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Important Information: I have made major changes to how I was thinking this SCP Article should work, every statement I made before I updated this Idea should be regarded as outdated.
Seeking Greenlights: Yes
Page Type: SCP Article
Elevator Pitch:
"Level 2 Cleerance or Higher" is the message that appears on an LED sign, similar to gas station LED signs, just above the handle of a safe door. This safe randomly appeared on an anomaly containment site one day. It went unnoticed and/or ignored for a while until the personnel on-site noticed the misspelling of "clearance" started questioning its origins. When looking from the outside, it looks like a normal safe door attached to a wall, however, with no room on the other side of the door.
When the door is open, a small steel box inside the door is revealed. This box is too small for more than one person to enter at a time. The door only opens when someone with said 'cleerance' pulls on the lever. However, once opened will allow anyone inside. When the door is closed with someone inside, the person will instantly reappear within a certain number of meters that grow by 10 at seemingly random points (starting with 148 meters).
Only wisps of information about what happens or what is seen inside return with certain people who exit.
"Level 2 Cleerance or Higher" is the message that appears on an LED sign, similar to gas station LED signs, just above the handle of a safe door. This safe randomly appeared on an anomaly containment site one day. It went unnoticed and/or ignored for a while until the personnel on-site noticed the misspelling of "clearance" started questioning its origins. When looking from the outside, it looks like a normal safe door attached to a wall, however, with no room on the other side of the door.
While the door is open the inside of a suburban-style house is seen. If someone walks through the door, it looks more like they walked through a wall as you can't see them from the outside (though they do actually end up inside the house). When someone is inside the house there is no way to contact them, although, their location can be tracked through GPS. The house is in the middle of a large forest. There is a single SCP who lives in the house. Anyone who sees this SCP or learns about it while inside the house will be completely immune to its anomalous properties permanently. However, anyone who learns about it or sees it while outside the house is erased from existence, along with everyone's memory of that person (provided you aren't immune).
Central Narrative:
The narrative will initially follow as a researcher does experiments to figure out how this anomaly works and what happens inside. Different people are sent inside, with each one being given a certain task to do while inside. After too much time was spent trying to figure out what was inside with minimal results, the project is canceled. Then at the end, a button will appear at the end of the page showing the previously mentioned text. Once clicked, the inside of the anomaly is shown to the reader.
The real anomaly is then revealed to be a creature that (unwillingly) erases the existence of anyone, along with any trace of that person, who knows about its existence (i.e., seeing it, hearing about it, etc.) in any place other than this one room. The narrative now follows the SCP from excerpts of ripped-out pages of its diary and short stories of forgotten events it caused. The anomaly's mental health is explored.
This narrative will follow a researcher as they interview the SCP inside the house to try and find more about how its properties work. The researcher will initially fear this SCP and think it should never be allowed to leave the house it lives in. However, the researcher will eventually sympathize with the SCP after realizing it's not out to get anyone and suffers from its loneliness.
Hook/Attention-Grabber:
A safe anomaly revealed to be related to a very dangerous anomaly with an unknown motive.
Explores how a person can make bad judgments and assumptions based on fears, then as they slowly realize they rushed to a false conclusion. Also explores the feeling of loneliness and being unable to do anything about it.
The article will follow this as the official report will be harsh towards the SCP. By the end, a new report will be proposed by the same researcher that's more lenient and relaxed.
Additional Notes:
I want to make this article have some parts where one will need to put clues together and solve puzzles to get some more information on the creature and its story. Any tips for this?
Any tips on how to incorporate logs into an article to tell a story while keeping it interesting would be a great help.
Hi! I'm Flight Officer Impperatrix!
I'm happy to see that you made your homework and read some last series skips. The proto-idea is good but needs to explain narrative specifics. You just showed me the way you're gonna tell the story and the anomaly, but not what you plan to tell. What happens inside the room? How people and the creature react to each other? What logs are created inside the room? You have a description, but not a narrative.
