A woman wakes up on a bright, sunny morning
in Midland, Texas. It’s her day off, and she decides she’s
going to use the time to take care of all the lingering errands she’d been putting
off for far too long. She gets dressed, washes her hair, and prepares
to pour herself a nice bowl of cereal. But when she opens the refrigerator she finds… there’s no milk. She’ll need to see to that immediately. She steps out of her front door and notices
a paper on her doormat. She bends down to pick up the pamphlet which
advertises a new supermarket opening in town, and what do you know, there’s a coupon for
milk attached. What a stroke of good luck! The woman makes her way into town, eager to
check out the new grocery store. She parks her car, and approaches the building,
when suddenly a stranger is standing right in front of her - carrying a plate of what
appear to be free samples. He’s dressed like a supermarket employee,
but he’s built like a soldier, complete with a military crew cut. He smiles and tells her that he actually works
for a rival store and points at a building across the street. He’s positive that whatever she thinks she
can get at this store, she can instead get at the one across the street for a lower cost
and higher quality. She can’t help but notice the almost unsettling
desperation in the salesman’s face. Something about his spiel makes her feel like
she’s in danger. She politely declines his offer but he continues
pitching deals and bargains at her as she makes her way into the safety of the new supermarket. The clean tiles below and the buzzing fluorescent
lights above seem so familiar, yet also strangely alien to her. Something about this place is just… Wrong. But she needs the milk, so she walks down
the aisles, deeper into the store. She hears strange noises and looks over her
shoulder. Was the bread aisle always behind her? She could have sworn she just came out of
the meat and fish section. Where do they even keep the milk in this place? Every so often, there’s a strange noise
somewhere in the store around her. It sounds almost like footsteps, but not quite. More like claws tapping on the tiles. Is she alone in here? Come to think of it, she can’t quite remember
seeing anyone else since she came in. There’s something so profoundly off about
this place, but she just can’t put her finger on what. She takes a step forward, and suddenly, the
floor gives way beneath her. The tiles separate with the whirr of mechanized
gears, as a trap door opens up. In an instant, she’s tumbling down into
darkness. As she falls she can see the white light beaming
in from above illuminate the edge of something metal and razor sharp. In the store above, the sound of a scream
can be heard, then the soft squish of metal piercing flesh followed by the gurgle of blood,
and then the trap door closes. A tinny voice over the PA system comes on
and says, “Clean up on aisle six.” The woman is never seen again after that. What superficially appears to be an independent
supermarket in Midland, Texas, actually contains a number of strange and often deadly paranormal
secrets, and that doesn’t even stop it from being a successful and popular supermarket. But the weirdest part of all? It’s all perfectly legal, thank you very
much. Welcome to Yeah, We're Totally Going to Sell
You This - Or, as it’s known to the SCP Foundation, SCP-4703. The primary anomalous effects surrounding
SCP-4703 affect not its customers, but the very legality of its own existence and operations. The anomalies shift laws to make everything
that goes on inside legal, no matter how unethical or dangerous. It also often reshapes laws to protect its
own interests from outsiders, and anyone who breaks these laws may experience spontaneous
attacks from violent animals, the most common of which are vicious lions. Here are a handful of the unethical and dangerous
- yet perfectly legal, thank you very much - things that go on within the confines of
SCP-4703. The stacks of shelves are mounted on powerful
pneumatic actuators that seem to shift and spin of their own accord. While this has the intention of keeping the
store varied and stopping customers from leaving, it more often causes serious injury with its
sudden movements. Occasionally, these sets of shelves will collide,
crushing whatever is stuck between them. If a child becomes lost or separated from
their parents while they’re inside the store, the child is forcibly detained, and the parent
or parents can only get their child back by either paying an upfront cost of $47.67 in
cash or submitting to having their eyebrows permanently removed with laser follicle surgery. There are also several dozen hidden trapdoor
mechanisms beneath the floor in various parts of the building, each one triggered by some
strange and arbitrary condition, such as saying the word Wednesday, or by not saying the word
Wednesday. The triggers are updated each day and displayed
