Hiii! Im glad to see you're back and well! I absolutely love your writing. I just wanted to request how the staff would get along with someone on the kinder side?
With the Foundation, a lot of people forgo kindness because they believe it makes people weak or unable to perform their duties. You use kindness as a strength. You can do the unethical things, but you save it as a last resort whenever possible.
I also want to mention though, I’m temporarily suspending any writing for the character Shaw. Due to ongoing issues, much of the information relating to Shaw is gone, and for good reason. I think they are in the process of writing a cool new story for the character Dr. Shaw, one that is not tainted by the horrible things done by the previous author. Once that is released, I will happily update this!
Clef:
Clef is the type of person to go with the flow no matter what, so I don’t really think your kind nature would “throw him off” per se, but it would intrigue him greatly. A lot of what he does is inherently unethical, so it would be difficult for you to work with him.
You and Clef meet at one of his reality bender seminars. After meeting a bender in real life and losing a friend to it, you knew they were something to take seriously. The Foundation has a strict “kill first, questions later” policy around Reality Benders that you are all too familiar with, but the thought of killing someone who doesn’t even understand their abilities doesn’t sit right with you in spite of the things you’ve experienced. You and about 50 others were in a room, when the windows and floors began morphing and carnivorous tables surrounded you. Clef had a team watching every single one of you, but what was unexpected was your behavior. You spent the entire duration of the attack aiding those who were hurt, bringing them to chairs and such. You evaded the desks with speed, but were non-combative. You were seen as a low-level threat. Which is why it was so shocking that you, with lightning speed, grabbed a folding chair from the side of the stage and hit Clef over the back of the head with it. You found Clef’s blind spot and you were faster than any staff could react. Although hurting anyone wasn’t ideal, you knew how dangerous reality benders could be, and knocking the source of the madness unconscious the most ethical thing you could do. It would be giving 50 others the time to leave.
Clef awakes to you sitting over him and checking the bruise on his scalp. The room was empty, every other person left as soon as the aerosolized counteragent was preemptively pumped into the air to allow the emergency medical team to do their job without dealing with mayhem. They all ran out early, but you stayed to bandage his head. Once you noticed he was awake, you grabbed his ukulele to use his proper name to address him. Even in his slightly dazed state, he was intrigued by your behavior. His first comment was that if he was a reality bender, you should’ve killed him instead of staying to help. You replied with a certain denial. The Foundation kept him alive for a reason, murder would be wrong unless absolutely necessary.
When Clef demanded you work under him, you thought it was retaliation for hurting him, but it wasn’t. In the day-to-day, Clef isn’t usually surprised by much, but you surprised him. Your behavior is fine to him, although it is abnormal compared to what he is used to. He actually thinks that you use your kindness in a way that it’s an advantage to you. He’d be annoyed if it made you spineless, but you’ve had multiple arguments with him where you’ve advocated that what he is doing is too unethical to the D-class. He is especially hard on you, but he likes having you around because he needs someone to catch him on some of his plans sometimes.
Even though you’d probably never let him know it, you’d likely dislike him intensely. He’s a liar and a manipulator, and the longer he’s known you, the more he has made you stop taking people at their word. You realize through solely a professional lens, you both do your best work together because your personalities are nearly opposite. He realized you were a natural at dealing with reality benders, and he was right. You do amazing work together. However, on a personal level, you might hate working with him. You’re forced to hurt people a lot in situations where you’re dealing with reality benders, and you wish you were in a position where that wasn’t such a requirement.
Kondraki:
Kondraki…doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get you. And he’s not gonna try all that hard to do so.
The last time he left the lab for an extended vacation, SCP-408 got way out of control. It started harassing people because nobody remembered to feed it. However, he recently noticed its sugar water would always be filled up when he got into work late. If he stayed home an extra hour because he was tending to a headache, he no longer had to deal with any agitated butterflies.
It wasn’t until a few months later, when he walked in about 30 minutes late and saw you filling up their sugar water. He had no chance of recognizing your name, but was pretty sure you lived in the same Foundation apartment complex as him. Although he very gruffly questioned you on why you were accessing spaces without permission, he didn’t do a whole lot otherwise.
