Mostly Moved Here
Current Proofreading - Back Burner - Completed Projects
Leads to Investigate - Misc. - Re-Imagining Contest - For getting people started
Active Draft I - Notes - Amorphophallus acherontos
Active Draft II - Notes - Resurrection ideas, incl. CYOA draft(s)
Active Draft III - Notes - [pending]
Active Draft IV - Notes -IV-1, IV-2, IV-3 - The Old Dog and the New Leaf
Active Draft V - Notes - [pending]
To Do
- A particular challenge
- Rework SCP-1001
Skips I really fucking love, in rough descending order of awesome (list under construction):
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Secret Santa 2015 gift for OZ Ouroboros.
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Secret Santa 2013 gift for Scantron.
Specifically handy reference (WIP):
Random forum things I wrote:
- The Oxygen Catastrophe
- A mineral poem (two other poems below)
- My favorite plant(s)
- The Leak
Things that just plain make me happy:
O5 signatures:
0 - Do you know the words once spoken?
1 - Do you hear the black moon howl?
2 - Can you hear the howling wind?
3 - Has the summer rain turned foul?
4 - The fortresses now silent,
5 - Now darkness closes in,
6 - The wicked and the violent,
7 - Lay strewn upon their sin.
8 - But there the lonesome walker,
9 - The one who does not doubt,
10 - The lord over the locker,
11 - Upon his flaming mount.
12 - Remains above the demons,
13 - Until the stars go out.
Concepts to keep track of:
- The Schmidt-Luhrmann effect: (from SCP-4001) "The Schmidt-Luhrmann effect is the tendency of retrocausally altered timelines to replicate events from the original timeline far more closely than would otherwise be expected under the Butterfly effect, presumably to avoid catastrophic chronological paradoxes."
Nascent Semi-Drafts
Item #: SCP-XXXX
Object Class: [?]
Special Containment Procedures:
Description:
Notes
It's an effect (pathogenic?) that makes certain portions of certain inanimate objects accresce, just like Physalis calyces. (Imagine a turtleneck sweater whose neck covers your whole head.) It takes effect quite suddenly, whenever the wearer of an infected object tries to discuss certain very specific subjects. The proscribed topics are, at most, tangentially connected, but they should suggest a frightening sort of connection.
Proscribed subjects should imply that whoever made the skip is trying to stifle discussion that would lead to discovery of his/her current activities. Those activities involve both general research and a specific plan to introduce an anomalous factor into some major industry's natural-resources pool, thus dispersing the factor irrevocably into human use. (The product affected should be something like sulfuric acid, a common plastic, or sugar — something everyone uses in a lot more places than they realize. Maybe tungsten, or the fluorescent coating in CFLs.) Proscribed subjects include the following:
- (Mechanism)
- Certain relatively-recent developments in [Substance]-processing techniques
- A handful of specific scholarly papers discussing [processes related to Substance]
- (Targets)
- Patterns of [Substance] distribution
- Common uses of [Substance]
- (Goals)
- [Anomalous Factor]
- [Group that created or discovered AF]
- [Interactions of AF with Substance]
- [Effects of widespread AF distribution]
- SCP-XXXX
- (Mechanism)
- Specific scholarly works about nanotechnology; epigenetics; husbandry/agriculture of cotton; and the historical anthropology of weaving
- Any textile-production technology developed since 1966
- Taxonomy, evolution, genetics, and physiology of any plant in the family Malvaceae
- (Targets)
- Changes in the geography of cotton-growing since 1990
- Changes in the economics of textile distribution since 1990
- SCP-XXXX
- This SCP object's origins, mechanism, goals, and purpose
- Any speculation that this SCP object might be intelligent
The idea behind it: someone sees the end of the world coming, tries to warn everyone, is ignored, and either gives up or gets out. The original idea was for it to be an environmentalist sort of thing — someone who gave up on trying to fix global warming and took an easy way out in the belief that humanity just can't be persuaded fast enough to save ourselves. That seems likely to fall into the "preachy" trap, so maybe it should be a different end-of-the-world scenario, something more esoteric and even more likely to be written off as crackpot. Whatever it is, though, the Foundation should believe it: there will have to be evidence (though not necessarily solid evidence) that it's going to kill us all.
Maybe the story could be about a seemingly-harmless SCP that's doing something rhythmic — a cyclical behavior that only one or a few people notice a trend in. It's getting bigger, and it's on an exponential curve — tiny now, but give it a decade and it'll, IDK, permanently render it impossible to form nitrogen-nitrogen triple bonds on earth (which would pretty much kill everything). The people working most closely with this skip come to realize what's going on, but for some reason (maybe they're considered emotionally involved, too attached to the concept) their warnings get written off. Eventually, in frustration born from years and years of being ignored and laughed at, they just say "fuck it" and GTFO.
