SCP-2319 / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-2319.

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Commentary

MisterBibs 10 May 2015 07:41

This one has a central basis and a few side-inspirations:

- Obviously, the Titanic was the central inspiration. Funny thing is, I've been mulling over a vaguely Titanic-themed idea for a while now, but as a story. It was supposed to be this story about some random guy tasked with delivering a strange object to some strange Foundation, and how excited he was that they were paying for the trip, only revealing at the end that the ship is the Titanic and the Strange Object is an SCP that attracts ice to it. Hell, if this SCP tanks, I might just still write it.

- Another inspiration was a book I read long ago, as a kid. It involved characters crossing dimensions/locations through a process that one of the users compares to being a 2D cartoon character getting past a solid line by lifting themselves off the page, hopping over the line in 3D, and then falling back into 2D mode. The bit I most remember is that the above analogy wasn't perfect, and one (or more) characters had everything on them flipped/mirrored at times. That, most of all, tied into this final SCP, with a lot of mirroring and flipping to give a sense of something weird happened here.

- This one is the least important, but it still sticks out the most in my writing this SCP. There was an in-universe special feature related to the first Blair Witch film in which one of the Talking Heads discusses at length how impossible it was to have found the Supposedly Lost Footage that made up the movie where it was. X Y and Z make it impossible, but that's where it was found. I really wanted to do that with both the SCP itself (it wasn't there, but now it is, and it's always been there given the wear-and-tear) and the final safe (it's there, it's been there for over 100 years, its covered in 100 years of disrepair, but it's a cira-2015 safe). I'll be honest, this part of it was most exciting for me as a SCP writer, because I tend to write from a Everything-Plotted-Out perspective and I remove things to give the reader stuff to ponder over. This time, I intentionally wrote things without an explanation in my head.

Re: Commentary

Hawkin 10 May 2015 17:37

The book you mentioned…it wouldn't happen to be The Boy Who Reversed Himself, would it?

Decibelles 10 May 2015 08:49

I'd honestly downvote for that Titanic reference, and would just neutral-vote on the assumption you get rid of it. Because… I dunno. I don't like the idea that this is the Titanic, but flipped I guess?

MisterBibs 10 May 2015 12:30

What Titanic reference are you seeing? The point is that it's the Titanic. Sorta.

As for it "just being flipped", I encourage you to think about it a little bit more. Mental excercise: take a piece of blank paper and draw the Titanic wreckage from either memory or from online. You've got the front half of the boat at the top, the busted-to-all-hell backside at the bottom, and in the middle-right of the page you've got the major debris field.

Now turn it over and look at what you've drawn from underneath, through a bright light. That's SCP-2319. Whatever force at play either 'saw' the ship like this from 'underneath the paper', so to speak, or was trying to do something that went wrong and left it like this. Even the location of where 2319 lays speaks greatly to what-the-fuck-happened-here tone I was trying to convey.

This goes beyond the location and existence of the wreckage. Like a piece of metal becoming mildly magnet after being exposed to a big magnetic source, everything involving 2319 has this residue of whatever happened to it. It's fucked with the sealife in the area. Sometimes things only catch a whiff of it (and their controls go all screwy and inverted), sometimes people seeped in it go a little weird for a while and need to step back.

The central theme of 2319 for me is that it's a series of what-the-hell-this-is-impossibles. There was never a Titanic south of Australia, but here's one. It's flipped left-to-write, down to the lettering on everything, which would never be done, but it's done here. And whatever happened, every single bit of it has an echo/residue of whatever the hell caused it in the first place.

Decibelles 10 May 2015 19:27

The fact that there's a Titanic at all is what makes me not receptive to this. I rarely like bringing real-world events into SCPs unless there's some amazing justification for this. This is a Titanic from another dimension… but it's still a Titanic. Even with the series of impossibilities and what-ifs, it feels like a cheap storytelling method and I can't get behind it. Since that's the basis for the whole article, I have to downvote.

Am I still missing something or misinterpreting anything, though?

Wils 10 May 2015 12:27

all teams studying artifacts from SCP-2319 are to work in 24 hour shifts.

24 hour shifts? You're a hard boss.

MisterBibs 10 May 2015 12:32

I'll likely correct this (I didn't sleep well last night) in a few hours, but the point I was trying to make was that all staff need to spend 24 hours away from working on anything coming from 2319.

TyGently 10 May 2015 13:32

"All research work is to be divided into x hour shifts, with no less than 24 hours between shifts with the same personnel." perhaps?

TyGently 10 May 2015 14:05

Some comments:

+ show block

At this time, the Foundation does not agree on the long-term survivability of SCP-2319, owing to the environment being hostile to the materials composing SCP-2319.

Awkward sentence. Maybe change it to something along the lines of "SCP-2319 is expected to deteriorate gradually due to hostile environmental conditions".

Historical maps show no hints of SCP-2319 dating back decades, but the current surface terrain is as identical to the ones found at the Titanic wreckage.

