So here come more mice to make him fat
I really liked this. +1
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Yes.
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
I love the continuous first-person POV switching as each of them dies.
For the record, I was more horrified that he actually reached the bottom of 087 than with what he found there.
To be honest, I knew from the start that nothing I could put at the bottom of those stairs would truly do it justice, but Dean was so determined from the start to get to the bottom and rescue that girl that I knew I needed to have him reach it only to die finding out it was pointless. In the end I decided to just go for a traditional Thing What Looks Like a Child But Isn't that fit with the "eating" theme of the poem; Dean didn't live long enough to find out, but the liquid at the bottom consisted of digestive fluids.
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
That maybe the child isn't even a child, but just some manifestation of his fevered desire to find something down there? That basically it's just a pile of juices and anyone who gets down there is gonna be so out of their mind that they'll see anything they want to while being digested?
The purpose of that chamber is to digest. Everything else, I leave to the reader's interpretation.
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
(account deleted)I found that some of the parentheticals in the second narrator's speech really broke the flow. Not that they had bad content, but were maybe in the wrong place. Otherwise excellent. +1
Narrator 2/Agent Johnson was meant to have kind of a scattered, jumpy train of thought, but I'm not sure if I showed that properly. Do you have any suggestions re: improvements that could be implemented after the contest?
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
Yeah, I think you did a good job of portraying Johnson, and most of the parentheticals work well.
Some of them, though, separate a subject from it's predicate, and they are long enough that when I get to the end of the parenthetical, I've forgotten the subject, so I have to re-read the sentence for it to make sense.
This works fine because it's short, and also similar to the subject, so it's easy to follow:
Every part of my mind was screaming (like Emily; Emily was screaming) that I should run
So does this, because it breaks in a natural place, and also carries the subject through:
How could I face Edward's wife (Justin's wife, Dean's wife, Sam's wife, Emily's wife…) if I just ran away
But here:
I don't even know if the mask (it's covered in splashes of molten lead now; will that slow it down?) is taking damage, but I hold my ground as it charges forward.
The long parenthetical separates "mask" from "is taking damage" and the separation is long enough that by the time I reach "is taking damage", I've forgotten what the subject is. You could either shorten the parenthetical so that the subject stays in short term memory:
I don't even know if the mask (covered in splashes of molten lead now) is taking damage, but I hold my ground as it charges forward. (did that even slow it down?)
or move the parenthetical to a more natural breaking point:
I don't even know if the mask is taking damage, (it's covered in splashes of molten lead now; will that slow it down?) but I hold my ground as it charges forward.
Similarly:
if I just ran away from something like this and left them all to die (are brains supposed to steam like that?) without doing anything?
might break better like this:
if I just ran away from something like this (are brains supposed to steam like that?) and left them all to die without doing anything?
Ultimately though, you may decide that sacrificing a bit of reading ease is the best way to portray this character, and if so, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Thank you. I think I will keep it as it is; thoughts interrupting thoughts and having to be dragged back before they go too far on a free-association tangent was what I was going for.
Edit, 15/5/13: Actually, reading the story again, I don't like how it flowed there anymore, so I made a couple edits.
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
I know I'm going to sound extremely stupid, but I didn't realize it was SCP-087 until I saw the comments. I really should have, looking back it is kind of obvious, after all.
Very good tale though. Now that I know what the "mask" is, I'm looking back over it and going, "OH, I get it!".
+1
EDIT: Also, I'm happy to finally see a tale with SCP-087.
Thanks for fixing the missing period and is/it error that I didn't catch, but *Mod Hat On* in the future please fill out the edit notes so it's clear at a glance that that's what you did.
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
Piffy: I did some formatting changes so that the poem would stand out more against the actual story, it was blending in a bit before. I hope this is within acceptable changes.
That works, yes. I wasn't sure how to best offset it from the prose, and this definitely makes it "jump" more.
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
I'm going to have nightmares about this all night…thank you very much. 1+
As an aside, the poem actually reminded me strongly of the poem "Ten Little Indians" from Agatha Christie's famous novel And Then There Were None. Really creepy.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, that I now firmly believe this is what happened during that expunged exploration log for 087.
You caught me. :P And Then There Were None was my first and is still my favourite Agatha Christie novel, and I actually did have "Ten Little Indians" (and "Five Little Monkeys Jumping On The Bed") in mind when I wrote the poem.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, that I now firmly believe this is what happened during that expunged exploration log for 087.
As a writer, I could ask for no greater compliment than this. Thank you.
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
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page revision: 1, last edited: 25 Feb 2021 03:57
