ERrOrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr………..
Name: Dr. Arthur G. Balthazaar
Security Clearance: Level 2
Status: Active
Position: Carnivorous anomaly specialist
Current Location: Has offices in Sites 40 and 27
History:
Dr.Balthazaar joined the Foundation several years ago following a career in zoology in his native Australia, and quickly went on to earn a reputation for being a reckless individual fascinated with anomalous wildlife. There are multiple documented cases showing Dr. Balthazaar bodily tackling such anomalies in the efforts of relocating them to containment suites for further study. He has a marked tendency towards supporting the Ethics Committee, and towards empathising with animalistic anomalies. Enthusiastic and boisterous, Dr. Balthazaar has cordial professional and personal relationships with most of his coworkers. In his spare time, Dr. Balthazaar enjoys photography, surfing, shooting, eating, wildlife documentaries, weightlifting and visiting zoos. He is a dedicated Essendon Football Club supporter, and has received 40 reprimands for reckless behaviour regarding animalistic anomalies. These have generally not been followed up on due to his uncommon intuition and connection with wildlife both anomalous and mundane.
Warning, anomaly detected. This individual may be effected by the hammerhead anomaly. should this researchers identification picture not feature a beard, please proceed to shelter while fireteams are alerted.
Certifications:
- First Aid Certification III
- Firearms Certification I
- Zoology Masters Degree
- Bachelors Science Degree (Biology)
- Certificate IV: Cryptozoological husbandry.
Commendations:
- Site 40 employee of the month, May 2017
- 3rd place, Site 40 power lifting meet 2018
- Bravery commendation
- Foundation Medal of Secrecy, for successfully maintaining the veil of secrecy from close family members for greater than 3 years
Reprimands:
- Reckless behaviour: 40 counts
- Failure to report to work station in a timely manner: 27 counts
- Unprofessional workplace conduct (Placed "whoopee cushions" under the seats of 8 co-workers
- Posting a false notice within digital and physical copies of SCP-1364's files. this notice read "Harmful testing on SCP-1364 has been banned by Dr Balthazaar, and is punishable by me breaking your fucking jaw."
Marital Status Missive:
Married to one Felicia B Ackerman, a veterinarian unaware of the Foundation, believing Dr. Balthazaar to be a zoological researcher. Any events including staff family members are to adhere to cover story 23-H.
NOTE: Can we not refer to the carnivorous anomalies as monsters? Really most of them are just misunderstood animals. Sure, 682 has a bit of a temper, but I'm sure this is perfectly natural for its species. Crikey, it's like you don't understand him (her?) at all. I mean, I don't either, but I might be right maybe.
Dr. Balthazaar Ackerman.
- SCP-2467 A Sum Greater Than Its Parts
- SCP-3019 Soylent Nursery
- SCP-4159 Oh God Something Touched My Leg
- SCP-4924 Tunnel Revenant
- SCP-4715 A Demon Born of War (Rewrite)
- SCP-5007 Bass Strait
- SCP-4564 Butthole Surfers
- SCP-6004 The Rainbow Serpent
- SCP-7776 The UnWell
- SCP-7219 F is for Fallout
- SCP-001-EX-J Abraka David's Proposal (co-author)
- SCP-8700 In the Court of the Dragon
SCP-2467: This is my first scip that I wrote, and I think she turned out pretty well. At the time I was reading a book on rogue waves, and was wondering how many ships were lost at sea because of them. Then I had the thought "What if something was making the rogue waves?" So I came up with a cannibal boat driven by a captain who long ago found something that allowed them and ship to be one, but still required replacement parts. It did change as time went by, but I'm really proud of how it turned out, even if it did take months to write.
SCP-3019: My second scip, and probably my least favorite if I'm honest. I think I jumped the gun in posting it before it was ready, but I really wanted to be in on the horror contest. This one came from my old job, an awful gig as a despatch worker at a wholesale nursery. It's very hot, hard work that often started before the sun rose and ended after it set. This was my attempt to show people the horrors of what it was like to work in a nursery, and the people made into compost is directly inspired by a near miss I had where someone turned on the mulcher while I was inside cleaning it. I took the photo for the page one morning at about 5am headed in before the lights were on.
