Sirpudding's Author Page

Civilization Prevails!

Some ask, "Where do you get your ideas?" but I don't understand that. What I want to know is "Where can I get rid of my ideas?"

The Author

About the Author: Sirpudding lives with his wife in Southern California (although in a relatively quiet part), where he is over twenty years into attempting to finish the longest Biology degree in the history of education. He has worked as a convenience store clerk, boy scout camp counselor, movie theater projectionist, QA for a major software company and environmental services technician. He is currently employed as a resident aid at an outpatient addiction recovery clinic and also has published some roleplaying game articles in SJGames' Pyramid Magazine. In 2008, while serving in the USMC Reserves, he deployed to Al Anbar, Iraq, and participated in mobile operations there.

He has been a participant at the Southern California Renniasance Faire since 1993, where he currently portrays the upright man (a Renniasance mob boss) of a coney catching gang (con men). He also does post-apocalyptic events with The Juggers of the Wasteland, and plays chain for the Army of Los Angeles. He blogs about tabletop roleplaying games at Of Paper Men and Plastic Monsters.

A Word from the Author: Hello, I'm sirpudding. I'm relatively new around here (joined in April of 2015, I believe). I'm here to write short fiction, improve my writing, and generally get the demons out of my head (and have fun doing it). I'm happy to answer questions in the discussion thread for this page, the appropriate page or by PM. My sandbox might have whatever I'm working on at the moment, but I do a lot of writing offline, so it might also not.

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SCPs

SCP Number	Rating	Comments	Created	Last Updated
SCP-2111	860	146	01 Nov 2015 17:12	10 Sep 2024 21:58
SCP-3519	832	190	07 Apr 2017 15:42	11 Oct 2024 19:52
SCP-2140	556	201	24 Jul 2015 07:00	23 Aug 2020 05:10
SCP-2523	258	81	01 Oct 2015 18:00	10 Sep 2024 22:13
SCP-2323	236	71	06 May 2015 00:20	08 Oct 2022 18:24
SCP-2673	230	44	24 May 2015 19:25	22 Oct 2022 15:42
SCP-2631	170	47	23 Jun 2015 07:57	22 Mar 2022 14:49
SCP-2890	96	44	22 May 2015 06:03	11 Apr 2023 05:47

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Supplements

SCP Number	Rating	Comments	Created	Last Updated
SCP-2673 Containment Maintenance Log	60	36	24 May 2015 19:25	11 Apr 2024 15:21

SCP Number	Rating	Comments	Created	Last Updated
Operation AZURE PEREGRINE	149	29	28 Feb 2016 22:21	27 Apr 2024 14:07

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Groups of Interest Formats

SCP Number	Rating	Comments	Created	Last Updated
SPC-682	186	44	02 May 2017 16:45	17 Oct 2024 04:49
SPC-140	166	47	01 Apr 2016 18:09	11 Oct 2024 18:54
The Lord Of Endowments	156	32	05 Mar 2016 15:47	11 Oct 2024 19:25

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Tales

Title	Rating	Comments	Created	Last Updated
In the Trenches with the Dead	290	38	06 Mar 2018 18:37	10 Oct 2024 11:52
A Thin Dangerous Line	248	17	02 Apr 2018 07:11	09 Oct 2024 19:29
A Witch's Tale - Mistakes Were Made	50	16	13 Oct 2015 04:41	21 Feb 2024 23:22

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Collaborative Entries

• I contributed short-short stories to And Then I Died... Part III. Rounds four, ten, sixteen, seventeen, twenty-six, twenty-eight and twenty-nine are mine. Round sixteen answers MacLeod's challenge before he issued it, rounds twenty-six, twenty-eight and twenty-nine do so after and round seventeen is supposed to be pretty good.
• I contributed a useless perpetual motion machine of the third kind to the Log of Anomalous Items. I'm not happy with it, it's far too wordy, and I am continually surprised it hasn't been cut. I may try to rewrite it.
• I contributed the SCP-2140 test and the SCP-3519 test to Experiment Log T-98816-OC108/682 (the SCP-682 termination log).
• I added a bit of dystopian cuisine to Experiment Log 261 Ad De.
• As noted below, four poems of the SCP-2673 Containment Maintenance Log are mine: the instructions you read when you make a new post, this haiku, this limerick and Spc. Nanku's pantoum.

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Commentary

SCP-2323 "Sentinel Butcher"

Little bird, little bird, what do you see?
Nothing that you can, singing in a tree.
Little bird, little bird, what do you hear?
Screams of my prey, impaled on a spear.
WrongJohnSilver

They are shrikes that use barbed wire to catch and devour fairies? That's metal as hell.
— /u/jack_dog on Reddit

For my first article I wanted to make sure that I had a solid idea that wasn't treading any well-trod ground. I spent a few weeks brainstorming and then wrote this. I'm not entirely sure where I got the idea from, except that I have always found shrikes to be a little creepy in a "red in tooth and claw" kind of way. They are songbird-raptors. They also use tools to feed. Some people didn't seem to get it right away, but it definitely seems to have found an audience. Ironically I feel like it maybe was too good for a first article, it took until my 6th article (SCP-2523) for anything I have written to surpass this one in rating.

+ To expand on that:

Brainstorming:

• I read, and then reread all of the guides.
• I made sure I read every article that was posted recently including the discussion threads.
• I thought about what succeeds and what fails with the current audience based on what I learned.
• I knew I didn't want a humanoid, or a Keter, or a Thaumiel because these are all supposed to be harder to have succeed according to the guides.
• I think that I was following the advice to think of something that is ordinary but has an emotional association for me that isn't obvious.
• In this case, as I said, shrikes are a little bit incongruous and creepy. They are cute little songbirds, that are raptors that use tools to impale their prey.
• Then I thought about how to communicate this, and it occurred to me that if you were the bird's prey they would appear to be especially monstrous. I suppose here I was inspired by Dan Simmons' Hyperion which has a terrifying time traveling robot killer called The Strike that also impales its victims, or more accurately: Simmons was inspired by the same thing I was and I was reminded of this.
• I didn't want giant birds that kill people.
  • Giant animals are difficult to do in a way that isn't B-Movie silly
  • Monsters that just kill people are inherently the most well-trod subject of supernatural horror.
  • Worse, giant birds that kill people aren't really a believable threat because we would just kill them¹ as we do with tigers, sharks and so on in the real world.
  • Besides, giant shrikes lose the whole "cute passerine" thing that is the central frisson of my idea.
• I needed a prey animal that humans could identify with more than voles and sparrows, and it needed to be anomalous (otherwise I am just writing the wikipedia article on Shrikes). I needed tiny people.
• Flower fairies are tiny people.
• Shrikes have been known to use man-made thorn substitutes (like barbed wire) making the connection to fairies obvious. As humans have done, my shrikes have learned to kill the good folk with cold iron.
• Since it's a learned behavior, I could write about ordinary shrikes, with an anomalous meme. Which plays into another thing I like to think about: learning and tool use in birds.
• I had once written for a collaborative story a bonsai garden where the evidence of tiny human sacrifice appears but no tiny humans are ever visible. I realized that I could recycle this here. Which developed another layer. How do people react to an unstoppable giant monster that kills them in a particularly spectacular and gruesome way? Religious ritual.
• Putting all of this together I realized I had an article about a meme, that doesn't affect humans, that interacts with this really anomalous thing, which itself can't be observed directly. So my theme is that the Foundation is containing ordinary birds and teaching them to kill and eat sapient creatures, which otherwise they are unable to contain or study. A theme well supported by the cold clinicism of an SCP.

Writing

• I read up on shrikes (mostly the Wikipedia article).
• I wrote the article over about three days. If there was anything I wasn't sure about I looked it up.
• When I write SCPs, I keep How to Write an SCP, as well as both the wiki text reference and the wiki code snippets collection open on tabs.
• I find that I usually have to do some calculations when I write. I try to triple check the math when I do. Inevitably I make errors (in this case in the number of generations of shrikes that would be part of this containment).

Feedback

• I made a thread for my draft on the forum: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/forum/t-1185591 (obviously the sandbox link isn't going to show you this draft but rather my current one).
• I went on the chat and tried to get feedback there.
• I personally found the chat feedback to be very difficult, although I think TwistedGears was helpful.
• I did find forum feedback to be more helpful, but I understand that my experience is nearly the opposite of what many successful writers here feel.
• I think that an important part of feedback is recognizing what is helpful and what isn't. Everyone means well, but some advice isn't very useful. I wouldn't have posted this if I had taken all the advice (someone thought it was too similar to the robot in Hyperion to ever work, someone else thought that there shouldn't ever be any more articles with birds in them, for example).
• Professor Will suggested I change my footnotes into Bibcites (because I was referencing fictional journal articles for versimiltude). I did so, but as far as I can tell I am the only writer to do this on the wiki. Usually fake journals are just footnotes. I think he was right though and will probably use bibcite again for fake bibliographic citations.