Item #: SCP-XXXX
Object Class: [?]
Special Containment Procedures:
Description:
Notes
The emotion behind it: Hopelessness. "To be a biologist is to live in grief" — and we aren't the only ones who see death coming and feel like we're shouting into the wind.
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People. Dozens, maybe hundreds of them — the forest makes it hard to tell. Each is bent backwards (ref. urdhva dhanurasana), hands and feet anchored to the ground, body turned to wood and sod and stone. Humans shaped into arches, loops out of the forest.
They were human once, definitely. They found this forest, entered it, communed with some anomaly there, and ended up fused into a weird symbiosis with tree roots. None of this was coerced.
Why would anyone do this? The place is a sort of benevolent Matrix where hippies can go: inside, they're experiencing a collective hallucination of a rather nice, ecologically stable society. It's built to take in the people who can't stand our broken, unfixable world anymore, who would rather give up and work on a prettier delusion since they feel nothing they do can save our broken planet.
How is the system sustained?
Who built the system?
SCP-6000 contest entry. Theme: "Nature."
Concepts to work in / kick around:
- Ecological grief (overarching story?)
- Played straight: a researcher watching a place they love degrade and die
- Is the anomaly the place itself? Is the anomaly killing the place? (Bit too close to 5934?) Something unrelated?
- "Animals. Like humans."
- 2697 is rare only in that it's not anthropocentric
- Sapience is a planar immune response, a way to fight off what threatens a universe
- So uninhabited universes have no anomalies? Ref. SCP-1485
- …or, no inhabited universe lacks anomalies? Minds fundamentally don't arise without opposition?
- Could be uplifting (we are nature's guardians/stewards) or depressing (we are sentinels over a dead cosmos — what's the point?)
- …One must imagine Sisyphus happy?
- Are anomalies part of nature? Does the universe abhor them, or are they just… another thing we don't understand? Maybe they're not all the same, we just lumped 'em because we didn't know better.
RP Stuff
These are the really picky details. Call me a little OCD, but I do want to keep them straight.
Backstory, the long (and ever-extending) version
Chelsea's early life was comfortably normal: middle-class Midwestern upbringing, close supportive family life, good schooling and a lot of hobbies. She's always loved to teach and learn, and both of her parents always encouraged it.
In college, her longtime propensities for teaching and science began to blossom; she earned three botany degrees in quick succession. Her master's and doctoral theses dealt with the evolution and adaptive significance of fertile-sterile leaf dimorphism in leptosporangiate ferns. She went on to a post-doctoral pteridology position. It was during this postdoc that the Foundation recruited her; she pounced on the opportunity, excited by the prospect of working with something truly strange and new.
She's a Level 3 researcher now, more-or-less-seasonally divided between lab work (winter) and low-risk field studies (summer), consulting frequently for MTF Theta-4 ("Gardeners"). She's been head researcher for SCP objects in the past — SCP-628 was one of hers, and she supervised SCP-1001 for a while — but is between assignments at the moment, working instead on a slew of anomalous and as-yet-unclassified objects.
Current projects
Trinitite Flora (or That C6 Glass Thing)
Retrieved by MTF Theta-4 from the White Sands Proving Ground, during an anomalous event on the 2013 anniversary of the Trinity nuclear test. They are plants, probably: their stems' vascular bundles are certainly plant tissue. All cortical and epidermal layers, however, have been replaced with rough-hewn trinitite. The glass appears, under live electron microscopy, to be undergoing recognizable life processes including photosynthesis and cellular respiration, although these are weirdly amorphous — dispersed through the glass almost as though each once-fused sand grain was a cell, and their fusion has made them plasmodial. The biochemistry is also either deeply weird or entirely impossible: it appears to be a novel photosynthetic pathway, best described as C6. Current research is focused most urgently on figuring out what light spectrum this pathway responds best to, as the full visible spectrum has not been enough to keep the objects from etiolating. (And isn't that a weird sight.)
Other
Left hand scars:
- "Grouse talon": thin two-inch seam running parallel down her arm, on the inside of the wrist over the left radial styloid process. She had a double handful of wild bird, who did not appreciate confinement.
- "Forceps": two fine punctures in the pad of her left thumbtip. She was badly startled and jabbed herself with the tool she was holding.
- "Digestive juices": burn scar, 1 cm diameter, outer edge of left palm. Defensive injury from digestive acid splatter, the first time she met a Nepenthes her own size.
- "Close encounter with concrete": two somewhat lumpy, irregular patches, each about 7mm across, on the lateral faces of her left middle and ring fingers' first knuckles. Scraped herself on a wall.
