SCP Foundation

So, I was on my way to work this morning and there was a news story about some of the giant colonies of bats here in the American southwest. For some reason, my sleep-deprived brain thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if all the chirps of the bats echoing in the cave formed words and told prophecies?"

So, I come to you. Would it? I have two thoughts on the direction of this. One, the chirps and echoes form human words, probably in one of the First Nations languages local to wherever the cave ends up being located. Of course, the prophecies are vague and can be interpreted in multiple ways, but are more or less accurate from hindsight. Second, and this is the one I like a bit more, is that animals from all around the world come to this location and ask for prophecy and insight and the chirps and echoes form the sounds that whatever animal naturally makes. The bats can mimic human speech in the second idea, as well, which is how the Foundation would learn from it. Alternately, they would have to use a signing gorilla. Which I kinda like better. Because gorilla.

So…what do you guys think?

Predictive skips (or rather, predictive fiction in general) is one of those things that can go badly in many different ways, the way I see it. It's hard to balance it out well to make it truly interesting, seeing how the basic tropes have been played over many, many times. That is not to say that "prophet=bad", just that prophets are hard to write well, especially by themselves rather than as a plot device..

I think the "oracle for animals" bit is the more interesting possibility. Principally because there's lots of things that animals could see as "magic" that are fairly normal to us. It's still anomalous in that these bats don't have technology for such predictions. And most importantly: gorilla.