"This is good, but what the hell is it?"
"Oh, it's Kalinin's."
"Ohhh."
Cool.
I dunno. I appreciate the viewpoint we have here, but I actually feel as though the impact 2888 has is more visceral and striking in SCP format. The Foundation being outsiders to the whole phenomenon and the article treating its subject matter almost like a mystery novel made the emotions in there (particularly what I felt to be horror, even) really hit a note with me, and the surrealness worked. While this is a good viewpoint to have, and it's written well enough, it doesn't carry with me the same feelings that 2888 gave me.
I did feel "Father" to be a bit overbearing with his presence in the story, though not enough to feel detrimental to a noticeable degree. This line:
"Bad? As in evil? That concept is so strange, and yet it has taken quite a hold among these people, hasn't it?"
Reads like it should be somewhat ominous or, from the POV we have, mystifying. But it came off to me as a bit silly. And I can only really nitpick that particular line because the rest of the dialog felt fine to me. This I feel was a highlight:
"That's funny. Don't you agree, son?"
Nothing about what happened at school was funny to the little boy in the slightest.
A really cool moment I enjoyed, because it characterized Marshall's relationship with Father so well.
Basically: a lot of words to explain that I liked it, but I didn't feel as strongly emotionally with it as much as I did with 2888, and I feel like that holds me back from upvoting.
I dunno, man. Blue and orange morality, and insanity, tend to be scariest when there's a modicum of sensibility to it, that by some twisted logic the madman has a point, be it that society is flawed, or violence is fun. I'm not really feeling it in this instance. The ominous nonsense of bringing peace to the world is a far cry from the simple chilling sadism implied in SCP-2888. No vote.
Edit: Okay, I get the deal about Father now - but I'm still not sure if it has that much to do with 2888.
I agree in part with the thoughts expressed above. Changing 2888 from unknowable, uncanny atrocity to a somewhat more relatable (if still horrible) phenomenon seen through the eyes of a relatively normal child, may retroactively reduce the impact of that skip.
If that was being done without a larger purpose, then it might have been a counter-productive exercise. However, I suspect that there is a larger purpose here - I'm not sure I would have picked up the 186 connection without Voct's comment on 2888 recently, although the "peace" references might have been enough. So I can wait to see if this expands further, which might justify the recontextualisation of 2888.
In the meantime, the psychology of a normal child in a very abnormal situation reads convincingly, and the creepy elements are well-judged. Upvoted.
One query - when is this set? The pink backpack didn't feel to me like it was the '40s or earlier. I'm guessing therefore that it's in the early '90s, based on Everett having died in 1985 in SCP-2888. Although another new set of DNA is picked up in 2014 (based on the 2888 update message being received on the date the skip is written), so I don't have high hopes for Marshall's lifespan in this iteration.
Intriguing story. It felt like a beginning, not a complete story in itself, but then I hadn't read SCP-2888 before, so maybe that's how it's supposed to feel.
I can say that this iteration of Marshall Everett differs from the one the Foundation had detained in that the last one (can't say original, as the SCP file hints that this has been going on a lot longer than that) had no remarkable deviance from normal behavior - well, aside from the obvious - while this one has the school considering contacting a "specialist". (Which is probably the part that Father finds "funny", although probably not amusing.)
I'm wondering about the thing on the wall, too; it seemed at the time like Chekhov's Raygun, but it hasn't been used - yet. Is there in fact more to come?
When Marshall was suddenly called 'Everett', I thought it meant that this was supposed to be about Dr. Mann's backstory… it was intriguing :-O but I don't really feel it when I read it with SCP-2888 in mind. I still upvoted it for its own sake, though. I hope this gets some expansion!