Posting

• I read through it several times. I should have done a search/replace for "SPC" and "XXXX" but I didn't. I highly recommend that you do this prior to posting!
• I was very nervous as I carefully followed the instructions in How to Write an SCP and posted it.
• I tried to get my author post done before anybody else got there but was ninja'd.
• I was initially very dismayed by the reaction. However it turns out that those first few posters were outliers. It now has, I think 58 upvotes and only three downvotes.
• I tried to respond to critique in the discussion as rapidly and tactfully as I could. Unfortunately I feel like I became somewhat more argumentative than I wanted to. I don't think that I communicate very well when I don't understand what someone is trying to say. In particular, I am afraid, I still don't really understand what Tiam Kiara or Adam Grey wanted me to do. I would like to improve on my ability to respond to critique that I don't understand.
• One thing that changed due in response to critique in the discussion thread was the addition of the footnote about normal shrike behavior. This has the odd effect of giving my article both footnotes and bibcites, which TL333s,² at least, found weird but I don't know if there's anything to do about that.

As a general thought about your first article, that certainly was very much in my mind at the time and that I haven't really seen articulated elsewhere:

Ideally the author's identity should be irrelevant to voting, but realistically readers have more patience with familiar authors. If you want to try something expiremental or unusual, or something that requires a lot of thought to unravel, or even just perceived as difficult (humanoids, Keters, format screws, Thaumiel, etc.) it is probably a good idea to do something simpler first and try to establish yourself. Otherwise you may very well post something that is quite good, but never given any chance to succeed.

This article has Chinese and Japanese translations!

SCP-2890 "Magic Certainly"

I've long found the song "Frosty the Snowman" to have a horror element that nobody else seems to see. Many people seem to think that the snowman was magical but the song is really about the hat. "There must have been some magic in that old top hat they found". What kind of magic animates humanoid simulacra? What kind of magician uses immortality to hang around children? What if the song was based on suppressed memories of real events?

This article had a very difficult birth. During critique, I added a lot of material in order to try to answer questions that in hindsight I probably should have left unanswered. There originally was a supplemental page called "LAVENDER CIRCLE" that detailed the Foundations attempts to find the origin and purpose of the artifact. I ended up self-deleting that (and so far that is the only page of mine to be deleted) and paired down the article almost to how it started before I got any feedback at all.

There's also the question of where the Foundation gets children for experiments. I took the suggestion that they sometimes source D-Class from refugee communities and ran with it. After all, it would be even worse to just take the parents and leave the children alone in some displaced persons camp, right?

I'm not really happy with how this article turned out, and I may try to rewrite it someday. Although it is just successful enough that I'm afraid to mess with it.

SCP-2673 "The Hunter in Words"

There was a failed SCP that appeared to be poetic, but was probably only accidentally so, which inspired me to write about a kind of info-life monster that could only be imprisoned in poetry. I thought about poets who died young (and I really wish I could have worked Keats in there, maybe I'll put him in the containment log eventually) and Marlowe immediately sprang to mind, which suggested the link to SCP-2264.

As I started writing I realized that this is a perfect excuse for a collaborative log. Between the lethal kill trigger poem, the containment sonnet, the description, and the first three poems of the containment log, I ended up writing six poems for this article.

It wasn't easy to write a long poem in iambic pentameter with a complex rhyme scheme that also was a coherent SCP description with all the usual checkpoints. Some of the liberties I took with scansion seem to have been too much for some readers. If anybody wants to point out the parts where the meter fails totally for them, I'm happy to try and fix it.

I wasn't really aware of the really very similar haiku article, at the time. I'm not sure if I would have written this in that case.

This article has a translation on the Chinese site.

SCP-2631 "Standard Containment Planet"

This is a rewrite of daveyoufool's original SCP-2631. I was watching the original fail, and offering suggestions on how to save it and had a fairly good idea of what a rewrite would look like when it went to deletion. I kept dave's original title "Cruciform Snare" as a codename in this version. I felt it had a very poetic golden-age-of-science-fiction quality that needed to be retained. This article has multiple K-Class scenarios which is pretty cool, I think.

I tried to make this as hard-ish SF an object as this form allows. I am pretty pleased with the results.

In the discussion page I made a lengthy post with case-by-case analysis of the effectiveness of of the 99-Tripurantaka protocol (Tripurantaka by the way is the four-armed avatar of Shiva that destroyed the Asura's sky fortresses in Rig Vedic myth), and it was pretty nifty so I'll reproduce it here:

Let us assume that the following are true:

• The preconditions for a 99-Tripurantaka event is a Keter level object at the verge of a K-Class scenario with potential interstellar consequences.
• The array's first response is containment either via nanobots or something more esoteric (like the 1987 experiment).
• The planet cracker relativistic impact is a worst case destruction failsafe.

The purpose of 99-Tripurantaka is both to neutralize SCP-2631 and prevent the triggering k-class event.

The following scenarios may occur:

+ Case-by-case analysis

Case I

99-Tripurantaka: Not Deployed
Array Containment:Deployed/Fails
Array Destruct: Deployed/Success
Triggering Keter: Survives/Escapes
Result: Planetary XK event caused by relativistic impact. Keter Object is freed for larger scale K-Class event.
Notes: Worst case scenario.

---

Case II

99-Tripurantaka: Not Deployed
Array Containment:Deployed/Fails
Array Destruct: Deployed/Fails
Triggering Keter: Survives/Escapes
Result: Planetary XK event followed by larger scale K-Class scenario, both caused by Keter object.
Notes: Net result identical to Case I.

---

Case III

99-Tripurantaka: Not Deployed
Array Containment:Deployed/Fails
Array Destruct: Deployed/Success
Triggering Keter: Destroyed
Result: Planetary XK event caused by relativistic impact.
Notes: We are extinct but at least the galaxy is safe.

---

Case IV

99-Tripurantaka: Not Deployed
Array Containment:Deployed/Succeeds
Array Destruct: Not Deployed
Triggering Keter: Contained by Array
Result: Potential catastrophic restructuring or extinction of human civilization.
Notes: May be survivable but this is unknowable. In an eariler draft I had a memo discussing treating this as a potential Thaumiel. Eskobar pointed out this is like a plan to have a bully punch you in the face to kill a spider on your nose.

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Case V

99-Tripurantaka: Deployed/Fails
Array Containment:Deployed/ As Cases I-IV.
Array Destruct: As Cases I-IV.
Triggering Keter: As Cases I-IV.
Result: As Cases I-IV.
Notes: As Cases I-IV. Given the vast gulf in technology and resources this is probably the most likely outcome of a 99-Tripurantaka deployment.

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Case VI

99-Tripurantaka: Deployed/Succeeds only in destroying the array.
Array Containment: Destroyed by Foundation
Array Destruct: Deployed/As Cases I-III.
Triggering Keter: As Cases I-III.
Result: As Cases I-III.
Notes: As Cases I-III. All outcomes result in human extinction.

---

Case VII

99-Tripurantaka: Deployed/Succeeds both in destroying the array, and containing/destroying/neutralizing the Keter.
Array Containment: Destroyed by Foundation
Array Destruct: Not Deployed or Deployed/Fails
Triggering Keter: Contained (or Neutralized/Destroyed) by human action.
Result: Humanity survives with mitigated damage.
Notes: Probable best case post-deployment scenario. This is the one that communicating with the other organizations helps the most with.

---

Case VIII

99-Tripurantaka: Deployed/Succeeds both in destroying the array, and containing/destroying/neutralizing the Keter.
Array Containment: Destroyed by Foundation
Array Destruct: Deployed/Succeeds
Triggering Keter: Contained (or Neutralized/Destroyed) by human action.
Result: XK scenario due to relativistic impact.
Notes: Ironic extinction event. This could result from the aliens being unable to recall the impactor after destruction of the array or from punishing us for destroying it. Or just too-late containment after the point of no return.

---

Case IX

99-Tripurantaka: Not Deployed or Deployed/Fails
Array Containment:Deployed/Fails or only partially succeeds.
Array Destruct: Deployed/Fails
Triggering Keter: Causes less than full scale event.
Result: Human civilization badly damaged but species survives.
Notes: Post apocalypse scenario. This one also benefits from warning the other organizations. Least likely scenario as the impactor probably won't just miss.

As you can see, if it gets to this point there really aren't any good options. Much better to control the Keter before anything else happens.

Of course if any of the initial assumptions about the aliens motives or capabilities are wrong, then this whole line of reasoning may be fatally misguided.

Now in Russian and Japanese!

SCP-2140 "Retroconverter"

Declassified
This was my entry into the Short Works Contest. I was listening to the story "The Retgun" by Tim Pratt on EscapePod while driving to a work site. I started thinking about an SCP that retroactively recruits people into the Foundation and probably inspired by the Ken Hite's GURPS Horror: The Madness Dossier the idea for a glyph that does this when you look at it, being re-purposed from a civilization on the other side of an ontoclysm (which of course simply had to be the Daevites) was born.

I originally started outlining this as a very long piece, but it wasn't really working. Most of the material would have logically been quite boring to read. Then I saw the contest and decided to see if I could make it work at 500 words or less.

The big challenge to writing this was having to describe something that can only be understood through induction rather than deduction, because it alters reality and changes the evidence. The Foundation knows this works because they have never tested it, and the only people who have ever seen it are already cleared to do so. This of course doesn't make any sense, with the way the Foundation normally operates, so they induced that it must be working as designed.

As far as I can tell, I now have the shortest Thaumiel (and I'm glad I didn't actually check to see how few Thaumiels there actually are; I may have been too intimidated to try this).

There seems to be quite a few people that wanted a longer treatment, and I may add some supplementary material if I can figure out how to make it work.