SCP-4159: I got the idea for this when I was on holiday in Gippsland. I was trying to bodysurf at one of my favorite beaches, but there'd been a storm not long before and there was a lot of kelp in the water and washed up on the sand. As you'd imagine, it sucks swimming through kelp, so it kinda spoiled things a bit. But it did remind me of my childhood fear of seeing one of those mounds of washed up kelp just decide to one day stand up and start walking. the result was 4159. After having the idea, I got down to the beach with my camera to get some good photos of the kelp and put the results in the article.
SCP-4924: Honestly don't know where this one came from to be honest. I got to reading about natural disasters on Wikipedia, somehow came to the Boston Molasses flood and then thought I could do something with it.
An artistic rendering of SCP-4715
SCP-4715: Well I obviously didn't come up with the idea, but I saw the ARC when I first joined the wiki in 2011 or so, and at the time I didn't understand why it had been archived. I thought it was super neat and cool and rad. As I continued to lurk about the site for years, I forgot about a lot of the early scps that I read, but not 517-ARC. It stuck with me, maybe because of the picture (I wish I could have used that.). Anyway, after I got a few successful scips under my belt, I was feeling confident in my writing ability, and before I wrote tunnel revenant this idea had formed where 517 was a bigfoot weapon the made to fight the humans. Moose explained to me that doesn't work since it was a surprise attack by the humans, that's how they won. That's how the current version came to be.
It was a lot of fun to write, though frustrating at times. It was very hard to describe its secondary arms. I had the mental image of how they looked, but the only animal that ever had hands(?) like these was chalicotherium back in the Pleistocene. And I think those paleontologists were just as stumped by them as me because they seem to actively avoid describing them. I als put in a lot of research into particularly bloody wars, cave paintings, and the workings of kangaroo tails. A lot of this didn't end up in the scp itself, but I basically got a working understanding of how its various anatomical traits would work.
I addition to all this, I also tried to include nods towards various historic/ religious events that it could plausibly have been involved in, as well as nods towards various aspects of SCP history too. These include:
- showing the skull of it as the picture, which is like the original. The SCP it fought is also the same as the original, being Able
- Its existence being confirmed in October of 1916 refers to the battle of Somme, the bloodiest battle of WW1
- It's activity in china during the 19th century is in reference to the Taiping Rebellions, which historians estimate caused up to 100,000,000 deaths (Holy shit)
- Being referred to as "the beast from the earth" in the woodcarving is a nod toward the book of revelations, where the beast from the earth possessed two horns and had a voice like a dragon. It declared that any who did not worship it or its image would be killed. I thought this fit pretty well with the waning moon ritual.
- Incident-4715-1944-J refers to its enthusiastic participation in ww2. In this case, I had the idea that it manually turned AA guns toward naval vessels to draw them into the fight.
- All the animals I reference in its genetic makeup display a particular trait that I used in the pictures and cave paintings I made. It's stance is from a gorilla, its horns are from ibex, the tail is binturong, the musculature of the secondary limbs is human. The hind legs are based on both bears and megatherium, the head in general on a cave lion with the dentition of a hyaenodon, and the arms, hands and to an extent tail are from the marsupial lion. I also worked to incorporate elements of leopard seal.
SCP-5007: This is an idea I've been wanting to explore for quite some time. In real life Bass Strait is known as one of the worlds most dangerous stretches of water. Despite having only been traveled for about 250 years, it has thousands of shipwrecks, with an unusually high number of aviation disappearances over it. People disappear from its islands, Strange lights are often seen in its waters and skies, and it used to be dry land. All of this has had me wanting to turn the whole area into and SCP. When the contest came along, I was brainstorming ideas when a friend suggested I finally solve the mystery. Why does bass strait have so many disappearances?
So, spurred on by the blue planet 2, the disappearance of the Beaumont Children, The Frederick Valentich disappearance and some cuttlefish videos I smashed this out, updating my photos as I went. I wanted this to be a mysterious, dark piece. I like the theme of there being something of horrific amounts of power, basically untouchable by any mundane means, yet stupid, possibly not even sentient. almost like a big idiot mushroom god jellyfish thing. The sort of thing that would throw a tantrum if it didn't get what it wanted, but would forget all about it as soon at it was done.
