"Petro" Derinsky's Personnel File
"Petro" Derinsky engaged in containment planning for SCP-███.
Name: Ivan Petrovich Derinsky
Security Clearence: Level 2
Affiliation: Department of Extra-Universal Affairs
Position: MUTA-NT Aperture Stability and Universe Habitability Technician
- Containment Specialist (retired)
Site of Operations: Site 87
Profile: Derinsky was born in Потёмкиногорск, Karelo-Finnish SSR, designated NEXUS-14 for its regular physics violations, extreme political credulity, and abnormally high rate of bureaucratic error. He received extended 5-year training in electrical and radio engineering during his mandatory military service. Derinsky was identified and recruited during an early SCP-2477 incident, spending the next ██ years as a Containment Specialist focusing in spatial and temporal anomalies.
Due to repeated exposure to anomalies under containment breach conditions or lacking safety equipment, Derinsky has been subject to dozens of temporal contractions, dilations, reversals, timeline excisions, divergences and re-convergences, and has been listed as MIA for multiple extended periods. As a result, his personal chronology and biological age are essentially impossible to determine.
Yes, Petro is completely ignorant of current events, political realities, popular culture, cell phones, the internet… pretty much all of it. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble determining how much of this is RVW Effect and how much is based on compounding factors. These include his being an obstinate yokel rural upbringing and attitudes, spending 60% of the time half-lit on reactor coolant probable high-functioning alcoholism, and singular focus on getting on my nerves distrust of modern "Western" psychological practice. See if a neurological and biological assay tells us anything, and if that doesn't work just push him through the system. He's cleared all standard batteries and does not otherwise pose a risk. - Dr. Alger, Class-E Evaluation and Rehabilitation Specialist
Derinsky was forced to retire in 2010 in spite of excellent health due to Human Resources policy. He requested and was granted a part-time Knowledge Retention Assignment to Site 87, where he uses his familiarity with spacetime instability and 70's-era Foundation electronics to attempt to ensure that nobody undergoes catastrophic eversion when utilizing the Multi-Universal Transit Array.
Special Containment Procedures authored:
SCP-2177 - Yellow Journal Infection
This was my first SCP after a long, long time lurking, and I had been kind of going over the idea in my head at work for years. I spent my undergrad career as a student worker in a library, and we had these yellow engineering annuals (actually pictured) that we deeply, deeply hated. They’re difficult to shelve, constantly take up more room, and nobody ever checks them out because they’re all available online. Think what you want about librarians, but we joked more than once about bonfires. Turning them into a “virus” in a library catalog was fun. The contents are a reference to our handling of war criminals after WWII: My hometown’s heroes came over in Operation Paperclip.
SCP-2477 - Inertial Dampeners
This one came from my few years as a physics major and a couple random ideas about “reference frames.” One of these was the image of things being stuck in space, but not in relation to the Earth’s surface. So, we have objects “stuck” at one point in Earth’s orbit around the sun, objects “stuck” as the solar system moves away in the galaxy, etc.
The second idea was from a daydream I had in a class in special relativity. I imagined people moving at nearly the speed of light “catching up” with light from Earth, only able to see the light from one half of the surface. This isn’t how physics actually works, but hey, it was a daydream. All the planets showing up was also reference frame daydreams, like, “What if there’s an entire universe moving in a different reference frame to us, and when you reach light speed, you catch up to it.” Again, NOT ACTUAL PHYSICS.
SCP-2977 - Periscope Ants
I’d had this image in my mind for a while of anthills and geographical strata, and how cool it would look if you could see them push out the bands of minerals out as they dig down. (I also had a lot of fun in GIMP for the pictures here.) The rest was partially inspired by a short story I haven’t been able to find again, where this incomprehensible deep underground mineral civilization finds out about man, and then eventually destroy mankind when they erupt giant volcanoes in their attempt to “explore” the surface. (That’s what the O5s are worried about). They’re nothing like 2977-3, though.
Also, thanks to the holiday gift exchange, this is now the subject of a kickass concept album by Thetataurus.
SCP-1555-J - Musical Audio Surveillance Distortion
This was inspired by a line in eric_h’s Standard Form for Downvotes, as well as a comment by Gaffney that Yakety Sax should be applied to every combat scene. I wrote this pretty much playing the Benny Hill gag straight. Some people thought it was an unoriginal reference gag and downvoted. VAElynx convinced me to put in a video log to give people some original content to follow, and I’m very glad they did.
(Learn from me, folks: A broken joke SCP can be fixed if you listen to the immediate feedback.)
SCP-2771 - Border Duty
This idea for the flash fiction contest came together on a late-night 40-minute drive home from a friend’s house, and I wrote it in pretty much one go (aside from feedback). Then I sat on it until the night of the contest, buzzing around with everyone else in chat waiting to post until the clock to hit midnight. It was a lot of fun. (Plus, woop woop, third place! I doubt I will ever write another article this popular.)
There were a lot of inspirations for this, including: The Disney Point, Pictionary/charades, videos of people screwing with cops at checkpoints, Peter Pan, and, of course, all the SCPs bleeding over from weird other places. The thesis statement was, “This job is so easy, we could give it to those weird people who use language.”
SCP-2577 - Falling Ships
Falling ships. Some people in the comments wondered how I picked out Ron Perlman, but the honest answer is the whole image of the ships smashing down on the tarmac under his narration was from a dream. I wrote up the SCP with just that imagery and put it up for feedback, and a lot of people thought there wasn’t enough to it. I ended up digging deep into my love of spy novels and Russian folklore and the GRU-P, trying to give it context without giving the Foundation all the answers. I'm kind of a sucker for leaving things open to interpretation, which is usually my worst instinct with these things. I don’t think it gelled as well as my other SCPs, but you can be the judge.
