-
Info
Heron & Hound Commentary Corner:
"Hey, Egret?"
"Hey, Dhole."
"Did you know that you're a tired amalgamation of the author's favorite character traits? That you're inherently a symbol of sacrificed originality for the sake of comfort in a new setting with new readers that aren't already exhausted with his extant characters?"
"I dunno, did you know that he named you after a species of dogs?"
"What?"
Name: Dr. Pat Dentick
Security Clearance: L-2//AFT/OV
Current Position: Junior Researcher, Site-22
Duties: Spreadsheet maintenance, caffeine procurement, and sustenance delivery.
Qualifications:
- B.A. (Quantitative Astrology), University of Georgia,1 2004.
- M.A. (Applied Linguistics, Puns), University of Atlantis,2 2007.
- Ph.D. (Conventional Metaphysics), University of Hell,3 2011.
SCP Articles:
SCP-3599 - A Hard Day at Work
My second article. I deleted the first with the intent to rewrite when it hung around +25, but that hasn't panned out yet. I'm not at all surprised this article hasn't gone above +50. I still hadn't nailed down proper tone, some of the description and containment sections are overwritten, and the ending feels tacked on. There used to be a bit about the entire apparatus (star plus orbital factory) moving toward Earth, but a comment pointed out how similar that is to the Hateful Star's shtick. Now it's left with something about selling whatever it's been manufacturing. I never had a solid idea of what was actually being built there, maybe to the article's detriment.
I also self-deleted a middling tale related to this article too. That one can still be found on scpper, but I plan on rewriting it someday. There's just something about a giant burning sphere of pure capitalism that's extremely appealing.
SCP-3442 - Innovative and Synergistic Customer-Directed Actualization
Speaking of capitalism! I don't remember what exactly inspired me to write this article. I finished it a few months before I was subjected to additional economics courses, but maybe it was generally anxiety about them. I've also never worked in a company that has quite this tangled an organization chart, though my current position is messy enough that it's never been clear who my boss' boss is. Maybe it was something like that. Regardless, this remains one of my more popular articles, especially in terms of minimal downvotes. The absurdity of the working world speaks to everyone.
In terms of mechanics, I went a bit overboard with details again. I hadn't been on the site for very long before writing these first few articles, and I definitely struggled with the idea of telling a story as opposed to writing a Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook entry. That said, there's much more narrative progression with the development of the anomaly over time. The implied Capitalism Deity is something I'd like to explore in the future, but it's hard to find a good angle for it. Maybe someone else will pick it up. Also, I suspect the interview is entirely pointless aside from the amusing digression on tracking down an employer. I never wrote another.
I've read plenty of interviews since then while giving feedback in the Drafts & Critique forum (and
while reading the site in general), and it's extremely rare for any of them to stand out positively. There's not enough time for me to relate to the characters, and recounting action after the fact is generally unsatisfying. I suspect the inclusion of an interview format in the How to Write an SCP page has led to a lot of spurious inclusions.
SCP-3791 - An Entirely Standard and Uneventful Anomaly
I'm not sure I should have finished this article. I had the idea for 910 halfway through writing it, and that article covers plenty of the same ground in a more interesting way. I've mostly left it up as a fun little mystery (Dark Souls' implied stories through item descriptions was a big inspiration), and also because I still love the idea of a person's insistence being so strong that it alters reality. That being swept under the rug of secret histories was so repulsive to cause all this. I don't consider my version of the Administrator to be a reality bender in the usual sense. They just cared about their life's work quite a bit.
This article is the first place where my love of cover-ups, bureaucratic nonsense, and internal strife shows itself. It's also a notable reference to the Howling Pillar, a place mentioned throughout my work (including my now-deleted first article). My typical process for developing settings has always been sprinkling offhand references to people, places, and events, then picking them up later to interlink and flesh out everything. It works pretty well.
I'm still amused by the concept of Foundation-issued alcohol. It doesn't feel particularly realistic in retrospect, but it does suit the tone of the small setting.
