Dr Rioghail's Personnel File

Name: Dr. █████ ██████, assigned the alias of 'Rioghail' according to Protocol Herostratus-4.

Security Clearance: Level 3 Rescinded following Dr. 'Rioghail's disappearance.

Duties: Establishing containment procedures for Safe and Euclid SCP objects. Reviewing and evaluating containment procedures for objects catalogued at Sector-██ in light of new research data. Rioghail is no longer considered to be in the employ of the Foundation.

History: Dr. 'Rioghail' was employed by the Foundation following a breach of containment at [DATA EXPUNGED], during which he, along with several of his colleagues at ████████ University Physics Laboratory, were exposed inadvertently to SCP-████. Along with a fellow researcher, ████ ████, Rioghail was able to devise a rudimentary method of containing the anomaly, preventing further damage and loss of life. In light of Rioghail's proven ability to successfully contain an anomalous object with minimal information and use of lateral thinking, Rioghail was inducted as a member of the Foundation.

On ██/██/████, Dr. 'Rioghail' disappeared from Foundation surveillance. At present, he has not been located. Documentation found at his home indicate that prior to his disappearance Rioghail suffered a psychotic break. It is postulated, although at this time unproven, that this was the result of unintended cross-contamination of SCP-███ and SCP-████, stemming from a flaw in the containment procedures Dr. Rioghail had created for SCP-████. Dr. Rioghail appears to have believed, as a result of his psychosis, that he was the person responsible for the creation of several SCP Object whose files he had largely authored, and was submitting them to an unknown audience for evaluation. Documents recovered from Rioghail's home demonstrating his irrational beliefs have been attached to this file.

SCP items catalogued by Dr. Rioghail prior to his disappearance:
SCP-1109 - The Painkiller
SCP-1153 - Programmable Patients
SCP-1135 - Living Village
SCP-1077 - The Devil's Cap Mushroom
SCP-1209 - Many Eyes in Many Places
SCP-1409 - The Whalesong Beacon
SCP-1509 - Blade of Rebirth
SCP-1609 - The Remains of a Chair
SCP-1615 - Photosynthetic Manna
SCP-1871 - A Vorpal Sword
SCP-2071 - Sir Michael Cavendish, in the Guise of the King of Serpents
SCP-2109 - A Tragic Accident

Additional documentation believed to be authored by Dr. 'Rioghail':

Anno Domino

Documentation recovered from the address of Dr. 'Rioghail'.

+ Notes on SCP-1109

Security Program: Standard Bearer (catch-all security program for inert safe-class items stored at Site-██.

My first SCP. Accidentally sandboxed this incorrectly, and made a sandbox just for this article. I then posted it up in the forum discussion, and after getting a decidedly lacklustre response it took me nearly a week to put it up. I was rather apprehensive with this one, and fully expected it to be shot down within 24 hours of posting.

What I realise now, but didn't then, was that the article really does lack an effective hook, however since the article is in the low forties at this point I'm not going to argue. I think this one might have a score that is slightly higher than is representative of its quality- as I recall I made it in the middle of a bunch of terrible articles, and I think some people were just happy to see a first SCP that wasn't terrible.

+ Notes on SCP-1153

Security program: Spitting Distance.

This is my favourite article thus far, even though it isn't the highest-rated. The reason I was so pleased with this was that I got a real sense that everything in the article was my own work. I can't identify any real source of inspiration for this one, and I'd never heard of a similar idea being done, so I got a real sense of accomplishment from the feeling that what I'd come up with in this article was original. I now realise this wasn't entirely a new idea, but I'm still very pleased with how it turned out. I find that articles which spring into your head fully-formed and only take a few tweaks in the final stages to fine-tune are the most satisfying.

+ Notes on SCP-1135

Security program: Prodigal Son (Manna Charitable Foundation information is under Harvest Home if anyone ever writes another article using them).

I've received an unusual amount of praise for this piece among people who have read it but don't have accounts here, both in real life and on other websites. Some people just like the idea of benevolent SCPs without visible drawbacks, it seems.

This came about very suddenly, while I was technically supposed to be doing other things, and I write it up in a hurry to get it out of the way. I chose to locate it in India because I rarely see SCPs from less economically developed countries around here, and I wanted to set something there. I didn't even realise at the time that 'thing what looks like a normal object but is actually ALIVE' was close to being a cliche.

+ Notes on SCP-1077

Security program: Cave Canem.

SCP-1077 is easily the worst of the articles that I've written, and it's fortunate that it got enough upvotes to stave off deletion while I fixed the myriad errors wrong with this. It serves as a cautionary tale against writing up half a file, then changing your idea to something totally different. When I posted it up, it was a mess of mistakes, run-ons, half-finished sentences and missing blackboxes. I'm eternally grateful to Adam Smascher for pointing out the large number of problems with this so I could fix them.