on the store’s website in several dead languages, including Latin, Koine Greek, Phoenician,
and Punic. Each of these trap doors drops into deep shafts
filled with some kind of hazard, such as spikes, glitter, or poisonous snakes. Yes, that’s poisonous, not venomous. The snakes are only dangerous when eaten,
but victims have reported that they seem incredibly appealing which makes resisting them rather
difficult. A section on the far side of the store is
marked “Starving for SAVINGS???” and “Discounts ad bestias!!!”, where all
the products are fenced off and also marked down by 70% or more. However, the products are guarded by no less
than fifteen hungry lions. Store-branded fishing rods, telescopic grabbing
mechanisms, and drones are available to rent for the explicit purpose of retrieving items
remotely, although this will result in far higher costs, so you will have to brave the
lions in order to attain those incredible deals. There’s also a roughly five percent chance
that, after checkout, your cashier will ask you to kiss them on the lips. If you refuse, they’ll burn your purchases
in front of you, and you won’t receive a refund. If you do kiss them, there’s a one in three
chance that the cashier will have an anomalous toxin on their lips that will cause you to
drop dead instantly. And every day, at an arbitrary time between
the hours of 3 PM and closing time, the lions will be released from the discount section
to roam the store, and only two checkout lines will remain open. All items will be free during this period
but they must be scanned one by one. The SCP Foundation is currently exploring
links between SCP-4703 and two other anomalies like SCP-2030 and SCP-1459, the former being
the cursed hidden camera show Laugh Is Fun and the latter being a nightmarish vending
machine that murders puppies and dispenses a variety of cookies in exchange. So then if it is so dangerous, why doesn’t
the SCP Foundation simply block access to Yeah, We're Totally Going to Sell You This? Unfortunately,, thanks to the anomalous legal
effect created by SCP-4703, the Foundation can’t just storm in or physically contain
the building. So instead they attempt to divert as many
customers away from 4703 as possible. To do this, the Foundation has started a rival
supermarket across the street, named Super Competitive Prices LLC. Sheldon M. Katz, esquire, is an SCP Foundation
Lawyer and Bureauromancer - a thaumatologist skilled in the art of interfacing with anomalously
bureaucratic SCPs, and he is spearheading the Foundation Legal Team’s efforts into
combatting SCP-4703. Untangling the complex web of legality around
SCP-4703 is a full-time job, after all, and in the following memo, Mr. Katz did all he
could to articulate the sheer enormity of the problem they’re dealing with. He writes: “Counteraction of SCP-4703’s legal anomalies
is a top-level priority for our department, and we are making every effort to resolve
the matter in a way which minimizes loss of life and economic detriment. We have received a significant number of inquiries
regarding the mechanism of SCP-4703's indisputable legality; unfortunately, there are no easy
answers. Law is a human concept. It exists on paper because we write it down. It exists in practice because we enforce it. Generally we interpret and exercise the law
through the scrutiny of semantics, intent, and precedent, yet bureaucratohazards such
as SCP-4703 are not necessarily predicated on such things—in fact, the law as most
know it has very little to do with the matter. While it's not a perfect comparison, one could
say that baseline law is to anomalous law as arithmetic is to algebra: both are recognized
as mathematics, but the latter is more abstract. Imagine that Timmy and Sally each have two
apples. If Timmy gives Sally his apples, then Sally
should end up with four. But she doesn't. She has ten. How can this be? Sally recounts the apples and reenacts the
scenario over and over, but there is no mistake. Two and two make ten. It is an incontrovertible fact. You see, even if anomalies are irrational,
they are factual, and it is essential that one accept this if they wish to develop a
countervailing methodology. Once Sally accepts that her four apples have
become ten, she reevaluates her radix and decides to recount the apples in base four. Suddenly, the "ten" apples are "10" apples. "10" is four in base four, which is the appropriate
number of apples. Eureka! Sally collects another four apples, bringing
the total to "twenty", which is "20", which is eight, which confirms that her new paradigm
aligns with the abnormality. Form follows function according to the function
of the form, and at last, everything makes sense. Except none of it does, really. A well-behaved reality oughtn't conflate the
concrete with the abstract. If you initially perceived a countable sum
