universe. However, when
returned to the journal, SCP-423 said that it couldn't duplicate them outside of that
particular narrative universe." When SCP-423 was introduced to James Joyce’s
rambling, incoherent masterpiece, Ulysses, which is composed of what might as well be
gibberish, the entity immediately returned to its journal, where it wrote out "Ow, ow,
bad idea." Dr. Mann noted: “SCP-423 dislikes the book, and considers
it a potential punishment if he misbehaves.” In the next text, SCP-423 was introduced to
a lyrics sheet for the classical piece “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, written by Julia
Ward Howe. If you don’t know it, look it up after this video, because you’ve definitely
heard it before. Once inside, SCP-423 altered the lyrics. "I have seen Him in the watch-fires
of a hundred circling camps" and "I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring
lamps" were changed to "Fred has seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps"
and "Fred can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps". Upon return,
SCP-423 stated that it found the experience interesting, but ultimately did not want to
do it again. When introduced to the nursery rhyme Mary
Had a Little Lamb, it became Freddy Had a Little Lamb. A book of 365 Haiku was altered
to include lines such as "Fred watched silently", or "Fred is also here", and "Only Fred remains".
A phone book noted no change, and no reaction from SCP-423. An Aesop fable written on a
metal surface with magnetic plastic letters saw new letters appear from the same material
and composition to include a mention of SCP-423. An english braille edition of Homer’s Odyssey
noted no changes, though SCP-423 commented that the experience was more boring than anything
else. When introduced to a hardcopy of the SCP-423 experiment log, no changes were noted
aside from Fred being described as “ruggedly handsome” in several sections. When researchers attempted to introduce SCP-423
to The Kugelmass Episode, a story written by Woody Allen about a man who is able to
travel into fiction, the Overseer Council forbade the experiment from proceeding, unsure
of what could happen if two meta-aware characters made contact with one another.
In another SCP-423 experiment, the Foundation gave Fred his very own story. Foundation Researcher
Torrez wrote a small novella, appropriately titled “Fred’s Story”, specifically
to test SCP-423’s capabilities as acting as a main character. Fred’s Story was set
in a fantasy kingdom, inhabited entirely by beautiful women. When the kingdom is attacked,
the queen performs a ritual to summon a hero from another dimension to save them. The hero
is never given a name, but it is mentioned that he is male and can transfer himself to
different works of fiction. While SCP-423 was flattered that he had a
narrative all to himself, he didn’t change much in the story. The hero was still unnamed,
and the text was largely unaltered, save for a single sentence mentioning the queen’s
handmaiden “Frederica”. After returning to the journal, SCP-423 had this to say: "I appreciate the offer, but I just can't.
I never deserved to be in the spotlight." Now go check out “SCP-1025 - Encyclopedia
of Common Diseases” and “SCP-1230 - A Hero is Born” for more anomalously literature-crazed
SCPs!
