"Regarding its understimulation - we briefly discussed music, Dr. Huxtable had a lot of early success with 5031 by giving it background music I'm sure you know - but we didn't have time to explore different genres.  I asked if there were sounds it knew it enjoyed and it told me it liked the sound of creaking and tearing metal.  It sounded like something the Foundation could easily get their hands on a sound library of."

"Visual markers about the time of day and background noise.  You say this will help you profile it?"

"Yes.  It's been very forthcoming with me - I anticipate that the hardest barrier with respect to profiling it won't be reticence but rather its mental capacity to introspect about and articulate its own feelings and state of mind, and reducing its background stress level can only help with that."

"I see the argument.  I'll want to review these suggestions with some of my staff but they sound harmless to me.  Thank you for your input, Researcher."

"Thank you for hearing me out, Doctor."

She inclines her head in acknowledgment.  "I do want to speak further regarding your project, and the interactions you've had with SCP-682 so far.  Is now a good time?"

"Sure."

"You seem to have become very emotionally invested in SCP-682's well-being very quickly.  Maybe due to your history with it.  Am I wrong?"

"...No."

"In some ways its to your credit.  But if you're going to work as a Foundation psychologist - and I think you should, I think you'll be good at it - you need to be careful.  It's true that many anomalies need advocates, including many dangerous or hostile ones, and emotional attachment to or investment in the people you're advocating for can be an important and valuable motivator.  But you need to be careful not to hang your well-being on theirs.  I think you're right that there's low-hanging fruit where SCP-682 is concerned, now that we can communicate with it effectively, but you need to be emotionally prepared for the possibility that you can't help it as much as you're hoping for.  And that even if you can, your next project might not be as successful."

"I don't know that there will be a next project, my comparative advantage seems to be with 682.  But I take your point."

"I also want to caution you against seeing 682 as..."

She frowns, steeples her fingers.

"You say that you want the Foundation to see 682 as an animal-shaped person rather than a monster that happens to be able to talk.  I don't think that's necessarily unreasonable.  But you need to keep in mind that if 682 is a person, it's still a very dangerous, very hateful one.  You may be right that we could understand 682 better, or contain it more effectively, if we imagine a human in its place, instead of a wild animal.  But if I do imagine a human in 682's place, doing the things that 682 has done - I imagine a human who kills any other human he sees.  I imagine a human who regards every other non-anomalous human with violent loathing and disgust.  I imagine a human who thinks this way, feels this way, speaks this way about other humans even when it is under an anomalous effect stabilizing its emotions, who cannot be killed.  I - am not inspired to sympathy, Ms. Fiftythree, if I imagine a human being in 682's place that made the choices 682 made."

"I think you're tempted to see yourself in 682.  You also inspire fear.  Your anomaly has caused deaths.  But those deaths were not your fault.  That fear is not your fault.  You were a child, barely old enough to talk, afflicted by an anomaly you could not understand or control.  682 inspires fear because of what it has chosen to do.  It has deliberately killed hundreds of people, after understanding them as thinking, feeling beings like itself.  If you're going to assign human importance and human motivations to 682, you also need to assign it human responsibility."

She doesn't want to pick a fight with Director Hijazi, at this point; realistically she can't just route around her the way she routed around Stochasta.  And there's probably some truth to what she's saying.  She can't deny that some of that hit close to home.

But like.  Jesus fucking Christ.

She swallows the angry lump in her throat, and nods, with not-entirely-feigned contrition.  "You're right.  682's situation is very different from mine.  I understand that it's done awful things.  I'll - try to bear in mind, when I'm advocating for it, that I'm - doing something more like advocating for a violent felon than advocating for an innocent child."

There.  That's a concession, and even a true concession, to Director Hijazi's admonition, that is not her picking a fight and is also not strictly speaking incompatible with her actual feelings about a woman having just said to her face that she's not inspired to sympathy by imagining a human being drowning in acid for several decades.