- Overview
- Catalogued SCPs (and Author Commentary)
- Tales Filed and Author Commentary
- Prometheus Labs Resources
- Supplementary Documentation
- Statistics
Name: Arvind Ramkumar Desai
Credentials:
Ph.D in Biomedical Engineering
Ph.D in Computer Science
Position: Director of Site-42, Former Head of Biomedical Division, Former Prometheus Labs Liaison
Clearance: Level 4
History: Dr. Desai was originally hired by the Prometheus Labs Bioengineering Division following the publication of his Ph.D thesis on the utilization of brain-machine interfacing to create artificial intelligences. During this time, he worked on all major Prometheus Labs Bioengineering projects, including SCP-████, SCP-████, and SCP-████, and was eventually promoted to the Head of Bioengineering.
Following the Cappuccino Incident, Dr. Desai was designated as the official Prometheus-Foundation liaison for several years. During the events of [DATA EXPUNGED], he was extracted from the Prometheus Labs Marianas Trench facility and hired by the Foundation as a senior project manager on Project Steve Austin. During the events of the [REDACTED] Crisis, Dr. Desai was appointed Interim Director of Site-42. Following the crisis, he was officially promoted to Director of Site-42.
Dr. Desai currently oversees all major projects and SCPs contained within Site-42.
Green = SAFE
Yellow = EUCLID
Red = KETER
Blue = THAUMIEL
White = NEUTRALIZED
Orange = ???
SCP-150 - Ship of Theseus (coauthored with Decibelles)
Although SCP-150 inevitably results in the assimilation and alteration of the central nervous system, including the spinal cord and brain, the host's consciousness and behavior are seemingly unaffected.
SCP-947 - Son of a [EXPLETIVE REDACTED]
SCP-947 is a contagious, memetic expletive defined by its creator as meaning "a really fake, annoying person or thing that you wish would just naff off already"[sic].
SCP-2060 - We Burn Every Day
"When the head of an instance is ignited and the feet placed in the mouth, the user will experience the effects and taste of smoking a cigarette, up to and including nicotine addiction. Instances of SCP-2060 will continue to burn up to the lower torso, down to the bone until scorched; they do not burn past the waist."
SCP-2060 is loosely based on a talk I had with my father about… six months, I think, before I posted it. We were out on a walk and he was in the middle of a diatribe about how Bush Jr. was Cheney and Bush Sr.'s puppet, as well as how Cheney was the real mastermind behind the Middle East invasions in order to steal their oil… and then he mentioned cigarettes for some reason, and for some other reason the words Cheney and cigar resonated with me. Originally I wrote about Dick Cheney alone being turned into a cigarette, and then I wondered what if all kinds of celebrities were turned into cigarettes? Thus, SCP-2060 was born. It's the first article I wrote that features the "Curios of the Worlds", a shoppe that apparently sells objects from all over the worlds…
SCP-2143 - Singin' in the Rain
" Although the symptoms of the disease are that of septicemic plague (diarrhea, fever, low blood pressure, gangrene, shock, etc.), the disease is untreatable by antibiotics. The disease's vector is unknown. If SCP-2143 is allowed to sing, any afflicted persons will quickly recover, and the area of effect will dissipate."
SCP-2143 will be familiar to anyone who's read the Asterix comics. Specifically, he's based off of Cacofonix the bard, whose singing is so bad that it causes rain both indoors and outdoors- at one point, he, Asterix, and Obelix travel to India to relieve a drought with his song. I was struck by how much Cacofonix resembled an SCP: he had a strange ability, was under containment (by Fulliautomatix the blacksmith, who smacked him in the face if he tried to sing) and was actively sought out by certain Groups of Interest like the Indians and Romans. So I turned him into an SCP. I couldn't write Cacofonix the SCP, since he lived in the year 50 BC (and it would be plagiarism). So instead, I drew upon another song-related figure: the god Apollo. Greek gods are supremely petty and vengeful bastards, so a conflict with his godly father Zeus provided some emotional backstory and also a reason for his affliction.
SCP-2210 - The Bureaucracy
"High-speed camera surveillance shows unknown individuals entering the residence, leaving the appeal form, and carrying off objects and possession that equal the value of the late fee. If the policyholder runs out of possessions and money, they will be accosted by an unknown individual in a business suit and mask, who will proceed to abduct them and carry them through the nearest doorway, whereupon the two will disappear."
SCP-2210 was written up for a Bright Challenge, specifically a prompt posted by InsipidParoxysm. He postulated an anomalous insurance company, so I ran with the idea. I started by thinking that a lot of parties in the Foundationverse would want insurance and/or special materials they couldn't get anywhere else given the nature of their work, hence the use of multiple Groups of Interest. But it wasn't enough to have an otherwise-regular insurance company -the company itself needed to be anomalous.
It's easy enough to get into a contract with SCP-2210, but impossible to get out. The geography of SCP-2210 itself is based around unnecessary complexity and obfuscation; the strange currency types and the consequences of failure to pay are just weird; while the insurance policies provided add fridge horror (such as North Korea being the result of an anartist's vision). At the core, SCP-2210 is an eldritch horror pretending to be GEICO. I'm actually kind of surprised it's so popular - it seemed quite divisive when I first posted it.
