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Hi there! My name's Crow-Cat! I'm inside your head now! Welcome to my author page! Come and take a look! I have small hands!
✦: Best Stuff
✦ SCP-6426 - Vampire Boat
The idea for this originally came from a post I saw in 2017-2018 on r/scp, where someone asked where they could find a link to the deleted "Vampyre Boat" scp, which led to me thinking up an scp about a "Vampire Boat." Turns out they were referring to SCP-048 lol.
This wasn't originally gonna be my first scp, but I had gotten so little luck on getting crit on my other ideas (with one of the few people who looked at my draft strongly misinterpreting the idea cause they misread and then ghosted me), or actually finishing the drafts for them, that I went "fuck it I'll just write Vampire Boat." Joining the Discovering SCP server was actually super helpful for finishing the draft, cause I was able to talk one-on-one with my critter and get real-time feedback. Also helped that I became friends with folks in that server, and they were willing to crit my stuff. They were very influential on the article. I also had to do a lot of research on vampire folklore and naval ships.
Originally the article was just gonna be the description and the interview (the purpose of the piece was just to add to Sharkest Timeline lore), but I realized that wouldn't be interesting enough for readers, so I wrote the Three Portlands battle in between the two, which ended up being the highlight of the article for everyone (especially the parts with THE GRUEL). I'm happy with its success, and I still really Like Vampire Boat, tho I'm unhappy that it's my highest rated and my first article. I want to write something good enough to surpass it someday. EDIT: It has! By 8905!
SCP-6818 - His Toolbox Grew Hands
After Vampire Boat, I wanted to work on something smaller. Initially, the idea was for an "original anomaly" I could put in a Fear in the Foundation game, after first learning about that ttrpg. I decided to just make it an actual scp and mulled over it for a bit. While I was at my grandma's house, I sat in the grass and listened to the wind and chimes, soaking in the peacefully hollow feeling it gave me, and decided that was the tone I was gonna go for.
I do agree with Plague that interview feels disjointed from the rest of the article, however I feel it's the test logs that feel disjointed. They are fun, but they don't carry the same tone as everything else.
✦ SCP-7755 - A Hole Dug With a Rabbit's Foot (for SCP-7000 Contest)
My favorite piece of fiction I've written, and also encapsulates all the aspects of my writing style: horror-comedy, mystery, a story that feels singular yet part of a wider whole, adventure, dialogue. This was also the most fun I've had doing research for a story: I love aliens, I love alien encounters, I love the weird spiritual and early sci-fi tone so many of them have. This is a love letter to that.
The story spawned from the original idea Quaker gave me, but I'd had the ending scene in my mind for a long time before that: UFO rabbit cultists summoning a moon monster was originally a ttrpg encounter I wanted to use. Looking back, the story was definitely influenced by another scp I wanted to write (and one I originally thought about cramming and turning into a 7k draft): an investigation into a helpful directional arrow located in Site-CN-51. It would've had a similar vibe and structure, but way less comedy.
I had an idea of how I wanted to structure the story: investigating leads like they're strings on a rope, each one tapering off until there's a single line to the Truth. I had all the leads thought out at the start besides Aaron Jackson's, which was originally completely different; I was gonna have the lead be about a tall mysterious entity in the woods, carving symbols and prophecies into the trees. It felt too disconnected both narratively and tone wise, so I went with the alien abduction route a cool person suggested me.
There was a lot cut from the draft due to time constraints. There was originally gonna be a scene where a ham and cheese monster animated by green moonlight was gonna chase George and a rabbi around a grocery store, the PENTAGRAM records were gonna be a whole video log, the sightings of strange stuff with Mortimer's Paw were gonna be full audio logs of recountings. However, I think this was the only instance where the time constraints benefited the end result. It made the article feel snappier, helping the pacing a lot. I also think the quick mentions of certain things improved the story for people, based on the comments it got.
A lot of the comments talked about how weird the article is, but the thing is I never thought of any of it as weird when writing. I don't mean that in a "to me the Joker is Normal Man" way, I mean I really didn't see it as out of the ordinary for the SCP setting. It messed with me a bit, and it sounds silly now, but I started to feel self conscious that I would never be able to write something normal, or having a grasp on what Normal is. Then a little bit later, I watched a showing of Shakespeare's Tempest, which my brother was acting in. I adored it; loved the characters, loved the slapstick feel of the story, it felt like watching an animated movie. I told this all to my brother when the play ended, and he went "Yeah, I had a feeling you would like it. The Tempest is Shakespeare's 'weird play.'" And then all those feelings of doubt washed away.