After that, he noticed you a lot more. He noticed you actually lived in the apartment directly to his left, and deduced that you probably fed the butterflies if you could hear him stumbling about his kitchen fixing a hangover cure through the walls. That made sense. He asked you a few weeks later how long you’d lived there, and you replied that you’d been there for a year and a half. But he was able to leave the Foundation Site for longer periods of time now that he knew someone cared enough to actually feed the butterflies in his absence.
Once the two of you start working more closely together and talk for a bit longer, he realizes that he won’t ever understand your outlook on life. He’s not going to try, either. In the Foundation, politeness can kill, and he’s not going to try and see it from your point of view. But he won’t mind taking advantage of your nature. Sending you out for his groceries with a list and some cash slid under your door because “you’re already on your way”, which you never once complain about. Stealing your food when he’s incredibly drunk and never apologizing for it. Asking you to take on some of his paperwork “just this once”. Living next to you for multiple years and never bothering to learn your name. You put up with parts of it, because you don’t really believe that kindness is something that can be taken advantage of. But you’re also not afraid to put your foot down or say no when he asks for something you don’t have the time for, because you’re not gonna give him a poor-quality result.
As for you, you don’t really mind him. You realize that he doesn’t really care about you, but he does in some ways respect you. He becomes more mindful of how loud he is when he’s hungover, and he leaves $5 more than he thinks the groceries will cost to make sure you’ll have enough to cover his stuff. He leaves a copy of his key with you in case he is drunk and loses his keys again, so he trusts you, but you don’t really know him that well because I don’t think he would let down his guard around someone he believes can’t last very long in such a calculating environment.
Gears:
Gears sees kindness as a weakness. That is it. He does not believe that you are well-suited for a Foundation environment.
When you first came to Gears’s attention, it was because you had gotten two humanoid SCPs to converse with you, both of which hadn’t made a sound in months. One was a 23-year-old female, the other a 12-year-old male. You had complete interview logs, too. None of the supervisors or researchers could figure out what made them talk to you and not anyone else.
Upon bringing you in for a “chat” (read: interrogation) he realized something almost immediately: you were committed to understanding the SCPs. You read their entire files, including their retrievals, and you realized that the two that were not speaking were put into incredibly traumatizing situations where they watched their friends and family get hurt. The 12-year-old watched his dog get tranquilized for making too much noise and almost alerting the neighbors, and it was clear from the recordings that he thought his dog was murdered. He refused to speak because he thought making noise was dangerous. You were able to convince him to speak by breaking protocol, showing him a recent Facebook photo of the dog from his mom, and giving him a stuffed dog plushie. He would only speak in the quietest whispers, but you got vital information from him. The woman was also taken in a traumatic way, but you were able to build a repertoire with her and she would write responses to you on a slate.
The Foundation, and by association Gears, do not like this at all. Every Foundation enployee is supposed to be replaceable, so the fact that they are becoming dependent on you and you are breaking standard protocol makes Gears nervous. However, you point out that you filled all the correct paperwork to be able to break standard procedure, and upon pulling those files, Gears realized that was also true. He realized you were slowly introducing both SCPs to other researchers, and slowly seeing them less and less as they became more comfortable speaking around them.
So, Gears lets you continue in your position, but he is watchful. He will always be weary of you, despite the fact that you follow the procedure plans to the letter and that you work to make the anomalies comfortable around other researchers as well. You are not making yourself irreplaceable, but Gears believes that your nature will inevitably make you refuse an order, so he will almost never trust you.
Iceberg:
Iceberg learned a lot from Gears, so he might have the same reservations. Completely honestly though, I could see Iceberg going either way.
If you and Ice met in the cafeteria, I think you’d get along pretty well. Many staff find him forgettable or unlikeable, but you’d talk to him. Go along with calling him “Ice”, which other researchers don’t do because they think it’s stupid. He’d totally be down to have a friend to mess around with explosives with, and for once, he’d feel like he isn’t just some forgettable, replaceable cog in the machine. He likely will say a lot of wack stuff, but you’re very kind when he does. You wouldn’t make any weird faces, you’d just listen and then possibly try to provide a different perspective. I think he would definitely view you as lesser than himself if your clearance is lower, and view you with jealousy if you were able to get a clearance that was higher.