Right hand scars:
- "Cottonwood bark": abrasion covering most of the distal pad of her right palm, almost completely faded. She was a kid climbing a tree, nearly fell out, and saved herself by grabbing onto some rather rough bark.
- "Chemistry accident": 2-mm raised pock-mark halfway between bases of index finger & thumb, on the back of her hand. A stray drop of liquid nitrogen boiled off her skin, not quite fast enough.
- "Pie": Diagonal swath of right index fingerprint is smooth (print missing). Potholder slipped while taking baked goods out of the oven. (The pie survived. Barely.)
- "Fenster": Two dashes-and-dots lines, about 4 cm long, diagonally across the back of her right hand. Her cat Fenster played hard at first.
(More as I think of them.)
The Anomaly
Character Name: Chelsea Elliott
Aliases: "Photosynthetic"
Concept: Solar-powered eldritch botanist
Played By: Photosynthetic
Description: Chelsea is a youngish woman, rather physically unremarkable: average height and medium build (5'6", 140lb), wavy brown hair, gray eyes, a rather prominent nose, and an otherwise-forgettable face. She has numerous small, well-healed scars on her hands and forearms, many of whose stories she'll happily tell. She tends to dress in well-worn, faded work clothes — jeans, button-downs, a favorite wool-lined canvas coat — and carry a satchel or smallish backpack. There's usually a sprig or two of local greenery stuck in her hat or buttonhole.
Background: Chelsea's early life was comfortably normal: middle-class Midwestern upbringing, close supportive family life, good schooling and a lot of hobbies. She's always loved to teach and learn. In college, her longtime propensities for teaching and science began to blossom; she took classes, did a little research, landed a brief TA gig, and earned her degree in botany.
During that same time, though, she also began to discover her… unusual propensities. It started with the day she curled up to nap on the Quad and woke up sitting twenty feet up in the branches of a tree. She'd been prone to sleepwalking as a child, but sleepclimbing? And why was the grass where she'd lain all frosted with tiny, unmelting white crystals?
That wasn't the last incident, either. She tried to ignore the occasional sideslips; she got pretty good at cleaning up spatters of sugar. Gradually, she learned to control it — just well enough to hide it, at first, but by the time she graduates, she could blink herself up steep hills and across busy streets.
She never quite made it to graduate school. During the year she'd intended for a gap, she instead discovered the Wanderer's Library. That way of life — steeped in sheer wonder, full of discovery and teaching yet free from the academic rat-race she'd resigned herself to before — called to her stronger than anything ever had before, and she dove joyfully into the nexus of worlds.
Skills & Assets: Chelsea is a skilled botanist, full of information on all kinds of plants. Her background extends as well to general natural history and biology. She's familiar with backpacking, navigation, and wilderness survival. She is an eloquent writer and fairly good at drawing, especially botanical field sketching. The danger of exploration prompted her to learn a little self-defense, and she can hit the broadside of a barn with a handgun.
She is also capable of limited, self-directed, solar-powered teleportation:
- The ability is apparently solar-powered, as she can't do it at all without full-sun-equivalent light on at least her face & arms (though she can deliberately build up her photoreserves ahead of time, and usually sunbathes for several hours before travelling). If she has the necessary light and she concentrates for a second or two on her desired destination, she blinks out of existence and reappears instantaneously in the planned spot. In the spot she started from, a fine hoarfrost of glucose crystals (100 +/- 17 g, every time) is left on the ground.
- Her range is proportional to her reserves; with a few seconds' face-and-arms sunlight she can jump about ten meters, while a full day's sunbathing extends it to a maximum of five miles. Trying to jump farther than her reserves allow results in her falling short of her destination, reappearing at a proportional point along the straight line between her original and planned locations.
- She never reappears inside a solid object, instead being shunted back along that same straight line to the first safe spot. She also never reappears more than five feet above a solid object, again being shunted back to the first safe spot. If the entire planned teleport path is blocked or aerial, she simply doesn't go anywhere, just getting her hands and forearms sugar-frosted for her trouble.
- She can teleport to places she has seen (even if only from a distance) with little effort. With an extra few seconds' concentration and some pencil-and-paper calculations beforehand, she can also go to a point specified only by distance and direction. This second method runs a significant risk of over- or undershooting, though, because she's no prodigy at eyeballing exact distances.
Other Info: [a giant geek, plants particularly but natural history generally, and is having the TIME OF HER LIFE ranging the worlds documenting strange wonders. The enthusiasm borders on mania, especially in the way it rebounds after tragedy. Also tends to poke things; note the hand scars.]
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