I also can't resist throwing in a bit of body horror and lovecraftian styling, along with my love of the sea, so really I guess this was inevitable.
SCP-4564: This is the result of Roget challenging me to smash out an Atari Arcadia SCP in 12 hours. I had recently read about freshwater eels that grow to enormous sizes when they're trapped upstream by dams. Freshwater eels migrate to the sea to breed and die, so when they can't get to the sea they just hang out in the deep water getting huge.
I figured that the demonic, eldritch gods that Atari works with would be expecting something for their input, so I figured there is possibly an eel god somewhere that this game serves, and in return for helping its slippery children transport to the sea, it will lend Atari its power. The mechanics of how the eels work was inspired by the real life practice of horsehair worms controlling bugs to take them to the water from within their bodies.
SCP-6004: I actually was originally considering this for the 5kon, but decided against it. Basically this is a wish fulfilment scp. I've been very upset with the state of the environment for most of my life, particularly here in Australia. Our leadership here is the worst we've ever had and the environment has suffered enormously under them, and the bushfires proved that. I wanted to write a divine justice, something to mend the world and punish those responsible. I didn't focus so much on the punishment aspect, beyond yeeting scott morrison into orbit (unable to die) but I feel like i did an ok job at depicting an ancient God on a rampage. Who knows, maybe one day the Serpent will throw its weight around against other gods.
SCP-7776: This scp has a very long history. It began as an idea about making an scp about a dragon, trapped outside our reality by king arthur, sealed away by excalibur driven into a stone. It would attract snakes and komodo dragons and the like, things would spontaneously combust in dragonflame and similar as it tried to force people to pull the sword from the stone. I later came to the conclusion that wouldn't work, but quite some time later I had a thought that I would love to write something genuinely scary, and what better to emulate for horror than the Ring. That movie scares the shit out of me.
So I talked with some friends, got some advice on it and decided to combine the idea of a scary well with the dragon idea, that something is trapped down the well, and wants OUT. The caustic ooze and reality warping effects were inspired by the terrible brothers grimm movie from when I was a kid, but I really liked the idea of the Foundation being forced to stave off this awful, abominable thing by performing the most taxing of rituals. For whatever reason (initially it was a defense mechanism of the universe to keep this thing out, like the body pushing itself to the limit to ward off an infection) these rituals were designed to fail, because this thing wants in desperately.
From there I spoke to more friends, one of whom suggested that the Foundation didn't discover the truth of the matter until it was nearly too late, which really went on to shape the rest of the piece. I don't know where that friend is anymore, but I hope they know I'm glad for the advice. The rest of it was my attempt to write the horror piece that I've wanted to see on the site. I wanted an atmosphere of dread, I wanted escalation and a sense of isolation, a fear of the unknown and the weaponisation of base fears like blood, rats and insanity. I feel like I pulled this off relatively well (pun), and was able to mix it in with my love of medieval settings and history.
SCP-7219: This SCP came about as part of the Anthology project. I knew the theme was horror, and the letter format allowed me to narrow down my options. I settled on radiation, fallout, and radiation sickness. The main inspiration from there was Hisashi Ouchi, a young nuclear technician who was exposed to a colossal amount of radiation, suffering from extreme radiation sickness but kept alive against his will by doctors performing experimental treatments on him (At the wishes of his family.) Such an awful death didn't exactly need much work, but it was seeing the 1984 movie Threads that allowed me to really grasp the scope and horror that is a large scale nuclear fallout. Images of the death, destruction and burns in the immediate aftermath of a blast are powerful images, but I found that they were nothing compared to what came later. The nuclear winter, strangling the survivors trying to rebuild their world, the crops pitiful and weak. The radiation taking a slow, steady toll on the remains of humanity as we regress to a medieval state or worse, with no schools to even teach our children to speak. That's the true horror, and I wanted to be sure that it had a place on the wiki. I hope I did a good job of highlighting that in the scp.