Time's Eye - The manifold threats of tethered reality

Summary:

Deep inside caves in Eastern Europe exists a Gold Room

Time's Eye - The manifold threats of tethered reality

RedOfPaw 01 Mar 2020 21:34

Deep inside caves in Eastern Europe exists a Gold Room, where Indoctrinated cultists must perform a Ritual every 72 hours. This involves an 'incantation', causing a confused man to appear through a wall, who is then sacrificed. Failure to do so leads to significant and catastrophic reality breakdown. 'Time-Shear', where victims and torn apart by different rates of time passage - Strange creatures from between worlds - 'temporal clones' where people encounter copies of themselves (and are destroyed on contact). In the far future a megastructure - a ringworld - has been built by entities unknown. Host to countless populations of diverse beings, many the descendants of mankind - and sustained by The Mind, an AI that controls Reality Engines that power the Loop. During an ideological war the AI is damaged and to keep the Loop from being destroyed establishes a Tether with Ancient Earth. Dr Czeeka, Senior Researcher, is at the center of the storm, trying to figure it all out.

I moved and trimmed your thread summary, since it was taking up a lot of space in the main forum screen. Try to keep thread descriptions (the text in the little box under the thread title) short so you don't crowd out other authors in the forum listing. Also, try not to overload the amount of information in a draft thread—reviewers don't need to see your concept summary; they can check the idea thread if they really want to. ~Zyn

Sandbox article is here:

http://scp-sandbox-3.wikidot.com/redofpaw

Currently:

-Working on formatting (plan to add in a real nice top bar with all the lovely SCP graphics
-Adding in a bunch of images (there's only a single one in there) - will be heavily photoshopped as well as some illustrations.

Looking for feedback:

-Is there anything that stands out as being 'non-SCP' in presentation? Does it read like an SCP should or have I missed something?

-I've tried to leave enough to the imagination, with certain ambiguities in place. Is it enough to build the picture or are parts of it confusing or under explained?

Along with the summary, this is the original description that got me 2 Greenlights, as per rules:

http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-12942120/time-s-eye#post-4471911

Appreciate all your feedback!

Last edited on 01 Mar 2020 22:20 by Zyn Show more

Re: Time's Eye - The manifold threats of tethered reality

MalyceGraves 03 Mar 2020 17:52

Summoned by PM!

On to the critique ->

Overall

I think that the concept is still a solid one, as I said in the greenlight thread.

HOWEVER, I think that the big thing you're going to run into is this thing is bloated as hell. At almost 8k words, it's a monster of a read and the structure of the piece doesn't give itself over to being easily followed. I'm terrible at suggesting places to cut, so I cannot be more specific, but this should probably be cut in half.

A lot of the excursion events could be combined into a single, slightly longer log, with a summary of the others. We don't need to "see" every detail, and if the detail is not germane to the scp as a whole, it could probably be removed alltogether.

I don't mean to be discouraging, but articles this big rarely do well, even if the writing is ok. More established authors can get away with it because they know how to fit the narrative into the overall narrative of the site as a whole, and they have a following that are sufficiently invested to read long pieces. You have to convince the readership that investing the time and energy required to read a large piece is going to be ultimately worthwhile.

There are also small SPaG/Coding/Consistency errors sprinkled throughout the piece. I've highlighted a few so that you get an idea of what I'm talking about.

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SPaG & Coding Errors

The R-4a ‘Ritual Sacrifice’ procedure must be every 76.3 hours precisely.

Missing a "performed" there.

…ruins of a 16th century Monastery

Monastery shouldn't be capitalized here, as it is not a proper noun in this usage.

was the initial focus of Archaeological interest

Same.

//The footage cuts.

Coding error.

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Consistency/Flow

MTF Lambda 5 (Alpha Division)

Properly styled as: MTF Lambda-5 ("Alpha Division")

Failure to complete the Ritual correctly will result in significant reality breakdown and risk to life.

This sentence lacks a powerful enough impact. Consider:

Failure to complete the Ritual precisely as indicated will result in a CK-Class Reality Restructuring Event.

Or pick any of the other K-class from the Comprehensive K-class list.

Senior Researcher Dr Edwin Bowler

It's usually written as EITHER Senior Researcher OR Dr., not usually both. I realize that this isn't how it's done in Academia, but Senior Researchers are all Docs.

Foundation allied groups first came into contact with SCP-xxxx in 1912, following an investigation into a number of anomalous objects that had made their way into the antiquities trade. These included a number of known anomalous items, including some which are still unaccounted for.*

There aren't many Foundation allied groups, none of which would be involved in this type of investigation. It'd be "Foundataion assets first…" or simply "The Foundation first.." Also, the asterisk should be a [[footnote]].

The activity at Site A is centered around the ruins of a 16th century Monastery near Ferice, Romania, below which is the site of a temple nearly two thousand years older.

Consider: "The activity at Site A is centered around the ruins of a 16th century monastery near Ferice, Romania, which is itself built upon the footprint of a significantly older religious site.

The construction matches the design of similar religious sites of the time

I would say "of the period".

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Closing Remarks

I think the idea has merit, and I think that the decision before you is fairly simple. Do you invest more time and energy into cutting this down to a more manageable size, or do you shift to writing a series of different (and smaller) pieces to establish yourself as an author BEFORE releasing a piece this large.

Up to you. I hope this helps.

Re: Time's Eye - The manifold threats of tethered reality

RedOfPaw 03 Mar 2020 19:42

Hi!

Yes, that helps a lot and I appreciate all the feedback.

I had suspected it was a bit long for a first go, but also felt I should run with it and see how it went.

Certainly cutting down makes sense.

However I also feel like I've learned a lot with this one - there's a lot of details and layers that go into writing an SCP that I didn't consider before. So I shall leave it as it is for now.

I'll work on something shorter in the meantime and then return to the concept at a later time.