The Book o' Babel

You look into Plugging with mindless curiosity only to see yet another goddamned Author Page.

Opening up the old book, you find yourself faced with a hostile cloud of dust, eager to invade your sinuses and snuff out your life before you can even read a single word. Thankfully, your body's autonomous gag reflex manages to best the foul beast, and rather than death, you are left with the disconcerting taste of dead skin and dirt. You consider slamming the book shut before it can continue to accost you with paper cuts or other things of the sort, but you consider the great deal of effort that went into slaying that horrid mass of airborne pollution; surely, you've come too far to give up now.

You flip the page.

Index

SCP-8418: ALGO-MART ………………………………………….. 250521
The Parcelmen's Creed ……………………………………………… 250531
From the Desk of O5-10 …………………………………………… 251125
A Gally Fellow's Lens ………………………………………………. 251211
The O5 Council Eats Breakfast ……………………………….. 251228

You feel yourself frown. Not only is this book an aspiring murderer, it’s also a liar. There are not two-hundred-thousand pages in this thing, not anywhere close, there couldn't be… though, what harm could it cause to double check? You flick the no-longer-covered-in-dust jacket, sending the pages within flailing towards the very end of the book.

Ideas & Other Things

Babel Dies In Real Life: Amusing title, but I have no idea what this would even contain.
The Serpent's Middle Finger: A Serpent's Hand operative manages to hack into the Foundation Database and create a rather-detailed page for their double-jointed digitus medius.
Dual Lepers, Together Forever: A toxic couple gets fused into one immortal body. A fate worse than death.
The Tower of Rabblerousers: A group of prisoners break free of their captors, taking over a mining yard and building a massive pile of clay to mark their territory. In the midst of the ensuing territorial dispute, a bolt of lightning strikes the clay mound, causing it to explode.
This Is Everything: An inventor with a time-travelling food truck watches the end of the universe a thousand different times from a thousand different places.
Look Upon Me & Prosper: A conman gets cursed with invisibility, and desperately tries to convince the Foundation to take a deal that would break the spell.

Mildly amusing, but not much else. You return to the front of the book with a slight smile before realizing the obvious: you forgot to count the number of pages. You sigh, chastising yourself for being oh-so-easily distracted by mild amounts of comedy. Thumbing back, you feel a sense of confusion wash over you, causing you to stop directly in the middle of the novel.

What kind of scam is this? Half the pages are blank! Recovering from your shock, you immediately resolve to give the author of this book, whoever he is, a piece of your mind; after all, now you know that there's a lying conman murderer out-and-about. If you really think about it, it's your civic duty to rain upon him many insults, fueled by the emotional turmoil and trauma this book has caused you. Something like, "Hey, pen jockey, you stink!" or "-1, should've been a Tale." Yes, it all seems so clear now..

But before you can march forth and give that petulant scammer a piece of your mind, you catch something curious from the corner of your eye. The pages are filling with ink, shifting and changing into shapes, into letters… and you think, maybe this book isn’t too bad after all.

I mainly wrote this to prove to myself that I could. I’d’ve been told by friends, family and professors that my writing was great for years, but I rarely felt that my works were actually appreciated; I’d send them out into the void of Discord chatrooms and get basically zero acknowledgement, and that combined with financial and academic struggles made it hard to find any motivation to work on anything bigger than a poem or short story. I’d’ve been inspired by SCP in my writings for years, and one day, I decided that if I was going to be writing things inspired by SCP, that I might as well just make them for the SCP Wiki.

There’s something about actually having my work seen by others that appeals to me, what can I say.

I got the idea for Algo-Mart — a supermarket with hypnotic music — due to the music being played at the retail store I worked at driving me absolutely insane. There wasn’t anything more to it. The characters of the story came later, picked and chosen from different archetypes I’d created in the past, and the Article came together a month or so later.

The result is a 22k word behemoth that has far too much effort put into it for something that can only be described as ‘mediocre.’ The actual characterization of the antagonists, Amelia and ALGOS, are paper thin, and the email structure is purely experimental and tends to disrupt the flow more than anything else. I don’t like it, but I can’t bring myself to delete it. You have to make shit work before you can make good work, I suppose.

I just wish it wasn’t as shit as it is.

p. 250521