Upgraded to what? Well that came right the hell out of left field. I was on the road to up-vote town before that bomb dropped. And now I'm just confused…
e: After some reflection, this confusion is not sufficient reason for me to withhold a vote. +1
So this explains away SCP-1216 as a product of an advanced ancient non-human civilization that apparently existed on Earth a few millenia ago, that independently discovered the breach in the fabric of the universe. I think it would work better if they were from an another world, but it's just a personal opinion. Or if it was millions of years, not a few millenia ago (that's too recent for a believable non-human Earth civilization for me).
To be fair: How did you reckon it was necessarily Earth?
Several millennia later, there was an admittedly quite minor reshuffling of the deck along the eastern seaboard,
and an organization devoted to protecting normalcy uncovered the factory. Several years later, they reopened it.This and the passages later refer to the SCP Foundation.
There was a cataclysmic reshuffling of the deck. Something very far away had been broken, first on that most basal of structural
scales — the atomic nucleus — and then on a much more macroscopic and aesthetic scale — land, sky, composite stone, and
refined metal. Beams and boards splintered. Foundations cracked and craters formed.This was about the non-human aliens discovering the gate to the extradimensional space. There was no indication the place of the shuffling was different. All the context seemed to point that this was indeed the same place in space, just not time. Yes, I assumed that this was Earth, just because there wasn't enough data about it and I used the Occam's Razor :)
Ah. See, when we're talking about far-flung dimensional restructuring, I personally don't think it's reasonable to assume that two shuffles will end up making a hole in the same place. But I see why you felt that way.
Yeah, I admit it's a personal feeling. I'm more accustomed to stating outright that something happened on a different planet/reality etc., especially when the narrative explicitly tells us about the passage of time. I feel it's a little cheating the reader when we tell them that "500 years later, Beebleplox opened the door" and not that Beebleplox lived on Mars and the earlier events happened on Earth - especially when it's not apparent from context. But I acknowledge that many good writers use such tricks for good effect.
Nope, the Pravealeaons are native Earth hominids from like 70 millennia ago. A nuclear explosion caused a Way to open between the ossuary, then a laboratory, and the desert dimension. The Pravealeaons used this place to build a mega research facility to develop autonomous macroviral drones and enslavement stelae. The facility and the drones are constructed of one giant protein. A few years later, they were wiped out by the hominids they were using as slaves, and another nuke sealed the Way. It may or may not be related to the Day of Flowers.
70,000 years later, the Virginia earthquake opened a Way between Lenox, Massachusetts and the desert dimension, and the Foundation found the facility.
In 2019, the Foundation finally managed to unravel the protein and get into the facility, thereby unleashing the effects of thousands of mass-produced stelae in various states of development and many different kind of drones, not all of them harmless.
OH! Jesus. I seem to remember several other SCPs using that too. And being inspired by it.
Good show then, all around.
Thank you for the explanation. So I was right to think it was Earth All Along. I admit I've read only SCP-1216 along with the tale. The information about Homo sapiens decensus helps greatly. I imagined the Pravealeaons as some sort of bipedal lizard creatures (humanoid figure and six fingers) that lived before humanity. If this is in fact a closer relative to homo sapiens then it makes much more sense to me. Correcting the downvote to an upvote.
The problem I had as I see it was that the tale needed references to several unmentioned SCP objects (SCP-1427, SCP-1000) to be fully enjoyed. Maybe my ignorance is to blame for that (as I wasn't familiar with them).
I like this, but the lizard-language (or whatever-language) words ("bureran" and so forth) completely kill it for me.
Regardless of why they're actually included, they SCREAM "I'm here so you don't miss the fact that the characters are not english-speaking humans!" Since the rest of the conversation is translated into standard conversational english, it's very jarring to have ideas and concepts that have perfectly serviceable analogues in english (bureran = roger/affirmative) dressed up in alien-speak solely to make the characters otherness unmistakable.
It's a bit less off-putting in the cases where the words are units of measurement, but even there it moves the focus off the scene and onto the words themselves.
I think it would work much better to let the reader infer difference rather than making it unmistakable in this way, it just comes off as really Ed Wood-esque, and that's pretty much the opposite of what the entire rest of the piece feels like.
It's Roger, yeah, but they don't have the name Roger. It's less a translation and more a cultural equivalent.
Oddly, I don't remember reading this as part of the time contest, but now that I read it (again?), I like it enough to +1. Could use a bit of a stronger ending though. Feels … abbreviated.