However, I liked the description very much. I'll suggest you some pages that can help you with this part of your article. Also, I'll recommend you two skips that can help you with the narrative.
Important information: Please disregard my reply, this is all outdated and should be ignored.
Sorry, I responded to this a bit late.
I left out a lot of information about my thought process because of the "400 words" word limit but just before I respond, I want to thank you for the pages, they gave me some ideas on how to stylize the article and work the story. Ok now to the explanation.
First, ill give you a little more information on how it looks/works. The second the door shuts, whoever was inside the box is transported to a room with white tiled walls, floor, and ceiling. Inside the room is a stack of papers, a printer, a computer that only opens a typing document, and all information about the creature. Each paper in the stack is written by the different people who have gone in there previously and decided to write their own report (usually researchers and doctors).
Whenever someone is in the room, all communication with the outside is always cut off by something inside the room for obvious reasons. While in the room, the person inside is free to leave or do some research on the creature. If the person stays a bit before leaving, they have access to all known information on the creature (the articles, any pieces of its diary found, any vanishes it caused), if they find anything of value. When they choose to leave they are transported back to the outside world at the exact moment they left with most of their memory of what they did inside wiped and any possessions they had with info of the creature to keep them and everyone else safe.
The creature is sentient, has human-level intelligence, and is self-aware. However, its exact species is unknown. It knows about humans and actively tries to avoid them (along with other animals with self-awareness on second thought, any animal with intelligence similar or higher than dogs).
If it does come in contact with a human, the human vanishes from existence, and everyone who knew that person has their memory altered to forget about them and not question it. The creature, on the other hand, has no clue how this happens and actively sorrows over it every time.
Note: I'm still arguing with myself over the possibility of the creature also gaining all of their memories and experience, let me know if this is a good idea.
Once again, only if they know about the creature while outside the room will they be erased.
Just in case you mean how people react to it while inside the room, it varies from person to person.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this but I'll do my best to interpret. Any logs created while inside the room always stay inside the room and become part of the paper stack, you probably know by now why.
There will be different logs for each of the reports written in there. The logs created will usually have to do with any new information discovered by the person who made them. Although their exact contents, I haven't decided yet.
However, the main type of log which will exist in every segment will be video logs taken by the room its self. This will show which person wrote the following article, what relevant things they did inside, and, occasionally, what they thought about when they learned about the creature. There sometimes will be a video log at the end when the person did something note-worthy while exiting.
This last part is all about how the narrative will go. This part I came up with thanks to the articles you gave me (Once again thanks).
The outside of the room will be one report about what happened when people noticed the door, their attempts at opening the door, then finally their attempts at figuring out what is inside the door. This part will be mostly logs, not a lot of value narrative-wise here.
In the pages about the room, each page (which will signify the start of a different person inside the room) will start with a video log, first of who they are, the date, and their initial thoughts about the inside).
It will then go on to show the report they wrote (if they wrote any) about the creature. Their emotions and personal opinions on the creature won't be conveyed through what they wrote but will be left to be interpreted by how they think the creature should be dealt with. Though, occasionally there will be a small video log of anything they said out loud while in there that shows their true thoughts on the creature.
Inside these reports, there will be small pieces of info revealed about the creature picked to use as their idea of the creature. Those who are more sympathetic to the creature will show more of its diary and personal thoughts while those who have more anger and hatred towards the creature will show more of its actions and events caused by it.
Finally at the very end, there will be text that says "Would you like to make your own report?" Which when clicked will show info on the creature that I stated previously (as a reminder all excerpts of its diary, events that it caused, and some of the people that were erased). This is the part where the puzzle will come in that the reader will have to use to try and solve some of the questions created.
In essence, I want to explore a mystery using the reports, and the feeling of being alone with the creature its self.
This is mostly what I have been thinking up until now, although there are still some more that I haven't added in this response because of time and length of my response. I hope I did a good job with explaining the narrative as I'm more of a show you what I mean then tell you kind of person.