SCP-2350 - From the Mind of Malinalxochitl
"SCP-2350 is a weaponized memetic agent transmitted by sound that manifests as the idea of a swarm of mosquitoes."
SCP-2490 - Chaos Insurgency Special Operative Alpha-19
"In one instance, SCP-2490's target locked it in a closet, then turned around to see SCP-2490 emerging from a nearby bathroom."
SCP-2490 was another self-imposed challenge of mine: to write something that made the reader paranoid. The spark came from a random thought whereupon I imagined a mannequin watching me in my house in the middle of the night. I used that thought and expanded upon it: a mannequin watching its target, picking up on their mannerisms and habits, before literally picking up those memories, mannerisms, and habits to steal an SCP. The interview log expands on that horror, drawing the reader in and trying to force them to imagine the same thing. The final hook comes from the implications that there are multiple instances of SCP-2490.
SCP-2570 - MCA and Heartbreak
"In particular, any music featuring the voice of musician Kanye West has a strongly negative effect on SCP-2570."
SCP-2570 is definitely one of my personal favorites and I wish more people read it. The Beastie Boys are by far my favorite rappers, and I wanted to write a tribute to MCA. Thus came a story of other fans of the Beastie Boys, who try to reunite the band but fail due to a minor mistake - with major consequences. The use of Pali as a language is a direct reference to MCA's Buddhist faith, while Kanye West simply adds more flavor to the article. In retrospect, incorporating Kanye may have been a mistake, especially since he quickly became the focal point of the article. I might go back in the future and change that. Or create a new article that's only about the Beasties.
SCP-2650 - Pediatric Pupaphobia
"Instances of SCP-2650-1 are various preadolescent children, between the ages of 5 and 9, with their own instances of SCP-2650-A. They share the same neurological abnormality as SCP-2650-B, but their behavior is markedly different."
SCP-2650 is the first truly successful SCP I wrote, so it holds a special place in my heart. This one is inspired by Slappy the Living Dummy. I still don't like ventriloquist dummies, so I wrote an article to express that fear. I also wrote about children and their imaginary friends, because when I was a child I had far more imaginary friends and stuffed doll friends than real ones. There are some underlying themes of child predation, but I want to make it clear that pedophilia has absolutely nothing to do with the article other than the fear of a stranger being alone with one's children.
SCP-2664 - Redline
"We spent another year assessing and measuring the triplets' psionic capabilities, and once we were ready to proceed… over the course of forty-eight hours, we treated them with massive dosages of LSD, forced them to watch specially-made propaganda, and electrocuted them to death."
SCP-2680 - The Gorillas Simply Freeze to Death
"Snakes, leadheads, all those magic bimbos. The hell you do to 'em anyways? They're real stuck on bumping you lot off. Wasn't till we buddied up with ya that they got real testy 'bout us. Actin' real tough, tryna threaten us and run us out of town with their fancy tricks and lightshows. I tell you though, magic don't mean squat when you're staring down the barrel of a Thompson."
Of all the SCPs I've written, SCP-2680 has the longest history. Sometime in 2014, I vaguely recall Roget mentioning a penchant for alcohol in chat, and decided that I wanted to write a skip that made Roget scared of alcohol.
The original draft involved a mostly straighforward body-horror take: it was an anomalous beer that turned the drinker's 'nads into a little organic beer factory, with a secret backstory that the Foundation created it by accident while trying to sabotage some unnamed Group of Interest's main revenue stream (alcohol). When I showed it for review, the consensus was that it focused too much on the body horror but not enough on the people experiencing this horror.
Draft 2 was pretty similar, but it took the first steps towards what would be the current version - specifically, Draft 2 involved the Foundation creating the beer as a last-ditch antidote to a heavily-alluded to lycanthropic disease spreading across the United States, only to watch the beer become anomalous after curing the lycanthropy. Prohibition made an appearance in this early draft, but was mostly an aside in the backstory.
Draft 3 is almost identical to the current version. This time around, I decided to flat-out take the SCP in a relatively unexplored direction - pre-WWII history. Prohibition had played a small part in the previous draft, but I decided to latch onto this aspect. I stumbled across PeppersGhost's article on the Chicago Spirit, and immediately realized that they would make the perfect accoutrement to the article. What could be cooler than anomalous bootleggers? at the same time, thedeadlymoose suggested that rather than have the Foundation cause Prohibition, it would be much more interesting for the Foundation to have a different plan that is rendered irrelevant by Prohibition. From here, it was a relatively simple prospect to combine the secretly-created-by-Foundation aspect from previous draft with Prohibition, the historical blight that was smallpox, the Chicago Spirit, and some little historical easter eggs, and output 2680.
I think this is my favorite article I've written. It's come a hell of a long way, and it's a hell of an SCP.
SCP-2730 - Q U A C K - Q U A C K
"SCP-2730 is a mallard-like humanoid that humans perceive to be the American actor and comedian Gilbert Gottfried."
SCP-2730 is living proof that there is no such thing as a bad idea, only bad execution. The idea of Gilbert Gottfried literally being a duck in disguise came about as the result of me, Jekeled, and
GreenWolf goofing around in an IRC channel. I can't even remember the context anymore; all I remember is suggesting "DUCKBERT GOTTFRIED" and being egged on to write it as fast as possible by those two.