Initially, this article started out as mushrooms that made you say stuff likely to get you killed. However, as I wrote it I changed it into its current form (a closer approximation to the original idea can be found under the voided containment procedures. I tried to tell a story, rather than describe an object, with this one. However, I screwed it up to an extent, and it didn't do as well as I'd hope. However, the lessons I learned here came in handy for writing up SCP-1609 later on.

+ Notes on SCP-1209

Security program: Tin Mine.

My first attempt at using an unusual picture for an article, SCP-1209 was a pretty simple idea that I didn't drop the ball on like my previous one, but I can't say that it was anything special. Inspired heavily by a recent X-Files binge I'd been on, and of course by the fantastic picture in one of the SCP-fuel articles. Once again, thanks to Gears on that for the picture, which really carried the article off.

+ Notes on SCP-1409

Security program: September Morning (overall classification for mind-affecting recordings). Stuff related to the whale is under Massachusetts (singular uncontained marine lifeforms).

Inspired (as someone successfully guessed) by a failed SCP somebody else put up, which was some sort of disease transmitted between shoes that made people march into the sea. The concept struck a chord with me when I read it initially, but given its rating I decided to overhaul the whole idea and retool it myself rather than trying to ask for a rewrite. I cut out the parts that didn't really matter to my knowledge and elaborated on the interesting bits (like the destination of the compulsion) and threw in a psychic whale for good measure because I really liked the idea of a psychic whale.

Said failed article has since been posted, and retained, as SCP-1667, and I made a terrible gaffe on its discussion thread because I forgot about the original version. Many apologies and thanks to Dr Somnus, the author.

+ Notes on SCP-1609

Security program: Jellyfish. Run A Mile for GOC-related information.

Currently my most popular article (although given the heights other peoples' articles have reached, this isn't that exciting). This started its life as a Tale, actually. It was called 'Evidence Collected for Inquest of May 16th', and was an in-universe attack on the Log Of Anomalous Objects and its habit of destroying SCPs, which doesn't gel at all with my headcanon. However, as I wrote, I began to feel that the story would work better as a mainlist SCP, but that referencing the Log too overtly might not be a good idea. I changed the people responsible for the chair's state from Foundation officials to GOC operatives, which at the same time made containment much easier.

Also, I love this one, because it gave me the opportunity to write the words "…all visitors to the enclosure must remark on the beauty of the flowerbed, with particular emphasis on the quality of the mulch" in the containment procedures.

+ Notes on SCP-1509

Security Program: Sun Dog.

My first outing into the realms of visceral horror. The idea initially came to me after reading China Mieville's book Kraken, in which a hitman gets into an envelope with magical assistance, mails himself to a target, and clambers out of the envelope to kill them. From there, it was a simple step of turn the envelope into a gaping wound.

Of course, the entire idea got completely reworked when I decided to turn it into the world's messiest resurrection ritual. I decided that the wound would lead to the realm of the dead, hence the addition of all the references to funerary figurines in the original version, thereby adding a bunch of death/rebirth imagery to the article.

The association between ants and death is not mythological, or my own invention. It's a reference to Dali, of all things- I'd recently seen The Metamorphosis Of Narcissus and loved the idea of ants being connected to death (also, Dali associated them with female genitalia, so that also fit with the 'warped rebirth' aspect of the item). Probably the most time I spent on this was searching for the right species of ant, and the Pharaoh Ant was the first Indonesian ant that I found. On the plus side, the origins of the Pharaoh Ant are unknown (believed to be from Indonesia), so I've now made it my headcanon that SCP-1509 is far older than expected, and is the original source of the Pharaoh Ant, which would not otherwise exist in nature. Yes it's silly, but I like the idea.

+ Notes on SCP-1615

Security Program: Harvest Home (along with other Manna Charitable Foundation stuff).

"When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, "What is it?" For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, "It is the bread the LORD has given you to eat." - Exodus 16:15

The verse which inspired the name for the Manna Charitable Foundation, and also the number for this article. Apparently a bunch of people liked the Manna Charitable Foundation following their debut in SCP-1135.

One of these people wrote an article (1139), which was essentially famine relief that caused anomalous weight gain. So far so good, but it was interpreted by a number of readers as pandering to fat fetishism and it got deleted. The author gave me permission to re-write, and with VAElynx's help I re-wrote it into this.

The article is also indebted in part to Smapti and his SCP-1176. I liked the idea that the MCF had made a massive, terrible mistake in their history, and I used that to colour the MCF's depiction in this article, showing them to be a competent organisation trying to shake off the spectre of their mistakes.

+ Notes on SCP-1871

Security Program: Rip Current (the stuff behind the second expungement, and the identity of 'Richard', is under its own security program, Settled Debt).

