Document SCP-354-3-a: Log of Exploratory Mission 354 Alpha

←SCP-354

Personal log of Dr. ██████ Our expedition to explore SCP-354, that gaping wound in the middle of Canada, has finally been accepted! The R&D boys have come up with what can only be described as a submarine with a drill on it. We know that the pool gets denser as you go down, so we suspect that at some point we won't be sinking, so much as digging. Hence the huge mining device built onto it. It's not hydrodynamic at all, but we're not really going swimming here. My gut tells me that there's something on the other side of the Red Pool, and just like digging down (up?) to China, all we have to do is dig down (up?) to it.

Personal log of Dr. ██████ Had a nice long debate with O5-█ over who's allowed to come. I wanted MTFΩ7 to come with us for protection, or at least SCP-076, but they won't allow it. Despite the massive damages he continues to cause, they still see him as too valuable to risk losing. Not that he isn't, y'know, IMMORTAL or anything. Maybe they just didn't have the guts to ask him to go exploring…?

Ackler, that ass, wanted us to take SCP-███ with us, but I wouldn't allow it. The file says SCP-███ was just born before he came through, so he'd be useless as a guide. He might be of some use as security, but that's mostly canceled out by that fact that he's [DATA EXPUNGED]. He'd probably just ████ ███ ████ ████ anyway.

The final crew complement apart from myself consists of three agents, two D-class personnel, one geologist, and some guy from R&D who's going to pilot the ship. I already forgot all of their names.

Exploratory Team 354-alpha (ET354a) mission log, day 1: Rotten sort of day to begin a mission. Rumor has it that last night there was a total containment breach in some Area or other. Then it turns out that there's no coffee allowed anywhere inside of Area-354 for some reason or another. And the whole mission almost ended in disaster when it turns out that they almost forgot to load the extra fuel onboard. Who the fuck is running the show around here?

Anyway, we're now underway. For a while there I had a definite feeling of going downward, but now we're dropping much more slowly. Marty (that's the R&D guy's name) says we're sinking at a rate of ten meters an hour. Apparently at this depth, the red pool is pretty damn dense.

ET354a mission log, day 2: Nothing of interest happened, but I learned everyone's names. We have Marty, our "pilot"; Agent Swanson; Agent Turquoise; Agent 86; Dr. Jay Macarthur; Chris Simmons; and Leroy Tucker. Whoop de frickin doo.

ET354a mission log, day 3: At about 4:30 am, gravity suddenly changed direction. Boy, that was a fun way to wake up. We're now rising, rather than sinking, which means we're more than halfway there.

ET354a mission log, day 4 We've reached the surface! Through the portholes it's mostly dark, which means it's night. We can't go out yet because for all we know, the atmosphere could be hydrochloric acid. We've got a shitload of sensors outside of the ship analyzing a bunch of stuff; whether the air is breathable, what kind of airborne bacteria we have to deal with, and simple stuff like temperature. We'll know in eight hours whether it's safe for human life out there.

ET354a mission log, day 5 Turns out the air is totally safe. Except it's been night for… going on 28 hours now. What's going on?

ET354a mission log, day 6 Dawn finally came. The sun was huge and red. I'm a biologist, but I know enough about astronomy to know that we're orbiting a totally different star. Is this a different time, a different place, or a different dimension? Leroy guessed that we're in "another plane of existence" and I think he's probably closest.

The pool on this side is way bigger, more like a large pond or maybe a small lake. The banks are more defined than on our side as well. We took an inflatable raft to the shore (Marty and Simmons stayed behind) and headed north. The ground here, or at least around the pool, is almost totally devoid of plant life. The only green we saw was a sort of fuzzy moss growing on the ground that looked more like a kind of mold. The ground is grayish tan dirt that's like a mixture of sand and flour. Macarthur said it was some mineral or another but I forgot what he called it.

I half expected all of our electronics to not work out here, but that wasn't the first thing to fail. After about two hours of hiking across flat boring ground, the compass suddenly changed direction. Now it points to what we had previously thought to be east. Evidently this planet's magnetics (is it even a planet?) don't work the same way ours do.

Not wanting to risk getting lost, we immediately made a 180 and headed back to the ship. I could've sworn that the trip back was less than half as long as the trip out. Tomorrow we'll work out a way of navigation that doesn't rely on the compass being sane.

ET354a mission log, day 7 Lousy night's sleep. The sun never went down. By my calculations, the day/night cycle here seems to last about 43 and a half hours, as opposed to 24 hours back home. That's going to take some getting used to.

We agreed on a system of navigation. Firstly, we're going to travel only in a straight line, to make sure that we can get back to the ship by simply turning around and heading in the other direction. Unless we encounter some kind of unnavigable jungle, we should be fine.

Secondly, Marty's rigged a radio… beacon… thing. I don't really remember his explanation, but if we're anywhere within 800 miles, his little gizmo will be able to tell us exactly which direction to go to get back, and how far.

ET354a mission log, day 9 We set out a few hours before the sun was scheduled to rise. But when we got to the shore, we found that the green moss stuff was EVERYWHERE. It had grown in mass significantly. My guess is the stuff shrivels up in the sun during the day, and expands at night to suck in nutrients or something. We decided we didn't want to walk through it, so we went back and waited for sunrise.

Sun came up and we set out again. The moss stuff was back to its smaller state. It just occurred to me that there's been no wind at all in this place. The result is dead silence. I'm not ashamed to admit that the overall emptiness of this place is pretty scary.