Summoned via IRC
Alright, so the overview here is you've got a lot of interesting elements but they aren't well strung together or connected by a common thread. The premise, about a world hidden behind a safe door, is not super unique at this stage, but it's interesting enough to get a reader involved. However, things struggle from there. Reading through your elevator pitch, I was pretty interested right until this bit:
Anyone who sees this SCP or learns about it while inside the house will be completely immune to its anomalous properties permanently. However, anyone who learns about it or sees it while outside the house is erased from existence, along with everyone's memory of that person (provided you aren't immune).
Whilst I can see what you're going for here, this kind of blanket "it'll kill you" thing, is difficult to get behind. Practically speaking, this makes it so the anomaly essentially just kills people, and that's far less interesting than exploring the anomaly on another, deeper level, levels which you appear to have in your narrative to a certain degree. This doesn't seem to really serve a purpose within the narrative or a wider view of the article, and I'd really recommend removing it from your concept.
The core issue here is that the narrative is fairly thin, and whilst it has elements that are interesting, you haven't described or explained them in enough detail to give a clear sense of how the article might turn out, nor have you created a strong throughline. You've set up this premise with this weird, mysterious anomaly, and then you've got a researcher interacting with it, great. But from there, there's a real lack of detail on what's actually going to happen here. There's an emotional character arc that you've vaguely described, but it's not framed within the plot and so it's difficult to get a sense of how the article might actually turn out. I would really suggest you give us more detail on what plot events will actually take place - what will drive this researcher to take the actions they do? What will cause them to gain sympathy for the anomaly? What's the narrative arc? These are the key questions you need to answer. For me as a reviewer, it's easiest to give you strong critique and help when I get a play-by-play of the events that will take place in the article as your narrative.
I think you've got an interesting enough premise here, and the narrative has a fundamental basis that is workable, but to give this concept my full confidence I'd need to see more detail on what events will happen, and what the article as a whole is aiming for - what emotions do you want to create in the reader? What kind of response do you want to spark? I think with a clearer sense of what the answers to those questions are, we could be looking at a much stronger idea here.
I hope this feedback is useful to you, and good luck!
Thank you for getting back to me. There are a few things I want to clear up, though.
Firstly, it's not a new world behind the door; It's a forest within the same planet as the foundation (sorry that this wasn't clear).
Secondly, while I'm not sure this makes the "it kills you" premise any more interesting to you, the SCP doesn't outright erase you from existence by its own will. Think of it as a side effect of learning of the SCP from anywhere outside the house (essentially an info-hazard that you will be immune to if you first learn of it inside the house). Because of this 'side effect,' the SCP is forced to stay alone in the forest until this door somehow ends up in a foundation site.
What will drive this researcher to take the actions they do?
This one is simple. The researcher does this as their job; they are trying to determine how exactly it works, why it happens, the origins of the door and the house, etc.
However, their first few interviews (along with some evidence found in the house) led the researcher to think ill of the SCP's intentions, which ends with their harsh report on the SCP.
What will cause them to gain sympathy for the anomaly?
As more interviews happen, the SCP recalls events in the past with intense sorrow and regret in its tone and actions. It's revealed that the SCP gains the memories of those it erases, so it sees every relationship that person had, all accomplishments, etc. These memories show the SCP all it destroyed, any potential that could have been reached by the person gone in an instant. The intense regret in something the SCP can't control leads it to hide away in this house it found in a forest to prevent any more from happening.
Upon seeing how the SCP reacts to the stories it talks about and how excited the SCP is to speak to others finally, the researcher realizes they were too quick to judge and starts to sympathize with the SCP.
With the previous questions cleared, we are led to the play-by-play.
The report talks about the door first being found inside the foundation site. The hallway is shut down. After a while, the door is raided by a small MTF team of 2 people. They find the SCP inside the house. Later the interviews start. The researcher asks basic interview questions. Then at the end of the first interview, the SCP mentions the 'existence erasure.' After which, the special containment procedures are shown. The SCP is to be monitored by those who are immune to it. It's never allowed to leave the house.