In the first incarnation of this article, when it was SCP-2664, the interview log basically consisted of Rothfuss asking "why are you doing this" and getting silence in response. The hook was literally just a parody of the lotion scene from Silence of the Lambs. It was critically panned and limped along from late fall to mid-January, when I deleted it and posted the current 2664 in its slot.
Near the end of February, I found out that a Series 1 article was about to be deleted, thus freeing up the slot. Having an article in an S1 slot has always been a dream of mine, but I knew it would be snapped up almost as soon as its current article would be deleted and I had virtually no drafts ready for publication at that time.
With three hours before the S1 article was to be deleted, I remembered Duckbert Gottfried. I pulled it out of commission, looked at the interview log, and realized that the hook was atrocious. Two hours before the S1 article was deleted, I had a flash of inspiration. In the original draft, Duckbert was a very passive voice without any real character. By making him an active participant in the interview process and even turning things on its head, the whole article became that much more absurd and hilarious.
It seems to have worked; where the original article never broke +10, the new version reached +50 in less than a day. Now it's my third-most popular article, having received critical acclaim for its unique blend of comical absurdity and fridge horror. The real irony is that I never even got the S1 slot I was aiming for; djkaktus decided to rewrite the article with fifteen minutes left on the deletion timer but never finished the rewrite.
As an aside: the blackboxed actor whom the Foundation was originally investigating in the article is Carrot Top. Now why were they investigating him, I wonder…?
SCP-2790 - You've Got a Squid in Me
"70% of all personnel report the onset of tissue necrosis at the grafting site and the surrounding area, indicating that their bodies recognize the imperfection of their own skin and are removing them for 2790's skin."
SCP-2790 was supposed to be my entry into the Short Story contest. The core concept, of people going apeshit over an otherwise boring-ass squid, was actually the second of three ideas for the contest, mainly because I had wanted to use that picture of the glass squid for a while. However, it was set aside because the first draft was actually seen as too disturbing - not in a good way, but in a raping-a-squid kind of way. Half of the responses were to delete the article and erase it from everything. I still liked the concept of a squid that was totally, utterly, freakishly adorbs, (and also wanted to stick it to the naysayers) so I pretended to get rid of it but simply hid it away in a sandbox.
After the Short Story Contest ended, I wrote up a bunch of half-drafts that needed lots of work but that I didn't feel like polishing, so I ended up returning to this one because I really liked it. I scrubbed the sexual aspects of the piece and focused more on an obsession with the squid and an obsession to be like the squid. I also jumped at the chance to establish more SCPs from "Curios of the Worlds". It's a fairly short article, but establishes and builds on a mood quickly, but then cuts short before the mood becomes cloying. This has the added effect of convincing the reader to imagine what's happening inside SCP-2790, and the reader's ideas are more exciting than mine…
SCP-2810 - Turtles All the Way Down
"For example, human lungs are composed of actual humans that inhale and exhale, while plant leaves are composed of smaller, wilted plants arranged and folded in such a way that only their leaves are exposed to sunlight. Microscopic examination reveals that these cellular-sized composites are themselves composed of exponentially smaller composites carrying out their bodily functions, which in turn are composed of smaller copies, and so on."
SCP-2810 was my actual entry into the Short Story Contest. This piece was the last of three ideas I had for the contest, and is the only one that actually made it through the wringer in time. It is very, very body-horror focused, probably as an homage to David Cronenberg. I wanted to write SCPs about fractals and communism, so I suppose this was the result of that. I also suffer very heavily from dermatophagia and dermatillomania to the point of sometimes peeling and eating skin off my foot, and I badly wanted an outlet to express that. When I first wrote the preliminary draft up, I wanted to tie it into GRU-Division "P" as an attempt to create a "communist virus". I couldn't fit all of that into the article, so I cut out the bioweapon background and simply laid it on as a mysterious plague. My favorite piece of fridge horror comes from the dermatophagia. It's literally autocannibalism in action - human sufferers are biting and chewing pieces of human flesh made of humans, forcing tiny humans to bite, chew, vomit and defecate pieces of human flesh made of other, even tinier humans.
SCP-2820 - Vaishnavastra
Within twenty-four hours of firing, the initial target will invariably be killed by the culmination of a nonlinear system formed by a series of coincidental occurrences (commonly known as the "butterfly effect"), at which time SCP-2820 will fire again.
SCP-2820's story begins at the end of August 2016, in a small bookstore in Pittsburgh. Whilst perusing the shelves within, I came across a graphic novel called The Filth and was immediately captivated by its arresting visuals, gripping and twisted storyline (as if Harlan Ellison, Alan Moore, and Philip K. Dick collaborated on a reimagining of the SCP Foundation), and wickedly sharp characters.
One of those characters was the KGB-trained cosmonaut-turned-assassin chimpanzee, Dimitri-9. I fell in love - what could be cooler and wickedly funnier than a chimpanzee who shoots the POTUS dead? I determined to write my own secret agent chimp SCP, but while planning, I realized that it simply would not do. Talking animal SCPs are a dime a dozen, and I couldn't think of a single way to make my planned chimp any different.