Having recently rewatched it, I suspect that Project Kallinikos was inspired by the Monty Python "Funniest Joke in the World" sketch.

This inspired Database Error? by MrWrong.

Now in Korean, French and Japanese!

SCP-2523 "Goblin Market"

"This mystical romp of a skip comes fully recommend, for its traditional yet somehow perfect use of fictional and mystic tropes, pitch-perfect delivery, lack of noticeably grammatical errors, and the best use of milk I've seen in a skip so far!"
-Zmax15, The Newspapers

This is a rewrite of Foamfollower's original SCP-2523 "Halloween Store". I had commented something along the lines of "There's probably something you can do with seasonal Halloween stores, but this isn't quite it." and when the article got to deletion range, I decided to walk the walk if I was going to talk the talk.

+ There's a few different things going on here:

• I have long been fascinated by the Gaelic belief that on Samhain (the festival from sunset Oct. 31st to sunset Nov. 1st that marks the end of summer (brighter half) and winter (darker half) of the two season Gaelic calendar) the gates to the Otherworld open. This belief is the origin of most of the North American Halloween tradition (including costumes, jack o' lanterns and trick-or-treating).
• There's a Scottish Highlands folktale about an annual invasion every Samhaim of our world by goblins that is stopped by a local hero.
• The fairly recent phenomenon of seasonal Halloween stores that rent empty storefronts or parking lots for the month of October struck me as a very liminal kind of place, with this almost dreamlike ephemeral existence. Much like the kind of places that are associated with faerie activity in the folklore of Great Britain and Ireland.
• "Stores" and "goblins" immediately suggested a "Goblin Market". Which brings us to Christina Rossetti's poem, "Goblin Market" (link is to full text at the Poetry Foundation) which is the primary inspiration for the piece.
• I am often struck by the notion that retail chain's uniform presentation means that it would be difficult or impossible to determine what store you are in from the inside, and that they could be the same store.
• I've long toyed with a cosmology for faeries that has time as a spatial dimension in the Otherworld which is split between the dominating geography of summer and winter. This probably stems from the Gaelic pagan ideas of a two part year, and the Otherworld as Tír na nÓg, the "Land of Youth" which is characterized as a timeless paradisaical afterlife combined with the more modern notion of a summer and winter court of Faerie corresponding with Seelie and Unseelie sidhe respectively. In this cosmology "goblins" are a race of free faeries that live in the liminal zone between summer and winter (neither of which are very free or nice places) and who serve as traders, mercenaries, and a political buffer zone between the two polar powers (similarly the tribes of helper fairies dwell on the spring border).
• The idea behind the apparent unevenness of the trades, was that the goblins aren't considering (or capable of considering) what we consider valuable. Rather the trade value in the Otherworld is based on the value that the person making the sacrifice personally held the object or quality. The mother who traded her child, actually traded "motherhood", which she did not personally value to a great degree. The child is fine, by the way, he is being raised back in the Land of Youth as a member of the goblin tribe (as they will always adopt the lost and abandoned who wander into their realm) while the abstract quality of motherhood is traded for other goods.
• The idea that faerie glamour is an antimemetic effect, and therefore subject to mnestic treatment.
• Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree was my favorite book as child, and it was hugely influential on me. There's a reference hidden the article.
• For the goblin interview, I borrowed the most famous goblin in English literature, Robin Goodfellow.

This eventually was the article that finally surpassed my first article, SCP-2323 in rating. Which tells me that people either like it when I end in a "-23" or when I write about fairies (probably the latter).

Kalinin's critique of this piece, cogently covers what appears to be the main issue that most readers had:

The interview doesn't really work for me. I don't find that it adds much to the narrative, and all it really does when I read it is reinforce this "tra la la oh you delightful human folk" tone that once again sounds like a mischievous faerie from central casting.

I think that I generally agree that I was lazy with with the Robin Goodfellow interview. I could have not leaned so heavily on faerie tropes there, and written him with a more contemporary voice. I think that I'm unlikely to change it now, as it is generally so well received, though. I will try to remember this for future work.

+ Otherwise, I will let Robin apologize...

If we shadows have offended,
 Think but this, and all is mended—
 That you have but slumbered here
 While these visions did appear.
 And this weak and idle theme,
 No more yielding but a dream,
 Gentles, do not reprehend.
 If you pardon, we will mend.
 And, as I am an honest Puck,
 If we have unearnèd luck
 Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,
 We will make amends ere long.
 Else the Puck a liar call.
 So good night unto you all.
 Give me your hands if we be friends,
 And Robin shall restore amends.

Translations of this article are on the Chinese and Japanese branches!

SCP-2111 "If You Can Read This..."

Declassified

Craftsmanship, preservation of immersion and just plain entertainment count for a lot with me, and so I enjoyed this. I can see where others may not have, but for me personally, it worked pretty well.
Kalinin

You've obviously been paying close attention and that's worth upvoting in my opinion.
qntm

SCP-2111: If You Can Read This by Sunnyclockwork

This was inspired by a failed coldpost some months ago that had the line, "If you read this, you are dead." I would like thank the author of that article, but it was deleted before that line had bounced around in my head enough to make this and I didn't make a note of the author.

I had the basic concept of this, that the reader of the SCP was a ghost and able to read it because the veils of mortal secrecy no longer apply to the dead, from the start. I knew that wouldn't work right off the bat, without some bulid up, and I needed to show the veils of secrecy somewhat first. I also thought about ghosts as essentially beings of pure information. At that point the Memetics department seemed like an obvious fit, and the competing mutually invisible Antimemetics (from qntm's "We Need to Talk About Fifty-Five", "Introductory Antimemetics, Unforgettable, That's What You Are) and Counterconceptual (from KnightKnight's SCP-2358) Divisions were too good not to use. So I knew I wanted a complex nested article with different versions of the same thing, all leading to the truth being only visible to the dead.

It took a few months of working out the internal logic of this before I felt I could write it. Eventually resolving when I realized it was a haunting, not of a physical place, but of a database.

The format took some time to work out on its own, and the current form came fairly late in the feedback stage. I wanted to have it be different pages, but I didn't want it to have to split votes between five or more page. This needed to stand or fall as a single work. I remembered that SCP-2998 did something of this kind, and looked at that. It took me a while to work out how the listPages module was being used by Aelanna there, but I eventually did and got it to work for my purposes. The fake, [4.63%] shell, UNIX filesystem here was made based on some really helpful advice from my wife (but don't blame her if it is stupid or nonsensical; that's definitely on me).

This is by far the longest thing I've yet written for the site (not counting this page of self-indulgent wankery, anyway).

Reception was good, but not exactly what I hoped. I honestly thought this was going to be my breakout hit: complex narrative, good characters, solid hook, and an interesting novel format. Those that didn't like it seem to have not liked the format, the reveal, the pulpy elements or all three. Those that liked it seem to have really liked it, especially the format, the reveal, and the pulp.

psul posted some insight about the relationship of structure to this piece's themes:

One of the things I most appreciate from SCPs (and from culture in general) is being surprised, or led in a direction that I didn't expect. One way to do that is to tell a story that looks like one type of narrative, but turns out to be another.

Here, the build-up is all to do with the intricate nature of both cognitohazards and the Foundation teams that deal with them. It is fun, pulpy, upbeat, intriguing. Even the start of the fourth tab keeps some of that up, despite the introduction of the supernatural. But by the time the full story is revealed, I realise that this is a meditation on death, legacy and the conflicting human desires not to be mourned, but also not to be forgotten. That realisation re-characterises much of what has gone before - the story overall is less upbeat and more elegaic.

I've gotten a few repeated questions so I'm going to do a short FAQ here:

+ Why are all the files listed?

The idea is that everything here is protected by varying degrees of antimemetic camouflage. So most viewers are going to see just the datafile directory and maybe a hard to look at gibberish title in place of RED TALISMAN. Memetics Department viewers can only see RED TALISMAN. Antimemetics can see RED TALISMAN and RIDDEN TONGUE. Counterconceptual can see RED TALISMAN and REVENANT THEORY. The dead can see everything.

+ What are the criteria for Omega-Zero?

I left this deliberately ambiguous because Omega-Zero doesn't want it's operatives thinking about this too much, but author intent was that Michelle Yu was absolutely correct. In order to be in Omega-Zero you needed prior access the database and at least one person on long-term mnestic treatments (like say Marion Wheeler or O5-8) knew you personally. Normally people grieve and forget, and the dead move on, but mnestics prevents this by giving the living perfect eidetic recall of the dead. Ghosts here are beings of pure information and by having perfect information left in the minds of the living, they are tied to the mortal world.

+ What are Omega-Zero Operatives like when they aren't using the Foundation's computer network?

They are haunting the database, and like some versions of the ghosts in a haunted house only seem to exist as conscious entities when they are interacting with the haunt. The theme here as that ghosts are information, and only are really able to think if they are generating or processing new information. They may still manifest as other kinds of ghostly activity, that's why they are able to write on walls (again producing information). Prior to being summoned by her SCP file, Michelle Yu was more rage-filled and mindless, like a preta. That's why the modified entry seems so emotional; she is in the process of regaining consciousness and it hurts. Later she would go on to write an eloquent manifesto and lead the insurgent dead, but Omega-Zero isn't going to allow new operatives to read it.

+ What can Omega Zero Operatives do?

