FILE 040959

COMPILED: 12/17/2049
PHYSICS STRIKE ELEMENT: Major Arcana -- 0021
RANK: Lieutenant
STATUS: Alive

SERVICE TIMELINE

FAMILIAL TIES // PERSONNEL HISTORY

NAME: ELAINE MOORS
RELATIONSHIP: Mother
LOCATION: St. Joseph's Hospital & Medical Center, Phoenix Refugee Point
DATE OF DEATH: 01 JAN 2035

According to the records, Moors' mother spent her career on the trauma floor at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center. Her death is dated to 2035, by which point the hospital had been folded into the refugee point and safe zone. The files note that a Foundation detachment under the common designation, Beta-7 "Maz Hatters," had been stationed inside the perimeter for incidents that had been occurring at the time. On the page, at least, it reads like a place that was meant to hold against any threats.

On New Year's Day, however, the APC seeded SCP-610 across the world in a wide sweep, and one of those points was this exact refugee zone. Moors was deployed in the same theater at the time. His transfer into PHYSICS was still fresh enough that command was vetting him the hard way, hot drops into active zones, and that was where the day put him. By the time his unit was tasked to the Phoenix point, it was already gone. The flesh had breached the complex and taken refugees and defenders alike, and there was nothing left to relieve, only after action reports.

[ATTACHMENT: VIDEO FILE > HELMET-CAM, BETA-7 ELEMENT]

The 'Beta-7 Operatives,' hardened task force operatives who had fought through countless engagements as far as we know, are on the footage for seconds. A defensive position set for situations just like this, a voice on the channel would be heard calling the refugees back behind the line. Then the doors crack open. They come from everywhere at once, in through the windows, up from the corners of the building, some of them forming directly out of the casualties already on the floor. You couldn't even designate what follows as a firefight. No withdrawal, it shows that the contact was over before most of them even peeled towards the next piece of cover.

The reports that follow are from Kendrick himself:

element overrun // no effective resistance recorded // total massacre of populace

Within that massacre was his very own mother, Elaine Moors.

NAME: KYLE MOORS
RELATIONSHIP: Father
SERVICE RECORD: United States Marine Corps, Gunnery Sergeant. PENTAGRAM, 27th Paranatural Operations Division.
EVENT: Early-war collapse
DATE OF LOSS: 2029
RECOVERY STATUS: Remains unrecovered

Marine Corp records show that he had enlisted way before anomalous activities had been publicized. The more lacking side of the records shows that Kyle Moors was a PENTAGRAM operative, joining before Kendrick was enlisted into the United Nations.

[Recovered Footage of a PENTAGRAM operator during the final engagement alongside Kyle.]

The footage opens on two ten-man elements stacked on a pair of ornate wooden doors, both emanating a vivid white glow, almost as if the sun itself were waiting on the other side. The building around them tells the opposite story. It is dark. Floodlights have been set in the corners of the room, but their cone only reaches only so far, and between them the air occupied with a dense dust that floats slowly through the camera's view. The thaumaturgic specialist would explain the survey tags of an emission as a Class-II or higher reality displacement signature. As they swiftly breach crossing the unknown threshold, a brilliance of sunshine glimmers through a fog that embellishes the area. Guns come up, and the fog thins to reveal a long, deep hallway running away from them into a blinding new environment. Buildings and balconies would line the sides of the dimension as if they breached directly into a desolate Roman city.

The initial clearing is swift and near silent, nothing but the thuds of boots echoing through the hall as they move methodically all the way up to a large sandstone building. The point man halts at a set of wide stairs, and the frame that follows is something out of an action film, the team seemingly tense, silence still in the air, time itself seeming to stop around them. For a moment the element only holds there, weapons up, plainly confused. Then, as the cameraman pans across the dimension, it shifts. Every building, every balcony gone, leaving nothing but the single long hall lined with ponds and the sandstone structure at its end. It felt off.

The sound that resembles a firework being let off could be heard.

A volatile yellow beam traces out of thin air and catches one of the operators dead center, the impact tearing him off his feet and sending him sliding twenty feet across the marble into a shallow pond, blood tinging the water around him almost before he stops moving. For maybe a split second nobody fires. Then the channel breaks into overlapping voices, contact calls stacking on top of each other, men scrambling to find an angle on whatever just put their brother face down in the water, rifles swinging up toward the top of the stairs as the first rounds finally go downrange. Inaudible voices would come through the net, and concussive gunfire begins to reverberate across the whole dimension.