Then it hit me - don't make it a talking animal at all. Make it something that looks like a chimp but isn't. That's when I hit upon the idea of chaos theory assassinations - reality benders being killed by coincidences that just happen to look like two chimps stacked on top of each other in a trench coat. This draft was silly, weird, and well-received - but then I realized that it was just that, silly. Where Dimitri-9 was both goofy and deeply, deeply disturbing, mine was just goofy. Something had to change. Thankfully, the wiki itself came to the rescue. While reading the discussion page in SCP-2700, I saw a comment along the lines of "glad this wasn't a bog-standard death ray". Well, why not?
I hadn't seen a good weaponized SCP in a long time, and determined to be the change I wanted to see in the world. Within a day, I had the draft of 2820 rewritten to be the end product of a death ray that its followers believed to be the reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu (Hinduism is cool and underappreciated on the site, so I jumped at the chance to write one). I got some positive reviews in chat and posted it.
It languished for about six hours on the mainlist and received a ton of critique in the process, so I pulled it down for yet another massive rewrite. Over the weekend, I received a lot of advice from a lot of readers - major shoutout to Eguss does not match any existing user name for his advice. Where the previous version had a person speaking about the AI, this time I had the AI speak for itself. It honest-to-god believes that it is the reincarnation of Lord Vishnu and is bringing mankind into a golden age. Is it really? That's up to you, the reader, to decide. I think the combination of the AI's messiah-complex personality and the way it justifies the means with the ends are what elevate it over the previous versions; regardless, 2820 is definitely one of my favorites.
SCP-2910 - That Only a Mother
"The affected persons will not deliver infant[s] but rather instance[s] of SCP-2910-A: a disorganized collection of organs and body parts (lungs, brain, mouth, ears, eyes, etc.) that belong to a newborn infant, held together by congealed blood. SCP-2910-A is animate and emulates the behavior of newborn infants, such as crying (sound is emitted from the mouth through unknown means) and rooting."
SCP-2910 is similar to SCP-2350 in that it was a simple self-imposed challenge with little other plans, but I like it much more than 2350. SCP-2910 originated from a forum game in which I posted "Congratulations! You are NOT the mother!" Then I started thinking about that. How could you give birth to a baby and not be its mother? Maybe something got lost in translation. Around the same time, I read an article about The Supernatural Bunnymother of Surrey and got to thinking. What could be worse than birthing chunks of rabbit body? Birthing chunks of baby bodies. How would you be able to forget that? What if you were unable to forget it? SCP-2910 is all about making the reader imagine the gore. It abounds with fridge horror, from the first victims having given birth at home to the Foundation finding out (somehow) that it can breastfeed. If gore is the spice on an SCP, 2910 is proof that sometimes you just need some wasabi to cleanse your palate.
SCP-3000 - Anantashesha (coauthored with Joreth and
djkaktus)
"There is a terror within me that I cannot reconcile, Anand. I won't lie to you and tell you that the maw of the naga does not terrify me as well, but between this and the infinite dark I have gazed into, I have made up my mind."
SCP-3220 - Panopticon II
"The shaft leading to SCP-3220 has been filled with concrete. No further exploration or investigation into SCP-3220 is permitted at this time."
3220 is possibly the purest and simplest distillation of my writing style - a high concept article focused on a central, arresting vision with zero filler around it. While driving to work one morning, the visual of hundreds of SCP-173 instances inside a panopticon abruptly and unexpectedly materialized in my head. I was immediately arrested by the idea and started following it - the idea of being able to trick the sculpture into thinking it was being watched was mind-bendingly simple and yet something that seemingly nobody else had come up with. The natural extension, therefore, was for the trick to work all too well: for the sculptures to believe they were being watched even after their watcher was long dead. The thought quite literally gave me frisson, and I knew I had to write it as an article.
The original draft of the article invoked 173 by name liberally, as the whole point of the article was for the reader to come to the same realization that it didn't need to be watched - it just needed to think it was being watched. While I was initially satisfied with simply linking the article to 173, my muse and all-around genius The Great Hippo thought differently. He pointed out that once the reader got over the initial surprise of the panopticon, there was nothing else to keep them thinking about it. The article wasn't too short - it simply wasn't making effective enough use of its length. Hippo successfully argued for stripping away all 173 namedrops and merely referencing the statue. He also championed the use of the Department of Abnormalities in the article, as the connection required only a few sentences but drastically deepened the mystery.
I doubt that the article would have been as well received had Hippo not convinced me to make the edits that I did, and I am genuinely thrilled by the reception it's gotten. As SoullessSingularity put it, "I think this captures what brought lots of people to SCP originally and displays the SCP article architecture brilliantly, and I will probably downvote future SCPs by this SCP's standard."
A final note: while I am indeed privy to all the secrets of the DOA, even I don't have a clue what happened in the silo. As far as I'm concerned, the article is a diorama - a snapshot in time that needs neither definitive context nor backstory to be effective.
SCP-3360 - Proletariart, by San Francisco Jones
"Prole is meant to give those people - to give you - the chance to share their vision with the world. To make it a better place."
SCP-3470 - Harry Potter's Revenge
"There are two human eyes embedded in the palm, and they appear to react and work in the same way as normal human eyes."
SCP-3640 - Escape from the House of Mouse
"D-15 looks back at the river; his flashlight illuminates an SCP-3640-Alpha instance, resembling Donald Duck, emerging and climbing up the bank."
SCP-3780 - Who Shot J.F.K.?