Written for Drewbear's birthday. I was a little unsure of whether to submit anything, and this is easily the biggest rush job of an article I've ever written. The whole thing took about 45 minutes (10 minutes of research, 15 minutes of writing, 15 minutes of a very speedy complete rewrite, and then 5 minutes to proofread). Acknowledgements go out to Drewbear, without whom I wouldn't have been bothered to write anything this month; Rumetzen, who inadvertently catalysed me into action by posting his own birthday challenge and got me to post my first article in about 8 months; and finally whoever wrote the original SCP-267 (still archived over at SCP Classic). And, of course, Lewis Carroll.

This started out as a weapon that could only be swung by people in a specific state of mind (enhanced by taking dissociative drugs), triggering a variety of sensory effects but also giving the subject a sense of triumph and some sort of bizarre insight. The whole thing was very vague, which I realized and decided to change it to its current form.

I was very careful to try to make the article read as if the effects are completely disconnected, but on closer inspection all tie into a narrative that the reader can understand, but which can't be totally understood. From the looks of it, this appears to have worked.

+ Notes on SCP-2071

Security Program: Spanish Gold.

There's not really any interesting story behind the development of this one - the principal germ of the idea comes from the painting The Ghost of a Flea and the rest of William Blake's work, and was bashed together unaided over the course of a week or so. The first thing to come to me was the image of the painting itself, and its title - the main problems I faced were coming up with effects that helped to tell as story - since I knew the title would be '…in the Guise of the King of Serpents' the poisoning and reptile-gathering effects flowed naturally, but coming up with a way of tying the story to its effects was difficult. Turning it into a horcrux that produced humanoid lizard-foetuses fixed that problem.

Jardine is rather transparently based on William Blake, what with the strange visions, idiosyncratic religious ideas (as evidenced by the fact the Horizon Initiative has contained one of his paintings) and unusual paintings. Jardine's early death by tuberculosis is a reference to the death of Blake's fellow Romantic, Keats. Cavendish isn't based on anyone in particular, save for the Victorian staple of dreadful stories of spousal poisonings.

If you didn't get it, the basic premise of the SCP is that Jardine's visions were real, that his painting functioned as a sort of soul trap, allowing Cavendish (or at least the twisted image of him as the King of Serpents) to interact with the world from the beyond, with the foetus being an attempt to bring Cavendish back into the world. It's also a very good thing that the portrait was taken with Cavendish looking to one side, for reasons I'll leave the reader to figure out.

I have no idea if Jardine will ever appear again, but I included Jardine's other works to attempt to limit myself from making that attempt (I find Jardine interesting, but I can't think of what other paintings I might conjure up, and would rather not feel obligated to try). That said, I included a line in SCP-1135 describing the MCF as an apparently fictional organisation to resist the temptation to push it as a GOI, and the rest of the site roundly ignored it and wrote their own stuff (much to my delight).

+ Notes on SCP-2109

Security Programs: Ragged Claws covers the anomaly itself, while the existence of IAKOB is part of Mahogany, and the workings of SILVER CRESCENT is part of Light Touch, a security program covering a group of counter-memetic anti-espionage measures. The reader in this case has been read into Ragged Claws and Mahogany, but not Light Touch.

SCP-2109 was me trying to write something traditionally creepy. Most of my articles are intended to be weird or intriguing rather than scary or horrifying (with the obvious exception of SCP-1509, which is straightforward body horror. However I decided to see if I could write something potentially creepy, and happened upon the image of a man wandering around his living room, as seen by a nanny-cam, completely oblivious to the creature dressed in black in the corner of the room, watching him.

This went through a lot of permutations in my head. At one point, it was related to the Daevites and attacked historians, but I scrapped that because it made the concept over-complicated when it didn't need to be. I'd still love to revisit the Daevites at some point (they and the Hanged King are maybe my favourite bits of site canon).

If you don't want the super-secret author backstory spoiled, don't read onwards:

SCP-2109 is the result of a non-human creature (or possibly a small order of non-human creatures) trying to stop humanity from discovery the answers to a number of long-standing problems in obscure fields of mathematics and physics. Being a blunt, bloodthirsty monster from before the dawn of man, this creature sees brutal murder as the best way to do this. The SCP-2109 effect prevents anyone from noticing select objects, or from connecting the creature to the events it creates, explaining why no-one can identify the deaths as murders, and also where all the notes and computers go missing. The dead Dr.'s notes and laptop are still in her car, just no-one can find them; also, the car is covered in bloodstains that no-one can see and the headless body is still in the boot of the car.

The reason for the highly ritualistic elements and the variety of the murders is because the creature (be it a surviving Daevite or whatever) is drawing its power from some sort of otherworldly patron, and that patron requires weird ritual sacrifices.

The exact reason that the creature is doing this are unknown, but it should be sufficient to say that it is a very good thing that something is suppressing this information, although the methods could use some improvement. It is vital that no-one ever solves the puzzle that SCP-2109 was created to protect.

‡ Licensing / Citation

Cite this page as:

"Dr Rioghail's Personnel File" by Rioghail, from the SCP Wiki. Source: https://scpwiki.com/dr-rioghail-s-personnel-file. Licensed under CC-BY-SA.

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