Author commentary:
This piece was an entrant in the 2020 Exquisite Corpse contest. Tip o' the hat to my co-author http://www.wikidot.com/user:info/Hinomupi, who supplied the containment procedures. Hinomupi's containment procedures were pretty open-ended, which left me plenty of possible directions to try to take this thing. So I began by focusing first on the reference to "eight pieces" in the conprocs. Hmm… what comes in "eight pieces?" Pieces of Eight, of course, me hearties.
The next requirement that had to be satisfied was the Object Class of "Safe (initially presumed Neutralized)." I think I adequately addressed that by means of the discovery that the anomalous effect is triggered only when at least five of the pieces are in proximity- it seems reasonable that this could initially be missed.
This article is, in a sense, a tonal inversion of spikebrennan's proposal. That 001 proposal was intended to start out grim and serious but end up kind of light-hearted and goofy — this does the opposite, by starting out silly and ending in an implicitly dark place. Ultimately, this piece, like several of my other articles, is less about the anomaly and more about how the Foundation responds to the anomaly by exploiting it for its own purposes. Essentially, this "Campbellian archetype token" technology falls into the Foundation's lap, and the Foundation proposes to use it to produce an army of obedient D-class slave-drones.
By "Campbellian archetype" I refer to Joseph Campbell's notion of archetypal characters in a narrative structure.
I intentionally avoided the explicit use of the word "pirate" anywhere in the piece. Two reasons for this: (1) as a light drafting challenge for myself - I find that SCP technical writing often somehow seems to come out better if the central idea is heavily implied rather than overtly stated; and (2) this thing imposes an archetype - meaning that it doesn't exactly make you talk and act like a pirate, but rather it makes you talk and act like a generic pop-culture archetype of a pirate.
Image licensing:
(1) Image is a re-colored and cropped version of https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieces_of_Eight_(7264793792).jpg by USFWSmidwest (https://www.flickr.com/people/49208525@N08).
(2) Image consist of background image by https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org/photos/a203c054-fd7b-47f1-9c05-94f11e3ae61f by Creativity103 https://www.flickr.com/photos/36894712@N04 ; with modifications by spikebrennan. I'm a lousy artist, and I'd really like to replace that hand-drawn glyph with a better piece of artwork that combines the Foundation logo with a pirate-style skull-and-crossbones motif. Lemme know if you can help.
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