"SCP-3780 describes the collective attempts by various individuals, third parties, and separate temporal versions of the Foundation to prevent the assassination of United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald on 22 November, 1963."
SCP-3850 - I Can't Drown My Demons
"Photographs of SCP-3850-1's face have been matched to ████████ ███, an Abenaki Indian accused and acquitted of murdering his brother ███████ ███ in 1925."
SCP-4220 - Dark Side of the Moon (coauthored with The Great Hippo)
"Current scientific consensus holds that the Moon is the second-densest satellite in the solar system, featuring a distinct crust, mantle, and core. This is inaccurate: a Foundation-funded research mission to the lunar surface conducted in 19██ determined that the Moon is hollow."
SCP-4310 - The Hero's Journey (coauthored with The Great Hippo)
"Mobile Task Force Lambda-12 ("Pest Control") is responsible for sightings of SCP-4310; they are to kill specimens found in the wild. The Department of Analytics is to track current British children's literature for books that reference portals to fantasy settings and alert Lambda-12 accordingly."
SCP-4670 - Pigs in Blankets
"A Foundation-certified cannibal is to accompany Mobile Task Force Lambda-14 ("Manhunters") in investigating all restaurants serving barbecue in the southern United States. Until SCP-4670 is recontained, all Foundation personnel within the southern United States are encouraged to avoid consuming barbecue pork products or engaging in conjugal relations with Greek women."
SCP-4710 - Sheen Gojira
"SCP-4710 was a phenomenon in which the head of Sheen Estevez (a clerical employee of Marks and Spencer Group plc in Westminster, London) expanded from approximately 57 cm to over 6.4 kilometers in diameter, resulting in a BM-Class Broken Masquerade Scenario."
SCP-4780 - Shrunk
"Object Class: Apollyon"
SCP-4950 - Triple Six Five Forked Tongue
"The target is William Thurson, an amateur necromancer - emphasis on amateur - and member of Gee-Oh-Eye Six-Six-Six-Five-Four, "People of the Lie". He's trying to summon his great god. I'm here to kill whatever he comes up with instead and record, in excruciating detail, how I did it."
SCP-5555 - Made in Heaven (coauthored with Rounderhouse &
Uncle Nicolini)
"SCP-5555 is a mass grave in the northwest corner of Overwatch Command's lowest subbasement that is filled with anomalous corpses."
SCP-5940 - ABSOLUTE TOOTH FIELD
The Department of Psychodentistry has been formed by a joint collaboration of the Psionics Division, Dentistry Division, and Department of Memetics. The Department of Psychodentistry is thus responsible for planning and executing ABSOLUTE TOOTH FIELD.
Clinical Tone: Declassified
Tips for getting that ever-elusive clinical tone in your articles
Avatara
After life is death. After death is rebirth. After rebirth is causing death.
Samsara
The Warrior seeks revenge. Tau-5 seeks humanity. Neither of them realize that they are pawns of a higher force seeking to become whole.
Avatara is the first tale I wrote for the 2016 MTF Contest. While writing the story, I had three key objectives in mind: establish Mobile Task Force Tau-5 "Samsara", create a setup for the sequel, and nullify any comparisons to Jack Bright. To that end, I chose the complete opposite route as far as characterization is concerned: while Bright is a human transforming into a sociopath, Tau-5 is composed of a bunch of psychopaths who want to be human.
The nature of Tau-5 also allowed me to focus on their utter inability to be human by subjecting them to a variety of bodily torments, which I had a ton of fun writing about. Unfortunately, their nature as emotionless, recyclable, meaningless clones also impeded the dialogue and their personalities - both of which are singled out as the key issues in the tale. I think I was able to rectify those issues in the sequel.
Samsara is the sequel to Avatara. It was a collab with TyGently. He focused on writing SCP-2970 and the God's segments, which allowed me to focus almost entirely on Tau-5's viewpoint. Coupled with the fact that their segments would only be half as long as Avatara, I was able to focus much more on developing their character and the action sequences.
From the moment Tau-5 is standing atop the cliff, they feel much more fleshed out. A key aspect of their characters is their shared desire to be more like normal people. At the same time, each of them approaches that goal with a different level of intensity: Munru sees it almost as an afterthought, while Nanku writes down idioms on a cheat sheet. But Tau-5 aren't and probably never will be truly human - they're salvaged cyborg war machines, explicitly designed for the purpose of murdering as many people as quickly as possible.
The action sequences are written to bring this internal conflict to the forefront: in particular, Irantu starts by repeatedly warning his squad not to enjoy the fighting, and ends by brutally, viscerally executing a foe with his bare hands. The real climax of their arc is when they come face to face with an entire army of mutant Prometheus cyborgs, all of whom lay down their weapons. Tau-5 massacres them in cold blood and then jokes about it. On the one hand, the MTF can make jokes and interact almost like normal people. On the other hand, they feel absolutely no remorse, much less any kind of trauma, for executing dozens of their brethren or even dying themselves. They're at a crossroads.