SCP-050-INT - Keep Calm and Babble On (Co-authored with Sobek109,
Eeveellector,
Guaire, and
J T K C for the International Collaboration Contest 2023)
This was probably the most hellish writing experience I've ever had.
Imagine if you will, four people working on the same project. Except one is in an American timezone, one is in the England timezone, and two are in the Singapore timezone. Imagine having to coordinate who is writing what, being dependant on certain sections being written in order to write your own, and having to wait half a day for your teammates to wake up so you can discuss how to proceed. Horrible times.
Each of us was in charge writing different sections of the draft: me and JTKC wrote the meeting logs (I did the first meeting, the one where everyone yells at Jackson, and the one where Perez is inspecting the site), Sobek wrote the incident logs, Eevee wrote the test logs, and Guaire translated some of the sentences at the end into Spanish. The first finished draft was super rough, with a lot of problems that we didn't think we could reasonably fix before posting closed. That is, until Sobek decided to go back and rewrite a bunch of the article, including adding new sections. Fixed all the issues and made it better than it was before.
I really did not like the article for a while, purely from how stressful it was. Looking at it now, I love it. It's a very fun, maximalist slapstick story about a Foundation project failing.
SCP-7131 - Reservoir Gobs (Co-authored with Sobek109 for Goblincon)
The ideation started out with Guaire as well as Sobek. I believe the former suggested combining two of the prompts together, like a battle royale of all types of goblins all across the world. That idea mutated into a group of different goblins performing a heist on the site. Guaire couldn't participate in the drafting stage, so it was just me and Sobek.
It's hard to think of what else to say for this; the writing process was very smooth, me and Sobek bounce well off each other. I think the biggest issue we faced was the deadline, which resulted in the draft being posted in a less polished state, which I think impacted readership (or I just plugged too much in the discords. Live and let learn). Me and Sobek went back some time later and fixed a lot of the issues, both that we noticed and the commenters noticed. However, it's remained at around +23 for a long while now, which is a shame, since it's much better than the rating implies.
✦ What Does B Stand For? - (for Romcon)
I was pretty excited to participate in what was essentially and Original Character Tournament. However, I made the mistake of joining it while entering Goblincon at the same time, and still having college work to deal with.
There was originally going to be a beginning scene with the Vampire Boat sneaking around the site, using SCP-6426-A to lure people closer (like the Bravest Warriors episode about the alien that puppets people) and killing people as he tried to escape, only stopping once he sees Karen. This was cut due to time constraints. The scene where Vampire Boat explains why he became a vampire boat was also originally cut for the same reason, only added in after posting.
It was interesting to watch how a small detail in this tale grew into something larger for Sharkest Timeline: when Vampire Boat says
"It feels like I’m talking to an emotionally-stunted android that just crawled its way out of a Gyre state's trash mounds."
I wrote that on the spot as a weird simile Vampire Boat could use, envisioning it as one of the garbage patch gyres being a kingdom in his world. But then I brought it up again in a later article, and it became an established location we listed down while drafting the Sharkest Timeline hub. After that, I brainstormed with the other Sharkest folks what the Gyre states are, how are they different from one another, etc. Anyways, I'm quite happy with this piece; it has some of my best dialogue so far and it placed #4 in the first round.
SCP-7267 - Echos of the Regime (Co-authored with LAN 2D for The Mighty Lore and Aesthetics Contest)
This is the most Ship of Theseus ass article I've ever written. The prompts LAN and I got were ‘GloomCore` and SCP-143-PT, and our initial idea was about the Foundation learning enough about anomalies involving infinite spaces that they build a machine that can create these infinite spaces. The story would be about two brothers that get lost in an infinite space after it starts changing (think MyHouse.WAD), being pursued by creatures that resemble the dragon from 143-PT, and have themes involving being a 2nd generation immigrant and having a strained connection to your family’s culture.