Identity Warfare Training allows them to attack other informational beings directly as long as those beings intersect with the database in some way (SCP files, incident reports, even anomalous statistics like mysteriously declining personnel reports). They can delete or even edit their targets, but it is a battle of informational systems and sometimes they lose. The more information about the target in the database, the better IWT works. Grey was powerful, very little was in the database about him, and he managed to get the drop on every operative that went after him.

They also can warn Antimemetics Department personnel (although not Counterconceptual, as their defensive training blocks out anomalous information) with the wall writing.

+ Why the cogitohazards?

This is how the non-communication of information that separate the living and the dead is enforced.

+ Why isn't RED TALISMAN a Thaumiel?

Thaumiel objects are classified Level 5 and this is something that ordinary level 2 and higher Meme Team personnel work with.

+ Easter Eggs?

There are direct references to qntm's Antimemetics Tales here, two are fairly transparent and the third may not be discernible at all: COLORLESS IDEA (in RIDDEN TONGUE) is the Grey Incident, OCHER MINERAL (in RIDDEN TONGUE) is the Clay incident and the Y-M/M-Y Conditioning is Marness-Yarrow Conditioning, named for Lyn Marness and Goldie Yarrow.

Also, I don't know if nobody noticed, or nobody thought it worth commenting on, but the guy who commits suicide in RIDDEN TONGUE is the director of Omega-Zero in READ THIS: Amos Sanchez.

The "Ará Orún" are the "saints" in Santeria, the guardian spirits who aren't your direct ancestors. This is partially why I posted on Nov. 1 (All Saint's Day) and why I used the 2111 slot (the other reason was pure marketing: I want to maximize exposure on Top Rated Pages This Month).

This article has absolutely no redactions, black-boxes, or expungements.

This article is translated on the Chinese branch.

SCP-3519 "These Quiet Days"

Upvoted at "Credible accounts of SCP-3000 related homicides, especially of children, begin to surface."

This is legitimately, terrifying, and the use of contemporary media works very well. The Conway/Cooper log stands out among the bunch, but all of them are good. It's a beautiful day indeed. +1
— Roget

Grim and poignant. Very good.

You captured the voices of those irl people perfectly. A lot of writers here are let down by the unrealistic dialogue in their pieces; it's been a while since I read dialogue as convincing as yours on this site. You should produce a guide on how to write it, if you can.
— Buttfranklin

Like psul's entry, this hits hard on the horror of the possible: it's entirely realistic for people to believe something like this, memetic or not. I love how things get less and less formal as the final log progresses. Good stuff. +1
— TL333s

I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to write for the SCP-3000 Contest, and then I had a nightmare where the scenario in this article happened. I entered the contest fairly late, on the 7th of April, 14 days after the contest had started, three days before the close of posting. I honestly expected a modest rating in the mid-40s and to maybe place ~20th. I ended the contest in 7th place at +188; which was a surprise.

After the contest was over, and it moved into SCP-3519, I changed the date (it was originally 12/07/19; and the party was for Halloween) and added the email, which fills a hole that I felt was there from the beginning. I also decided it call it "These Quiet Days" instead of "Peaceful Sunday" because 03/05/19 is a Friday.

There were a quite a few things that were cut from this one:

+ show block

Suicide Note 11/24/19:
We failed. This didn't need to be the end, but I think it's clear now that December 7th is a K-Class event because we decided it was. It's too late. I'm sorry. I don't want to outlive humanity.
— Nori

"Synod Rules on the 'Widow of Livny'", Russia Today, 11/01/19:
The Holy Synod has ruled on the case of the "Widow of Livny" (Russia Times continues to preserve the dignity and privacy of this woman) a Church spokesman said. In a press conference this afternoon Bishop Hilarion said, "The Patriarch himself has met with the widow himself. She told him of her vision. That she saw St. Ambrose come to her in the hospice, and he lifted her up from her body and carried her through the door, where Christ was waiting. The Patriarch found that she was pious woman of good character, and that details of her vision would only be known to someone who was well educated in theological matters. Furthermore, he said that when he heard her speak he was blessed with the understanding that she spoke true prophecy."
He went on to say, "The widow said that in her vision she took Christ's hand, and He said 'look to the next room'. When she did she saw that St. Ambrose could not convince her neighbor to leave his body and then Satan came in the form of a doctor and sat next to the man, telling him that life was flesh and not to abandon it. The man refused St. Ambrose and Christ said to her, 'Go and tell what I have shown you'".
He said that the woman died shortly thereafter holding Patriarch Kirill's hand. The hospice confirmed this for Russia Times reporters.
When asked to clarify the interpretation of the prophesy of the "Widow of Livny", Bishop Hilarion said, "It confirms the signs that the Second Coming is to occur on the feast of St. Ambrose, and furthermore that we must abandon our physical forms to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven."

Excerpts from the Livejournal of "Solstice Sunrise" (Rinna Saar (23) of Tallinn, Estonia):
11/01/19:
My brother is an idiot. He told me that he saw in Russia Today that some lady told the Patriarch of The Russian Orthodox Church that the world is going to end on St. Ambrose's day, which is the same as this "7th of December" meme that everybody is being dumb about. I asked him since when does he read Russian propaganda or is Christian, even. He acted like it was a joke, but then I pointed out that people really are dying over this shit. He then said that I should have an open mind if people like the Russian Patriarch are taking it seriously. I said why should I take him seriously now, all of a sudden, when I don't believe in his stupid God anyway and when he says I am evil for loving Sigrid.
11/03/19:
This stupid apocalypse thing! I got into an argument with Sigrid today. I told her about how mad I was about the thing that my brother sent me, and how everybody, even the news was taking this whole December 7th thing way too seriously! She said that of course it wasn't the Second Coming of Christ. But THEN she said it was an asteroid or something. I said that the scientists say there's no asteroid coming, and that she was being ridiculous. She said that she heard the scientists were lying in order to not scare anybody. Then some big Swede at the bar said he heard it was the Fenris coming to gobble up the world, with a straight face! And Sigrid, agreed with him! I said "How can it both be an an asteroid and the Fenris" and she said that reality is an illusion hiding deeper truths blah, blah, her usual witchy crap. Is everybody a moron?
11/05/19:
This is terrible. Jelena, the nervous lady down the hall from me, killed herself today. Apparently she sent her two little kids to her sister's and then she hanged herself in the shower.
11/08/19:
There's no food at the store, but apparently LiveJournal still works. This fucking world!
11/09/19:
There was an announcement today from the government about how to prepare your body for retrieval if you kill yourself. Apparently more people are dying than the city can handle. What the fuck is happening?!
11/10/19:
Oh my God! My brother just tried to kill me! He was trying to talk me into killing myself with him, and I said he was being an idiot and he should stop joking around about this stuff, it wasn't funny. We got into a big screaming argument and then he tried to grab me and make me swallow pills. He was crying that I needed to go to sleep before it was too late or some shit. I ran home and locked the door. I'm going to leave the city as soon as I can convince Sigrid to come with me.
11/12/19:
Sigrid's gone. I let myself in and she was there with a needle in her arm. She promised me that she'd quit that shit. She's gone. It's been two days. I still can't believe it. I'm alone. I miss her so much.
11/13/19
She emailed me, before, and I've been thinking a lot about what she wrote. I think maybe you should too:

Remember when I told you about Nick Bostrom's argument that reality is a simulation? The one that presented a trilemma of unlikely outcomes? Either civilizations never achieve posthumanity, or posthumans don't run ancestor simulations, or we are living in an ancestor simulation?
Let's say that we accept his argument that the probability of life being a simulation is one. Looking at what's happening in the world right now, the probability of surviving past the 7th is definitely not one, it's rapidly declining to zero. Even if you do live, what kind of life are you going to be able to have?
What's the probability of everybody in the world deciding that the world is ending on the exact same day and that you have to, in defiance of the survival instinct and everything, kill yourself before that day? It seems unlikely, but it is happening.
What would a simulation look like from the inside, right before they switched it off?
Maybe they need to migrate us to a new program.
I love you so much, Rinna. We'll see each other soon.

No further entries.

(T-2) 12/05/19: Site-3000 Inventory: 18,000 MREs (~20 years at reasonable calorie budget); 500 L water; stream ~ 25m W clean mountain water; fish; fishing gear (thank you cabin owner whoever you were); snow currently 33 cm deep; complete field hospital kit; four M-4 carbines; 4,999 rounds M855 FMJ; satellite phone; four CF-19 Toughbooks with L4 Memetics Department software suite; RTG (rated for 500 MW with a half life of 87 years, also all the hot water I could want); access to all Foundation facilities via O5 overrides (untested); truck has full tank; additional ~ 150 L of gas.

Operation AZURE PEREGRINE

There have been few things on this site that have switched between boring and entertaining as much as this AAR.
-Jacob Conwell

Poster by DrKens

This supplement to SCP-2970 was the 4th part of a series:
1. Avatara, by A Random Day
2. GRANT REQUEST FOR INVESTIGATING THE APPLICATION OF CERTAIN RESEARCH ASSETS IN OVERCOMING INHERENT LIMITATIONS OF THE HUMAN BODY by GreenWolf
3. SCP-2970, Holy Misplacement, by TyGently
4. Operation AZURE PEREGRINE, by me
5. The Lord of Endowments by me
6. Samsara by A Random Day and TyGently

Tau-5 Patch Logo by Sunnyclockwork

The letterhead design was made by TyGently with the Tau-5 logo made by the amazing SunnyClockwork

This was the After Action Report entry for the third place team, Apotheosis, in the Mobile Task Force Contest. This was my first team contest, and it was really a lot of fun working with GreenWolf, TyGently, and A Random Day. Working with the contest restrictions, deadlines, and with the elements established by my teammates provided a wonderful framework for creativity.