SCP-2438 - There Is No Hunger In The Lee Of The Stone
SCP-2438: This one germinated a long long time ago as an episode of Radiolab about mitochondria and internal digestion and how these tiny happenstance evolutions caused massive potential increases in biological energy and what a being can be. I was wondering what would happen with the next leap. Initially I wrote this about humans with a specific genetic heritage, which is where the Celtic hearth god came in. That bit stuck around, the rest didn’t.
Also, somewhere in there, I had the idea to write an SCP where addiction was a reasonable result of the effect and how the Foundation would handle it.
The amnestics idea and shift towards animals came from a completely separate article on the evolution of capsaicin, which mentioned that producing complex chemicals takes up a ton of a plant’s dietary energy. Well, if a being’s got plenty of dietary energy, what’s the most complex chemical in the Foundationverse? I know a bit about how to write about lab animals (and was able to research enough to BS the rest, with some general assistance from my chemist brother). I must’ve heard about knockout mice on some podcast, but rabbits just seemed like a cooler idea. Not sure why, they’re just kinda on the brain from a lot of different places.
Title is, of course, a reference to the Secret of NIMH.
SCP-4077 - El Dorado
This was on the back burner for many years before going up. Originally it was written as events that had been erased from history so hard that they were only stories, and was buried under so many layers of allusion and "subtlety" that it was basically unreadable. I wanted to dust it back off when I found out the 4000 contest was history themed, so I dug up what little I'd written and tried to put a more direct frame around it.
When it was first posted it had a final log I had meant to add urgency and a conclusion, but someone pointed out to me that it just murdered an MTF. I hate that trope and hadn't realized I was doing it, so I cut it. One day I might try to come up with a real conclusion, but there are enough other problems to fix that I'm not sure I'll ever crack it.
SCP-5177 - <title pending>
My entry for the Exquisite Corpse Contest co-authored with pamplemousse.
When I got their ConProcs with the candle, I knew I wanted it to be a symbol of remembrance, but it had to serve a practical containment purpose. With is being an area of land, I was also thinking of a battlefield, so I looked at wikipedia's list of unusual military articles for inspiration. I found the Battle of Kiska, a WWII battle where the allies lost 120 men to confusion and friendly fire invading island fortifications that had been abandonned. Then I procrastinated until there were only 3 days left.
The IJAMEA connection fell into place easily, as did the combatants. Initially I was writing it with more casualties, but then I realized I was killing off an MTF and that is one of my least favorite tropes, so I tried to make it more personal. (I feel kinda bad for still doing a gender stereotype.) The initial draft was similar except that the anomalous effects were all from different things (Yokai, antimemes, cognitohazards), but then I realized that was way too unfocused and was getting in the way of the story. When I changed the focus to just Yokai, Tsukumogami just kinda clicked into place, and it was just much cleaner.
(Mostly not their mainlist titles.)
Additional Duties:
Technical Liaison to the Sloth's Pit Municipal Government
Time Crime in Greater Wisconsin: A Primer
S&C Plastics is my absolute favorite canon, and in various places Iphkm had talked about a scene with time travelers stealing donuts that had never been written up. They were kind enough to give me a shot at it, I really wanted to go through an Orientation tale, and time travel clearly presents a lot of issues (See every Primer/Back to the Future/Looper argument ever. Or just read qntm’s website). Sadly, I don’t have any actual experience with the Great State of Wisconsin, so my references and vernacular trended more towards the Departed or cop shows than anything. I’m still very glad it stuck.
Low-Risk Personnel/E-Class Subject Pool
SCP-2602 Photographic Evidence
When I drew 
Communism will win in the 2016 holiday art exchange, I was super stoked. SCP-2602 is one of my favorite skips, and definitely my favorite that used to be a library. Lucky me, I had promised to moderately Photoshop (ok, GIMP) up some pictures, and luckier me, I knew from my old library job exactly where to look for the weird obsolete stuff. With the help of a friend at my alma matter and my own phone at the current college, I gathered a bunch of shots of weird random gear and architecture, and then proceeded to throw in or chop up stuff. Annnnd then not post it for four months.
Site 87 RAISA Metanarrativistic Paranotary
A Murphy Law comic
Yet another holiday exchange present, this one for The Great Hippo. Once I got the idea for comics for his meta-noir hero, the main task was clipping random interesting-looking frames out of years worth of public domain comic strips and trying to put turn them into coherent scenes while crosslinking some of my favorite SCPs. (Thankfully the detectives in those comics all looked similar enough, especially if I threw a hat on them.) There was a lot more manipulation on some of the slides, because it really easy to get sucked into random detailing when you're working on an image. It was a lot of fun, although I think I annoyed my family over that holiday break.
A Comprehensive List of K-Class Scenarios
Sometimes I do things like data-scraping and making spreadsheets when I'm procrastinating from doing actual work. If you spend enough time around stats, you can get a little crazy. Combine that with my crankiness on the forums desire to give people actually useful answers in Foundation Universe, and you get this monstrosity.
I was definitely also inspired by the Comprehensive MTF list, which showed that a few dedicated creators/curators and the momentum of the community really can answer some hard questions. There have been dozens of K-Class question threads over the years, but nobody had seemed to put it all in one place or really check the numbers. I searched individual SCPs using tags and custom Google searches rather than learning to use actual data-scraping software (something I'm occasionally picking at, if another clear use ever comes up), so I spent about a week procrastinating on my dissertation to bodge this together. I dumped it in the forums before thinking to just create a guide. Glad others have chipped in, and I hope it helps people.
