#70
Hmm… bit at odds, with this one. The technical execution is very good. Your dialogue is on-point, especially in the earlier sections. It feels organic, real, not hackneyed — which would be a very easy trap to fall into here. The anomaly itself is also pretty funny. Satanic Panic as an SCP would've been awkward, so shifting one step to the side and the Satanic Panic as containment for an SCP is smart. Lets you play around with the concept without inviting the weight. P&L buying out the company was also clever.
My point being that all the component parts here are excellently pulled off, but I don't feel like they add up to anything greater than the sum of their parts. This article is basically three setpieces — the church scene, the GRU-P scene, and the 6237-C scene. Which isn't bad, but they felt like distinct, disparate setpieces rather than a cohesive article. The article jumps from the church scene — which was good, and entertaining — right over to the GRU-P setpiece without organically connecting them. The MTF log served the narrative purpose of showing an example of the anomalous stuff, but you could've done that just as well in like, a summary log. The stuff it lays out, with the entity, is never followed up on.
The GRU-P setpiece is also fine in its own right (though I think the reasoning for his presence is a little flimsy but w/e) and this one actually does lead a little better into the following section. But the final section, with the board meeting, feels awkward because the themes laid out are greed and wealth but those ideas are never brought up in any of the preceding setpieces, even though they're treated like a very matter-of-fact moment. It feels out of left field thematically — also that the company's actions are very abstract, not really grounded in example. The three-moons ending felt similarly out-of-left-field, but that one might just be me.
I think you could've… cut the first section with the MTF log, make it so that the reader's first addendum is the one with Laskin and the reader learning about the company, introduce a new log with the Foundation investigating specifically the ERS building and finding Some Fucked Up Shit to ground the company's anomaly, then close out with the boardroom log. I think that would've let them flow smoother into one another and create a greater whole. But given that the individual pieces are still excellently constructed, I'll leave this as a novote.