All members of the Apotheosis approached this project very much in-sync from the beginning, to the extent that we all came in into the contest with the same ideas about themes and goals. We even all independently proposed team names that were all variants of references to apotheosis (mine was "Gods and Monsters", a quote of a toast from The Bride of Frankenstein proposing a new era of apotheosis through science).

We established an irc chat room for team planning, and had a very productive brainstorming session that established the concept and themes of our planned series as well as a broad outline of the narrative and how we were going to use each document type to support it. I was assigned the AAR as a supplement to TyGently's SCP.

Real life made the next few meetings hard for me to attend, but I started research into doing the AAR. In the meantime A Random Day wrote Avatara which established some details about the team.

At this point we had some conflict about the direction we were heading, I really didn't like the four man squad, as a squad of infantry is much larger element. More problematic for me, was that the entire point of the Samsara project was that they could replace casualties within weeks, with memories and training intact, but any casualties to a four man unit are very significant; militarily a unit is considered suppressed if it sustains >10% casualties, neutralized if it suffers 10% to 29% casualties, and destroyed if it sustains 30% or more casualties; for a fireteam this means that one casualty neutralizes them, and two will destroy them. The ability to quickly replace casualties is a great force multiplier, but a purely logistical one and is only relevant strategically; on an operational or tactical scale, the scales that an AAR covers, this advantage would be invisible. Furthermore, the tactical considerations of MOUT (mobile operations in urban terrain), which was the type of operation I was tasked to write, mean that it is difficult to conduct without taking some casualties and that it generally requires a minimum of a squad to clear a structure, due to the need to cover danger areas (like hallways and stairs) and multiple entrances simultaneously³. I felt at this point that I had multiple conflicting directives:

• Write a document with a high degree of verisimilitude.
• Write an entertaining document with some degree of narrative tension and danger.
• Clear a structure with a significant number of armed hostiles with esoteric defenses.
• Show the troopers taking some casualties, so that the Samsara "respawn" tech is highlighted.
• Use no more than the four troopers of Avatara.

We had a meeting where I presented these concerns, and reached what everyone thought was a solution, but unfortunately I seriously misunderstood the decision.

I then wrote a draft of the AAR. In this first draft I based Tau-5 organization on the Indian Army, for cohesion with the whole Hindu theme, because a British-style commando troop is a little lighter than a US platoon, and because of the whole "every MTF is different" thing that comes up a lot on the forums; also because I like the sound of Indian ranks (and I'm a huge fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Ian Macdonald's River of the Gods, and Kipling). This version had three sections of 11 troopers each, all of them copies of the same base personalities. Nobody in my team liked it very much. They fairly insisted on familiar US ranks and organizational elements for our largely US audience's conservation of WTF, and absolutely insisted on the four man "squad" of Samsara troopers, in order to limit the characters to a small relateable cast. While these are sensible choices, they initially felt impossibly contradictory to me. With only four Samsara troopers, I initially saw the possibilities as:

• The Samsara troopers are a small part of a squad-sized element mostly composed of conventional human operators. In this case, it really made more sense to distribute the Samsara troopers across four fireteams. I felt this was largely unsatisfying because ultimately I'd be writing a very mundane account with speculative elements that would be mostly cosmetic.
• Ignore verisimilitude and write an AAR from the universe as directed by Micheal Bay. This would have been failing to do the job I was tasked with.
• Deploy a fireteam into highly hazardous environment, kill them, and fail the mission. This makes the Foundation look extremely incompetent, and makes our MTF appear useless besides.

I tried to resolve this for a couple of days, when it occurred to me that I needed to think of the Samsara troopers, not as a special operations fireteam, but as a squad of IFVs. I needed force multipliers that would make a individual trooper equivalent to an armored vehicle. These multipliers were, it turns out, there all along:

1. The Samsara troopers are made from the cells of a god, with significant supernatural properties, which had already been established in GRANT REQUEST FOR INVESTIGATING THE APPLICATION OF CERTAIN RESEARCH ASSETS IN OVERCOMING INHERENT LIMITATIONS OF THE HUMAN BODY; specifically they have both significant magical affinity and rapid regeneration.
2. The Samsara trooper's bodies are constructed by an exogenic process, and can easily be customized with both improved biology and cybernetic implants.
3. While extremely hazardous operations is the primary mission of Tau-5 the secondary mission is the testing of paratechnology.

So I rewrote the article with a platoon-sized element built around support of a four man squad of humanoid tanks. As an aide, I also created a ToE for Tau-5. This version passed my team's assessment, and I posted it to the forums. Forum critique led to some major changes: the minor-GOI that was responsible for ARGENT ICON was replaced by a less formal group of wizards, details about supporting elements and intelligence assets were removed, the concept of operations was streamlined, the operation itself was simplified, and I removed the ToE to the files. I briefly toyed with attaching a spec-sheet for the paratech but my teammates liked the descriptions where they were, so I streamlined them instead.

Easter Eggs

• Sarah Hughes is named after Stanely S. Hughes.
• When I asked what I should use as the codename for the operation, A Random Day suggested I use something that would be military slang for something vaguely insulting. Azure is blue and a peregrine is a falcon; therefore an azure peregrine is a "blue falcon", which is milspeak for a "buddy fucker" or someone who doesn't pull their weight or causes problems for their teammates. I'm really surprised nobody noticed this!

Reception of the final article has been pretty positive, with some complaints that the document sacrifices some entertainment value for verisimilitude, and some complaints that the premise of Tau-5 doesn't work with a highly conservative model of the Foundation.

The Lord of Endowments

This GOI format article for the third place team, Apotheosis, in the Mobile Task Force Contest was the fifth part of a series:
1. Avatara, by A Random Day
2. GRANT REQUEST FOR INVESTIGATING THE APPLICATION OF CERTAIN RESEARCH ASSETS IN OVERCOMING INHERENT LIMITATIONS OF THE HUMAN BODY by GreenWolf
3. SCP-2970, Holy Misplacement, by TyGently
4. Operation AZURE PEREGRINE, by me
5. The Lord of Endowments by me
6. Samsara by A Random Day and TyGently

After I finished Operation AZURE PEREGRINE, I realized that we had plenty of time left in the contest (especially after the deadlines were extended); A Random Day and TyGently were writing Samsara but I was out of assignments. We had all of our required document types, and with Samsara we would have the required number of documents; so I wasn't required to write anything, but I could if I wanted to. I considered writing a Prometheus Labs document based on the paratech I described in AZURE PEREGRINE, but I felt that it would just repeat a lot of the same information. At the same time, we were getting feedback on the four articles that had already been posted and it was clear that most readers weren't connecting the dots as well as we had hoped.

The unnamed wizard that would become Rashid of the Lion Gates was originally there so that the mission wouldn't be an unqualified success, but I realized I could use him as a viewpoint character on the other side of this story as a Serpent's Hand document (my first GOI format article of any kind). I first wrote The Jailors' Prometheans which was just Rashid's account of AZURE PEREGRINE; I was instantly very unsatisfied with it. A Random Day in particular found that it had too much perfect knowledge on Rashid's part, and I agreed. I rewrote it to be about the god mentioned by SCP-2970. The first draft pushed the Prometheus metaphor a bit too far, so I rewrote it a bit with more ambiguity. TyGently pointed out that the information given by Israfil conflicted with the account of SCP-2970, and rather than correct it, I decided to roll with it and make Israfil an unreliable narrator. Even Rashid, ostensibly one of Mary's followers, questions him in the third footnote.

I took it to the forums and got some really good critique from psul which led me to greatly expand the article, especially the "Observations and Stories" section, including the account of the White Monk of Tours which also directly contradicts Israfil (check the dates!), how monkey hive-minds measure things, and more. It also features Ulyana, the narrator of A Witch's Tale - Mistakes Were Made.

There's a ton of references in this and lots of ambiguity, which I think the format supports very well.

+ So what IS the deal with Israfil?

Israfil is the Lord of Endowments or is speaking for him. He is deliberately trying to undermine SCP-2970 and also implicate a theocratic government, as the real reasons for what happened aren't very good for follower morale.

Reception was extremely positive, and it currently is the only thing I have written with zero downvotes. A couple of maybe misconceptions came up, though. First, Beyond Good and Evil is meant as a reference to the Nietzsche book directly (not the eponymous video game classic). Secondly, "Israfil" is a reasonably common Arabic name (and its use in Al-Andalusia is the reason that "Israel" is a name in Spanish-speaking countries), it is the name of the Quranic angel who heralds the apocalypse and its use here has nothing to do with SCP-579 (other than probably also being a reference to the Qur'an).

Thanks to Dmatix and MarqFJA87 for translation help.

SPC-140 "It's a Shark-Punching Book!"