It makes sense that /maps/ wouldn't show a shipwreck, if a shipwreck has just been discovered, historical maps wouldn't have anything on it. However, you could achieve the same effect by saying that there is no record of such a ship ever sailing, as that is something that would be recorded historically.

Also, "is as identical to the ones found" is very grammatically incorrect, and also wrong in the context of the skip. It's not identical, it's mirrored.

SCP-2319 is mirrored along the X axis

As far as I know, there is no commonly accepted definition of the "X axis" used geographically. If I'm right, that means that this statement means pretty much nothing.

remaining paintworks on the hull hint

Hint isn't very clinical, and you use it three times. I would go with "indicate".

As with the Titanic wreckage, a unique ecosystem of anemones, crabs, shrimp, starfish, and rattail thrive within the wreckage of SCP-2319

Are they identical or mirrored from the ecosystem at the original record?

upwards translating to downward motion

I get the port/starboard thing, because it's flipped horizontally, but if directions are flipping vertically, why didn't Titanic show up upside-down?

air-tight safe, it contained

That should be "air-tight safe containing" or replace the comma with a semicolon.

Okay, so, final comments. First of all, what about the corpses? Are they identical to corpses found in the real record, DNA wise? Or can they not be analyzed?

Also, on the subject of importing animals from the mirrorverse, there's actually an interesting chemical principle that changes things when you mirror them. Certain molecules exist in a way that they are not symmetrical, this is called "optical isomerism" or "chirality". The molecule mirrored one way can actually have different properties than the molecule mirrored the other way. This is especially important when dealing with medicine and drugs, as drugs can have completely different (or harmful) effects when they're mirrored. So, my question is… how does that work in the mirror-verse? Is biology slightly different to work with the different optical isomers? Or are the functions of isomers changed? Like, if isomer A is harmless and isomer B of the same thing is poison, you could say that the corpses contained high levels of the deadly isomer or something, because in their universe that's the safe one. Not really a major thing, just something relevant you might want to be aware of.

All in all, I'm a bit iffy on this concept. It seems rather… simple, and I'm not entirely sure I get what implications are coming from the last note. My thought is that some extradimensional entity tried to save the mirrorverse Titanic, but ended up just moving it to our universe and screwing up the fabric of both universes. Anyways, that's just my two cents. I'll novote for now, but I'm confident that with some tweaking you could change that.

Scorpion451 10 May 2015 16:05

as all samples die within 3.2km of SCP-2319

Should that be "when more than 3.2 km from SCP-2319"?

Dr Calton 10 May 2015 18:22

I like this. It gave me a lot of questions with just enough answers to satisfy me but still leave plenty for me to think about. upboat

Adolf Grier 10 May 2015 18:56

For some reason, I'm finding this really fucking scary. Nice job.

sirpudding 10 May 2015 19:10

I like this, but I feel it has a few issues. Notably the sentence about degradation from the environment is awkward, and "mirrored on the X-axis" seems meaningless geographically. Do you mean the lattitudinal axis?

MisterBibs 10 May 2015 19:19

Honestly, that was the singular problem I had when describing the effect.

The only way I can explain it, as I did above, is that it's like looking at something you've written on a piece of paper, from the back side. Everything is flipped.

Like the name of the ship. Sure, it says TITANIC on it, but it's written as if someone wrote it through the inside of the ship. Every piece of paper recovered from the ship is illegible unless you hold it up against a light and read it from the back. Even the goddamned ecosystem that lives in the wreckage is flipped around. It's not just that we've discovered another Titanic, but where we found it and what it looks like.

Last edited on 10 May 2015 19:50 by MisterBibs Show more

sirpudding 10 May 2015 20:20

"SCP-2319 is a copy of the wreck of the RM Titanic, mirrored on the vertical and lattitudinal axes. It lies hull up, with the bow oriented southwest at a depth of 3700 m. All written text in wreck is mirrored, e. g. the archboard readsƆ'IИATIT ƧMЯ'. Living organisms recovered from the wreck have similarly mirrored lateral symmetry and this extends to stereochemistry (left and right chiralities as well as E and Z stereochemistry are mirrored)."?

Last edited on 10 May 2015 20:21 by sirpudding Show more

Guilliman 10 May 2015 20:16

Why would the geography of the area be expected to match that of the original Titanic wreck site?

MisterBibs 10 May 2015 20:23

Out of universe, it's because I wanted to hint that it's not like 2319 just appeared on the seafloor, but that however it arrived, it did the exact same (if flipped) damage to the seabed that Titanic did, even if that seabed should not realistically be expected to be there for 2319 to alter in the process. It should look like it trashed the south-of-Austrailia seabed, but it looks like it trashed the off-the-coast-of-NewFoundland seabed.

In universe, I cannot justify it and I'll change it right now.

Updated A Bit

MisterBibs 10 May 2015 20:29

Taking into consideration the suggestions here, I've done some work on the piece. Let me know what you think.

One thing sticks out to me from a mechanical perspective: I █'d out the time that the ship has been underwater in order to not have to update how long it's been since 1912. Is this appropriate or am I just █ing to █ something?

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