That is when the rest of the opposition show themselves, an enemy force over fifty strong, and they do not move like untrained militiamen either. They split clean into two wings, twenty peeling off each flank while the remainder hold the sandstone balcony and pour suppressing thaumaturgy down onto the team. They move by fire, wielding firearms of unknown origins, and their intent is obvious: a deliberate effort to encircle the team from both side and massacre those who entered their domain. The PENTAGRAM element answers the only way it can, putting ordnance into anything that shows itself, but the flanks are already closing. The point man calls a retreat by fire, and the team bounds back into a reservoir of ankle-deep water surrounded only by low marble walls, the closest thing to cover the kill tunnel will give them.

Gunfire and explosions would fill the surroundings.

Kyle's voice comes across the channel, ordering the team to hold the next position and take out as many as they can. The helmet cam swings toward the operators setting up their machine guns, rounds landing all around them, slabs of marble bursting apart as beams of yellow hammer the ground in front. Then another operator is hit clean through the helmet, blood spraying across the water as he slumps over where he kneels. The medic reaches him, checks him, but it is already done. The man whose camera this is starts screaming the dead operator's name, and Kyle is seen grabbing him by the helmet, hauling his face around, calming him, telling him to keep firing.

The team works the pond like the last hard point it is. Prone operators, five guns up on the marble staircase, belt fed and hammering, the rest calling targets and fighting to keep an egress route open through loud concussive fire. For a short time it holds. Cloaked figures fall and are walked over. A flank that was clear a second ago fills, the perimeter closing no matter how many they drop.

The point man calls it and the team breaks for the door in a controlled fighting retreat, three at a time, one element firing while the next bounds. Boots stride through the water as they run for the door. They make it far. But their numbers thin with every meter, and operators die in the troves as they fight, overwhelmed, covering each other to the last round. Kyle and the helmet cam operator are the last two standing, working their way to the door back to back. One swift look back and Kyle is seen struck in his thigh, dropping instantly. The operator turns to drag him, hooks a hand into his harness, and Kyle slaps him away.

Kyle Moors was not among the recovered, and the last order on the recovered channel, half lost in flurry of gunshots, is his voice telling that man to live, and to close the door behind him. The only reason the footage makes it way out is the fact that the operator plunges through the door with a bullet right through his chest. The after action that closed the file was written by the GOC attachment recovery lead as the lone survivor promptly passed away.

PSYCHOLOGICAL & BACKGROUND ASSESSMENT // MOORS, KENDRICK

Kendrick Moors was born in Arizona in 2001, into a household weighed on a scale between saving lives and taking them. His mother, Elaine, was a trauma nurse who held that a life mattered more than the alignment of the soul wearing it. His father, Kyle, wore the uniform of a Marine over the actual truth of a PENTAGRAM operator, and believed the opposite end of the same creed: that some lives must be taken so that others can be kept. Kendrick took both ideas and bent them into convictions of his own.

He grew up clever, with the kind of sharp, protruding arrogance that only a lonely person ever really builds. His parents were mostly gone, pulled away by with work that could never be spoken of at the dinner table, and so he was left to spend the better part of his childhood pondering the world on his own. He had no real desire to fight a war for the rich and no patience for formal education, no clear direction at all, only a lost soul. In 2019, with nothing else pulling at him, he enlisted in the United Nations.

Over the years that followed he served across multiple deployments, ceasefire zones and scenarios of uncertainty. What the records show now, and what he did not know then, is that the path was not entirely his own choosing. His father, sitting on knowledge he was not cleared to share, had pointed him toward the blue wreaths in random conversations, unknowingly preparing his son for a war he could not see coming long before the world was told it existed.

Down the line Kendrick was quietly offered retraining at a specialized UN facility, told only that it was advanced preparation for harsher combat environments. It was the Global Occult Coalitions polite lie almost any anomalous organization tells before it shows you the truth. He did not understand he was being readied for a war against the anomalous until the war arrived to explain itself, and by then his father was already dead, lost in its opening collapse in 2029. Kendrick inherited the lesson without the man, and has been answering for it ever since.

Ten years of service and more to count, the retraining only added a new path to his journey, one of violence and retribution against those who threatened his way of life. He was twenty-eight when North Korea was wiped from the map under Broken Mantle, and the martial law years of 2029 to 2031 became a blur of combat, the kind that left any normal soldier dead within weeks from one miscalculation.

He was thrown from squad to squad in those years, into whatever element had bled out enough men to need bodies. One week a containment breach in a contested zone, the next a night insertion against a thing the briefing could not name and the survivors would not describe. The worst fights were when the dead got back up wearing the faces of the very soldiers he fought alongside.