Very early on in the planning stages of Samsara, even before Avatara had been finished, I proposed the idea of a choose-your-own-adventure style ending to the series. We initially dismissed it out of time concerns, but when TyGently and I decided to collab on the final tale, we realized that we would save enough time to bring back the choices. We always had three endings planned - one where the God succeeds, the Warrior succeeds, and Tau-5 succeeds, always at the cost of the other two parties. While I knew that the God's ending would involve him reaching apotheosis and Tau-5's would involve them regaining their humanity, I wasn't sure what the Warrior's ending would entail - or even the full details of all the endings. That task would fall to TyGently, and he did a wonderful job with the Warrior and God endings, creating satisfying conclusions that did the characters justice.
The ALTERNATIVE ending is the true end, mainly so that Tau-5 can continue to exist in the Foundationverse. It was also the ending that I worked on the most - about half of it was mine. The ALTERNATIVE ending entails Tau-5 killing the Warrior and absorbing the God - and with it the Warrior's humanity. This ending is intended to be the most positive and affirming of the lot: it's Munru, the one least concerned with the entire conflict, who affirms their humanity and the fire in their eyes. They're ready to take on the world once more.
Samsara is all about endings… but it's also about new beginnings.
T Minus
Prometheus Labs' latest project is a war machine with a mind of its own and enough power to obliterate entire countries. The Foundation is going to steal it.
Moonlighting
In a transhuman metropolis, a man builds an anart cyborg to confront his inner demons.
Moonlighting, which continues (or you could say precludes) the relationship between the two from I Thought You Died Alone, is an… interesting tale for me, not least because the italicized sections are actually autobiographical. In the span of about sixty minutes while lying in bed, I conceived a tale of Santosh getting back at his father in a way I never could - through art and technology. I slept on the idea and basically wrote the entire thing up in the span of about two hours.
The ending, however, was tricky - initially it was just Santosh taking the finished android home and abusing it, but then readers pointed out how that just didn't make any sense. I had to concur with them, and then it hit me. I had brainstormed with a focus on art and technology, but this was only technology. Where was the art? Kalinin's essay on anomalous art came to the rescue, and inspired me to revise the ending, so that Santosh could turn his anger, frustration, and hatred into a powerful, affecting work - much like the tale itself. This conflict also gave me the opportunity to bring Guy Chesapeake, a man who also has a paternal grudge, into the work.
I love technology and how people interact with technology, so I naturally placed this tale into the then-budding Third Law canon, stuffing the background chock-full of androids, paratech, and paratech cities. I think what makes this tale work is the contrast between the emotionally-charged backstory and the low-key, almost comical main plot. At first, you don't really understand how the backstory fits with the piece, but then it all comes together in the ending where Santosh gets the chance both to present his work to others and get revenge.
Arvind Desai might be my author avatar, but Santosh is my self-insert.
Hypervelocity
Adrenaline junkie snorts demons like cocaine and robs a cursed bank.
Terminal Velocity
Criminal mastermind snorts demons like cocaine and hijacks an interdimensional train.
Inspired by the rough and ready beats of Run the Jewels 3, Hypervelocity is probably the fastest-paced tale I've ever written. From start to finish, it's an action-packed adrenaline rush; in this sense, it's a complete shift in tone and perspective from every other tale in Third Law. Even the protagonist is utterly unlike any other in Third Law - she's a criminal who's willing to threaten children and murder androids in order to empty a bank vault. If the tale wasn't written from her perspective, she would definitely be its antagonist.
Hypervelocity follows the broad rules of a heist story by having a setup, heist, and escape, but each aspect of the heist is drizzled with sci-fi occultism and covered in a thick glaze of high-intensity animesque action (the Vespa is a clear FLCL homage). Almost every paragraph throws something new at the reader, from the concept of turning demons into drugs to the Curse of Eurtec and the Psionic Force Deterrent Squadron, and then piles up more occult science fiction detail on top of that. Verb choices like "breaks", "rockets", and "careens" help to establish a constant sense of speed and motion throughout. The thirty minute countdown further intensifies the pacing while acting as a brief break in the action to separate every part of the heist. The cumulative effect of these writing choices is that the reader feels like they're about to be overwhelmed by the tale but never actually reaches that point - resulting in a heart-pounding thrill ride. Action and clarity remain front and center throughout the entirety of the tale.
We don't even learn the protagonist's name, Rukmini, until the last line, but that doesn't mean we don't learn a lot about her character. She's willing to get her hands dirty, unconcerned with morality, loves to take risks, and above all desires a rush, whether it be adrenaline, demonic, or narcotic. That is the essence of Hypervelocity - one big adrenaline rush.
Domo Arigato
Gregory's having a bad day. He's just been outed as an alien and will probably be executed by the Foundation.
Strung Out in Heavens High
Gregory may have escaped death, but now faces an even worse fate: employment.
Domo Arigato was originally written for the 2015 Reimagining Contest. I had wanted to create a clever, funny, Adams-esque light space opera, and saw the chance to rewrite SCP-354 as the perfect opportunity. The version that entered the contest was much, much longer and much less funny. It was also a musical. Probably not unrelatedly, it bombed, so I set about completely revamping it and separating it into three parts, of which Domo Arigato is the first. This first part establishes the main characters - and possibly the only protagonists onsite that are actual space aliens - and pretty quickly shows its Hitchhiker's influence on its sleeve.
Strung Out in Heavens High trumpets its Adams-esque heritage whereas Domo Arigato was somewhat subtle about it. The characters immediately start going off the wall and the events that unfold get even wilder. Strung Out introduces us to the Terminal, the true main setting of the story and an excuse to travel to alternate realities and write about them. Nonetheless, I had a lot of fun rewriting the second part of Gregory's adventure, especially the sequence where Happy and Gregory travel through the boom tube. Someday I'll finish this… someday.