of ten apples in base ten, then the equivalent number of apples in base four should be twenty-two,
since it stands to reason that changing your subjective view of an outcome oughtn't alter
the physical materials in the equation. However, we live in a very naughty reality
which may, on a whim, allow a young girl to wield apples unbeholden to thermodynamics. This explanation is inadequate, of course,
but hopefully it goes a small way toward helping you understand why the legal department is
currently occupied with a comprehensive redrafting of Texas corporate law in a quaternary semiological
system. This in itself would be an exceptional feat
even for the most skilled of bureaucromancers, and it is further compounded by the necessary
incorporation of contingency clauses against the self-aware fact patterns that keep legitimizing
rabid lions into existence inside my goddamned bathroom. We are grateful to you, our valued colleagues,
for your patience and cooperation as we work together toward a solution.” The Foundation is currently conducting a three-pronged
attack against the forces of SCP-4703, the first being the Super Competitive Prices LLC
competitive store, the second is the tireless efforts of Mr. Katz and his team against the
trifling legal issues of SCP-4703, and the third is outright infiltration and espionage. Of course, when you’re going behind enemy
lines, it’s crucial that the proper operative is selected for the job. It can’t just be anyone, dropped into a
high-pressure situation like this. Especially considering the rapidly evolving
nature of SCP-4703’s conditions, the SCP Foundation was more than aware that they might
only get one shot at getting one of their own in and out of the building. For this task they selected Field Agent Felicity
Blandina, code name: Karen of Justice. Blandina was uniquely qualified for a job
like this. In personality tests conducted on all Foundation
agents to test loyalty, they consistently found Blandina to be one of the most obtuse
and shameless agents on the Foundation payroll. During group lunches with other staff members,
she has been reported numerous times sending meals back to the kitchen when she felt they
were unsatisfactory. And Foundation cyber-analysts have detected
multiple posts on various social media networks made by her, directly tagging and criticizing
brands that provided products or services she perceived as being sub-par. While these qualities made her a terror to
the customer service staff in her local area, they made her the ideal candidate for bypassing
the bureaucratic stronghold of SCP-4703. If anyone could do it, it would be Field Agent
Felicity Blandina. She was sent into the building with an expired
coupon under the pretense of being an unhappy customer. She spoke to a sales assistant inside the
store named Daniel Paulson, who explained to her that her coupon was denied because
it was only applicable when the recipient submitted to ritual castration performed by
the SCP-4703 staff. Seeing as Agent Blandina didn’t have the
necessary equipment to undergo such a procedure, Paulson generously offered to provide her
with a free surgery to have the proper parts attached, though finding a suitable donor
would likely take several months. Agent Blandina, following her well-trained
Foundation directives, could not be assuaged by the bargain. Instead, she pressed on, first guilt-tripping
him with sob stories about her children, then her lifelong struggles with astigmatism, and
even threatening Paulson with physical violence. Eventually, she delivered the true coup de
grace: Demanding to speak to the manager. Showing clear reluctance, Paulson agreed,
and led Agent Blandina to a door near the front of the store. It opened up into an unlit staircase that
descended into the darkness below. At the bottom, they found a break room that
appeared similar to a bunkhouse in a Prisoner of War camp, containing hammock after hammock,
filled with uncomfortable, sleeping employees. Paulson informed Agent Blandina that some
of the people who work at the store were once normal civilians who’d been exploited with
a number of legal loopholes, and now lived inside the store full time. Some, for example, had stayed in past closing
time, which had resulted in them becoming store property for a minimum of a year. Paulson himself had entered a raffle for an
abs transplant and instead won servitude at SCP-4703, which he couldn’t legally turn
down thanks to the powerful anomalous laws of the store. As Paulson and Agent Blandina ventured deeper
into the bowels of the staff area, they passed eleven unmarked doors, before finally stopping
in front of the twelfth and last one. She opened the door and discovered shelves
and stacked boxes within. Agent Blandina expressed incredulity at the
idea that the store’s manager would be kept inside of a supply closet in the basement,