Oh my god, you created Sharkicism

One thing I love about this newer, seriouser version of the SPC is that I get the sense that everyone involved in it is just one or two light taps away from completely losing their shit. They're all waking on eggshells around SPC-001 and it's driven them completely bonkers.
-TL333s

When I read MrWrong's SPC-2615, I was struck by how it took this utterly ridiculous concept and warped it into darkly humorous horror; it was very reminscent of the kind of horror in Jerome Bixby's classic short story "It's a Good Life!" (which was adapted into one of the most well-known episodes of The Twilight Zone), which is a favorite of mine. This version of the Shark Punching Center is about a world created by a typographical error, and the people who are forced to live in this world — by punching sharks.

I really wanted to write one of these as a result and I was inspired to write about what happened to this world when Sarkicism became "Sharkicism". MrWrong in his author post suggests that SPC files are alternate universe versions (in the vein of comic book alternates) of SCP files, except that instead of describing the object or entity in containment they explain how that object or entity can be used to punch sharks. This, and the connection between Sarkicism and the Daevites (specifically that Sarkicism started with the revolt of the slaves in the Daevite city of Adytum), suggested that I rework SCP-140 as a shark punching book.

Odds and Ends

• This is the very second (after SPC-2615) SPC format article ever.
• GREY WANDERER is this universe's SCP-140-A.
• CYAN ABYSS Deviant-Type Selachian Entities are sharktopusmen.
• All of the political geography in this article is alternate historical, except for Massachusetts.
• The date of the Hades Shoal raid is the same as the GOC raid on Adytum's Wake, and "Hades Shoal" is a direct reference to "Devil's Reef" in "The Shadow over Innsmouth".
• The Centre is willingly working to help complete SCP-140 in this universe because as far as they know it will just rearrange some borders in Central Asia, in exchange for getting rid of SPC-001.
• Yes, INCIDENT GOBLIN CHARIOT is the Centre getting booted from the Wanderer's Library for punching sharks.

I requested the amazing illustration by Scorpion451, when I wrote this. It took awhile but the wait was certainly worth it!

Now translated on the French wiki!

SPC-682 "Easy to Punch Shark"

This is actually… kinda scary.

The Punching Centre has more-or-less complete and total control over 682, something the Foundation never has. And they focus said control into punching sharks, or turning things into sharks so as to be punched.

I think we need to stop laughing at the SPC now, guys. They ain't funny no more.
-dankaar

I've long thought that SCP-682 really has two anomalies. The first, explicit, is that the lizard cannot be killed. The second, implicit, is that people are compelled to try anyway. Trying to neutralize any anomaly that can be contained is really out of character for the Foundation, so what if there's a reason for that? Note that many of the disparate origins of the lizard in tales have it the victim of some kind of curse, and being cursed to suffer through attempts to kill it but being unable to die certainly seems like a pretty serious curse.

I also have long thought that the way to contain 682 would be to create an environment where the best adaptation is something that makes it easy to contain, and then just maintain that environment.

In SPC-682, the Centre's overriding need to punch sharks has allowed them to succeed where the Foundation failed. They've molded it into a selachian form that takes advantage of its regeneration, and have created a shark you can punch forever which won't die.

+ What's up with the weird math?

A core premise of MrWrong's idea for the SPC is that as a consequence of S Andrew Swann's Proposal the common typo "SPC" resulted in the accidental creation of the Centre's universe, a universe where the Foundation-equivalent must punch sharks. This universe only survives as long as it amuses you, the audience, and could be corrected at any time if interest wanes: an ontological apocalypse the Centre has codenamed CASE LIQUID WHITE.

So the first number, the years Liquid White is delayed, is a function of Swann's Proposal's rating and the rating of SPC-682, the percentages are the percent of upvotes to total votes of SCP-682, its termination log, and SPC-682 respectively.

Which, I'll understand if you think that was a lot of work for a vanishingly deep joke, but I felt it was the right choice artistically and I'll stand by it.

There are some world-building details for the Centre-verse that I invented here that will show up on any hypothetical Centre hub, so watch for that, Frogmen!

"A Witches Tale - Mistakes Were Made"

This story for this, my first tale, came to me, almost as-is, in a dream.

It's main flaw, IMO, is that it uses the anartist as hipster asshole troupe, which I agree is becoming fairly tired. I couldn't really avoid it, because it was central to the original dream. I promise that if I write AWCY? again, I won't do this.

The narrator, Ulyana, also appears in The Lord of Endowments.

Some observations:

• Petra is a tulpa (a thought-form; this idea originates from Tibetan Buddhism). Her name starts with "p" as a reference to the Philip Experiment (where Canadian parapsychologists claimed to have created a tulpa in 1972). I suppose I could have named her Philomena.
• The witch is speaking with a competent and well-connected Foundation Agent. Someone like Agent Navarro. I probably ought to ask TwistedGears what he thinks about this, actually.
• The witch isn't talking about the God of Abraham when she mentions God. More like a pantheistic reference to the universe.
• Morena was a Slavic goddess.
• A bereginya is a mythic Slavic spirit, or monster, or minor goddess about which little is known now.
• It was asked in the draft stage, so in case anybody else is curious: When she was about 13 there was a peasant levy, she didn't have any brothers of-age and her father didn't want (or couldn't afford to) campaign himself so he passed her off as a son. I suspect this kind of thing was fairly common.

Randomini did an excellent reading for his Advent Calendar 2015:
(.mp3 Direct Download)

In the Trenches with the Dead

After I posted SCP-2111 I started getting questions about the details of the complex technical metaphysics I hinted at in the article and there clearly was a lot of interest in Mobile Task Force Omega Zero from some readers. Then qntm finished "There is No Antimemetics Division" (which I referenced in SCP-2111) with Your Last First Day) and made a call back in there to my article. I started thinking about how MTF Omega-Zero would have to deal with the same events. I also started wondering about Bart Hughes, if he was dead then he'd probably be in Omega-Zero but if he was alive and in hiding, then they wouldn't be able to find him for the same reasons that 3125 can't.

I asked qntm about Hughes and qntm told me about "Five-Five-Five-Five-Five", the sequel series to "There is no Antimemetics Division" and he mentioned that he wanted to use Omega-Zero more substantially there. I decided that I therefore probably ought to write a bridging story that connects the events during the loss of Site-41 all the way to the moment they reenter the story. This would also serve to answer some of the desire for the technical details about IWT in way that is more entertaining than just an info dump somewhere (though that is coming soon too).

I decided that for all Omega-Zero stories going forward I wanted to use characters whose deaths occurred in other author's works so I posted to the forums asking for suggestions, although I already knew I wanted to use Marness, Desai, and Cooper. I then posted an outline to Ideas and Brainstorming, and it was suggested that I break up the story I had planned and serialize it. So now it's a series, called "What the Dead Know" and will probably be in five parts (including SCP-2111).

In this first part, I wanted to cover what Omega-Zero was doing to support Antimemetics and to start the quest to find Hughes. I also wanted to show IWT in-action and give some sense of what a manifestation looks like.

The end result was an entirely epistolary action story told mostly with dialog, technobabble laden dialog, that expects the reader to have read a lot of other material on the site. I don't think that if I had originally thought about it in these terms I would have written it, because that sounds like a recipe for failure. Strangely it seemed to have worked, and no one is more surprised than I am by that.

Cooper and Desai will return.

---

Foundation Universe

Here are some of the elements of the world of the Foundation that I've introduced in my articles. Feel free to use them (with attribution) in other works as appropriate!

Mobile Task Forces

Omicron-13 ("Trick or Treat")

Mobile Task Force Omicron-13 is tasked with the containment of SCP-2523. It is a secondary duty assignment for most members, which activates annually in mid-August and stands down in mid-November. Due to the antimemetic nature of the anomaly, members are on a regimen of mnestics during this period.

Sigma-31 ("Damocles Shield")

Mobile Task Force Sigma-31 is tasked with carrying out a 99-Tripurantaka order in the event of an SCP-2631 activation. Members are standing servicemen in armed forces worldwide, who in the event of a Tripurantaka Ready order are detached and placed under Foundation command. MTF Sigma-31 includes ground, naval and air assets. Host nations are required to maintain MTF Sigma-31 assets at a combat ready status at all times.

Tau-5 ("Samsara")

one of the most well known and important MTFs in SCP lore
— Modern_Erasmus

Never heard of it.
— AdminBright

Mobile Task Force Tau-5 is a platoon sized special operations task force, tasked with extremely hazardous missions as well as field-testing paratechnology. MTF τ-5 is built around the four SAMSARA program troopers, constructed biological shells made from the cells of a dead god and operated by mind-scanned personalities derived from deceased special operators. Samsara squad can replace casualties in only a few weeks by printing a new trooper and downloading their most current scan. Their supernaturally durable bodies, combined with their paratech implants, weapons, and gear, make them a considerable force multiplier. Instrumental in the events following the escape of SCP-2970. See also the Third Law Hub.

+ Patch Logo by Sunnyclockwork

+ Table of Organization

Psi-10 ("Maslow's Motivators")

Mobile Task Force Psi-10 is a worldwide network of psychologists, sociologists, and memeticists, most of whom are reserve Foundation employees assigned ad hoc, tasked with detecting, identifying and tracking anomalous memes and behaviors in the human population. Active in tracking SCP-2631 and SCP-3519 related effects.