SCP-910 - Dust, Embodied
It's the big one! At least, it was the big one for a while. About halfway through 3791, I realized that a more specific story about the betrayal it implies would be more interesting. SCP-2975 was a big inspiration in terms of showing that the branching format attached to an article could actually function. The lack of real choice here is still something I worry about, but it feels thematically appropriate to the article. Ahmadi is bound by her position and perceived duties even with her immense power, and the reader is subsequently bound to a limited number of choices as a result.
Coming up with a bunch of vague anomalies that could be used in the component disasters was the hardest part aside from my eternal proofreading struggle. I'm still partial to the nuclear hive mind (later referred to in Maim the Sky, Slay the Sun) for similar reasons to my partiality toward the temporal nonsense in 3791. Belief imparting power (in this case, summed fear of nuclear weapons pushing them toward quasi-sentience) is a theme I return to frequently. The bit about loss of identity in a chunk of Canada's population, the immolation cult in China (the first appearance of Egret and Dhole even if I hadn't conceived of them as such at the time), and the Grand Canyon being a giant mouth all still stand out positively to me. The rest of them are generally unmemorable. Oh, and whale wizards. I'll have to return to the whale wizard skeletons under Hell, Michigan some time.
The monumental importance of Hell, Michigan is also a thing that's cropped up throughout my writing. For the uninitiated, Hell is an unincorporated township in Michigan (Wikipedia page for reference) that's relatively close to where I grew up. I've never actually been there. Regardless, I'm a firm believer that all places of power should have silly names. Anyway, whale wizard skeletons teaching a kid Secret Thaumaturgy underneath that township is still an amazing scene.
In terms of mechanics, a lot of my wording was definitely too flowery. The climax is probably too short as well, and Ahmadi's character beyond her exhaustion isn't elaborated on enough, but the piece was still received well overall. It has been a very passive sort of positive reception though. With how much crap the cyborg mobile task force gets, I'm a bit surprised I never heard complaints about an immortal wizard overseer.
Persistent thanks to Shaggydredlocks for the 910 slot itself. I've become very partial to the number, and it's definitely more memorable than its original 3983.
SCP-3985 - Focus of a Regulatory Dispute
This article started out explicitly being about the Administrator. It still relates to them, as quite a few people have rightly determined in their analyses, but they're obviously not the focus anymore. The expunged description and general course of the article came about as I realized that the original concept wasn't particularly interesting. It had previously been framed around a sort of amorphous blob that was revealed deep in the piece to be the Administrator? Regardless, I'm certain I made the right decision in changing it to the current structure.
This article is also the first time I elaborated on the general structure and atmosphere of the Foundation within my larger body of work. In my eyes and in my writing, it's become a sprawling organization full of argumentative power centers and people with starkly different ideas about the right way to approach any issue. This naturally includes the Ethics Committee and the Overseer Council, but has come to include MTF Alpha-1, the Administrator, and a number of regional directors and other bureaucrats. They also all have lots of guns. That last part's more personal preference for thematics than anything else.
Sakarya is fun to write because she believes she's always right. Contradictory opinions are conspiracies. Contradictory facts are lies. From that self-assured air comes a certain kind of charisma, and from that charisma comes institutional power (Graham Allison's third model basically). If her emails read as being dramatic, it's only because she's writing for a future audience who will be looking back on her actions after a decisive victory.
The most frequently repeated complaints I've seen relate to believability and pacing. I wrote at length on the former issue in the discussion section, and I maintain that the course of events is realistic in the context of the article's world. Realism and believability do seem to diverge fairly often though. I probably could have smoothed out the pacing by writing more, but that would have come at brevity's expense. Just some of those classic writer problems.
As a last note, I've always found it extremely interesting that a (apparent) majority thinks the Ethics Committee is in the right here. I didn't have a particular intention when it came to presenting one side or the other as right or wrong, but I would have assumed Sakarya's general grandstanding (and coup) would be more repellent. Even operating under the assumption that the previous Overseer Council had been unjust in their detention of the former Administrator, the new one continues that detention and expands it. It's always interesting to see people coming away from a piece with different understandings and feelings than expected.
