HND Intro

The year is 1987.

Iran-Contra is all over the news. For only $3000, you can get a phone that fits in your pocket. Reagan told Gorby to tear down the wall. The Simpsons are on TV. The kids are playing Mega Man and Zelda 2.

The economy is booming, the space shuttle is flying, and it looks like the Cold War might actually be coming to an end. People begin to feel as if the world is changing; they dare to hope for a brighter tomorrow.

But they'll never see it, because you're going to destroy the Universe.

In a secret lab in 1947, government contractors working on cutting-edge quantum theory successfully created what they called a Quantum Induction Field. For just a moment, they artificially forced a completely random event--the decay of Cesium-137--to start decaying beta emissions according to the rhythm of Billy Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train". Three months later, they used their device to cause a coin-flipping machine to flip heads 16,000 times in a row.

That July, an outdoor test went beyond safety parameters, and a Nazi-branded jet aircraft materialized out of thin air, quickly crashing in the New Mexico desert. The aircraft had capabilities never seen in Luftwaffe aircraft, and documentation on board suggested the pilot was a veteran of an ongoing conflict on American soil, which his side was winning.

The possibilities were considered, but the military quickly seized control of the project, and ordered it shelved and buried.

But not everyone involved was cool with that.

Little is known of exactly who recreated the Quantum Induction Field, but it is surmised these initial actors were instrumental in the founding of Paradox, Inc., an Arizona-based research firm still operating today, in 1987. Said firm hires top minds, particularly along the fringes of quantum theory, and has them work on cutting-edge research--that they mastered decades ago. These fake projects are used to test the insight, loyalty, and moral flexibility of their employees, and a select few move into the inner circle, and learn the true goals of the organization.

Paradox invented a way to manipulate probability. It's no wonder how they found the funding for their organization, but that's just the beginning. Their technology can open portals into other dimensions, or modify the very parameters of time and space. They don't have a time machine (yet), but they can "bend" time, as well as what they call the Probability Axis--a "5th dimension" along which any given piece of spacetime (like, say, you) propagates infinitely, varying ever so slightly across short distances, but profoundly across longer ones.

But there's a bit of a snag. There are things along that axis...things that we were better off not knowing existed, let alone opening a doorway for them to invade our world. And that's exactly what they've been doing.

By the time the government found out what was going on, it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle. They initiated the SCP protocol--Secure, Contain, Protect--and created a network of extralegal forces, facilities, and procedures to deal with "intrusions" and "anomalies" on a case-by-case basis, terminating what threats they could, and locking the rest away, hiding all evidence.

Paradox, despite their involvement in the initial fiasco, were the only game in town with any ability to combat the threat. They're once again entered a contract with the government--highly secretive, of course--and provide them with the means to combat and contain threats, while they continue research on methods of sealing the "Prime" timeline from these intrusions once and for all.

Or at least, that's what they tell those who join the Inner Circle.

And one of them believed it, or at least was willing to believe in some baseline goodness of Man, and went along for the ride, offering her brilliant mind to their cause. She caught up on decades of research, enjoyed the fruits of all the technology they'd developed, and went to work on solving their problems.

And, inevitably, she discovered it was all a ruse.

She stumbled upon some very damning evidence, and risked everything to skulk about and see for herself. She found the directors of the organization discussing a "reset", as they casually discussed figures that revealed the dimensional threat to be far worse than they admitted even to their trusted government contacts. When they caught her snooping, they activated a security detail. When cornered, she promised to go quietly--but one of them pulled out an unknown device and leveled it at her.

"A pity. This one helped quite a bit. This may set us back. But...we have 43 years of wiggle room. Remove her."

The guard fired, and a black beam enveloped her. And she experienced the horror of being unmade--not just in three dimensions, but across the entirety of her personal timeline. Every version her of from every instant of life was simultaneously annihilated.

And then...the oddest thing happened. She was alone, floating in a ball of blackness, seeing--to the extent that she could comprehend it--the infinite timestreams surrounding her life. She briefly saw her own world, rewriting itself to accomodate the loss of her existence from the moment of her birth, and saw glimpses of others...

And then she was back in her body. Same day, same time. She was in her home, lying in bed, at 2:30 pm on a work day. The TV was on in the other room. She had a nasty headache, and a pit of nausea in her stomach. She immediately knew the feeling, as absurd as it was. "I'm hungover as a wolverine. What the fuck?"

She began to remember the previous night. A night out with the girls. That tracked. But then a phone call, from Eric...that didn't happen, but she remembered it clear enough. And she remembered breaking into the liquor cabinet. She remembered playing target practice with the empty bottles. She remembered waking up in the tub at 5 am, popping an Ibu, and dragging herself back to her bed. She vaguely remembered calling in sick.

None of that happened. But it did. In this timeline.

And she remembered everything from her original one.

She knew what Paradox was up to. And this version of them didn't know she did. She had to find out more. She had to stop them. She ought to figure out why she survived their temporal assassination device.

She's died quite a few times since then, in interesting ways, but she keeps coming back. She's learned things--terrible things--and the conspiracy keeps widening. She's not sure what to do, but she has to do something. The world--nay, the Universe--is doomed, and only she can save it. If she even can.

If only Hyacinth Knight had a little help.