SCP-1721

Since acquisition, outputs from SCP-1721-1 take the form of a novel, written in Cyrillic in the style of a 19th-Century Russian author, although the text of the work matches no known publication. SCP-1721-1 began the work shortly after recovery and to date has produced eighty-seven chapters (over four hundred thousand words) with no signs of stopping. It is unclear whether the SCP is composing the novel or transcribing a pre-existing work.

The novel, entitled “The Bureaucrat’s Wife”, follows the trials and travails of Ekaterina Petrova, the young wife of a disaffected low-ranking official working in 1890's St. Petersburg. The official, Gennadi Arsenyev, frustrated with his low station and staid home life, has begun an affair with a local artist. The developing text is available through the SCP-1721 output file to any interested parties.

SCP-1721-2 transcribes with remarkable accuracy the thoughts and internal monologue of one randomly selected nearby individual. Testing has demonstrated that the instance's ability has a range of about three (3) meters. If no persons are within that range when the top is placed in motion, it spins in place until an individual approaches, at which point the transcription effect resumes.

Researcher U████ had high hopes for SCP-1721-2 as an advanced interrogation tool, but field testing revealed severe obstacles to SCP use. While it is simple enough to get the object to select the proper individual for transcription, the instance records all of the subject's thoughts, conscious and unconscious, in a mass of incoherent and unconnected words. The resulting large mass of uncategorized information requires extensive data sifting and has proved less efficient than more conventional interrogation methods. Nonetheless, a “translating” software is in development which would render the top's outputs comprehensible; early results reveal repeated occurrences of [REDACTED] in subjects' mental narratives, despite the fact that no subjects tested would have had opportunity to meet the individual in question.

SCP-1721-3 has two output modes, both unhelpful. It alternates irregularly between providing nonsensical advice, and instructions which seem excellent but prove disastrous if followed. The advice is always pertinent to the occupation of the spinner, though the SCP identifies the occupation of all Foundation personnel as nothing more specific than "working for the Foundation." The quality of advice shifts from persuasively argued to totally incomprehensible with little observable pattern.

Field Agent W███████ reports that prior to recovery, while in possession of [REDACTED], Instance 3 provided increasingly unfeasible proposals for new magic tricks. Since coming into Foundation hands, the object has produced a stream of entirely unhelpful containment procedures for Foundation-held anomalous objects both real and imaginary broken up with periods of persuasively presented but ultimately disastrous advice for various specific researchers and agents coming into contact with the instance. Attempts to use SCP-1721-3 to identify poor plans pre-emptively were unsuccessful because no means yet exists for forcing the instance to "discuss" a particular topic, preventing timely compilation of relevant steps to be avoided.

Personnel are advised to disregard all of the instance's advice, no matter how reasonable it may seem.