You’ve finally done it! After years of adding movies and shows to
your queues, you’ve officially run out of things to watch on Netflix. You’ve also exhausted your entire backlog
of books and you’ve even run out of cereal boxes to read, so you’re left roaming the
streets in search of entertainment. That’s when you see a worn-looking flier
stapled to a nearby telephone pole. It’s an ad for a local community theater
production of a play you’ve never heard of. A play called “The Hanged King’s Tragedy.” Normally, you wouldn’t think of yourself
as much of a theater person, but something about the art on the poster grabs you. There’s a strange figure on the poster. Its face shrouded, its body wrapped in a web
of chains. Your curiosity gets the better of you and
you check the performance date. To your pleasant surprise, opening night is
a week from now, and you don’t have anything planned. You’ve made up your mind. You’re going to attend a live performance
of The Hanged King’s Tragedy. It’s going to be the first live play you’ve
ever seen. And little do you know, it may also be the
last. Because The Hanged King’s Tragedy isn’t
just any old play - it’s a powerful and deadly memetic hazard that may be one of the
gateways to an even more dangerous being. It’s known to the SCP Foundation as SCP-701,
so take your seats, be sure to read your programs thoroughly, and prepare for the dark and terrifying
tale of The Hanged King’s Tragedy, and the wave of death and destruction it causes in
its theatrical wake. But how could you know any of this? While you head home to make dinner, looking
forward to seeing the new play next week, the local thespians are hard at work performing
dress rehearsals. The director, one Marcus Fitch, happened upon
a copy of the play while looking for Carolinian theater that’s a little more family friendly
than some of Shakespeare’s classics. When he’d first discovered The Hanged King’s
Tragedy on a theatrical forum, it was described as being similar to Shakespeare’s Hamlet
and Titus Andronicus - but the violence was largely offstage and implied, with a lot of
the play’s nastier elements glossed over. Perfect for audiences of all ages! Given the fact that performances of The Hanged
King’s Tragedy tend to be mass-casualty events - for reasons you’ll soon see - The
Foundation does everything they can to control the spread of the play’s script. All copies are kept in a triple-locked vault
in a secure Foundation archive, which currently includes two copies of the original publication
that are dated to the year 1640, twenty-seven copies of the 1965 trade paperback edition,
ten copies of a 1971 hardcover printing, twenty-one floppy diskettes containing the play script,
and one S-VHS video cassette tape containing a live taping of one particularly infamous
incident. However, this seemingly does little to prevent
new performances of The Hanged King’s Tragedy from occurring. The text of the play continually pops up online,
often under different or misspelled titles, preventing Foundation web crawlers from keeping
track of them all. Nevertheless, the Foundation does everything
in its power to detect and stop performances before they can go ahead. The danger of putting on or even viewing a
performance of The Hanged King’s Tragedy cannot be overstated - it’s believed that,
in the almost 300 years since its original publication, it’s claimed 10,000 lives through
performances at the very least. And if you’re in attendance, dying quickly
is one of the better outcomes. The origins of this memetic virus are just
as mysterious as the power that seems to drive its effects. The play never has a declared author, and
the publisher - one William Cooke - disappeared from all historical records after the play’s
publication. Performances have been varied over the 300
years the play has been active - it’s been spotted everywhere from British University
drama troupes to American high school plays. In what could have been an even more disastrous
tragedy, a television adaptation of the play was almost broadcast by the BBC, before the
Foundation stepped in and put a stop to it. While its containment classification is currently
Euclid, scientists who have studied the play have campaigned strongly to upgrade The Hanged
King’s Tragedy to Keter-Class - on account of its unpredictability and tendency to manifest
across the globe with incidences appearing decades apart. While members of the O5 Council are skeptical,
some researchers even believe that if given a wide enough exposure, The Hanged King’s
Tragedy could cause a dreaded XK-Class End of the World Scenario. It’s that dangerous. At this point you’re probably wondering
“what exactly is The Hanged King’s Tragedy? What’s the play even about?” As the name suggests, the play is a tragedy,
and takes place over five acts during the Carolinian era, portraying the drama of the
royal court much like a number of plays from that time did. It takes place in the city of Serko, the capital
of the mysterious, fictional kingdom of Trinculo. The focal point of the play is the conflict
between Gonzalo, the illegitimate king of Trinculo, and Antonio, the true heir to the
throne. Before the start of the play, the previous
king of Trinculo, King Sforza, had been betrayed and murdered by Gonzalo. Gonzalo led Sforza into the woods, where he
and his men subdued the king, and hanged him from a nearby tree like a common criminal. Hence, The Hanged King’s Tragedy. However, Gonzalo is trying to keep his part
in the king’s murder a secret to keep the throne for himself. But his guilt-stricken wife, Isabella, threatens
to spill the secret of Sforza’s murder. While Antonio tries to uncover the truth of
what happened in the woods, Gonzalo - in true Shakespearean villain style - plots further
murders of his co-conspirators and loose ends to keep his dark secret safe. This is where the play gets a little gruesome:
One enemy, Gonzalo has killed and cooked into a stew. He then intends to use this stew to murder