We found an area with none of the moss stuff for a few hundred feet around, and decided to camp for the 'night.' The sun is still up but it's time for us humans to sleep, so I'm calling it 'night.'

ET354a mission log, day 10 Some time in the 'night' (which was really daytime… fuck, this is going to get confusing) we were all awoken by some kind of roar. You remember what the T-Rex sounded like in that old movie Jurassic Park? It sounded a lot like that, big and reptilian. It was so loud that I was certain whatever was making it couldn't be more than twenty feet away. But when we all got out of our tents, we didn't see anything. The whole area's so flat that we'd see any sort of animal within half mile or so, but there was nothing. Fucking scary.

We packed up camp and continued on. After a while we stopped seeing the moss stuff (Maybe it only grows around the red pool?) and the ground became rockier. In the distance the land seems to grow more hilly. I think I see trees.

ET354a mission log, day 11 The bare ground has ended, now we're walking across a vast field of beautiful green grass. It almost looks like a well-mown lawn. The grass seemed ordinary enough until Turquoise tripped over a rock, and arose to find his hands covered with several dozen bloody pinpricks. Apparently the tip of a blade of this grass is incredibly sharp, and easily punctures skin. It's no threat to our Foundation-issue boots, but we must all be careful not to fall on it.

We came to a tiny stream, really no more than a trickle. Swanson suggested we could refill our canteens, but Leroy and Macarthur wanted to check the water for something or other first. Macarthur took out some equipment and after a few minutes announced that it was not water, but liquid carbon dioxide. CO2 is usually a gas at this temperature, and it's never a liquid. The laws of physics don't seem to be working right.

ET354a mission log, day 14 Haven't had time to record anything for a few days. We made it to an area sparsely populated by trees. The grass there was withered and brown, and not sharp enough to pierce the skin anymore. The trees were ordinary, looked like birch but the leaves were wrong.

At some point we lost Swanson. This place is so quiet that none of us really feel comfortable talking, so we have no idea when we lost him. There's a good eight hour window where he could have gone missing. We called to him, but none of us wanted to split up to look for him.

During the 'night', a tree fell on 86's tent. He wasn't hurt and none of the gear was damaged, although the tent got mangled beyond repair. 86 swears that the tree hadn't been that close when he pitched the thing, and none of us can tell what caused it to fall. The trunk just… snapped. We all agreed not to pitch our tents anywhere near a tree from now on.

The next 'day' (which was really night time) we heard the same roar from a few days ago. It sounded exactly the same as before, and again we have no idea what made the sound, and none of us can even agree which direction it came from.

Then it started to rain. We all pitched our tents for the 'night,' this time a whole lot closer together than we had before. The nearest tree is about three hundred feet away. Macarthur confirmed that it was actual rain and not more CO2 bullshit, and we set up this funnel thing to refill our canteens.

Leroy donated his tent to Agent 86, and I offered to share mine, since it's a little bigger than the other guys'. I asked Leroy what he did to wind up as a D-class. He said he raped a couple of people. I think he might have been trying to freak me out, but who knows? Anyway, he's one of the most well-behaved D-classes I've ever met, so I don't think he's going to, say, assault me in my sleep.

ET354a mission log, day 17 Good GOD the rain has finally stopped. Everything is soaking wet, including us. Except for the ground. After that much water you'd expect it to be muddy as all hell, but the ground beneath the grass is barely damp at all. Perhaps the plants absorb moisture from the ground more efficiently than the ones back home.

We're setting out again. Perhaps the rain awakened some animal life.

[DATA CORRUPT]

sion log, day 25 What seemed to be a huge cliff in the distance turned out to be an artificially constructed wall. It's made of solid rusty iron and it stands maybe fifty feet high. To the left and to the right, it goes on farther than the eye can see. I can't imagine how thick it is. We have no way around it. We'll have to go over it or through it. We made camp for the night. We'll work out what to do in the morning.

ET354a mission log, day 26 Leroy jury-rigged some kind of blowtorch thing with our equipment. I swear, this guy is fucking Macguyver.

We cut a hole in the iron wall big enough for us to go through. It turns out it's only about a quarter of an inch thick, but there's another wall behind it with less than a foot between. Apparently this thing has multiple layers. Leroy cut through eight of them before we finally made it to the other side.

The grass on this side is black. Not burnt or anything, it's just a different color. And finally there's some wind! I was getting tired of

[DATA CORRUPT]

oncluded that coming here was a mistake. We have to turn back.

ET354a mission log, day 39 We passed through the second barrier, and we're back to the weird place with the black grass. I half expected the hole Leroy cut through it to have sealed up or something, but it was still there. Thank god, or whoever runs the show in this world.

I don't think Macarthur is going to make it through the night. He lost a lot of blood.

ET354a mission log, day 40 We awoke to find that Macarthur had crossed. We didn't want to do it, but we had no choice but to terminate him. 86 said that something back home might be able to help him, and he may have been right, but we couldn't afford to have him slow us down. We only have a few more days unt

[DATA CORRUPT]

ay 48 We made it back to the ship with only an hour or two to spare. The first thing they asked us was what the fuck had happened to Swanson, Turquoise, Macarthur, and 86. As if a few dead team members are our biggest problems right now. Marty has us underway, and we're definitely sinking. I just hope they don't

[DATA CORRUPT]

[END OF LOG]

This document was discovered in the central Foundation database. No such mission to explore SCP-354 has yet been suggested or approved. No records of any personnel mentioned in this log exist. The log's origin is unknown.