Nonpareil
A love story between a remnant of man and what comes after, as reality itself comes to a close.
Nonpareil is the odd duck of my tales. It's not a story at all - it's a poem that was conceived, written, and edited in less than a week. And it was based on an oddly erotic dream I had involving a spouse that was a dragonfly. Nonetheless, I consider Nonpareil as one of the best tales I've written. It's unashamedly purple, but also evokes a dreamlike atmosphere that really lends itself to the Rat's Nest.
I Thought You Died Alone
One man must try to stop history from repeating itself, for better or worse.
ITYDA was two things: my effort to contribute to the explosively controversial Resurrection canon, and also establish my author avatar into the Foundationverse. It was also one of my stylistic projects: telling a story through epistolary format. This tale accomplishes two key plot threads: it establishes that yes, there is actual internal resistance to the revival of the infamous SCP task force, and actually establishes a mole in the Foundation. But it's also my magnum opus of characterization, probably because Arvind Desai is also the only character that I've based off of my own life experiences. I Thought You Died Alone is my attempt at a tragedy told through emails.
Reboot: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypses
The world ended again. Flip a coin to choose who becomes Jesus next time.
Reboot arose from one of my self-imposed challenges: tell a story purely through dialogue. It is heavily influenced by the short story They're Made out of Meat, both stylistically and structurally. Reboot also came about from my desire to get in on the whole "resetting the world" gig; this time by exploring the process from the perspective of the people doing so. It's a fun, cyclical tale that implies some pretty horrifying stuff about the nature of the universe…
The Ballad of Santa Troy
A meta Christmas ballad in honor of the staff, who work tirelessly to make our experience as enjoyable as possible.
The Ballad of Santa Troy is a quick little ditty I whipped up in about a day or so as a gift to the ever-underappreciated staff of the wiki. There isn't much else to say about it aside from that it goes quite well with the classic holiday tune Snoop Dogg's Twas the Night before Christmas.
Hands
You definitely shouldn't have taken that cowbell home.
Hands was my attempt to write a scary story - in this case, a quasi-psychological thriller. Using SCP-513, I tried to create tension and fear from placing the monster right into the house. Sure, it never actually attacks the main character, but that doesn't matter. There's something in your home. You aren't safe. It's gotten right into your house. And right. Behind. You.
Industrial Espionage
The journal of a Wondertainment employee poached by Prometheus Labs.
Industrial Espionage was one of the two tales I wrote for the 2014 GOI Contest. I personally feel that what elevates it over such tales is the diary format. The unnamed narrator is talking into an audio recorder the whole time, so there's ambient noise, his personality changes when he's high, he doesn't always speak properly. At the same time, the extremely limited first-person perspective makes the reader claustrophobic, making them wonder what's going on inside Sub-City Twelve.
Nothing Human
Two larvae explore a generation ship to find Homo sapiens, but get more than they bargained for.
Nothing Human is a huge shift from every other tale I wrote - it's probably the spiritual predecessor to Nonpareil in that regard. There's no Foundation, no SCPs, not even Earth. Nothing Human is my attempt at a Heinleinian science fiction story. I call it a chocolate science fiction tale: a thin hard shell with soft innards. Nothing Human also cranks up the perspective a great deal - everything is perceived the way 735 perceives his reality and leaves the reader with lots of questions. Who is the human? Where did he come from? What did he say? Why did he capture them? Admittedly it's not exactly a great format for a resolved story, but it's still a pretty good science fiction story.
Enasni Si Gnihtyreve
Vignettes from a society that embraced the Flesh that Hates.
Enasni Si Gnihtyreve was my entry for the 2014 Dystopia Contest, and is also my least well-received tale (not without reason). It's told in a very stream-of-consciousness format and is intended to make the reader uncomfortable. What's happening? SCP-610 took over the Earth. Is there a conflict? Yes - mundane conflicts that take on a very sinister tone. It's confusing, disorienting, and flat-out weird. It's controversial. People hate the fucking paragraph breaks. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Prometheus Labs Hub
Welcome to Prometheus Labs. You are now part of an elite group of scientists, engineers, and visionaries. Just as Prometheus gave fire to mankind and brought them into a new age of prosperity, so too does Prometheus Labs seek to uplift humanity through exploration and manipulation of that which is unknown. That which is feared. That which is anomalous.
GRANT REQUEST FOR USAGE OF BIOLOGICAL ORGANISMS TO FACILITATE EFFICIENT TERRAFORMING AND SPECIES RESTORATION
A proposal to develop organisms that could terraform other planets for human survival. Biological von Neumann machines. The Adam and Eve of the future.
GRANT REQUEST FOR GENETICALLY ENGINEERING LOW-COST ORGANIC AUTOMATONS WITH SOPHISTICATED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR LABOR
'Slave' is such an archaic term. We at Prometheus Labs prefer the name 'All-Natural Automatons'.