Through all of this he learned that surviving was the same as winning. The record from that period is a long column of engagements marked loss, loss, withdrawal, loss. The Foundation and Coalition forces feeding themselves into a war that held no value for human life. By the time the dust of those years settled, the idealist who enlisted in 2019 was gone, he decided that if he could not save everyone, he would at least make the things on the other side pay in full for every name he lost. In 2032, a quarter of the way into the war and now he entered the fight as a fully trained operative and joined PHYSICS.

Then came 2034, and the rest of this file exists to explain. On New Year's Day the APC seeded SCP-610 across the world, and one of those releases took the Phoenix refugee point where his mother had refused to leave her post. Moors was in the same theater and arrived too late to do anything but report with his own hands. Eighty-nine days later came the Great Culling, the mass execution of anomalous humanoid POWs. The records here are careful, and they matter: Moors tried to stop the massacre. He did not stand with cowardice, and he is on record having moved against it. A man who lost his mother to the anomalous and then watched his own side answer that grief with a slaughter he could not prevent. Despite all of that, Kendrick pushed for action against those who broke the moral constraints that would put humans on the same side as animals. He refused it. The enemy was never the anomalous as a category, but anyone, human or otherwise, who decided that suffering could be answered with more suffering and called it necessity. He truly believed that the APC had murdered a continent's worth of innocents create even more chaos, an excuse for violence. His own side had taken that excuse and butchered prisoners with it. To Kendrick, by the end of 2034, both had committed the same crime. Him wearing the patch however, meant that he would shoulder the burden and proceed with the same duties that proceeded him.

He had decided what he was, and he had decided it in the worst year of his life: not a weapon aimed by other people's grief, but a man who would do the violence the war required and refuse, absolutely, to enjoy the part of it that crossed the line his mother died standing on. The middle years of the war continued without an end in sight. He was across the continent when San Diego fell to the clone legions out of Deus Ex Machina in December of 2035, and heard it the way everyone did, secondhand, after the detonation had already made headlines. At the Battle of Los Angeles in February 2036 he fought on the outskirts, never the heart of the battle, and from that distance, through smoke, he caught half a second of Mekhane manifesting to decimate the Eigenweapon-class entities and avert an XK scenario before scattering across the world in pieces. Escaping by dropship, sat on the edge of the exit ramp he pondered.

The war ended in 2040, and Moors was in the most dangerous engagements of his career back to back. On the 12th of December he was at Operation Bygone Dawn, the raid that encountered the Mekhanites at the Cathedral of the Mechanical Saviors and uncovered the Church of the Broken God's heresy with SCP-939-A instances. On 27th of December he was at Forlorn Hope, an outpost overrun by an SCP-610 colony on the West Coast lines, and extracted in the last window before command liquidated the site by tactical nuke. He went out with the heat of it at his back and did not look behind him, because he already knew what the flesh does to the people it takes. On the 2nd of January, he was on the hunt for Ramiel in Lysychansk, Ukraine, killing Ramiel after being field promoted due to the death of his field officer. Seven weeks later, on 24 February 2041, the Eighth Occult War ended. The celebration was a brief absence of bloodshed. The population of the Earth had collapsed to a few hundred million, and Moors, forty years old, was still standing.

The pause in the world did not really heal. It only removed the noise that had been drowning him out. Through the long Silence from 2041 to 2049 he ran garrison and containment work, killing the singled anomalies the war had scattered across an uninhabitable mainland, and the rest of the time he simply moved, in the flat, functional way. He never went looking for what was left of Arizona. There was nothing there to find, and he knew it. When the Unified Paranormal Defense Mandate stood up on 9 September 2049 and began drafting the young into the fight, Moors, at forty-eight, was brought in as veteran cadre and put in front of the recruits. He found, to his own surprise, that he could not be indifferent to them. He saw himself in them, and behind that, his father, the same chain repeating one more time. Perhaps that was the point. If he could walk these recruits down the road his father had quietly built for him, he might pay back some fraction of a debt that could never be settled directly, amends made not to the dead, but to the living who still had a chance.

Assigned to strike element Major Arcana as operator 0021. He is, by any honest account, exactly what his father built him to be and exactly what his father tried to shape him into becoming. The brown hair has started to go at the temples, thin scattered lines of gray arriving early the way they do on men who have spent too long in the field. He does not believe he is a hero, and would be contemptuous of anyone who said so. What he is, is a man who refuses to die of foolishness, and has decided that keeping them breathing is the only debt he can still pay.