Also, COMMANDMENT NOON is a great protocol name.
SCP-3649 - Overcast and Overwhelming
Hazard, Nebraska is another great name for a place where things happen. Coincidentally, it's also a real unincorporated township.
If I recall correctly, I began drafting this soon after Doomcon was announced and published it before the contest started in earnest. Contests aren't really my thing in general, but it was a fun theme to work with. The first version was much shorter (somehow) and was rightfully shot down as being half-baked. This version's much better, though I still have some ideas for revising the overall presentation of redacted sections. The original intent was to show that the reader doesn't have high-level clearance, which in turn justifies why they can only see the titles of associated documentation. I'm sure there's a better way to get that across without outright stating it, but inspiration has yet to strike.
I didn't have a solid idea of what exactly is going on behind the document titles other than things persistently degrading. I don't think that matters much since the punch is in the presentation, but I would always be interested in knowing what readers see there. All that aside, I think the academic article's title is great, SKYSCRAPER is a clever project name in context, and this article plays a role in my second tale series.
SCP-4470 - Endure
It took me six months to write this article. It started off as an 001 proposal about the immortality element, sidetracked into a more in-depth article about the exact means of immortality, and finally reached this form after an initial failure on the main list (and advice from Petrograd). The article's final form was largely inspired by the CIA's RDI program (see: torture) and some thinking on powerful institutions within the Foundation. There used to be a letter that spelled things out more clearly, but I cut it because… it spelled things out more clearly.
Sakarya ends up in a bad place here, huh? You'd think she wouldn't have to put up with this kind of nonsense after securing that coveted seat on the Overseer Council. I don't usually feel bad for my characters, but I especially don't feel bad for her. I hope readers feel some pity at least, if only so the piece evokes something, but I'd feel worse if someone else was being put through this elaborate ringer. I might have made my own antagonist too much of a pain in the ass.
SCP-001 - Pedantique's Proposal: Fishhook
I wrote this in about four days total. The first draft was written in twelvish hours and was much shorter than the current version. It didn't succeed, and you may be sensing a pattern here with my articles. After deleting that, I kicked it around for a week or so, asked a few people why they didn't like it the first time, and wrote a bunch more. Being able to spiral into increasingly surreal settings was a big incentive for me to keep working, which is probably apparent from the higher writing quality in deeper sections. The initial justifications by Emmet are certainly the weakest part of the piece.
The conceit came to me when I was trying to think of how to successfully redact everything in an article. There's been a fairly clear trend through 3985 and 3649 with me and restricting information, but what set my mind to this challenge was an episode of pxdnbluesoul's excellent podcast. I don't recall the exact episode, but there was a discussion of extensive redaction as a means to catch readers' attention and indicate different expectations. In the end, that's already accomplished by its nature as an 001 proposal, but it's still a fun touch in my book. I'd love to see someone manage to redact even more content.
While some will disagree (and have), I don't think this article works half as well outside the context of an 001 proposal. There's no good in-universe justification for an empty article with a memetic kill agent otherwise, and adding an entire article at the start would slow the story down unnecessarily. I think its presence on the SCP-001 hub also fleshes out the canon of that page by presenting an article that is clearly false in-universe. Variety would make sense in what's supposed to be a giant obfuscation.
I've said plenty on the structure of the article in the discussion section, but to sum it up: the Twine element is useful for presenting a shift in appearance that matches the shift in perspective. It's intended to communicate that the reader is accessing a different narrative layer than they were before, which is supplemented by the second-person point of view. Twine also enables a lot of minute (and overt) changes in words, sentences, and whole paragraphs as the reader returns to previous sections.