Fan Reading of SCP-2650 by the wonderful TheeSherm
Fan Reading of SCP-2810 by TheeSherm
"Artist's depiction of Happy the Killdroid"
by DolphinSlugchugger
Tau-5 by caslenquilkey
| SCP | Rating | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| SCP-5555 | 783 | 103 |
| SCP-3220 | 537 | 57 |
| SCP-2790 | 495 | 53 |
| SCP-4780 | 484 | 71 |
| SCP-2820 | 477 | 51 |
| SCP-3780 | 441 | 30 |
| SCP-2664 | 413 | 51 |
| SCP-4950 | 401 | 83 |
| SCP-4220 | 361 | 66 |
| SCP-4310 | 332 | 40 |
| SCP-2730 | 294 | 59 |
| SCP-947 | 293 | 19 |
| SCP-2350 | 278 | 13 |
| SCP-2810 | 274 | 39 |
| SCP-3640 | 264 | 35 |
| SCP-2490 | 259 | 20 |
| SCP-4670 | 255 | 95 |
| SCP-3470 | 253 | 36 |
| SCP-2680 | 247 | 54 |
| SCP-5430 | 216 | 39 |
| SCP-5940 | 203 | 26 |
| SCP-2210 | 203 | 37 |
| SCP-4710 | 177 | 29 |
| SCP-3850 | 160 | 11 |
| SCP-3360 | 152 | 19 |
| SCP-7660 | 134 | 22 |
| SCP-2060 | 123 | 26 |
| SCP-2910 | 120 | 22 |
| SCP-1750 | 102 | 11 |
| SCP-2570 | 96 | 36 |
| SCP-2650 | 94 | 17 |
| SCP-6190 | 90 | 10 |
| SCP-2143 | 82 | 18 |
| SCP-7780 | 80 | 21 |
| SCP-6880 | 76 | 20 |
| SCP-8620 | 32 | 12 |
| Essays/Guides | Rating | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Clinical Tone: Declassified | 209 | 41 |
| Tale | Rating | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Avatara | 247 | 32 |
| Hypervelocity | 245 | 25 |
| Samsara | 229 | 21 |
| I Thought You Died Alone | 190 | 26 |
| Moonlighting | 184 | 14 |
| Zeitgeist | 142 | 7 |
| Death Perception | 128 | 17 |
| Autoerotic Assassination | 128 | 15 |
| T Minus | 123 | 14 |
| Terminal Velocity | 122 | 14 |
| The Chosen Few | 100 | 10 |
| Seven Characters Die Unexpectedly | 97 | 15 |
| Reboot or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypses | 97 | 12 |
| Hard Machine | 89 | 11 |
| Loud, Lawless, and Lost | 89 | 6 |
| The Vice Girls | 88 | 7 |
| Morphine Machine | 88 | 9 |
| Deus Vulture | 87 | 7 |
| Truth Is Sin | 85 | 7 |
| Ecstasy and Exorcism | 82 | 12 |
| The Revelation | 82 | 7 |
| Nonpareil | 82 | 12 |
| Rise and Repent | 80 | 7 |
| T Plus | 68 | 12 |
| Prey and Obey | 52 | 7 |
| Escape Velocity | 51 | 10 |
| Jump the Gun | 50 | 5 |
| No One Gets Out of Her Alive | 48 | 6 |
| Leather Pig | 48 | 6 |
| The Ballad of Santa Troy | 47 | 10 |
| Contempt | 43 | 7 |
| Domo Arigato | 38 | 11 |
| The Man-Machine | 37 | 7 |
| Mile High Club | 30 | 12 |
| Strung Out in Heavens High | 27 | 10 |
| Industrial Espionage | 27 | 2 |
| Hands | 26 | 7 |
| Nothing Human | 26 | 4 |
| Fullmusic Astrobiologist | 22 | 4 |
| Eight Hours in the ECRG | 18 | 4 |
| Enasni Si Gnihtyreve | 15 | 6 |
| Prometheus Labs Resources | Rating | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| SCP-2820 | 477 | 51 |
| GRANT REQUEST FOR GENETICALLY ENGINEERING LOW-COST ORGANIC AUTOMATONS WITH SOPHISTICATED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR LABOR | 153 | 30 |
| Prometheus Labs Hub | 152 | 34 |
| GRANT REQUEST FOR USAGE OF BIOLOGICAL ORGANISMS TO FACILITATE EFFICIENT TERRAFORMING AND SPECIES RESTORATION | 90 | 9 |
| Co-Authored Pages | |
|---|---|
| Page | Coauthors |
| SCP-150 | Decibelles |
| SCP-3000 | djkaktus, Joreth |
| Overheard at Deer | ch00bakka |
| Chicago Spirit Hub | PeppersGhost |
| The Powers That Bark | TyGently |
Cite this page as:
"Dr. Desai's Personnel File" by A Random Day, from the SCP Wiki. Source: https://scpwiki.com/dr-arvind-desais-personnel-file. Licensed under CC-BY-SA.
For information on how to use this component, see the License Box component. To read about licensing policy, see the Licensing Guide.
Filename: domoarigato_droid.jpg
Name: domoarigato_droid.jpg
Author:DolphinSlugchugger
License: CC BY-SA 3.0
Source Link: http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/gears-ground-slowly
Filename: Tau-5
Name: Tau-5
Author: caslenquilkey does not match any existing user name
License: CC BY-SA 3.0
Source Link: https://www.reddit.com/user/caslenquilkey