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This is the second time I've ever posted an SCP on the site, the first time it was eventually downvoted into deletion, I hope I have improved enough for my SCP to *not* be deleted now! Thanks to everyone that read and critiqued my SCP in its draft stage Including FloppyPhoenix and
Westrin. And big thanks to
YossiLeiner for giving me last minute technical critique. I hope you enjoy my SCP!
Short, sweet, and wholesome. And it's always good to see some interaction between Groups of Interest and the Foundation, especially light-hearted. Here's my upvote.
Simple, yet compelling and also refreshing by its light hearted tone especially in the interaction between the Foundation and a GoI, which are usually adversarial or neutral at best.
Although personally would have liked a bit more details about the constructions the beavers are making, especially about how the "it's all wood" aspect works with construction that would not be able to be build of wood at all, if it just anomalously works anyway or if the beaver circumvent the problem another way, etc…
+1
to be completely trustworthy
The "completely" made this sound less like an official evaluation and more like just praise for the sake of praise, which seems unusual for me. However, the second letter paints Throckmorton as a WWS fanboy whose judgement is clouded by his own connection to 3765, and I expect he'll be getting disciplinary action once it filters up to O5 (based on the Foundation in my head). That headcanon, that's he's gonna get punished for being so cavalier with this anomaly, is what's preventing me from downvoting. Otherwise, the story I'm reading would just be "hey, look at these cool beavers guys, they're totally helping out and everyone loves them."
Edit: on second thought, that headcanon is not enough for me.
Otherwise, the story I'm reading would just be "hey, look at these cool beavers guys, they're totally helping out and everyone loves them."
This is the story I'm reading. And it's not doing a whole lot for me. There's not much more to this than people in-universe remarking on how much they like these animals.
I kinda tried to make it more cute and upbeat than you'd normally see with the Foundation and you both definitely have a point on how it seems that it's just these folks fanboy-ing on these beavers. Thanks for the feedback!
It’s “everything goes well and as planned”, the SCP. I feel no real investment here. I read a whole bunch of fluff with no progression other than “things are good and then get better”.
We have beavers that can talk, like building, they’re nice and good at what they do, WWS wants to use them, Foundation says yes, use of beavers is successful, the end. I feel that stories are driven by conflict, or at least the want to know more. I see neither conflict nor mystery here. Also not sure why the beavers need to speak. There can be things anomalously smart without being human tier. I dunno. I felt no investment here. -1
I want to say that keeping things cute and upbeat and having it all turn out well isn't a problem, and I encourage it.
It's just that in terms of human or overall narrative or just weirdness of the mental image, there wasn't enough there. You introduced a bit of conflict in the messages back and forth, but the tone was really casual and hard to believe (especially on the Foundation's side, where you'd expect them to be more serous/professional/bureaucratic) and as others have said it really didn't go anywhere interesting.
-1
I do actually like the base concept here, but I have to agree with some of the comments above; the entire article feels very much like:
"Hey aren't these beavers great?!"
"Yeah, they're the best"
"We agree then, everyone loves the beavers."
"Go beavers! Woo!"
The biggest problem here is just how willing the Foundation is to let them go ahead with this. It already seems like they have a bunch of security breaches everywhere that don't seem to be dealt with, with these beavers basically going door to door in a town, and let them actively work on what must be a publicly visible building (I don't know much about WWS, but they have a public hotline so I assume people know where their HQ is) seems to be just throwing fuel on the fire.
The phonecall transcript doesn't really seem to add anything to do the article - it's just a reiteration of what you said in the paragraph before it with no new info or insight into anything. And personally, I've never been a big fan of the "The primary anomaly is X, the secondary anomaly is Y" method of delivering information in an article (obviously this is just a personal taste thing), though I will admit the "the secondary anomaly is that they speak English" line did get a laugh out of me.
As I said, I like the concept, I just feel like a lot more could have been done with it.
Reading this article feels like being in a meme group devoted to gushing about cute dogs, but it's the Foundation greenlighting anomalous beaver construction crews. The beavers honestly feel like transplants from a children's cartoon.
It almost reads there's an unrecorded anomaly that makes everyone want to go along with the beaver's plans, but that headcanon gets punctured by the phone log.
As it is, this doesn't really feel like it goes anywhere and I don't really think the tone you've struck fits well with the rest of the site.
Here are a few suggestions for keeping this in the positives rating-wise:
SCP-3765 was brought to Foundation attention on ██/██/████ after GOI-466 (Wilson's Wildlife Solutions) received a number of phone calls from civilians encountering a group of anomalous beavers requesting the blueprints to their homes (See Addendum SCP-3765-2) for a transcript of one such call.
If you strike the text above the reveal happens in the transcript, which I think enhances the impact.
The Addendum tweaks just strike me as more typical in tone.
SCP-3765's secondary anomalous property is the ability to communicate in fluent English effectively through gestures, grunting, and scratching out building plans with their claws1 .
People complained about the English, and since you don't actually quote any of the beavers, why fight it? In any case, this is even weirder if you think about it.
After carefully considering your request, we have decided to approve employing SCP-3765 for your construction projects as part of standard Foundation testing protocols. We will be evaluating their organizational and fabrication abilities. The Foundation wants you to know that we do not treat this sort of request lightly. <SNIP> Don't mess up. We will establish an isolation zone in sector 13 of Site 64, adjacent to your existing facilities, and place security undercover as the supposed construction crew. Please present a copy of the building plans for review, and we will get back to you with a proposed testing and construction schedule. We apologize if this seems unnecessarily restrictive; your group's work has been quite valuable, and we have given your evaluation of their abilities and intentions substantial weight, but even when dealing with apparently harmless anomalies we've learned that caution is always called for. Please "discuss" the basic plan with SCP-3765 (or the group's preferred representatives) on camera, and send the footage for analysis; it will help determine which of our non-human interaction specialists would be most suited to the research.
This still provides a positive response, but is a bit more… Foundation-y.
We can't thank you enough for letting us use the beavers! We've spoken to them about our agreement and they seem ecstatic! We've already begun putting them to work building a new wing for our on-site dormitories, and they're doing a great job! We're thinking about By the way, thinking ahead to your testing, we talked to them about teaching them how to use materials other than wood, but they seem a little apprehensive to that… They've streamlined our production of facilities and I think that our arrangement is going to be instrumental in the growth of the WWS. The good part for you is that they work for free so this should slash the amount of money you need to give us by a significant amount (see article 3 chapter 4 of the Boring Agreement for more details on the finances).
I thought Frank's response was pretty on target for WWS' voice in other SCPs, so I just tweaked it to match the original Foundation response. I actually like the invitation to visit the beavers.
Finally, I'd just drop the final response from Throckmorton.
So, aside from the original Foundation response, I think this is pretty serviceable, but obviously I think the other tweaks would be helpful, too.
For reference, the source for the image used in this article is Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0, and is cc-compliant with the SCP wiki's license (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Mm Mm Good
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