Omega-0 ("Ará Orún")

The "saints" of MTF Omega-0 are informational constructs with the memories of deceased Foundation personnel able to manifest through access of the Foundation's intranet terminals. Using Identity Warfare Training (IWT) they protect their living comrades against informational threats and entities. The existence of MTF ω-0 is unknown to most or all of the living members of the Foundation. For more information, see SCP-2111 and In the Trenches with the Dead.

+ Coat of Arms by Sunnyclockwork

Foundation Programs

BASILISK

Project BASILISK is the protocol for weaponizing SCP-2140. BASILISK qualified personnel must have a personal history rated with a high degree of similarity (within two standard deviations on all measured indices) compared to controls not exposed to SCP-2140, be qualified for field operations and certified in the operation of anomalous weaponry. BASILISK operatives are trained to recreate SCP-2140 from memory, and are required to carry washable markers and flash paper in order to create disposable glyphs as needed.

Occult Symbology Working Group

The Occult Symbol Working Group (OCCSYM) is an interdepartmental group tasked with analyzing occult symbols. It includes experts in history, cryptography, archaeology, thaumatology, and literature. An example of their work can be seen in SCP-2890.

Project SAMSARA

Originally a Prometheus Labs program, project SAMSARA involves the exogenic construction of humanoid biological shells with brain structures derived from scans of four special operations troopers, using stem cells derived from the remains of a god-like entity found in the Tabernas Desert of Southern Spain. These tissues have enhanced repair and regeneration abilities, as well as increased thaumaturgic potential. This technology allows for the construction of extremely durable bodies, constructed with cybernetics in vitro (with no risk of rejection), and customized tissues and organs. Since they are constructed with their personalities, memories, and training intact it allows for rapid (~14 days) replacement of casualties. The project's four prototype troopers form the core maneuver element of Mobile Task Force Tau-5 ("Samsara").

Identity Warfare Training Primer

IWT Glossary

casper: MTF ω-0 slang for a Field Memeticist
CIB: Core Identity Biography the official approved edition of a saint's Narrative threads.
CIB protected state: A read-only version of the CIB that a saint can be restored to if damaged or compromised by hostile identity dethreading or injection. This is triggered by injecting a coded sequence. These codes are changed regularly, and are highly compartmentalized. On Revenent field operation the team leader will have the codes for each of their team members, while the Identity Defense Specialist carries the code for the team leader (Wraith teams carry each other's codes). Restoration to CIB protected state typically results in loss of short-term memory and temporary confusion.
CS: Chain Strength; a quantitative measure of the effect of an anchor on any given construct. CS is logarithmic scale. Saints are required to have a CS of 4.5 or higher to qualify for field operations.
dead memes: Information which is stored in static physical matter such as print, and isn't currently accessed by any living or free memome. Dead memes cannot be affected by IWT.
deleted: MTF ω-0 slang for erasure.
dethread: One of the principle offensive techniques of IWT. Dethreading involves erasing portions of the target's narrative threads, causing loss of identity, amnesia, confusion, and ultimately erasure. While dethreading can be targeted against specific threads, this level of precision is nearly impossible against an aware, resisting subject, and therefore hostile dethreading typically targets threads semi-randomly. Dethreading relies on permeability and thus is significantly less effective against living memeomes. Suffienctly skilled Identity Warriors can use targeted dethreading as an amnestic technique, but injection of an antimeme is usually preferable.
dissolution: The gradual subsidence of free memes into the noosphere. Note that dissolved is different from erased: dissolved information can still be remembered.
editior: MTF ω-0 slang for an Identity Offense Specialist.
EIT: Erased in Action
erasure: Complete removal of information from the noosphere. No one, not even informational entities can remember information that has been erased (although copies of the information as well as memes about the erased information aren't erased, which is how MTF ω-0 still knows about Michelle Yu and Site-41).
Field Memeticist: A saint specializing in analyzing, creating, and countering memes and antimemes.
free memes: Memes that exist in the noosphere not directly attached to corresponding physical storage.
five dogmas of defense: A core principle of IWT, these five elements provide the backbone of an Identity Warrior's survival as an informational entity.

• Narrative: The portion of a memeome that codes for identity, it is reinforced by constant unconscious restatement. All sapient memeomes have narrative threads. Narratives have multiple redundancies that make them resistant to dethreading.
• Anchor: A living person who remembers or imagines an informational construct. An anchor's memome is the focal point around which the informational construct initially coalesces into the nooshere.
• Mission: A goal or purpose that motivates an informational entity and keeps it from dissolving. Saints are trained to use the core mission of the Foundation as their mission.
• Emotion: The emotional state of an informational entity. No longer bound to endocrine and cognitive influences, an informational entities emotions are entirely memetic. Emotion allows informational entities to influence physical matter when strongly invested in the outcome, for reasons that are poorly understood.
• Society: The relationships between informational entities that duplicate some of the same functions as anchors.

fizzle: MTF ω-0 slang for the failure of an injected package to activate.
geist: MTF ω-0 slang for a Quick-Space Manipulation Specialist.
Identity Defense Specialist: A saint specializing in using defensive IWT techniques.
Identity Offense Specialist: A saint specializing in using offensive IWT techniques.
Identity Warfare Training (IWT): A formalized body of techniques, developed by MTF ω-0 in order to contain SCP-2111, for survival and combat as informational entities.
Identity Warrior: A practitioner of IWT (or equivalent methods).
infolaser: A tightly focused, extremely permeable memetic injection. Infolasers are both significantly faster and more reliable than standard injection methods. Weaponized infolasers are currently only theoretical for MTF ω-0, but hostile infolaser attacks have been documented in the field, primarily associated with SCP-3125.
informational construct: A organized structure of free memes. Informational constructs are vulnerable to dissolution. Informational constructs only actively exist while they are interacting with other forms of information otherwise they are merely potential in the noosphere.
informational entity: A sentient or volitional informational construct.
informational entity, intuitive: An informational entity that does not possess formal training in IWT (or equivalent). Some intuitives do present strong natural ability despite this and can represent a threat to trained identity warriors.
informational entity, post-biotic: An informational entity whose narrative includes the genuine memories of a living memeome, now deceased.
injection: A principle offensive technique of IWT. Injection involves inserting a targeted meme or antimeme ("package") directly into a memeome. Unlike dethreading, injection works equally well on both living and free memeomes. However, injection can be resisted and even successfully inserted packages can fail to activate.
linebacker: MTF ω-0 slang for an Identity Defense Specialist.
living memes: Memes that exist in a cognitive system (like a living brain, or sapient AI). Living memes have permeability like free memes but are more resistant to IWT.
manifestation: The informational environment supporting an active informational construct.
manifestation log: An electronic document used by MTF ω-0 for manifestation.
meme: A carrier of cultural information, equivalent to a gene. Ideas are constructed from memes. Memes can be stored or transmitted in a physical medium (including neural structures in a living brain) but are also present in the noosphere.
memeome: The set of memes that make up a sapient entity's identity and consciousness. Equivalent to a geneome.
messaging: The practice of using emotional focus to manipulate matter in order to write on surfaces in quick-space. The natural antimemetic immune mechanisms of living memeomes usually make these invisible to the quick, mnestics and/or training can make messages perceptible, and techniques exist that allow a skilled messenger to write messages that aren't subject to these mechanisms.
noosphere: The realm of memetic activity. The existence of free memes implies the noosphere has an existence seperate from physical reality. The precise nature of this existence is poorly understood.
permeability: A property of the behavior of memes in the noosphere allowing memes to interact, blend, and share information. Free memes are highly permeable, living memes are less permiable, and dead memes are not permiable at all.
PKI: Pathos Kinetic Index, a quantitative measure of a saint's emotion. PKI is a logarithmic scale. A PKI of one or higher can generate cold spots, effective messaging becomes barely possible at around PKI 1.3; PKI 2.0 is the minimum requirement for field deployment; ~ PKI 3.0 allows for meaningful pyscho-kinetic effects; at PKI 4.0 an identity warrior can reliably produce around 1 N of force.
quick: Related to living persons.
quick-space: The physical world as separate from the noosphere.
Quick-Space Manipulation Specialist:A saint specializing in using emotion to affect the physical world.
re-min/in: From "reminiscent reinforcement"; a principle defensive technique of IWT that counters dethreading attempts by copying the thread that is under assault.
saint: An MTF ω-0 operative.
shielding: A principle defensive technique of IWT. Shielding blocks attacks through the same erosive mechanisms that cause dissolution.
teams: MTF ω-0 organizes saints into the following types of teams, in each the senior member is also the team leader:

• Revenant: The principal strike team of MTF ω-0; consists of a Memeticist, Identity Defense Specialist, Identity Offense Specialist, and Quick-Space Manipulation Specialist.
• Wraith: A two saint investigative team. Consists of any two saints with different specialties who are cross-trained on the other two specialties.
• Specter: A four saint support team tasked with research or maintenance. Members are typically not qualified in any specialties.
• Banshee: A two saint support team tasked with messaging, consists of a Memeticist and a Quick-Space Manipulation Specialist.
• Reaper: A two saint support team tasked with assisting and recruiting recently deceased saints. Consists of an Identity Defense Specialist; the other saint can have any specialty but is typically unqualified.
• Draugr: A two saint support team tasked with IWT training. Consists of two saints with different specialties and cross-training in all four.
• Manes: A four saint staff team. Members are typically qualified, but it isn't required (although it is for high rank in MTF ω-0). Manes teams command operations, conduct intelligence analysis, carry out strategic planning and so on.
• Phantom: The special memes strike team.

thread: An interconnected set of memes within a memeome. Equivalent to a chromosome.
zeroed: Denigrated term for erased. The model from which it originates has its proponents but has yet to be proven conclusively.