A couple weeks in, LAN pointed out that we were probably biting off more than we could chew, especially for something with a deadline. There was also the fact that neither of us are immigrants, so we felt unqualified to write about that experience. I was reluctant at first: when I write, I decide on an idea and then write it until it's finished. I eventually relented, and we shifted to an idea about a group of phones that had ghosts of people's family members, who grew up during the Brazilian government's 1964-85 dictatorship, on the other end. I felt like that was a bit limiting, so I suggested they be random encounters with ghosts, with different ways they try to communicate. Herein lies the problem: whereas I am reluctant to change the idea I'm writing, LAN is a writer who constantly iterates while he drafts.
We ended up rewriting the base idea again, from random encounters with hauntings to them being located in this one school. I think we might've changed it to a school after doing some research on what life was like back then, and a school seemed like a good setting for a protest. We continued to rewrite the hauntings over and over again, without finishing it. I convinced LAN to stick with what we had and finish.
Looking at it now, the end product is a bit of a mess. It's not really obvious what the purpose of most of the hauntings listed are, which causes the themes of the article to be muted. I would like to return to our original idea someday, same with LAN.
✦ SPC-6985 - THE ANTI-SHARK (for Remixcon 2023)
The original SCP-6985 annoyed me a lot: it had a really interesting idea in its video log, but then that log got removed, making the whole article feel undercooked. I wanted to rectify this.
Depending on how you want to write an SPC format it can be pretty easy, since at first it's just parodying the original article. That's the method I went with for this. After that, I added the examples on how the Anti-Shark is useful, which allowed me to worldbuild a bit more for the Gyre states: the idea of the automatons from Gyre states being made of microorganisms holding together trash came from Rust Tooth. Next, I wrote the log on why the Anti-Shark is really bad actually: this was based on the original cut log, where a guy wanders into a hotel room that has SCP-6985, and soon there's one too many bugs that are a bit too big to be normal. I do agree with SD Locke that the halfway prose doesn't work; I was really prose brained at the time and wanted to have fun while writing the log, but the end result is messy. I still think this is one of my better pieces, tho, especially for horror-comedy. Also, the reason I added a second version of the photo in a footnote is cause a lot of my critters couldn't see what the picture actually was.
✦ SCP-7547 - Seven of Cups (for Anthology 2023)
Definitely the best piece of fiction I've written to date, but the process of writing it was not fun. Here's some commentary I wrote a little after I posted it:
You know when you have a really big project you gotta to do, but the size of the thing seems so intimidating and overwhelming that you don’t know how or where to start, so you just don’t? If you’re neurotypical then probably not.
I was very happy when I got assigned the Seven of Cups for Anthology: the card is full of such a variety of symbolism and meaning, and I wanted to take full advantage of it. Unfortunately, I got scared of the monster of a draft I made up in my head, and since I had a whopping 11 months til October I decided to put it off while I worked on other stuff; I had plenty of time. Ever heard of Parkinson’s Law?10 months pass and the only thing done is an outline.
Guaire noticed my current predicament and graciously offered to help co-write the rough draft. And the way we did it was something I wasn’t used to: typically when I write, I would meticulously adjust every word and line as I wrote them, only moving on to the next when I was satisfied with it. But for this, we had to work fast (started on September 1st), which meant I couldn’t agonize over every word at first. I hated the first draft because it was unpolished and rough, and that’s likely because I never have unpolished first drafts.
This made it hard for me to go back and edit what I wrote, since I hated it.
I'm a lot more relaxed now and don't really approach writing this way anymore. Or maybe I've just gotten more skilled and confident in my writing. Probably not. Anyways, the themes of this piece were inspired by The Wailing and Elden Ring: a constantly shifting web of who you can and can't trust, and a bunch of different groups relying on one dude to enact their paradigm shift, respectively. During early drafting, I knew I wanted each offset to correspond to the symbolism of one of the cups, tho I wasn't sure how to order them at first. I settled on:
1 - Human head
2 - Figurine covered in white cloak
3 - Treasure hoard
4 - Castle/Tower
5 - Snake
6 - Laurel wreath
7 - Dragon
Also, the only reason Guaire isn't credited as a co-author is cause they didn't want to be.