In terms of the story itself, Morgan and Grauer are named after two former professors, though I mostly picked the names because I think they flow well together. Emmet's name emerged in the course of writing. I'm sure I had some clever idea behind it, but it's escaped me. The characters' personalities flowed from their roles in the story. Morgan and Grauer are cold and authoritative because they're manifestations of cold authority. Emmet's generally pathetic because that's a trait that could motivate someone to toss away their life so easily. The bureaucracy sludge is just doing its job. No one ever brings it the right forms.
Thematically, this draws on my general anxieties about career stasis, not achieving anything significant with life, and being small in the face of greater things. The unpleasant feelings people have reported while reading it have been very validating. I'm glad I could properly convey those emotions properly.
Finally, the way 001 proposals get treated by a segment of the site's readership is pretty corrosive. I think the in-universe security theater gets taken out-of-universe as a sign of inherent importance. This wasn't the impetus behind the article, though it seems to be taken that way. They're still just stories. Don't go too nuts over it.
SCP-4471 - Hoard
There's, uh, dragons. I don't have much more to say about this one, other than the fact that it's probably still too obtuse after multiple attempts at making it clearer without directly spelling everything out. That bugs me a little, but not enough to take it down.
The whole article sprang from an old version of the line "SCP-4471 is an anomalous fee levied on a broad subset of financial transactions related to national security apparatuses and the development of modern communication technologies." It was a tax initially, and it wasn't about dragons at all, but that's how things develop sometimes. I think at some point there was significance to the specific industries that the fine targeted, but now it's just profitable companies that likely have sprawling financial engagements.
Observant readers will note that the POI referred to in this has appeared in the latest chapter of MUCKSCAPE / MEGAGRID / MAYHEM.
SCP-4472 - Auger
SCP-5656 - DEEPWATER DOWNWELL
SCP-5920 - Work on What Has Been Spoiled
SCP-5344 - An Uncertain Volume of Willow Ash
Tales:
Forgetting the Number of Dead Stars
The third tale I wrote for the site, the second to survive, and the chronological first piece in Maim the Sky, Slay the Sun. None of the characters in the series were particularly well fleshed out at this point, but the tale does a good job at establishing a few things:
The series' setting is one where issues are settled through violent means. The Overseer Council (or at least one overseer) is at the Ethics Committee's throat, or maybe vice-versa.
Egret is highly skilled, intentionally forgetful, and generally amoral. She substitutes direction for purpose and feels good about being useful.
Ahmadi is powerful in multiple ways, limited in others, and will do a great number of awful things to achieve her goals.
A few concepts raised in this tale are also intentionally never resolved in the series, including why half the night sky is missing stars and why Egret was involved in selling secret information. She sure doesn't seem the type! This tale also has one of a few references to the Autumn Firm, a group formed by the merger and acquisition of most business-oriented groups of interest. I was doing something with them previously, as a deleted tale will attest to, but not so much now.
Thirty Pieces of Silver, Plus Inflationary Costs
A new fighter joins the roster!
I'm incredibly partial to pairs of characters that play off each other in the way Dhole and her nameless accomplice do. Dhole's already-fun dialogue is even better when it's accompanied by a similar conversation line. Her bickering with Egret is good too, but characters being so synchronized that they're two halves of a whole is even better. True friendship is a thing to be aspired to, even if it ends in murder.
This tale also establishes a few new things in the setting. Deep interaction between anomalous and mundane societies is the most prominent of these. I imagine there are places throughout the world like that bar where people (and creatures) from both sides of the veil interact with relative impunity. They probably all have mysterious underground service elevators too.
Out of it all, I think my description of Egret beating back the cognitohazard is pretty great in terms of mechanics and imagery. I could have fleshed out the physical action a bit more, but it's hard when one side refuses to fight back. It's one scene I have aspirations of returning to when motivation strikes.
I later addressed some of what the pair was doing in this world in the tale Fattening Stacks, Fashioning Stones.
Shockingly, the pair doesn't get along.