but Paulson insisted that this was indeed the manager’s office, and as he did he pulled
a string connected to the ceiling. This caused a wall of boxes to split down
the middle like a secret doorway, revealing a large executive chair, facing the wall on
the other side of the room. Still maintaining the cover story that she
just wanted a discount, Agent Blandina pressed on and approached the chair. She spun it around to get a better look at
the manager and found herself standing in front of a dessicated corpse, with no eyes
and all of his teeth pulled out, his mouth wrenched open in a permanent, silent scream
of terror. Paulson identified this man as Mr. Venatio
Haruspice, the manager of SCP-4703. Paulson would have told Agent Blandina that
his boss was a corpse earlier, but to do so was against their rules. Agent Blandina sighed and grumbled, “I feel
like I should have expected this.” Paulson assured Agent Blandina that she could
still make her complaint, though, and the Owner of the store would eventually hear it. As Paulson understood it, the body known as
the Manager acted almost like a kind of telephone, sending messages through to the Owner. The Owner would then reply through faxed messages
hidden inside the cereal boxes that acted as the only food source of the staff trapped
within. This Kafkaesque nightmare just kept getting
worse and worse, but Agent Blandina refused to give up that easily. Agent Blandina asked him to explain the exact
nature of the manager’s condition to him. Paulson replied, “I know that he's legally
our manager. I know that he's, well, what he is. I know that one of us always has to kiss him
goodnight at closing time. I know that if we tell him something, the
owner knows, but the owner seems to know everything that happens here anyway, so I can't be certain
that's related. What else…? I know that he's empty— or hollow, actually. Hollow's probably a better word.” Agent Blandina leaned in a little further
to see what exactly Paulson meant by that, only to make a horrifying discovery: The Manager
wasn’t a whole corpse, he was just dessicated skin, a husk somehow propped up into the shape
of a corpse. When Agent Blandina asked why Paulson specified
“hollow” and not “empty”, he told her that it was because a noise was sometimes
heard emanating from within the skin husk. Agent Blandina wisely refused to put her ear
anywhere near the Manager’s gaping, toothless mouth, and instead fed the hidden microphone
she had been wearing down into the husk’s throat. Before Paulson had time to remark on the strangeness
of this, sirens and alarms began going off all around them. Paulson began to panic, yelling that the lions
were incoming, and the duo needed to move quickly to get out of harm’s way. Luckily, Agent Blandina was able to escape
with only minor injuries. But shortly after her escape, SCP-4703’s
legality was once again restructured to make it illegal for non-employees to enter the
employee-only areas. The audio that Agent Blandina recorded inside
the body of the Manager was also analyzed by experts at the Foundation, and they discovered
that, when sped up by 75%, the sound was indistinguishable from human laughter. Due to the highly strange nature of this anomaly
and its containment procedures - even by SCP Foundation standards - the classes and designations
applied to SCP-4703 are equally strange and complex. Knowledge of the file and the anomaly itself
is relatively low-tier, with Restricted Level 2 Access Permissions. Due to the immense difficulty in keeping SCP-4703
hidden or contained, thanks to its unique legal situation, it has been given the Object
Class Keter. This, however, is where things get even stranger. The SCP-4703 store has a rare secondary object
class, Truculent. This classification is likely to be unfamiliar
to most, but it is used in the specific situation when an item is unpredictable and often transformative,
and the containment measures around it must be consistently updated and evolved in order
to meet its containment needs. It has the Level 3 or Keneq Disruption Class,
meaning that it has a roughly medium potential to cause disruption, though this disruption
is likely to be confined to a relatively local area. And finally, it has the Risk Class Warning,
meaning that it presents a high risk to all who interact with it, complete with the possibility
of causing severe harm, including death. Though legally, due to a missive sent from
the law firm working in association with SCP-4703, I am obliged to tell you that it’s mainly
because the bargains at Yeah, We're Totally Going to Sell You This… are simply to die
for, which is perfectly legal, thank you very much. Now go and watch another entry from the classified
files of Dr. Bob, such as “SCP-5172 North American Hotel Ice Machines”, for another
SCP that will make you think twice about visiting common everyday locations. 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.