The Sharkest Timeline - Co-Authored with LORDXVNV,
Lt Flops, and
ThisisNalkan
The Sharkest Timeline was one of my biggest fixations on the site, way before it was even called Sharkest Timeline. I read LORDXVNV's, SirPudding's, and MrWrong's Shark Punching Center renaissance works back in high school, and the setting of it absolutely fascinated me. This bizarre world felt like it had so much history and depth that hadn't been written yet. And then Lt Flops continued to write SPC articles for it, expanding the setting in little pieces. It felt like exploring a deep jungle, cutting thru a clearing, only to find a beautiful unexplored valley.
SCP-8205 - PIPEMAN
This piece is simultaneously one of my best comedically and the one I'm the most embarrassed by. I started drafting Pipeman a little after my first article on site, and the first thing I wrote for it was the first half of the interview log. I got stuck on how to continue it, got some feedback on what I had so far, then put it on the backburner. A year later, Discovering SCP's annual WriterBotCon rolled around and I decided this was a good opportunity to finish it up the basics of the article. I found I really enjoyed writing Pipeman's description, figuring out how exactly he functions and how the Foundation still doesn't understand him. I find those are some of my favorite SCPs, the ones that the Foundation can't understand using their usual methods.
After that, I knew (upon a suggestion from a friend) I wanted the article to end with a confrontation between Pipeman and Wheelman. I put the article on the backburner again until 2025 when I decided to finish it. I didn't know what to put in the middle of the story, besides sightings of Pipeman in the wild. I got suggested to have him encounter obscure GOIs, which was really fun to write. I finished the draft, showed it to various people who all reacted positively to it. However, the last critter I sent it to pointed out a lot of inherent flaws with the piece, how the humor doesn't work. It was really good crit, but as soon as I got it I lost all motivation for the draft. I theorize this was due to two reasons:
- The draft had been in the works for so long I was tired of working on it;
- The crit involved changing most of Pipeman's dialogue, which would essentially be changing most of his character, and I was invested in this character.
I did try to implement the crit, but I couldn't get far. I couldn't fix the issues, but I knew I'd feel worse if I didn't post it at all. I apologized to the critter about why I couldn't use their crit; I don't think they really cared, but they did downvote the piece, so I feel embarrassed about the whole thing. I still like the jokes in it, tho.
✦ SCP-8905 - One must imagine Sisyphus getting a promotion (Co-Authored with PinkHatPinkJeans )
Quaker shared an idea she had about an unpickable lock that the Foundation tries opening with 005, which causes a huge explosion. I suggested a different ending, and then proceeded to think about the idea for the next few days before asking Quaker if she wanted to collab.
Writing this was so much fun. A lot of it was making each other laugh and thinking of increasingly esoteric ways to open the box, tho pacing and the order of the tests were something we had to prioritize too. The crit process for this one was a good example of figuring out what advice to listen to and which to not: our first critter didn't find the article funny at all outside of the ending, and recommended giving Dr Lord an "Ahab and the whale" type relationship with the lock. We tried adding notes from Dr Lord to each test (one of which is still there), to show his increasing frustration with the lock. Every other critter said the notes were their least favorite part of the whole thing.
Aside from that, the editing process was pretty smooth. I think the last change we made was adding the budgets for each test, since one of our critters noted that it would help add a sense of scale and progression.
SCP-8468 - …I drive a Chevrolet movie theater (for Classiccon)
"Interior Crocodile Aligator. Interior-Interior."
The song was the base inspiration for this piece, along with the title of LordStoneFish's fun tale. Had a rough visual in my head of the crocodile becoming the interior of the interior, synced up to music. This doesn't come across at all in the text I don't think. Actually writing it out, it became a different beast entirely (probably cause I ended up using it for Classiccon).
The ending was originally going to be third person, and have the anomaly eat Ricken from the inside. Got crit that said that was a bit too predictable, but after they suggested the third log be some sort of animal enclosure, I thought it would be a good bait and switch to have Ricken die due to debris rather than the thing. Changed it from an evil monster to a weird animal, and the horror from a creature to how one bad decision can have horrible consequences.
Even if it's low rated, the reception to this piece surprised me. I didn't have time (2 hours before posting closed) to thematically connect both halves of the story in a natural way. No one else seemed to notice or care about that tho, with most of the praise going to the ending incident. It was very relieving, and also the first time since 7755 where it felt like I wrote something special without meaning to.