If you met Ice due to work, he probably would not like you all that much. The reason being, if you’re meeting him at work, then you are pretty unique to the Foundation. Even if your clearance remains low, you are most certainly going to get assigned to unique tasks. If Ice never met you in any other context outside of work, there might be some resentment.
Glass:
As a newly assigned therapist to Site-17, I think you and Glass would be on pretty much the same page. I believe it is somewhere in the notes of some tale that he got reprimanded for advocating to be able to speak to the SCPs, and I think a kind researcher would likely have the same approach.
You meet Glass for the first time because he scheduled a one-on-one meeting to speak with you. He’d stop spinning his pen with his fingers just long enough to shake your hand properly. Upon introductions, you both handle things very professionally at first, not diverging from the standard pleasantries. However, Glass’s job is to figure out if you will be good at your job, so he quickly pushes it. He breaks standard procedure to test you by warning you about some folks. You, like everyone else, respond with enthusiasm.
However, what he notices when checking in on you at six months, at a year, at two years, is that you never once lose that enthusiasm. You are there to do a job, and your job is to help others be able to do their jobs. And you love your job! The stories people tell are fascinating and you genuinely enjoy helping them solve a problem or navigate an issue. You’ve started having people request you specifically, and Glass is proud of you for that. He still loves his job and loves to help the people around him, but he became more guarded as time went on. You deal with some of the “difficult” folks with ease. Glass is excited that you’re able to maintain such a positive environment, but it also takes some of the burden away from him. The Foundation tends to try to send all the “difficult” folks to meet with him, so the fact that you can also manage those situations is something he is relieved about.
Rights:
Rights is regarded as one of the few people on site who did not become a cold and calculating figure. She maintained a lot of herself, even in the stressful environment of studying SCPs, so I think she would get along very well with someone she realized was not the same cold and calculating as everyone else.
She saw you around a few times, but you had never really interacted. But she started hearing stories about you. Just hearing your name occasionally, until she’d heard it enough that she could recognize you easily. She’d see you sometimes and you’d be smiling and joking around with some folks. At first, people are hesitant, but they do enjoy being around you once they understand you are nice to them because you want to be, not because you want something.
She orchestrates a situation where the two of you have to interact. It could be a work thing, it could be bumping into you on the way to your office, but she struck up a conversation and the two of you began to build a friendship.
Rights would love hanging out with you outside of work. Even if it’s not your scene, she’d drag you to the mall and find a way to make sure both of you had fun. Most of the people here would be work friends, but she’d be a really good friend inside and outside of work, and she’d be willing to work to maintain that relationship.
In addition, you would like Rights. She’s fun, she’s cool, and if necessary, she will absolutely say mean things to others on your behalf so that you don’t have to.
Strelnikov:
Strelnikov is weary of you from the moment he meets you. Reason being, you smile what a Russian would consider an unnatural amount. He gets on well with the MTF folks because they’re usually experienced, and therefore, don’t usually show a whole lot of emotion. But you’re the sprog, no experience in an MTF at all. He would very likely request your transfer if you smiled even once while he was in the general vicinity, even if it was at mealtime.
Upon requesting your transfer, he gets access to your files and is shocked to learn you came from a GOI. You have more experience than most of the people in his MTF. Regardless of which version of Strelnikov you subscribe to, the man has a decorated past and can recognize that you have an absurdly specialized resume; one that is valuable to a team like his.
He doesn’t want to pull you into his office to talk about it, because then he’d have to admit he tried to transfer you. So, he trails behind you after work to find you at a bar, by yourself. It’s a perfect, casual opportunity to talk.
However, when he walks in, he’s surprised to find you sitting alone, sipping your drink. Next to you, there is another drink, one he recognizes from the glass as a Moscow Mule. Once he walks in, you look up at him with raised eyebrows and a slight smirk, and offer him the drink. He wordlessly sits down next to you. You are quick to inform him that you know he was trailing you, and you were able to put together why. It gives him an opportunity to ask his questions properly about your experience. By the end of the night, and possibly partially due to the quantity of alcohol consumed, he has gone from skeptical to something akin to admiration. You aren’t cold and calculating like the Foundation usually is. So many of the soldiers he sees have no heart for what they do, but it’s clear from the conversation that you do, and he will really respect that.