I don't have a whole lot to say here, other than a humble request for everyone to feel bad for Dhole. She doesn't deserve most of what she's put through in this series, unlike a certain chairwoman. The fact that she's so easily beaten into doing awful things is almost certainly a reflection of suddenly being denied someone she'd spent her entire life relying heavily upon. Egret is an awful influence in contrast. That's not to say that Dhole has no agency in all this, but I still think she's the closest thing this series has to a real victim. Her, and maybe the guy she shoots here.
This is the first tale I wrote involving any of these characters, and was the second I'd written for the site. My prose was pretty clunky at the time (at least in comparison to now), and I've lightly revised it two or three times since posting.
I'm still very happy with this portrayal of Egret's internal workings. Her ability to cut away chunks of memory gets visualized, her aptitude for violence is continued, and it's just a weird place. The fact that it's all being used as a glorified fitness review after the events mentioned in 910 is even better. I've retroactively referred to her memory shenanigans as weaponized mindfulness, and I should have worked that phrase into the story itself somehow.
Writing the brief chunk of position paper at the start was extremely satisfying. It's fun to get to bring some of my other knowledge and training into the writing process. You can see plenty of this in my other pieces too.
The only connection this really has to the broader series is the main character. It does get at some of her history, mindset, and motivations, but that's still a pretty loose connection. I wouldn't have included it in the main series of tales, but it probably makes even less sense without that context. Egret isn't exactly a character who is recognizable to most readers.
As always, the surreal bits (see: all of it) were the most fun to write. I especially liked the awful nightclub with a black hole in it. Writing dialogue with those distortion characters is a decision I'm still not entirely confident in, but it felt appropriate at the time. All that combined is likely why this is one of the lower-rated (and commented-on) tales.
Worm subway!
Watch some Burn Notice if you haven't. The piece's setting and general atmosphere were inspired by it, and the first couple of seasons are good TV. I have very strong feelings about its particular successes and failures.
I slotted this tale earlier in the series to do a better job explaining Sakarya's motivations and to set her up more clearly as the antagonist. Previously, the transition to the next tale has been very sudden and absolutely required reading 3985 to make sense. Reading that article still helps a lot, but I'd hope this helped smooth things out. It also establishes that Sakarya is magical! This is relevant later!
Dhole listening to the news is always entertaining, I think some of the dialogue is pretty good as veiled threats go, and the entire thing is even more amusing if you imagine it happening with kids splashing around in the background.
I just wanted to write a bit with the coat of many arms plus guns. I'll commission art of this whole bit someday, if only because I enjoy the entire concept so thoroughly. Everything in this piece is built around that image. I think I pulled it off pretty well, though the narrative arc right around the climax gets a bit muddled. It's supposed to have a fever-dream quality as Egret obliterates her sense of self defensively, but I should still go back and untangle things.
Egret is scary when she's mad.
It's Dhole's time to shine!
All my non-SCP fiction is firmly in the fantasy camp, so the setting of this piece came much easier to me than other things. People in weird masks getting stabbed with swords comes pretty easily too. Egret's bad influence is even more apparent here, especially after the influence manifests as a giant flock of birds. There's probably something poignant about Egret's only gift to Dhole being a pistol, but maybe not.
I do worry that the meaning behind all the mask switching gets a bit muddled somewhere in the middle of the story. They're supposed to be representations of how individuals in the society conceive of themselves at any given time as well as symbols of their personal aspirations. That most of the animals being represented in them have proxies on Earth is something that I don't explain mostly because I have no good explanation. It's magic.
This tale was originally the finale of the series. I came back to write more after having some good ideas, but this still stands out to me as a pretty strong conclusion on its own. I do wonder how people interpret the blue text/birds throughout the last story and this one. It's pretty ambiguous in my eyes between it being Dhole's stressed mind manifesting a justification/guide for herself and an actual fragment of Egret's spirit, but I think the story works fine either way.
Some of the thaumaturgy throughout gets pretty handwavey, but I'm not generally interested in creating a perfectly explained magic system for people to try and understand as having internal rationality. It's magic! It's a spectacularly powerful magician's magic! Stuff's going to get weird. No one has seemed to have a problem with that so far.