After more interviews go by in which the SCP will talk more about the past. More of what led to these circumstances is revealed through the interview. It is implied through how the SCP acts and speaks while recalling these events, its true feelings of everything. To add some variety, there won't be only interview logs. An example will also be pictures of things found inside and outside of its house. At the end of the article, a new report is shown, this one much more lenient and considerate of the SCP (although still not too lenient).
In one sentence of what I want to achieve, a sympathetic character gets a somewhat happy ending.
Apologies for the delay, I had a response written up and then lost it.
First up, a few small things:
The report talks about the door first being found inside the foundation site. The hallway is shut down.
What exactly is this report? When you used that term before, I assumed you were referring to the whole SCP document, but given this comes before the containment procedures (typically the first thing in an SCP document), it seems like it's something else? Do you intend for this article to be a format screw of some kind? I would suggest not doing that for your first article because they are often quite difficult to justify internally.
Alright so here's where I'm at, I think there's a core here that could work, but it's 1) over-complicated and 2) the narrative is not working.
The first issue is that you've got a series of different properties that, functionally, only really obscure the core idea of a narrative wherein a researcher gains sympathy for an anomaly's plight. (It's worth noting that that core idea is a little stale at this point, but it's not worth dwelling on for the moment). You've got the anomaly, within a door that leads to another part of Earth, and if you learn about the anomaly whilst outside the door it erases you from history. Really, the most important parts are "the anomaly" and that it erases people from history, because they're the two elements core to the story you're telling. I'd recomend streamlining things a bit here, strip back the things around the door and it's properties and so on, and really focus on the properties that are actually key to telling the story here. Simplistic isn't always better, but it's usually helpful to keep things within a certain boundary of simplicity in order to facilitate the storytelling, and I think this is a good example of one of those cases.
Second, the narrative just kinda… ends. This is perhaps a result of how you've explained it to me, but it seems like you've got all this setup for very little payoff - nothing really happens in the second half of your play-by-play. You've said you'll vaguely reveal some information about it's backstory and so on, but no events actually take place. This is a good place to note that your story as a whole is very reliant on interviews and so on. These are fine, but they are storytelling devices, not stories in and of themselves. If you aren't using them to convey something or tell a part of the story, they'll become boring and people won't want to read them. I think you really need to put thought into what the actual events are here, and how they fit into a satisfying narrative arc, beginning, middle, and end. Remember, the key to success in writing an SCP article is a compelling or satisfying story, everything else should exist only insofar as it services that goal.
Like I said before, there is a solid enough idea in there, but it's being obscured and restricted by other elements around it and a weak narrative that relies too heavily on devices over story. Put some work into reforming those elements, and this could be stronger.
Anyone who sees this SCP or learns about it while inside the house will be completely immune to its anomalous properties permanently. However, anyone who learns about it or sees it while outside the house is erased from existence, along with everyone's memory of that person (provided you aren't immune).
Here’s where you lost me a little… I don’t really understand the need to make it so insanely overpowered that it erases people from the outside from reality… I think a more subtle anomalous effect would do wonders here. Take it down from something incredibly dangerous, to something strange and otherworldly, which would allow for possible character development. Because what matters to this story (from my perspective) is that this being is stuck in the house in the woods and can’t leave… So I think you could make it have a subtler effect (not erasing someone from reality) and have it.
This narrative will follow a researcher as they interview the SCP inside the house to try and find more about how its properties work.
Sorry, you’re not really explaining what the SCP is, you’re just labelling it “the SCP” – what is it?
Explores how a person can make bad judgments and assumptions based on fears, then as they slowly realize they rushed to a false conclusion.
Who is making the bad judgments and assumptions here? Is this anomaly like a curse on the person stuck this way because of their judgments/assumptions?
Any tips on how to incorporate logs into an article to tell a story while keeping it interesting would be a great help.
I think a psychological evaluation of the anomalous entity in the house would be a good way to discuss its mental state and the details of its situation. This is slightly different than just a researcher trying to get answers and I would pattern it more after the way psychologists or therapists ask questions.
Overall:
