AndarielHaloII

**My long meandering Director's Commentary** (Do not read if you don't care):

Corrosive Corpse:

Wow this one changed significantly. Original draft was something almost completely different, a revised article after having captured a living person who was a generic "I'm a 4000 year old aliens and everyone thinks Im hot as fuck" with the temperament of a teenaged brat and the libido of a hypersexual sociopath. She then commits suicide and her body doesn't decay, but starts to make shit rot all around her instead, like a reverse microwave.

The corrosion part, including the neurodegenerative aspect, was the result of a merging of the above with my first posted article (long since deleted), "Cephalensis-8". I also had some feedback from a very helpful WarpZone, who suggested that I stop Mary Sue-ing this teenage brat and emphasize what I had initially thought up for her as being a "weapon" created by aliens to destroy the Earth. His comment of "emphasize the nature vs nurture" aspect, or the idea that she was a good person, ordered to do evil, and thus took her own life as a result, strongly influenced the final product's letter in particular.

The very first version of the mishy-moo'd Corrosive Corpse was meant to be pure horrorshow—-her face, with the prosthetic eyes and missing tongue and hands and feet were meant to induce a mind-affecting affect that would cause people to develop paranoia and mental illnesses based just on looking at her, and that looking at her, they would be compelled to keep staring, unable to look away. This poorly executed idea came from an incredibly odd and barely coherent source of my own life, and trying to attribute it to the myth of Medusa. Basically, I never understood the message behind the Medusa myth, and the theme of "petrification" referring to being scared stiff, until I saw something for the first time in my life I found really genuinely horrifying. So horrifying I can't even describe it here, not because it would affect others, but because I've had people make it their avatar or hide an image of it for me to accidentally stumble upon just to screw with me. When I first saw this thing, studied it, then looked away, I realized I had spent the next half hour essentially "frozen" in a slouched, leaning-forward position, hand on my chin, too "scared" to even move my hand from mouse to keyboard.

I wanted the same effect with this girl, a mix of creepypasta and Uncanny Valley, like Victorian Death Photos, but much worse. Containment procedures involved putting a hood over her head. The idea was cut out for being stupid and entirely too subjective without resorting to "haha mind tricks!" anomalous effects that suck too much dick to last in a good article.

The draft itself almost completely collapsed when I got some intriguing and rather brilliant advice from TheRaven to basically scrap the entire original concept while retaining the "corrosive" effects by basically making it about the real-life case of Gloria Ramirez, "The Toxic Lady". I was hesitant because at the time, I didn't particularly like the idea of roping in "solved" historical mysteries into SCPs with the usual "cover story, amnestics" handwaving to keep it interesting.

The other defining aspect was that I just didn't trust myself to write it well, as well as resisting the urge to basically let the story write itself—-recounting the actual events and then only swooping in with my input at the very end, explaining "shit's anomalous, yo". The only way I could pull that off, making the SCP aspect more interesting than the actual incident, would take some heavy writing and thoughtful ideas, and I am neither experienced enough nor particularly clever enough to pull something that massive off.

Another idea I had which survived much too long for its own good was some odd manner of "immunity" to the mental illnesses. I had a concept in mind in which certain individuals who had some form of autism (earlier versions included Tourettes and some other neurological impairments) were "immune" to the corpse's neurodegenerative effects, and that somehow the idea would branch off into "people are evolving with certain mental conditions as a defense against this effect" which would further branch off into an idea of two different alien species waging war—-one defending humanity from the other, which this girl would presumably have been a part of. All of that was cut out for being stupid.

After that was cut, there was no need to maintain the neurodegenerative aspect. However, I've always been fond of psychology, with a strong interest in abnormal psychology, and also in part with an early draft comment by someone comparing this corpse's effects to that of SCP-106, I wanted this thing to be unique—-if it just released "noxious killshit gas" then it could probably be accidental. By releasing "noxious killshit gas" AND "crazy mist", it would be undoubtedly intentional. This was in a version of the draft where the letter was meant to be off-limits to all but Level 4 personnel.

At some point, the draft was revamped substantially, and the corpse moved ahead 100 years or so, and was inspired by my own mini-journal used for recording school stuff and due dates for homework assignments and other assorted reminders. The stupid sting at the end was her remarking on what a stupid name "Keffy Lenses" was, a direct reference to Cephalensis-8, which was up at the time.

Some of the later versions of the draft had some elements that in some cases are still there or otherwise implied in the article, but not articulated. In some of the drafts, I articulated them way too much, including a pointless aside where I mention police reporting to the area first, and "follow-up" interviews revealing that all the police officers present at the scene eventually ended up with dead or otherwise mentally incapacitated.

At some point, I realized based on feedback that while it was getting interesting, there was really nothing inherently dangerous about the thing that it couldn't be moved off-site and put in a box somewhere. That's when I expanded on the function of the corrosive effects, doing some brief research on the effects of decomposition, the types of bacteria that can corrode concrete, and how aerobic and anaerobic organisms work. None of what I wrote is likely scientific, but I figure it sounds like it could be plausible if you handwave the more specific biological/technical functions with "anomalous". From there, I expanded it to have an effect noticeable on the entire community around it. Then I drew myself into a hole as I made it so big, it necessitated a full quarantine and a massive die-off, so I toned that down considerably.

I figured the main reason to keep the corpse where it is, rather than take it off-site was that it would negatively affect an entire facility of Foundation personnel, and that if people are going to be exposed, better it be a contained population of civilians than researchers. Then I hit a wall when I made the "repair" procedures that basically shut off the breach and prevented its spread. What stopped it from being moved into a highly advanced facility instead, like SCP-106, with layers of lead paint to keep out the spooky? I was hoping at the time that the effect would be explained basically as "We've seen that repairs to the structure have stopped the effect of the bacterial spread, but we're not 100% sure that it's not still spreading out into the town, and that the death rates due to neurodegenerative diseases may remain somewhat elevated and no one would notice for the next few decades"

So I went the cheap and easy route of "the corpse is stuck in the ground", and that trying to pull it out or dig it out risked damaging it. I figure I would get extra spiffy points for not having the corpse be OMG INDESTRUCTIBLE. By that point, I figured it would cost less to just keep it there and build a containment site around it rather than demolish the building, dig the thing out with heavy machinery, and bring it to another site that would have to be prepped for it anyway. Sure, the Foundation has infinite money, but it's still more sound than going through all that effort just for one non-Keter thing.

The total lack of safety procedures was originally meant to reflect the timing of the discovery—-mid-20th century or so. But as the draft changed, the date got pushed up, and the process of the bacterial stuff remained the same. I figured it would be okay to have personnel in and out on a regular enough basis, like a game of "Fallout", where you get some radiation poisoning, then leave and take some Rad-Away and you're okay again. I specifically emphasized at some point that the corrosive effects took so long that it would basically be safe for someone to wander in and wander out once a month with no effects. But it got too complicated there, and I'm still stuck with basically everyone dicking around in a biological hazard area. I changed the containment procedures to include mention of hazmat suits, but I'm otherwise stuck where I am.

Basically, all of the original ideas and concepts for this article were there by the time I merged the Corrosive Bitch with Keffy Lenses. Because my expertise is in history, I wanted a heavy historical influence and as much "out of place artifact" type stuff as possible. Most of those details never made it into the draft, but the original was much longer with regards to detailing the history of the building the corpse was discovered in, and a potential link between her and the original owner. All of that got cut out because the more I edited, the less I saw any reason to include any of that, since I wasn't going far enough to write a novella about her.

Keeping the "nature vs nurture" aspect in mind, I wanted to wrench the reader with an emotional story (I find I'm rather good with emotiony stuff) but the original "letter" raised more questions than it answered. Another version of it was a snarky, rage-fueled rant against her alien overlords full of sarcasm and outrageous requests. Another version told brief tales of the women in the photograph, and how they had all taken her in, and all started suffering her deleterious effects. It was repetitive and I found myself not caring about them, so why should the reader.

By the end, everything was perfect and technical and scientifically plausible and such, but had no real hook. I had removed the letter at that point, and everyone I showed it to basically said it was a lot worse without it. So I re-added it, re-wrote it, and condensed and edited it down. Originally the letter was meant to imply that she and her handler had access to an Apocalyptic MacGuffin, and that it was still out there, hidden away, and that we were all at risk because her letter never reached her handler. Then I realized it was a stupid idea since she herself was a weapon. Then I shifted it over to she herself being a weapon, and re-introduced the original "nature vs nurture" content I mentioned above.

I thought it would be difficult to strike the right balance between revealing too much and telling almost nothing, but I hit it rather quickly, to a point where I could add or remove a sentence or two, and end up with just slightly "too much" or "too little". It's still not perfect, but I always keep in mind something said by Steven Pressfield, "'Perfect' is the enemy of 'Good'"

So aside from some minor additions explaining that the neurodegenerative effect was physical and not magical, and that people in the room should wear hazmat suits, this thing went from uncertain draft to upvoted mainlister within just a few hours. It's the end result of at least 3 months of writing, thinking, whining, and pity-whoring about how I'd never write anything good enough for SCP after Keffy Lenses bombed so horribly.

So remember kids, write shit, and keep pushing your shit on others if you want to be successful. The only time and place where it is good to be obnoxious and annoying is when it comes to pushing for your creation to succeed.

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Cephalensis-8

Seffy began as a thought based on the idea that certain human instincts like tribalism, nationalism, prejudice, etc, the basic foundation of "Us vs Them" was unnatural, and actually planted in us by aliens or something in order to keep us divided. Building on that, the original Seffy content was meant to be a prion that caused people to become highly fanatic and flock to one another into tribes, leading to persistent conflict with those uninfected.

This notion grew and changed in my head to have a greater focus on the alien thing, and with my amateur love of psychology, I wanted to incorporate some of the most unsettling and disturbing mental illnesses out there I've studied up on, like Capgras and Cotard delusion, and other forms of dementia and schizophrenia that involved hallucinations, paranoia, and otherwise being unable to recognize things normally (like seeing your hand as a fish sandwich).

The prion idea became too stupid to function, and so it became basically something like a zombie plague, or more like the infection in "28 Days Later", only instead of making people mindless monsters, it made them all into mentally ill paranoid people, all having Capgras syndrome. The anomaly was meant to be that everyone infected had the same delusions and hallucinations, witnessing an identical woman with "too large eyes", meant to imply some kind of boogin.

The ultimate idea/backstory for Keffy Lenses was that it was a disease/infection created by aliens meant to either to make all humans destroy each other, or to give all humans the ability to witness and fight another alien that was trying to destroy all humans. The uncertainty was its hook! And I thought about how misunderstanding how certain things work can lead to all manner of odd disasters, like when a space ship accounts for Miles rather than Kilometers, and ends up horribly off-course or exploding. Since people don't explode, I thought about what sort of random effects could be "generated" if you could conceivably scratch grooves or poke holes into a person's brain, much like how mental illnesses tend to be random in effect, though following a consistent pattern based upon what portion of the brain was affected.

So using that, the case was meant to be, in the event that the Keffy was a friendly disease meant to help us, that it was implemented in the wrong way—-like, maybe these aliens had only encountered a different species of human before Homo Sapiens, and so calibrated their MacGuffin to work for Homo Erectus brains, and as such have odd and somewhat related effects on Homo Sapiens brains. I thought (and still think) such a thing is cool, but my whole idea sucked hard regardless.

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Came Back Haunted:

This was an anomaly; the first thing I ever wrote which went from draft to mainlist in about a week or so, and without any major changes. What the final result is is basically 80% what the very first rough draft was. The entire idea came from a thinking session I had a while back where I decided to use real world events and mysteries and make into SCPs. For this one, I chose the Bobby Dunbar case, and then basically tried to attach everything on to that as much as possible. Virtually every aspect of the SCP, aside from SCP-1692-1, was done with incorporating the Bobby Dunbar incident in mind—-setting it in Louisiana, different DNA stuff, and so on. Other body horror things I added on as dressing, and came up with an idea for a spooky thing, but I didn't want the spooky thing to be the main focus of the article.

The spooky thing was meant to be some magic macguffin (alien, demon, monster, unwed teenage mother) that wasn't evil, but rather cutting up and "disassembling" people, the way someone would take apart an electronic device to learn how all the components go together and such. Except due to the anomalous methods the spooky ghosty used, the people would come out subtly wrong, like when you open something fresh out of its box, then put it back in, and the box doesn't close right the way it did before. I wanted to go into detail regarding the types of wrongness (like people showing up with different pigmentation or different blood types altogether) but aside from being impossible to explain, none of it was important to my narrative.

The only new addition to the draft was adding the female survivor at the end. Originally, aside from covering Bobby Dunbar, I was going to have a diary from a black soldier during the Civil War, and did some brief research on the location and what was happening then. The diary would have entries detailing the swamp, soldiers being taken, and a noticeable change in the writer as his grammar inexplicably changes without remark.

I ended up cutting it because aside from essentially going nowhere, it dragged much of the squishy story details of my story away from the time period of the Dunbar incident, and back into the Civil War era. Also it went nowhere.

The original title was "Shaper", but as I finished up the final version and went home in my car, I was listening to Nine Inch Nails album "Hesitation Marks" and came upon the song "Came Back Haunted" which I was immediately wanting to listen to over 90000 times and felt an odd sense of creepitude as some of the lyrics seemed to match what I was going with in this story.

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Gateways:

This one actually didn't bomb as hard as Cephalensis-8 did, but I've utterly exhausted this idea to a point where I consider it a failure. It can still be salvaged, I believe, but it would be unlikely to resemble the original idea at all, and for the foreseeable future it is dead.

This one began an idea in my car, as I was listening to the album "Abrahadabra" by Dimmu Borgir, there is a song on it called "Gateways", along with an orchestral version of the song. I had SCPitude in my head at the time, so as I kept playing just those tracks and two others, I had an idea in mind of a song that essentially had two different versions (an orchestral version and a heavy metal with orchestra version) that people would perceive based on their brain chemistry, which in the original idea, was basically based on their religion—religious people would experience the heavy metal version with hallucinations and atheists would experience the orchestral version.

The idea for the female entity came from the music video for "Gateways" as well as the style of movement. Everything else just sort of twisted together to try to make it all fit together, with questions being summarily answered in occasionally hamfisted ways.

During feedback in the chat, overwhelming focus came down on the religious aspects, with questions regarding whether difference in religious belief affected the hallucination, whether ideology created a markedly different reaction, and whether that meant there was a difference between ideologically strong-faith believers and just casual or more secular believers. At that point I dumped it all, and went back to psychology which I like much more.

With that part fixed, the rotten foundation could be addressed directly: It sucked and was boring. So I changed it substantially, including removing the female entity and replacing it with a more sexualized female entity and creating a more drug-like effect. At which point, one of the people in the chat basically summed it up perfectly; it was a series of events arbitrarily tied to one another without much reason or purpose.

People kept assuring me that it could be saved or that it just needed "more", but at some point I just deleted the article altogether and shelved the concept. Coming back to it every so often, I still have no ideas on what to do with it.

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Open Alpha

This one began life as a rewrite of SCP-664. I wanted to rip off successful portal exploration SCPs but change it up by making it not "omg where is everybody?" or blatant horrors. The idea I eventually settled on was a malevolent alien species creating a simulation to impersonate a high school to infiltrate Earth, and was thus beta testing it. I wanted it to be like interacting with a faulty video game with limited dialogue options.

It was apparently unloved at first, as I quickly posted and it got down to -10 votes and more. I followed the advice of commentators and removed some dialogue and tightened some other areas, and it started slowly rising up again, including getting some of the downvoters to cancel out their downvotes or even upvote entirely.

This was prolly my quickest inception to mainlist ever

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Single-sided Paper

This was the very first SCP idea thing I ever wrote ever way back in October 2013 when I first joined. It went through a number of odd ideas to basically ornament the basic idea—the final product is essentially what I wrote to begin with, but the after-effects changed constantly.

The very first version had a doctor sticking their arm into the paper and pulling out a beaker with no odd effects. Days later, they had a ring of discoloration on their arm where they reached in, and days after that, their arm was amputated and they claimed their arm had always been amputated and had no memory of using their arm in the experiment. They then went insane when shown records of the test, and had to be killed.

That element remained for a long while, before I turned it into a fourth-dimensional portal. I even had a log of them sending a robot with a camera inside. The inside was meant to be the same as the room, only like a Cubist painting—as in, being able to see all sides of objects at once. Then a random boogin would destroy the robot after breathing on it and making weird mechanical noises.

The final version sat in my sandbox for many weeks, more than two months, essentially dead. After getting three articles up and my author page put, I started to work on another project, but ran out of ideas. Seeing my wicked and pure evil enemy Wei Zhong churning out more and more great drafts made me dig this one up since my sandbox was getting full of stuff and this one was here and not terrible.

The only major change from the version sitting in the sandbox is that the prior version had the hamster disappear completely, and the edges of the paper from the invisible end capable of severing matter perfectly. The table got cut a bit, and a D-Class lost some of their fingernail from it. I changed it because the cutting was a needless addition that I didn't do anything with, and I made the hamster return because EVERYONE thought the smell of decomposition was from the hamster trapped in the eleventieth dimension.

It's not the hamster making that smell. It never was.

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Refugees

I wish I could say I was somewhat surprised this one failed, but I wasn't. This was my "white whale" for at least a month, and went through a large amount of changes, add-ons, and removals.

The inspiration came from an Animorphs book, Megamorphs #2 "In the Time of Dinosaurs" in which our heroes time travel somehow and meet aliens on Earth at war with other aliens, which the Animorps help to defeat the second aliens. Then the second aliens drag an asteroid to hit the first aliens, thus wiping out dinosaurs and creating the fifth extinction and such. Animorps return to their time via nuclear magic.

The original idea was basically a straight ripoff of that, adjusted from a modern perspective of "we found this shit in here look at this". I started stripping and re-doing elements to separate it from its original inspiration, and basically came up with a certain canon that I had to abandon before the final version, but which I brought back with "Open Alpha". Namely, whether the creatures found in the building were "aliens" or actually native Earth things. For the purpose of the final version, they were aliens—refugees from a war hunted down and wiped out. For the purpose of "Open Alpha", they were a sapient, technologically advanced species that developed on Earth more than 65 million years ago.

The original draft had these creatures long-lived, meant to imply one of them was still alive and wandering the construct even after 65 million years. It even had an exploration log featuring totally legit task force and an interview loge with one of them. The implication was that these things were primates, and that they were essentially us humans—that a few of them survived the fifth extinction, then eventually came out and started merging and evolving with other primate life. People said "No no no" and comparisons with SCP-1000 came up and I wouldn't be able to resolve canonicity issues with any other "origin"-based SCP. I even took a fake-looking screenshot from "Skyrim" of my character in werewolf mode looking up at the sky.

The physical description changed significantly into what they are now—Bugbears; as in, having ursine features and a bipedal body, with insect-like hands and feet, a chitin-covered torso, and a completely featureless face save for two ellipsoid openings, one atop the other. This version of the draft left out anything origin-related and stuck with just the aliens. But it wasn't as interesting on its own and people complained about the lack of dinosaur shenanigans. So I gradually brought that stuff back in.

Then I brought in too much backstory. My official headcannon (12 pound smoothbore) on the backstory was this:

Bugbears and the pale white creatures (and initially a third species) all lived in peace, until the pale white creatures sneakily betrayed them. Using gravity-based weapons and propulsion, they wiped out the third species by dragging their moon onto their home planet and then enslaving any survivors. Then they do the same to the Bugbears, meant to imply the use of the asteroid.

Second version (updated) was only the Bugbears and pale white creatures, at peace with each other, but fighting a creepy alien depicted in images as a "featureless black horde" of bipedal and quadrupedal creatures. Then the pale white creatures would have surrendered to them, and started using their gravity weapons to help the black horde defeat the Bugbears.

At some point, the black creatures were meant to be primate/simian, meaning to imply they were proto-humans and that the Bugbears were the original Earth natives and Humans are aliens. This was dumped as I realized it was a straight ripoff of a concept album by Iced Earth that was essentially the exact same thing.

I basically had to tell this story without using words, nor even real pictures, but descriptions of pictures. So I cut back on it and tried to make it vague and implying that the Bugbears were aware they were going to die, so they try to leave behind as much evidence as possible of their existence. In the "Earth native" version, they have starmaps indicating the native star system of the black horde. In the "Aliens" version, the starmap indicates their home system.

It all fell apart once I posted it, though people said it could be saved. I shrugged it off to Athena Grey to rewrite and it is pending on them.

The only element I kept and which people liked was the Bugbears. So I moved them into SCP-2093 Open Alpha basically reprising their role as Cretaceous-era Earth natives. I also wanted to make them cute and loveable, with odd sorts of behavior like nonchalantly using microwaves to heat up food, or just casually leaving mid-conversation to do something else.

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Anabasis

When I wrote 2093, I was like "This is gonna be my magnum opus, my SCP-093" but then it came and went, it was amusing, but it wasn't OMG SPECTACULAR. So then I started glaring at my squishy SCP fuel ideas, and I had written long ago to do something that was basically a mishy-moo of the ideas of SCP-093 (and alternately, of the Nine Inch Nails concept album "Year Zero" which has a highly similar storyline) along with stuff from "Fallout 3" like Vault 106 with it's hallucination-gas, just like the Ocean House Hotel from Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, Vault 92-related stuff (which I scrapped), and some element of the Sandwich Building which I scrapped due to not fitting anywhere and being too Eldritch.

The first draft idea was an ugly mess, as I had three separate buildings, then two, that appeared out of nowhere. The first building was the school, the second was an office building, and the third was an unknown building which was from 100 years in the future of the place the buildings came from. That element stuck around longest, which included a humanoid found in the building who was basically a homeless squatter who ends up here. The twisty thing was that they were a Neanderthal, indicating they had survived in an alternate universe or whatevers.

I even had a fully written out interview with her (she spoke Spanish better than English) from which we would learn the background behind the odd visions in the building. The other twisty thing would be that she would say some words or phrases that would be exactly the same as those in the Agent Locke's log.

I severed that whole piece largely because I couldn't fix the description which was oddly structured to accommodate three different things in one paragraph. Then the more I put into the school building and exploration logs, the more useless and distracting it became, so I excised it.

The four agent reports I was most stressed about, as I think I'm really good with dialogue stuff, but last time I added some dialogue in Corrosive Corpse, it fell horribly flat and people said "that's not how real people talk." In a way they were right, though it's kind of how I would talk. So I simplified these reports, and wrote them basically in my own voice, dependent on mood. Cortez was calm and neutral, Piper was wary and cheery, Saisset was flat and mildly prissy, Reekers was like Cortez, only with more clipping and bemusement.

The tone and short, clipped style I put for Locke was heavily inspired by the character Ulysses from Fallout New Vegas. Even had his voice playing pretty clearly in my head. Eventually I made Locke female.

The content of Locke's log was a mashing of many different elements, most my own, and some I copied/borrowed/was inspired by/integrated from other sources. The description of the medical logs was greatly inspired by a similar scene in the book Tides of War by Steven Pressfield. I got scared I might've been copying too much and too closely, so I removed some details and changed some of the wording and overall changed it significantly so it wasn't too fixated on the logs.

Posting it, it got a stale reception, which in some ways shocked me but mostly got me worried that it was too dense, purple, derivative, or otherwise pointless. So I made plans to procrastinate a tale detailing the world that the school came from (by this point I didn't want it to be 'alternate universe shenanigans' so I never clarified that). Then came a contest to write a tale about SCPs with less than 40 votes. This one was on the list, though it was only a few days old, so I decided to procrastinate harder with it.

Then I shit out basically exactly what you see in the supplement in maybe an hour or two. It came surprisingly easy for me, and the editing process removed very little in the way of content.

For that correspondence, I borrowed some more from Steven Pressfield, namely The Afghan Campaign, as well as its likely source of inspiration in places, Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, and even a Star Wars novel that was an adaptation of Heart of Darkness, but with more emphasis on the natives, and how they exploit the imperial powers to support their tribal wars in the guise of fighting their own imperial war.

Basically, I was joking at the time, but it's pretty true what I said about myself; Not an original thought to be had.

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Cephalensis-9

This started as a complete and total re-write of Cephalensis-8, going back to the original proto-inception which was a disease that caused extreme nationalism/tribalism in order to divide people violently. I incorporated elements from Cephalensis-8 because I had no other ideas. This actually started as Cephalensis-11, and it was exactly the same as -9 except that it involved an actual parasitic creature that did the brain alterations. Others convinced me it was too cliché for its own good and I replaced it with nothing. As in, no thing was apparently causing it. I added the ghost-spine-squid based on [The Presence] from the Nine Inch Nails concept album "Year Zero".

The town observation log was done on the fly, and I wanted to incorporate lots of elements that seemed to make no sense until you realize all together it's a display of all the dry medical terminology and descriptions put into action. The implication was meant to be the same as Cephalensis-8—that this was poorly designed by some other creatures and either not intended for the human brain or not taking into account the evolved brain over some earlier Homo species.

The interview came in a lot later, and was heavily inspired and drawn from actual conversations I had with a genuine arrogant racist anti-Semite who was a malignant narcissist. I often compared him to Eric Cartman from the South Park episode with the fish dicks, and it was accurate—he had an amazing ability to warp and re-write his own memories in a way to better favor his own ego, and he was completely oblivious to it.

The doctor in it is actually not an author avatar, but based on another person who spoke with him and me. She wasn't interested in his BS, but one day he started prying into her Polish ancestry and suggesting weird pseudo-racist things, and she lost her shit and cursed him out for the first time.

I got loads of great feedback, but it wasn't until I posted that I started getting sharply conflicting reaction. Many people loved it, many people hated it, to a point where it had 30 votes and roughly +7. The most common complaint was the nationalism thing. I didn't want to pull some bullshit of having actual human biases and prejudices be some anomalous thing—I had tried to make it clear that the SCP wasn't actually causing racism/sexism etc, but exploiting it naturally occurring in order to force people into violent action against each other.

One of the comments basically said that if the prejudice aspect was kept, but directed towards the uninfected, it would be much better. This was exactly what I had done with Cephalensis-8, though I had thought that to be too cliché in itself. So I worked it back in while retaining a sense of "us vs them" mentality persisting. At a later point, I just completely removed all the bigotry elements and made it more "affected vs unaffected" while emphasizing the subtlety (as in, infected wouldn't just Pod People howl at uninfected and chase them, but actually try to befriend them, talk to them, gain their trust, etc) while maintaining a level of dissonance in terms of behavior—as in, this thing doesn't work as intended, so not everyone is affected the same way.

I heavily stripped out much of the anti-Semitic diatribes in the interview, so much so that I didn't feel confident claiming that it was inspired by my own conversations with this other person. But it was originally inspired by it and some of the diatribes and the personality remained intact, so it still is.

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Miracle Stuff

This one was directly and very inspired by the short movie "The Gate" and was in fact initially a straight rip-off of it. The intention was basically that the pills were filled with random things that are not medicine, yet function as the ultimate medicine. But unlike SCP-500, they don't work properly or permanently. The initial function was basically causing people's bodies to warp and distort, limbs elongating and body parts changing. The image I had in mind was basically the people in that movie but with something more along the lines of "fractalism" in their deformations, which made sense at the time but which probably doesn't now.

Dr Yucatan pointed out that this was basically a straight rip-off of the movie so I went back and decided on making it more of a direct link to SCP-2021 in a subtle way while also playing off the theme of Stuff Industry—-namely, exploiting something anomalous to create cool stuff, yet having it work in a disagreeable fashion.

Put simply, SCP-2077 does in fact cure all ailments despite being regular capsules filled with sediment or mushed up taco meat, and it does this by creating a healthy copy of your diseased flesh directly beneath that diseased flesh, then forcibly removing the diseased flesh so that the new flesh can take its place. And much like fixing an electronic device by hitting it, the people making the pills have little to no idea how it actually works, so they simply use whatever works.

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Smith Jim, Life Fuckist

This one had a rough handling. It initially began as I was thinking of stuff to add on to the Anabasis backstory, and was thinking about changes in Chinese history that would have resulted. Then I started reflecting on one of the great failures of the Great Leap Forward, the backyard furnace idea, where Chinese peasants and farmers were encouraged to melt down useful metal tools and pots and pans into generally worthless pig iron because they were peasants and farmers, not metallurgists.

The idea I then had was a tie-in with Anabasis in the form of a robot intended to be part of a series, made by the Qing Empire to sabotage the American infrastructure by giving them as gifts to American cities, with the promise of smelting metals into higher quality metals. They would then act as the backyard furnaces, smelting everything down into brittle pig iron or slag or just an unusable lump of metal needing to be melted down again.

It was named Smith Jim, Great American Patriot, the name based on a MadTV sketch about a man running for president who was very extremely not an alien. The biggest part of the article was a hilarious interview where Smith Jim answered questions in an incredibly evasive manner, as well as dismissing some questions as "non sequitur", inspired by Nomad from Star Trek.

The idea was not good received, so I kept changing and shifting, eventually dropping the faux-patriotism aspect, renaming him Smith Jim, Greatest Of All Time, and trying to tie it into Anabasis by having it be a product of certain American terrorists potentially tied to Agent Locke.

At some point, it started falling apart, as it became too much a matter of "shit doing random things all together" and too dependent upon the Anabasis story. As well, people didn't believe the picture used could fit hunks of metal into its chest cavity to smelt them down, so I changed the picture to a bigger robot, and stripped away Anabasis stuff. I then added a stupid twist where Smith Jim creates a perfect working copy of itself overnight. Neither Smith Jim would acknowledge the existence of the other openly, yet very clearly were aware of one another.

I think it was this version I ended up posting as SCP-2299, and it slowly failed. I self-deleted after a day or two as it lingered between -9 and -10 and let it sit in my sandbox for a month or so.

Then I started to re-write it, removing the idea of "comically poor attempt at sabotage" and instead making it a case of "it steals shit it thinks is valuable for its nefarious purpose." Originally, it would ask for something, and give something else in return, with stupid/hilarious results, such as taking in a paperclip and outputting a lump of clay with a lima bean in it, or taking in batteries and outputting steel ball bearings. It became curiouser as it was discovered you could pretend to put something in its chest cavity, and it would still give you something, indicating something.

Adding on to that, I had the idea of it giving out bad advice. This was initially just an excuse to use my joke of "in alternate universe SCP Foundation, D-Class personnel are in charge and researchers are terminated every month" spoofing old articles. It had an interview which was goodly written and fun, but didn't add anything important. It also featured Smith Jim giving some good advice—for a researcher to stop asking it questions if the researcher wanted to live.

I stripped that out at some point, and then stripped out the "give stuff, take stuff" aspect which was criticized for being too much like SCP-914. Out came the final product, more or less, with a robit giving out humorously bad advice while stealing shit. Based on user Azzleflux's critique, I added sections to clarify the fact that when it stole shit, the shit would disappear, despite the fact that basically no moving parts were moving within the robot as this happened.

Aside from the "monthly termination of researchers" gag and the "ignore 682 because he's a troll", every line of advice it gives is relevant to its backstory, abilities, or potential connection to other SCPs of mine.

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Absence of Absence

This one had a rough life getting started, namely because it was two entirely disparate ideas that were merged as one.

The oldest one was represented by my old draft "Limited-use Door", in which I had an idea of a "disposable door" that you could quickly set up, use for a bit, then have it disappear when it was of no use anymore. That not being enough dramatic drama for an article, I started littering it with various ideas and adding on to it. At one point I had it involve inter-dimensional shenanigans, with people who stepped through the door disappearing when the door disappeared.

To accentuate that this wasn't just "spooky disappear and they were never heard from again" I had one of the people come back, only this time in different clothes, and with a gun, trying to kill one of the doctors. Then I tacked on an "Are We Cool Yet?" connection with the stupid line "Best to burn all your bridges before going out with a bang" indicating that the disappeared guy was going to go out with a bang of a gunshot, then escape from the Foundation, with the door disappearing behind him, like a bridge burning thing.

I had multiple different examples of what would be found in the inter-dimensional doors, including a room full of guns and explosive devices and such. At some point I dropped this completely and decided to tie it in to SCP-2021 with the idea being that the rooms the doors open to are where the spare body parts are stored. At another point, it led out into an entire outdoor area, where Bugbear body parts were littered around.

At its latest incarnation, I removed the inter-dimensional room shenanigans bit and focused more on the door. This then changed to basically a "single-user door", in which the first person to touch the knob is the only one who can open and close it. I kept putting ideas in and out, including memetic shenanigans in which the user of the door would have a mental breakdown if someone else tried to force open the door. The end result after all this was that one of the doctors would "solve" the mystery of how to get through the door when not the "user" and the door would reward them by revealing the multiple copies of the bodies of the people who kept using the door, indicating this was very much related to SCP-2021.

Overall this didn't work well and I got tired of working on it.

Many moons later I had an idea based on a thought experiment I had from years ago—the idea that an area of space would simply be impenetrable. As in, there's nothing there to physically stop you, and yet you are physically stopped. For some reason this wasn't considered enough of a hook, so I decided to merge the Stuff elements from the door and the end result is basically exactly what is displayed there.

The note complete with spare organs for Dr. Marlowe came afterwards when people said they didn't understand what was happening with the in-room shenanigans.

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Mashed Potatoes Can Be Your Friend

This one began and ended as entirely based on a line from "Dare to be Stupid". I found I loved the endless cycle of confusion when doing the Stuff tales, so I wanted to apply the same level of back and forth inane confused bantering, but on a storytelling level rather than a dialogue. The backstory originally only went missing-person-security-police, but I expanded to add the diner-hospital-hospital-again purely as filler.

Originally I wanted either the interview, or the expanded backstory, so I went with both when I realized I stopped giving a shit and it was all fun anyway. This was only reviewed by two or three other people before I posted and it's succeeded as of now.

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Copy of A

I started this one many months ago, around the same time SCP-1692 came about. I spent a long time working on it, and it was based on a Cracked article with an entry on Quantum Immortality, and thought an awesome SCP idea would be if there was a quantum flaw in quantum in which someone was literally invincible because Girl-1 would transplant another universe Girl in her place.

It started with her being able to control it, which had Xman accusations. I removed that, but it also meant she could spawn them by trying to kill herself. I had a fun scene in which she started spawning living copies of herself in containment, killing them, then fashioning a big spear out of their legbones.

The ending was the hardest part, as well as a testing log which went into more detail. But the ending had multiple different versions which I forgot them all because I lost those drafts. They're buried in the history of this sandbox, so not worth digging up. The main one was that the girl would die, and be surreptitiously replaced with a copy of herself.

Given that there was no way to drive this home, I added an entire component in which the girl submits to the Foundation after much testing, agreeing to stop fighting and escaping containment by spawning shitloads of bodies in exchange for better chambers and such. Then she would kill herself and spawn a living copy of herself who did not agree to those conditions and would go back to fighting and containment breaching.

Mixed to no reactions led me to make basically the ending seen in the final version, in which an alternate universe version of her NOT in containment would show up, complete with schoolbooks subtly referencing the "Anabasis"-universe I set up for SCP-2084. That ultimately went nowhere, and so the draft went into a Word file for the next several months as I cleaned the sandbox.

Fuck out of ideas, I went back to resurrecting this idea, starting with a complete and total rewrite that had absolutely nothing to do with this version. This one would involve infinite copies of a missing girl being spawned when people try to look away from her, basically forcing people to always look at her. The idea behind it was that some anomalous boogin saw a missing-persons ad for the girl, saw the age-progressed photo, and created the anomaly in order to force people to remember the girl, except the girl ends up being found and looks very little like the age-progressed photo. Then I tacked on a cognitohazard thing in which people literally could not forget the girl, even despite amnestics, and that even the actual missing girl would join in to efforts to finding "herself"

I still have that draft and may rewrite it and reupload at a later date. The day after first posting that one and seeing it start to fail, I dug up "Copy of A" and basically didn't change anything except to add on the last addendum, in which the girl kills the alternate-universe girl. Then I decided to exploit the Keter rating and had the bodies keep spawning from her body, presumably never to stop even if they find her body. An interview later and it got upvoted a lot.

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Andronika Optima Maxima

This one was a merging of two disparate ideas I had had for many moons. The entire concept was based around an excuse to do something history-related, involving the invocation of a somewhat literal Damnatio Memoriae in which an entire swath of history was rewritten, either by some SCP or attempting to promote it. It also meant toying with conspiracy theory-style thinking and the "Phantom time" hypothesis to serve my own narrative.

The subject itself was basically taken from a novel I had written 5-8 years ago about a female Roman soldier who becomes a de-facto commander, and becomes target of a Epirote/Carthaginian/Roman/Samnite coalition to wipe her out from memory. It featured gratuitous battle scenes and was generally poorly written. I salvaged the basic concept and the name (Gaia Andronica) as the backstory for this one.

Because I hate basic "compulsion" in which everyone is affected exactly the same by an SCP, I made it so that the intended effect of the SCP ended up like a game of telephone, with a multitude of different story versions, including seemingly disparate elements that were all basically the equivalent of the subconscious mind trying to "re-construct" the intended historical tale using random elements. For example, the name "Andronika" implies a female, so some versions feature a female leader, or a set of female leaders, or female soldiers. Elements like the Roman legionary style of fighting end up being displaced into a World War 2-like setting, and so on.

All these elements, including a "basis" tale which would've served to be the "actual" Andronika story were to/will be covered in tales and/or addenda to the article. Given the apparent disinterest in the article itself, and the fact that the character of Andronika basically started life as something of a Mary-Sue and I've been more anxiously focused on removing all her Mary-Sue aspects, and that the story being told would likely be severely long and amusing only to myself, there's a high likelihood that the story will never be fully told.

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Tussaud's Delusion

I actually don't remember how/why I got this idea, but it essentially didn't change from first draft to posting. I don't know what else to really comment about it. The more I read it over time, the more I realize how disturbing and mysterious it is. There's no rhyme to it. No patterns. Just random people begin to appear as ventriloquist dummy versions of themselves via electronic media.

Originally it had a picture at the top of it, this one which was originally this one which I photoshopped the puppet head onto his body and made it a gif which would switch between the two versions every minute or so. I had to remove it for copyright reasons.

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REMEMBER MEEEE

This is the one I mentioned in the Copy of A commentary. After Copy of A initially failed, I set about with a new idea that, as it progressed, only tangentially became related to Copy of A. The idea of the effects came from this video, SCP-173 ripping off of, with the idea of something where blinking wouldn't kill you, but be a colossal pain in the ass as they started reproducing.

Everything about the story itself I already covered in Copy of A commentary. Since then, I had added on a continuous effect in which people kept remembering the anomalous girl despite the use of amnestics. A bunch of people and me loved the idea of amnestics not being a complete fail-safe, but like real drugs, in which repeated use would be deleterious to the human body, so when everyone keeps remembering the anomaly, mass-amnestics isn't gonna work, so they just leave them all be to keep "remembering" the girl. At this point, as the actual missing girl (who was later found) joins in the effort to "find" the missing "girl", I hoped to make it clear that whatever the intent of this anomaly was, it was failing.

The final add-on with the new anomaly as a missing boy was just a clarification that the anomalous girl wasn't the sole anomaly, but that these things are apparently being created by someone/something trying to get attention focused on the missing children, and, as mentioned above, failing miserably.

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Eater of Dreams

This one I can honestly say now that it's out of me is and was a complete fucking mess. At the very start, I wanted to re-write a very old idea I had which was basically an anomalous DVD copy of "The Wire" which would include an anomalous clip of an apparent snuff film, in which the victim was the viewer, and the killer was someone close to them. Then I re-wrote it to be basically a hostile version of 055 affecting individuals — in that, people who watch the anomalous clip become somehow "shitlisted" by the entire rest of mankind, and are never believed when they make any sort of claims, and disrespected constantly, seemingly for no reason.

While I still have that idea in my head to use somewhere, somehow, I moved on to revamping this idea to being something of its own. Above all, I was intent on having it be somewhat related to the title, which like Came Back Haunted and Copy of A, I ripped off from Nine Inch Nails songs. The imagery in my head was that from the movie World War Z, towards the end, when they look at zombies in the W.H.O. facility through security cameras and they were just standing around twitching uncontrollably. I thought that was disturbing just in itself, and imagined normal people doing that.

To add to the confusion/randomness of it, I started having people on security camera footage doing another trope I absolutely love; non-humans desperately trying and failing to act human despite it being painfully obvious that they are not human. Best example of that I can think of is the opening scene to the shitty movie "Land of the Dead", where a bunch of zombies are seen basically play-acting, pretending to be human and doing human things without really understanding what they're doing (like the gas station attendant zombie pretending to pump gas for the destroyed car).

The cause of this would be a set of anomalous humanoid things that would appear in security camera footage narrowly avoiding being caught directly in frame. It would all be connected via the video footage, a nonexistent show involving a bunch of people seeking out "Eaters", while the "Eaters" appear in the background, the main characters oblivious to them so close by, possibly because they cannot see them.

The idea behind it was that the anomalous humanoids (Eaters) were a species of anomalous thingy that fed on people's dreams — namely, their goals, aspirations, inspirations, that manner of dream. The effects of people seemingly gaining new skillsets they never had before was the result of an Eater basically storing "leftover" dreams in other people's heads.

This effect stemmed from the initial idea prior to merging it with the "The Wire" stuff, in which there would be several Class-D personnel, or otherwise outside civilians able to wander on-site, completely unnoticed by everyone, but not "ghost-like" and thus moving through them or anything, and Foundation personnel constantly trying to predict or otherwise prevent these apparitions, and always failing to do so. At some point, I removed the anomalous humanoids appearing, but left them in the video clip to establish it as basically something that was happening.

The varying percentages of people affected by it reflects my own disappointment with articles involving compulsion which basically treat all humans as uniform, saying that "all people affected by SCP report the exact same things" when the human brain doesn't work that way. The lettering and descriptions was taken from a failed article I had posted about an anomalous horse that basically spread "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"-type paranoia in people around it. I adjusted the "C" effects to be more coherent and relevant to this article at hand.

The entire mass of seemingly random elements would be utterly incoherent on its own, and while that sort of incoherent mystery would be awesome to execute on another medium, doing so in an SCP format is basically impossible without a master writer. So I put in the monologue by one of the characters, seemingly having figured out the Eaters and what was going on, but unable to properly communicate it.

I love the idea of anomalous/alien beings not communicating in the same way as humans do (what with verbs, nouns, adjectives, etcetera) and instead using seemingly esoteric statements, comparisons, similes, or nonsensical metaphors to convey ideas rather than words. I did the best I could to balance it between incoherent rambling and subtly informing the reader of what was going on. I left it as-is, because otherwise I would have been touching it and re-touching it endlessly, and making an even bigger mess of it.

The basic "translation" or "interpretation" of what I was trying to convey:

- The "real dreamers" being described are basically anyone with free will. The entire paragraph rambles on that.

- The animal thing tries to describe how animals basically (to this guy at least) have no real "dreams" beyond mate, feed, kill, and thus if they had everything provided for them, they'd basically sit around all day doing nothing. I explicitly put in "stand around all day twitching" as call back to the imagery I wanted, and hopefully to inform readers that since this is what the Foundation personnel affected by it were actually doing, that what he was saying was relevant.

- The third paragraph basically compares "desires" and "needs" as if they were food, referring to "dream" food as being like drugs, rich and tasty, while "needs" food isn't.

- The entire fourth paragraph was a direct reference to the Eaters stashing half-eaten or uneaten dreams in other people's heads like refrigerators.

- Here is a mindless rumination on the idea of "stuff that's bad for you tastes/feels so good" and making an abstract comparison between eating dreams and religion, with the idea of austerity, chastity, fasting, etcetera in most religions as representing the "needs", and the "dreams" being basically sinful, stuff that's bad for you but tastes/feels good." The idea of "Necessity" as a God was taken directly from Steven Pressfield's books.

- A callback to his earlier taunt, and lamenting the earlier religious connection — the idea that a life of chastity, austerity, etcetera would be a lackluster, dull life without "dreams". So he promises to help the viewer resist the Eaters somehow. But since the show never got picked up, presumably no solution resulted.

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Mayhem Dressed in a Suit

This one is exactly what it says on the comments; an SCP based entirely on the game Payday 2 of which I was at the time (and still am) obsessed with and have put hundreds of hours into. The core idea was adapted from what I ended up canonizing for my Stuff Industry: anomalously, a group of unrelated people somehow came together and basically assumed entirely new identities for as long as they were around one another.

I adapted actual gameplay mechanics in terms of their "health" in that, when there are four of them, they seem to take less damage — as, in-game, when your health is down to 0, rather than die, you are "downed", like in Left 4 Dead, requiring another player to get you up. Additional "skills" and "traits" are associated with gameplay mechanics while also emphasizing the fact that as these four are around one another, this anomalous effect is strongest, and as they get separated, they become more and more vulnerable, until individually they revert back to their original selves.

The anomalous speakers "Frank" and "Andy" were based on the game's mastermind "Bain", who is in constant radio contact with the players, despite them having no visible earbuds or any radio receivers on them at any time. The names were based on the two antagonists of Bioshock for no other reason than I was playing that at the time and thought I was making some other kind of connection which I ultimately dropped for having not done enough to connect it.

The girls' original fake names were based on philosophers, "Huxley", "Rand", "Chomsky", and "Locke", but people said this was too distracting and seemed to imply some other connection that wasn't there. So I went with candy bar names, "Mars" (as in Mars Bars), "Kit" (as in Kit Kats), "Ruth" (as in Baby Ruth), "Reese" (as in Reese's).

The idea for the interviews I had in mind something like a brief flashback-type collection of them, showing snippets one by one of each individual interview, basically showing each woman in a different state of shock, confusion, anger, denial, etcetera, then showing them all together perfectly calm, fine, and seemingly alien, completely different people.

Just for more lulz with the Bioshock stuff, I had the interviewer use "Would you kindly?" at the very end.

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For the World to Dictate Her Death

This one was rough and had a rough beginning and end. It initially began as a completely unrelated idea which itself was based solely on my own stupid pun statement "Are We Cool Yeti?" In it, I had in mind the idea of a sentient, sapient Yeti living in a mountain having a normal humanoid life, and being bombarded constantly with prank calls. The Yeti couldn't speak, so it would roar and growl down the phone at people.

This was the entirety of the idea for the longest time, until I came up with the idea of it being constantly teleported away from its home and into people's living rooms when they viewed an anomalous video tape. Hilarity would ensue as the Yeti angrily flails and roars, but doesn't actually try to kill anyone or destroy anything. This is eventually how the Foundation finds out about it. It included a log of a prank call in which the Yeti was routed in. Almost every line in the log was taken from actual prank call victims.

I also added in an interview log briefly detailing how the Yeti experienced this effect, as it communicated via a Text-to-Speech program on a tablet with Foundation personnel. This idea got downvoted, so I revamped it thusly:

I replaced the Yeti with a random woman, removed the prank calls and the AWCY aspect, and made it more a case of "slowly erasing someone from reality" in such a way that the individual wasn't being erased, but the world around them was essentially refusing to sense them (in terms of all senses, including touch). Basically, when an anomalous video is viewed by someone, the woman gets teleported into that person's room. The person sees them, but after several minutes, that person will no longer be able to see her or hear her, although they'd be able to feel her and such.

Presumably the video makers (if any) were constantly upgrading/updating the video's effect, and so when the person watched the video again, the woman would return, although this time she would be unable to interact with her environment around her over a certain radius of space. Meaning, she would be able to move around in a house, but unable to remove objects, unable to break anything, unable to open doors or even move motes of dust.

The further along this went, the more it began to tie less into the person viewing the video than the person's brain chemistry. Thus, the video makers (if any) make her "erasure" from reality more rapid-paced, as no longer would that woman be "erased" for the one person who watched the anomalous video, but the woman would be "erased" for anyone in the entire world with a similar brain chemistry to the person viewing the video.

The very end of the article subtly implies that the Foundation basically has no idea what to do, and is preparing to basically stop containment procedures on this woman, as the longer time goes on and she keeps being exposed to people, she will eventually become "erased" from reality for all people in the entire world. This would presumably leave her to die of dehydration trapped in a room somewhere unable to get out, presumably unable to even move if the room is dusty enough.

Thus, her existence is basically dictated by the perceptions of humanity as a whole, rather than by her own self-actualization.

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Instant Animals

The center idea for this came from a dream I had, in which someone was selling little paper packets full of dirt, and in the midst of it, shriveled, dehydrated monkey fetuses which would grow into actual monkeys in a few hours if you added water to it and planted it like a seed.

So I put the idea to text basically as-is, but also added in a shady mystery backstory. The broken English was intentional, meant to emphasize phonetic spelling of English words. The "Rejection Hotline" is a real thing I added in as an attempt to make it seem as if the makers (if any) were either operating on a different phone system as us, or if this was a product from an alternate universe, or if they intentionally include that as a way to say "Fuck off and don't call us" to people who buy it.

The idea for the animals' anomalous behavior was inspired by Eater of Dreams' line about animals standing around all day twitching. The idea I had was that the makers (if any) were creating cheap freeze-dried animals for people to buy, while themselves (if they exist) having no actual experience with animals. As such, the animals wouldn't behave like proper animals. The part with the great apes re-enacting human-like behavior possibly implies that the makers (if any) cannot distinguish between chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, and human, and likely thought they were selling instant humans in the form of chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans. This implies there might be instant humans out there somewhere.

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Partition E:

This one began as I was in the bathroom reading a chapter from a school textbook about virtual machines. I already knew about them, but the phrasing used in the book, much like how Carl Sagan or Neil DeGrasse Tyson present standard scientific information in a way that makes it seem new and profound, seemed to astonish me. I came up with the idea of "What if our Earth was a "virtual machine" on a larger physical machine? And what if there are multiple copies of "Earth" as virtual machines on the same physical machine, basically completely isolated from one another, but using the same resources as each other?

So I set to making this happen suddenly overnight; as in, on an empty lot somewhere in the world, a building appears overnight. And from that building are the network people responsible for maintaining our copy of Earth running and functioning fine. All records and such regarding the existence of the building and its associated company would be altered to include them, while people's memories would not (because they're presumably people).

The idea in mind was basically some major disaster occurred with our copy of Earth, and (akin to SCP-2000), an earlier copy of Earth was restored, with a new maintenance staff set up to handle it.

Getting this idea across was incredibly difficult, especially as I established a faint sense of "wrongness" about the networkers, as well as preventing Foundation personnel from simply bumrushing the building and discovering this all themselves. I took a liberty in having an agent sneak in with a recording device (although I did deal with consequences/punishment of his associates) and had him record a portion of a conversation between instances of the engineers. They would be mid-conversation regarding their work and referencing other "partitions" of Earth, as well as suggestions that not all partitions were running on the same chronology as us.

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Remains of Subterranean France

This one came almost entirely from a long-winded dream I had which had disturbing realism in imagery and such. I think the dream may have been inspired by the book "World War Z", the chapter from the South Korean guy's perspective as he talks about North Korea creating a subterranean city to evacuate its entire population to, and how they sever all communications with the South and the rest of the world, and how even after the end of the War, decades later, no one has ever heard from North Korea ever again.

This was foremost in my mind as I pondered over the dream, as well as associating it with this song and trailer here (including title). I kept elaborate notes of all the major parts of the dream I later associated with the SCP. Prior to the complex itself, elements of the dream included being in a video game which was identified as the original "Doom", although the gameplay involved people being zombies, and having the zombies become normal humans again upon being handed hoes or rakes or shovels or pickaxes, gardening tools and so on. As well, the man in the video message originally in the dream was identified as being the man who played Joseph Stalin in the cutscenes for "Command & Conquer: Red Alert" in an apparent outtake, while also addressing the viewer.

As of December 30th, 2014, I decided to change the title to something more descriptive and less incoherent. From "Freeze" to "Remains of Subterranean France".

The notes I wrote are as follows:

- During an unspecified crisis, an entire region/nation made the decision to evacuate their lands (perhaps France/Northeast France) in secret. They set sail on ships to the Atlantic and apparently are never heard from again.

- It is unclear if this is real or not, as this is depicted in a fiction novel.

- Comes to Foundation attention in the form of a young girl apparently frozen and hovering in air high in the sky, covered in frost and with most features weathered down as if she'd been there for decades or centuries. From her, coordinates are learned of a "gateway" to a group of refugees. Despite being labeled as singular, the coordinates point to several areas in North America, South America, and Southeast Asia.

- These locations tend to be underneath or near large office buildings, typically below their basements. Others are just beneath the surface of suburban areas. Reaching them requires digging, and leads to a staircase heading downward. Of the six locations located and verified, only three are accessible; the other three have been ruined somehow, filled in with debris. As a result, they appear to have "disappeared". For example; even if that debris is cleared out, or the ground around it is dug out, the staircase leads nowhere.

- Of the three locations, they lead to three distinct areas, apparently of an underground city (regardless of whether the location is underground or not) in which lighting appears to be failing in many places, and overly bright in others.

- Location 1: Staircase is partially collapsed, with niches in the nearby wall. In one of the niches is two apparently lifeless bodies. They are cold to the touch and apparently very stiff and brittle. They break apart if treated roughly. One of them has a pill bottle containing 137 pills of a non-existent drug. Prescription was apparently filled on 16/15/99.

- Bottom of staircase has elevated platform placed before a television screen. Motion sensor turns on television screen and plays a video of a very large, burly man with a too-small head addressing someone off-screen concerning a person named "Eric" or "Irik". They then address the viewer as if they were an employee or a subordinate, offering praises for their job and assurances that they should speak to "Irik". They then laugh wickedly, then apologize for doing so, assuring the viewer "everything will be okay".

- Bottom of platform has a doorway which opens into an apparent outdoor area, with small one-room buildings placed in a checkerboard pattern under a perpetual night sky. None of the buildings have doors, but appear empty through the windows. At corners where three or more buildings' corners meet, there is furniture and wall decorations, including daguerreotype pictures of people dressed in modern clothing.

- Past this checkerboard is a walkway over a small body of water, leading into another room. This room is brightly lit, and has several dozen women inside. Most are lining the walls. In the center of the room are two looping ramps, similar to what a skateboarder would ride upon. Groups of two women cart a metal pole with a wooden cylinder in the center, moving in sequences around the loops, and occasionally on the loops, apparently in defiance of gravity. The wooden cylinder takes upon a certain color tone or shades of colors after going through the loop. The cylinder is then brought over to a wall, where several rows of 3 seats have been placed, the seats removed, and the wooden cylinder placed where the three seats would be, one at a time.

- You find one of your fellow agents there, trudging along a wooden cylinder from one end of the pole, and run to help them. The two of you walk up the loop, but instead backflip to avoid falling from the loop. Your wooden cylinder takes on the color of a tiger, with frayed blueish edges. Placing the cylinder in the seat row spells out the letter "M". The agent tells you they intend to keep doing so to spell out "Madagascar", as this will shut down the entire operation here. The agent asks if you are scared. You respond no, then ask if you are expected to backflip each time and/or if they backflipped themselves or were brought along in the backflip by the other agent. The other agent responds no. You then state that you are scared.

- The women in the room become hostile as you spell out "Madagascar" but do nothing to impede you. You do not manage to finish spelling out "Madagascar" as you run out of wooden cylinders. An outline of a door is present on the other end of the room. It is impassable. The agent states that spelling out "Madagascar" with the wooden cylinders will open the door. There is nothing left to do at this location as a result.

- Location 2: Staircase leads to a vast open dark room. A very tall, very thin man in a tuxedo is walking perpendicular to the group, apparently with a severe limp. One of the agents shouts, "Hey, Slenderman!" and reaches a hand up to wave. The man turns towards them and abruptly disappears, along with two of the agent's fingernails and most of the hair on the arm they have raised. The hair will grow back without incident. This man does not re-appear in subsequent visits.

- Several doors are present. Two open to solid brick walls. The rest do not open save for one. This one opens into a brightly lit hallway extending several meters at an upward incline, leading to another room. This room is a vast, darkened hall, with several human figures similarly frozen, stiff, and brittle, standing before a stage, heads raised and watching a television screen. The television screen depicts an elderly man smiling and giving a speech, occasionally panning out to show the audience applauding at certain points. No sound is heard from the television screen.

- On stage is a hairless pale man in a suit, mouth open far too wide, screaming incessantly whilst swinging their head around in a circle. They appear to be in pain and may or may not have arms. They do not respond to the agents, and their scream is apparently muted. A sign next to the figure reads "Vot For Mi. Ai em tha best candideit. 1996."

- A room opposite the hall appears to be a classroom, brightly lit. The floor is covered in trash, mostly papers and garbage. The blackboard has been replaced with a window, and displays a view of an office building apparently across the street from the room. An elevated metro rail is present. There is no movement and no signs of life outside, and there appear to be no other buildings apart from the office building. High walls enclose the areas alongside the two buildings.

- One of the papers recovered from the garbage is a flyer warning of a "hypophemoral pestilence" which can only be treated with diet, vitamins, and treatment using one of two different prescription medications, both subsidized by the local government. One of the medications is the one found on the woman in Location 1, and claims to be a "brain relaxant, muscle stimulant, identity supplement".

- There is nothing else at this location.

- Location 3: Main location is a dimly lit hall similar to that in Location 2, with tables resembling a school cafeteria. At one end on an elevated niche is a grotesquely obese, amorphous humanoid figure with a cone-shaped head. This figure alone is warm to the touch, but is solid and resistant to physical trauma. All around the room are normal humanoid figures apparently in various stages of decomposition, although all are frozen and brittle to the touch. Some appear normal-sized, others are dangerously emaciated or taller/smaller than average. Feathers, bones, and tentacles are seen bursting from the skin of several individuals, apparently causing pain in most cases.

- Further from the center of the room are several humanoid figures made from pillars of what appears to be wet sand/gravel in the shape of humans. The floor is caked in a dried slurry of meat, bone, gore, and plant matter. Several sand-figures are seen desperately attempting to open a door. The door is framed by windows, which show debris filled in.

- The other end of the hall contains a series of rooms. Humanoid figures in various stages of decomposition are seen resting in beds, hands on their chests, side by side, while fully dressed. One room contains a pair of legs dressed in fresh denim jeans apparently frozen in mid-stride. It does not appear to have been severed from a fully formed individual, as the skin is grown over the top of the waist. The legs are warm to the touch, but solid and resistant to physical trauma.

- At the far end of this complex is a room with a human woman in it. This woman is alive and in motion, and can communicate with some difficulty to agents. They claim to have been born and raised in this complex, and claim to be 70 years old, despite appearing physically 40. The only decoration on the wall is a calendar dated 1943. Calendar has 12 months and depicts every month as having 30 days, beginning on Mondays and ending on Sundays irrespective to one another. The images for each month on the calendar are shots of a naked blonde woman smiling to the viewer. Each month depicts her in a more advanced state of decomposition. The woman claims their family has lived and died in this complex for generations. The stories the woman tells are roughly analogous to and corroborate information collected from other locations.

- Story pieced together:

- Children of refugees from aforementioned unspecified crisis establish contact with one another over an unknown service of instant vocal communications.

- Discussions over the exact nature of the unspecified threat become contentious debates, resulting in a recall of the governing body and an impromptu re-election.

- Persons claiming "zombies" or "infiltration" by external forces are punished with fines and/or jail time for disturbing the peace and slander/libel. It is uncertain what the standards of slander/libel are in these cases.

- An unknown event causes a severing of communication between the six locations for a period of 27 years.

- Once communication is re-established, the aforementioned unspecified crisis re-emerges, apparently spreading from one or more of the six locations.

- No further information can be discerned. Interviewing the sole living woman indicates symptoms of anterograde amnesia, and thus time scale regarding these events cannot be conclusively established, as she recalls it all as having unfolded within the past several weeks, when several years or decades may have passed.

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Another Version of the Truth

I think this is the absolute best thing I've ever written. It is exactly the kind of escalating piling up of incoherence and confusion until it reaches a point of questioning all reality. It began as a dream I had, based upon real life events in which I had a college course on greek mythology that I kept skipping constantly, to such a degree that I once forgot it existed. I didn't forget it thoroughly enough to forget to show up for test dates so I passed the course anyway.

The dream was a lot more distressing and traumatic for me, and prompted me to remember those events and decide to come up with a story about it.

From there, I needed more to it, so I came up with the idea of the world changing itself in subtle and slight ways all around someone without them noticing at first. I piled on with more "weird shit" in terms of improper student registration and multiple students all claiming to be the same individual. I decided then to be as opaque as possible while dropping unavoidable hints that this was an escalating problem that was likely to get much much worse long before it would even be acknowledged as such.

The end note idea I think only came to me as I was writing, not pre-planned, and seemed the perfect way to encapsulate just how irrevocably effed this world was as a direct result of this one SCP. The idea behind it of course is that, if this SCP has created a fictitious Foundation Site Director, and presumably a fictitious university campus, it may have created an entire fictitious city, and quite possibly gone beyond that.

How and why people notice these changes and can determine they are the result of an anomaly is probably the only saving grace against it, and the one true fact that can clearly determine the boundaries between something or someone real, and something or someone created by the SCP.

But the paranoia is always still there. I feel it then becomes the truest and best possible application of "secure contain protect" I've ever written in any of my own works; this is something that absolutely has to be secured, contained, and protected, because unlike something that would burst out and blow up or enslave all humanity, this is the sort of anomaly which, if unleashed, could be conceivably permanently undetected, at which point it ceases to be an anomaly, but just the new world; one that has been created and is being constantly adjusted by something without regard for the inconsistencies or errors it leaves behind.

my favorite comment on it was left by Scantron, "Shit's Kafkaesque, yo."

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Girl on Fire

This one came out extremely quickly and was meant for a contest of short SCPs and I wanted an idea that was "classic" in the sense that there was no convoluted technobabble explanation that could even begin to be applied to it. It's an orangutan that is on fire at all times and is alive and well. The hardest part was trying to find a photograph of an ape on fire, only to realize that any such photo would be gorey and disgusting so I gave up on that and settled for a lame cop-out of an orangutan in water which got taken down due to copyright anyway.

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The Curious Case of Jackson W. Parnell

This was my first SCP after some 4 years. The original idea was based on the old short story "The Facts in the Case of Valdemar" and in particular gifs I saw from the italian film adaptation "Il Caso Valdemar", in which a man dies but is prevented from passing on, kept in a state between life and death before finally being allowed to pass on, and essentially exploding into "nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence."

The idea I had was the inverse of this; someone is kept in a state between life and death because to allow them to die would not cause them to splat into gore, but cause everyone else in the world to do so. Gaps in logic I plugged up over time with the draft, using scary magic in which literally anyone who has come into contact with the person plus anyone related to that person is affected.

I don't remember for certain but at some point I considered making it an allegory for climate change or the like, though I don't remember in what specific way or how. Someone (sorry I forgot who you are) who was giving critique in chat liked the idea but suggested as an underlying theme an allegory for the "Not In My Backyard" attitudes around hazardous (and in particular nuclear) waste disposal.

I proceeded to lace this around in the article in the form of escalating incidents of mass rotting deaths, gradual breakdowns in containment, and an overall flatout refusal by multiple Site Directors to take on this anomaly given its extreme risk. At some point I considered digging up that old bit of bullshit, arguing whether the SCP "Prime Directive" (secure hard stuff for science, not destroy it because it's easier) but figured that would drag the whole thing down and be largely uninteresting.

Instead, as with life, I left it as a perpetual cloud of doom hanging over everyone, until it reaches a point of having "infected" so many people that it becomes apocalyptic while everyone who can do something about it just doesn't. Completely non-relatable to our times.

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