✦ SCP-9588 - Genius of Love (For Stop Making Sense)
I went into this with the intent to write something small, like I did with 6818 (small in my mind, I guess). The prompts I had were "Genius of Love" and "Surrealistics War", got an idea and story structure pretty much fully formed from that, then I just wrote.
I ended up getting burned out a lot over the course of writing this, which was around early 2025 to early 2026. I think it's cause I wasn't fully back into my scp phase, or the fact I was ignoring other projects in favor of this one cause I was worried about the (constantly changing) deadline. Mighta been both.
If you couldn't tell, I got bored while writing this multiple times, which is what led to some of the wackier moments during the story. I think that's why I don't remember much of the writing process, since it was spaced out so much with lots of breaks. I'm really happy with the reception to this one tho! Especially compared to Señor Senor.
One more thing is that, in retrospect, I really like how this piece unintentionally lines up in a meta way with the album. Being a story taking place in another universe with the Surrealistics Department nowhere to be seen, same way this is a song by Tom Tom Club and not Talking Heads.
Oh yeah there was gonna be a bit where EVE invade the Buddhist cycle of reincarnation and outcompete hungry ghosts, which leads to the karmic alignment wheel being shifted clockwise. But then I didn't write that.
SCP-9398 - Evil Dragon Phenomenon. & Typhoon Reagent Testing
This one was based on the title prompt Cathy Autumn came up with. Initial visuals I got when ideating were of the stars in the sky forming an outline of a man with bleeding eyes, a TV showing dragons with bleeding eyes, and lizards with bleeding eyes fighting each other to become more dragon-like. I couldn't figure out how to fit all those together, so I just went with the last one.
The format and wording of the file was originally more similar to SCP-212 than SCP-173 (you can still see this in how the format of the images mimics 212). This was cause I didn't find 173 to be very inspiring, and there weren't many other Series 0 articles posted yet that I could use as a basis. The initial draft also copied 212 in that only the conprocs and description were on the page, with all the fun tests in the supplement. This led to the piece feeling not at all like series 0, but perfectly fitting with series 1 according to a friend. I later rewrote the main file after some more Series 0 pieces got posted, as well as moved all the logs from supplement up to the orangutan reptile, since I was told that one felt like a good ending.
The non-reptile tests originally only had the dog, easter rabbit, and comatose person tests, but I got feedback that it was too short and needed some sort of throughline. This was was trickiest part. Initially I just made more weird tests, then leaned into the idea of the military weaponizing the evil dragon blood. Originally the narrative of the piece was gonna be them using two human volunteers and have them both mutate using hoards and killing other evil dragons, then send them out commit terrorist attacks in the middle east. One would be arrogant and wimpy cause he had it all handed to him, the other would be obedient and creepy cause she fought for her stuff on her own. A theme of pregnancy had also unintentionally cropped up in a lot of the examples and tests, so I thought that the climax could be the two dragon people (who were based on the solomanari and balaur respectively) secretly having a baby. This gets found out and the two have their heads blown off, but the mom's body keeps moving and attacking until they shoot her belly, where they find the baby was controlling her like a mech suit.
I lost motivation for this direction once I got to the non-test part of the story, in which I realized I just wanted to write test logs. I scrapped the narrative and tests with humans, and focused on the military trying to find uses for the dragon blood, essentially throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. This ended up being the right call and also allowed for a few more comedic moments. I ended up removing two after one of my critters pointed out they didn't fit. One was a test to see if aerosolized Typhoon Reagent could be used as a weapon itself: they expose it to a POW who mutates into a crippled reptile mass (the reason that this happened because of the POW's diabetes is a detail I'm sad I couldn't keep). After a few hours the blood in the air condensed into living plasma (based on fire drakes) and flew around the room and ate the POW. They would then be trained using scented candles and esoteric animal handling, and sent off to assassinate political opponents with no evidence left behind. The problem would be that they can't follow direction properly unless their handler is in the same room as them; the issue with this one was that there was no biological element, so it felt dissonant and too magic-like.
The other test was using pig meat to create fake people the SCP Project could place in low stakes environments. The issue with this one was that it had too many interesting implications and worldbuilding repercussions to leave in a supplement page not many people are gonna read. I'll revisit the idea later down the line as its own article. One last thing is that the final test was just gonna end on the initial form the volunteer took, but I was told it needs to focus on the bodyhorror more, so I made the person go full humbaba afterwards.