Twenty-Step Death March To UltraHell
Probably my favorite title out of everything I've written for the site. I wrote the name of the titular song in the text of the story first, then liked it so much that I had to double down on using it. There's a quality to the way the words are put together that satisfies me on a very existential level. Amazingly, it also sort of describes the story it's attached to.
The executive summary of an intelligence memo was really the nexus of this story. Over the course of its very long gestation period, it had at one point or another also been another branching twine story, a more traditional game, and tales focused more heavily in different directions. The memo was always there though. As can be seen in 3985, I really like writing these things. It lets me feel like I'm using the ol' master's degree for something entertaining.
I don't usually enjoy the Chaos Insurgency as a concept. Their portrayals frequently lack nuance and character. That said, I do think there's more room for exploring them as a historical organization that's seen by the modern Foundation as having been cartoonish in-world. That feels true to the way historical events get flattened, and allows for the development of a more nuanced inheritor organization too. In this case, it's just Ahmadi adopting the name for a very specific reason while having no real ideological affinity for whatever they stood for. All that said, I think her speech through Egret is very true to the spiritual essence of execution videos. If any of the phrasing is weird, it's entirely because she's a wizard who sometimes speaks like a wizard.
This piece examines the premise of Egret's odd psychology enabling the fragmentation of her mind across a number of different hosts via magical means. There's absolutely no way I thought far enough ahead to plan this while writing Quarterly Performance Review, mostly because I never think ahead or plan long-term narratives. Looking back and picking up threads to continue from older works is more my style. There's some drawbacks to that, but it works when it works.
Also, I think the part near the end where there's a fast-paced spiral of general terrorism is really good. One of my favorite bits that I've written on the site.
Staring Down the Barrel of a Sun
It's actually the end this time! At least for the main narrative of Maim the Sky, Slay the Sun. Certain characters persist into future pieces, but events coming full circle and stopping there feels very appropriate for a setting where even the mightiest struggle only delays the inevitable.
I hope to write more one-off pieces in the future that feature these smaller-scale interactions between Egret and Ahmadi. It's a different sort of interaction at this point, especially after Egret has been so thoroughly mauled on a psychic level (though I would argue she is still herself for all intents and purposes). Monster and monster tamer is a good dynamic, though at this point it's also something like squire and knight, and also something like handmaid and queen. There's a lot of thematic overlap.
The whole phylactery bit is good too. I like it being used as a means of torture a lot, though I think there are some tweaks I could make to emphasize the personal hell Sakarya goes through a bit more. Regardless, I'm still happy with how all this went overall. It feels like a fitting conclusion.
Also, more snow globes! Another reoccurring feature of my articles and tales. I probably won't ever do anything explicitly about them.
This is another piece that went through a number of forms before finally settling into its current shape. In this case, the tense and POV also underwent multiple changes. I'm glad I decided to ditch some second- and first-person attempts. Third-person just flat out works better for conveying the story and its more important elements, though being more personalized in it might have been better.
As I said in the tale's author note, this isn't the most original subject matter. Schools being used as fronts for shadowy recruiting programs seems like a pretty frequent detail in espionage fiction, though I don't read a ton of that, and I've seen it pop up in other genres too. Sometimes you have to write whatever's occupying your mind to make room for other things though, and I do feel like the backstory helps flesh out Egret as a character. She goes through quite the range of mutt behavior! I think my favorite part is when she's moping while also murdering people.
Fattening Stacks, Fashioning Stones
Like the Moon's Drifting Carcass
Floral Arrangement Fundamentals: Chapter 26 - Calcified Hearts and Dental Oddities
Hubs:
In case of my future absence:
Don't rewrite, revise, crosslink, etc. anything I have written under any circumstances. Thanks.
Cite this page as:
"Dr. Dentick's Personnel File" by Pedantique, from the SCP Wiki. Source: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/pedantique-personnel-file. Licensed under CC-BY-SA.
For more information, see Licensing Guide.
Licensing Disclosures
For more information about on-wiki content, visit the Licensing Master List.
