"It's also to your advantage that you're not proposing a way to kill it.  There's still a very vocal bloc within the Foundation that wants 682 very dead, but since the great declassification every intern with access to more than three files thinks they've come up with a way to terminate 682, and they're never very good ideas.  Spinning your proposal to talk to it as you not being so naive as to think you've got a revolutionary new idea for terminating it - not quite in so many words, but that sort of attitude of humility - I think will go a long way to getting over the thesis committee's initial skepticism."

Jot jot nod nod.

"Now, right now I would say your thesis looks a bit unfocused."

A little sheepishly: "Yeah, honestly.  I know I want to talk to 682, and learn about it, and I know I'd like to - leverage my anomalies to try containing it without torturing it, but I recognize that's a harder sell.  We don't know why it seems to hate humans so much, and - in me - we have the means to talk to it, but we haven't used it.  If we understood why it attacks... maybe it's naive but I'm hopeful it'd be a more productive avenue to keep people safe from it, than just working out new ways to kill it."

"See, you're honing in there - you want to develop a better understanding of the entity's motivations, what it's thinking and what it wants and why it feels the way it feels about us."

"I think I was worried that would sound too - starry-eyed."

"With a dissertation proposal it's good to have a very specific idea of what you want to do, even if the idea sounds like a bit of a moonshot.  The committee's taking a chance on you, seeing if you've got what it takes, and they're going to want to see that you're not just noodling around."

Nod.  "That makes sense!"

They talk.

Given that SCP-682 has spoken coherently, even eloquently, during multiple termination attempts, the Foundation can in principle form a psychological profile of it just as they would on a hostile humanoid.  What she decides to argue is that the Foundation is remiss in not having done so already; even in cases of intractably hostile humanoid anomalies, there's precedent for psychological profiles like these facilitating less expensive and more effective containment, cf. 353, 076-2, et cetera, and there's no reason a priori to treat SCP-682 differently just because it's not human-shaped.  It's already communicated more intelligibly than some humanoid anomalies that have successfully been psychologically profiled.

A great deal of the work of profiling SCP-682, she believes, can be done simply by going over the records of its previous communications and actions with an eye toward modeling it as though it were a human being that's monster-shaped, rather than (as the Foundation seems to have been modeling it so far) a dangerous animal that happens to be able to talk.  In principle there's no need for Charlotte to talk to it at all.  But the elephant in the room is that, now that SCP-053 is an adult, there's an enormous opportunity to learn more about SCP-682, sitting there waiting for the Overseer council to grab it, and the longer they leave this particular twenty dollar bill lying on the ground the more money they spend on constantly replenishing 682's acid bath.  And with Dr. Leonard Salt and O5-1 herself as DELTA/AGENT designees, risking a containment breach is less costly in personnel and human lives than it was decades ago when SCP-682 was initially contained.

"She isn't wrong."

"Who escalated this to us?  Another grad student who wants to play with the lizard, okay, the Council has better things to do than this."

"Doctor Stanley Huxtable escalated it to Site Director Agatha Rights, who escalated it to me.  I'm sure you're all familiar with Dr. Huxtable's bona fides, and this has his stamp of approval."

"I'm not familiar with SCP-053's recent development..."

"My impression of her is that she is intelligent, prudent, and loyal to the Foundation," Four says.

"Mine as well."

"Two such dangerous anomalies in the same room sounds to me like a recipe for disaster."

"The last time we cross-tested 682 and 053 there were two deaths and five injuries," One says.  "I think Dr. Salt can spare that many, if we decide to go forward with this."

"I agree with One here, I don't see much point in the DELTA/AGENT designation if not for situations like this."

"One of those casualties was to Fifty-Three's anomaly, yes, not Six-Eight-Two?  Her backlash effect, when someone triggered an emergency acid hose and hit her with it.  If that effect hits Salt I'm concerned it would spread through all his iterations."

"I would expect the interdiction effect to protect Dr. Salt's duplicates in that case."

Eleven inclines her head.  "You're the expert."

"Well, I've been interested in 53's pacification effect on 682 for a long time, I think it's been under-studied."

"I agree, there's potential there."

"Certainly, but do we want 053 itself in charge of the project?"

"It's past time we start taking more chances on sympathetic anomalies, in my opinion."