IWT Field Manual Excerpts

2.10 — Five Dogmas of Defense: The Identity Warrior must depend on five key elements of identity for defense in IWT, as well as for long-term survival. We call these five elements "dogmas" because you must believe them if you are going to survive.
2.10.1 — NAMES: Use the mnemonic "NAMES" to remember your five dogmas: Narrative, Anchor, Mission, Emotion and Society.

— Identity Warfare Training Field Manual-01: Basic Techniques

2.10.1.2 — Anchor Your anchors are those among the quick who remember you. Strong anchors knew you well, grieved for your loss, and have taken mnestics at some point in their careers. Initially you'll need your anchor to survive but you can, and will, learn to do without. A strong anchor can be a powerful asset to the Identity Warrior. You can learn to use your anchor to sustain your narrative, learn to sense your anchor's location and emotional state, and even manifest at your anchor's location.
-2.10.1.2-A — CS Rating: By utilizing exercises in Section 3 you will be able to quantify the strength of your anchors. This is the CS (Chain Strength) scale. To qualify for field operations, you'll need at least one anchor with a CS of 4.5 or higher.

— Identity Warfare Training Field Manual-01: Basic Techniques

2.10.1.3 — Mission: Intuitive informational entities are frequently sustained only by their singular dedication to personal directives that, left unfinished in life, are impossible to complete in death. The Identity Warrior draws strength from a more sophisticated version of the same idea: dedication to the core missions of Mobile Task Force Omega-Zero and of the Foundation. So long as these objectives remain relevant, the world still has need of the Identity Warrior, and the dedicated Identity Warrior remains bound to the world.
2.10.1.3-A — Secure: To the quick, ideas are as water to a fish, so ever-present and vital that they do not see the medium in which they swim nor can they easily capture it. Memes and anti-memes easily spread from host to host, change quickly to adapt to any trap, and elude capture by infecting the captors. Identity Warriors bend all lesser ideas to their will and bring them under control. You must comprehend what the living cannot see, capture what they cannot hold. This requires constant vigilance, and constant vigilance ensures continued existence.
2.10.1.3-B — Contain: Through Identity Warfare memetic anomalies are isolated, translated, transcribed, and locked down in the Foundation's archives in ways that transcend mere data or media storage. Without you the Foundation has a sieve, not a cage. You are a wall, so long as you never fall.
2.10.1.3-C — Protect: Bad ideas have preyed upon mankind since the beginning. The quick are poorly equipped to even recognize, much less combat, the threat hiding among their own thoughts. The Identity Warrior faces these on their own terms. Without you to guard them, the living are defenseless. Their safety is your true purpose and to fail them is to become meaningless.
— Identity Warfare Training Field Manual-01: Basic Techniques

2.10.1.4 — Emotion: At your core, you are information so basic it cannot be expressed as language and must be felt. Strong emotion endures when all else fails and can survive the loss of all other identity. Without the discipline of IWT, it isn't uncommon for intuitives to be reduced to nothing more than localized rage or lingering sadness. With IWT you will turn your wounds into weapons.
2.10.1.4-A — PKI: For the Identity Warrior, this core of emotion is a wellspring of power. Using the exercises in Section 3 you will develop and quantify your PKI (Pathos Kinetic Index), a measure of the power you are able to bring to bear.
2.10.1.4-A — Messaging: Emotion is what allows an Identity Warrior to transcend the limitations of mere information and directly manipulate the world of matter. By focusing your emotions you will learn to write the messages we use to warn the quick and recruit the dead.
2.10.14.-B — Quick-Space Manipulation: Writing on the walls isn't the limit of what is possible for the Identity Warrior who nurtures a PKI of 3.0 or higher. If you can feel strongly enough, you may be able to push objects, light fires, or even sculpt air and dust into solid form.
— Identity Warfare Training Field Manual-01: Basic Techniques

2.10.1.4 — Society: Left alone long enough even the strongest identity will dissolve. Who we are to ourselves is only a small part of our story. We define and redefine ourselves constantly in relation to others. An Identity Warrior is never a lone wolf operator, but part of a self-sustaining and member-supporting team.
2.10.1.4-A — Roles The untrained subconsciously adopt Roles in relation to the Roles of others without awareness. In one group a person may be the Wise Mentor, but to another they play the Old Fool. The Identity Warrior must not allow this to just happen, instead they deliberately choose the Role that best compliments the team and supports the Mission.
2.10.1.4-B — Team Identity You will learn the Narratives of your team mates and to incorporate them as a part of your story. You will collaborate in the creation of a shared identity that transcends and reinforces your own. You can never fade away as an individual if your identity is integral to that of a strong team nor can the group ever fade if it remains a key part of a strong Identity Warrior's Narrative.
— Identity Warfare Training Field Manual-01: Basic Techniques

---

MTF ω-0 Roster

The following personnel are possible candidates for Mobile Task Force Omega-Zero ("Ará Orún").
Requirements: Candidates must:

• Be Foundation personnel (including researchers, field agents, and task force operators but typically not D-Class⁴.
• Have died in a previous work on the wiki.
• Deaths should be roughly in the period from 1976 to 2018, but some fudging around the borders is possible.
• For developed characters (e.g. not one-off MTF operator red-shirts who died in logs), their creator needs to be available for contact, as I feel that character death is often something that author's have strong feelings of artistic integrity about, and I chose to respect that.

Feel free to suggest additional candidates in this thread. I'm especially interested in less interesting candidates at this time: redshirt MTF operatives, Foundation maintenance staff that were in the wrong place at the wrong time, ect. and candidates who died before 2000.

+ show block

Beatus	Saint	Source	Died	Significant Anchor	Specialization	Notes
Amos Sanchez	Y	SCP-2111	02/14/1984	Marion Wheeler	Editor	MTF ω-0 Operations Director
Lyn Marness	Y	Unforgettable, That's What You Are	2015?	Marion Wheeler	Casper	AD Founder; EIA Operation Cold City
Zoe Smith	Y	SCP-1638	20██	Agent Helen Zhao, MTF Eta-11	Editor	EIA Operation Cold City
Santosh Desai	Y	I Thought You Died Alone	c. 2004-2005	Arvind Desai	Linebacker	Highest known CS (7.8)
Riley Cooper	Y	SCP-3512	7/20/2016	Director J. Erlenmeyer	Geist	Significant PTSD from death
Jan Isaacs	N	SCP-2138	05/29/20██	Site-73 Director	Support (Research)	May retain SCP-1238-A
Scott Fletcher	N	A Memorandum		Dr. Khayyam	Casper	Married to Ari Bayer
Ari Bayer	N	A Memorandum			Geist	Married to Scott Fletcher
Allison Eckhart	N	SCP-2565		Allison Eckhart As Needed	Special Editor	In this universe MTF ω-0 contained SCP-2565 and is now under control
GE Washer Dryer set that is also Jim Thayer	N	SCP-1539	20██		Special Linebacker	Saint attached to the semantic identity of a 1972 General Electric washer/dryer set; advanced IWT techniques have somewhat restored the identity of Jim Thayer
Pawlukojc	N	SCP-3966		R Argent	Support (Research)
Tyler Bailey	N	A Very Bailey Christmas	1997	Tristan Bailey	Support (Research)	Inventor of the MUTA;need ihp's permission
Zachary Johnson	N	Three Farewells	2013	several including David Navarro	Support (Research)	Connected to Anderson Robotics articles and tales
Daryl Loyd	N	SCP-1504, SCP-3002	2016-2017	Connor Teach?	Support (Research)	Conflicting accounts of death
Gordon Richards	N	Personal Log of Gordon Richards	June 12th(?), ████		Linebacker	Not sure if he actually died; need Gear's permission (also ask about the other Zeta-9 personnel in the log)
Pyotr Vasilev	Y	Personal Log of Richard Larenz			Geist	Former chef
Andrew MacLaughlin	Y	Personal Log of Richard Larenz	██/██/████		Casper
Vihaan Sai	N	SCP-2559	29/10/2013		Support (Research)	Virologist; may retain stroke-related aphasia
Samuel Barnes	Y	SCP-2559	15/12/2015	Dr. Lloyd Quaile	Any Qualified|MTF u-4	married to Tayna Barnes, due to MTF u-4 service memory of marriage was lost
Tayna Barnes	Y	SCP-2559	6/12/13	Dr. Lloyd Quaile	Any Quailified	MTF u-4 married to Samuel Barnes
Noah	N	SCP-1730	██/██/████	Any		MTF Apollo-3
Vigo	N	SCP-1730	██/██/████	Any		MTF Apollo-3

Note: Look into Sigma-66 (per Rimple, they're doomed anyway) and End of the Olympians.

Footnotes

1. In fact this is one of those "nature is a better horror writer than you" things. We actually did drive a giant bird that ate people into extinction.

2. Whose feedback at this stage was extremely helpful.

3. This Marine Corps Gazette article illustrates some of the challenges in MOUT.

4. Due to a lack of personal commitment to the Foundation.