his entire court with the help of an effective and undetectable poison he was given by the
mysterious Ambassador of Alagadda. Though you’ll be pleased to know that this
tragedy has somewhat of a happy ending. In the end, Gonzalo is exposed and Antonio
claims his rightful place as King of Trinculo. Unlike his predecessor, Antonio decides to
show mercy, and Gonzalo is exiled to a monastery for life rather than being executed for his
murderous ways. The heroes are rewarded, the villains are
punished, and all the deserving parties live happily ever after. At face value, nothing seems off about the
play. If you’re familiar with other works of the
era, you might even find yourself getting bored while reading it. How can something this… normal, be the cursed
play that claimed so many thousands of lives? But the play’s unassuming nature only serves
to make it more dangerous. It doesn’t appear that the memetic hazard
is caused by simply reading the play. Like all good theater, it only truly comes
to life onstage. And your local production of The Hanged King’s
Tragedy is no exception. As your community’s amateur actors study
and rehearse the play, making sure to commit every scene, every line, every single word
to memory - they don’t notice the little things that, to an outsider, might seem a
little...off. Occasionally, during group dress rehearsals,
actors will veer from the script. And we’re not talking about flubbed lines
or simple improvisation. No, actors will at times seem like they’re
reading from a completely different script, and their fellow performers will respond in
kind. The play lulls you into a false sense of security
- stagehands, crew members, even the director, all believe they’re performing the play
exactly as it was originally written. Ok so that’s not so bad. A play that changes itself. But things are going to get worse from this
point. Much, much worse. But hey, why let a deadly anomaly ruin your
evening plans? You’ve been looking forward to seeing this
play all week. And you couldn’t seem to get that figure
from the poster out of your mind: All-black, face shrouded, wrapped in chains. You have no idea that this entity is wanted
by the SCP Foundation, and that its designation is SCP-701-1. All you want is an unforgettable theater experience
- and you’ll certainly get one. It’s a packed house, not an empty seat in
sight. The house lights dim and the curtain opens. Act 1 is quite normal, with all the back-stabbing
and royal court intrigue you’d expect.You actually feel yourself getting a little bored. A big yawn escapes your mouth. You’re thinking that maybe this was a big
mistake and you might sneak out between acts, when just then, you see it. In the final scene of Act 1 you see the shrouded
figure, lingering in the background against the curtains. He seems so still he’s almost like a shadow,
but as each act seems to run into the next, he becomes more prominent. The rest of the cast never acknowledges him,
as they deliver dramatic monologues, but he’s always there. Finally, the play reached Act 5 - the grand
banquet scene where it all comes to head. Gonzalo is preparing to poison his dinner
guests with his cannibal stew, while Antonio and his allies plot to reveal his terrible
crimes and dethrone him. You find yourself so gripped by the drama
of it all, you almost didn’t notice that the shrouded figure of SCP-701-1 was standing
right among the actors now. While, unbeknownst to you, the actors have
been deviating from the scripted story this whole time, things are about to really take
a turn for the horrific. SCP-701-1, who is now known to the other performers
as “The Hanged King”, produces a blade from thin air and passes it to the actor playing
Gonzalo’s wife. The actors onstage suddenly become entranced
- they attack and restrain Gonzalo, and a noose drops down from somewhere above the
stage. The actors proceed to ritualistically hang
Gonzalo, before the actor playing his wife stabs him to death, all while chanting “Blood
for the Hanged King!” You should be horrified, but you’re not. You don’t even feel like yourself anymore,
and you’re loving everything that’s happening. Onstage, a series of other nooses fall from
above. Each actor grabs their own noose, and the
cast repeats “Blood for the Hanged King!” before sacrificing their lives to the shroud-wearing
monster. If the carnage stopped there, it would be
bad enough, but this play doesn’t just drive its players to acts of violent insanity - it
pulls the audience in, too. Before you know it, you’re pulled into a
vicious brawl with your fellow theater-goers. There’s biting, clawing, punching. People hitting each other with chairs like
it’s a wrestling cage match. It’s such a frenzy of random, senseless
violence that the building can’t contain it anymore. You and anyone else who isn’t dead already
spill out onto the streets, and start attacking everyone you can get your hands on. It’s transformed from a pleasant night out
at the theater into a full-blown riot. Even the police, sent in to control the situation,
are overwhelmed. It isn’t until the SCP Foundation sends
a number of Mobile Task Forces trained in advanced crowd control that the situation
finally begins to de-escalate. But you don’t care. Even when large men in Foundation tactical
gear are holding your arms, you still try to bite and kick. The effects of the play normally wear off
after around twenty four hours, but until then the infected, including you, are just
rage-fueled monsters. In the end, it takes four adult men to properly
restrain you. You’ll feel the bruises from their night
sticks tomorrow, but now, all you feel is hate, and violence, and single-minded devotion
to something out there that you couldn’t possibly comprehend. And the whole time you’re screaming one
thing, over and over again “Blood for the Hanged King! Blood for the Hanged King!” Now go watch “SCP - 610 - Zombie Plague
- The Flesh That Hates” and “SCP - 3999 - I Am At The Center Of Everything That Happens
To Me” for more horrific stories from the files of the Foundation!
