Yeah. So the idea is just a tree something that emits Wi-Fi. Anyone has thoughts to make this interesting? I would also be glad to know if there are similar anomalies already tackled so I'd know if the idea is still workable or not. Don't be shy.
Well you got a "what", and a nice pun to boot. Now to continue from that one of the approach you could use is "5W+1H", which is "What Why When Who Where + How"
Starting with What: A tree that emits Wi-Fi signal. Tree is apparently Willow to build the pun.
Why: Why does that tree exist? Why does it emit wifi signal? Why should the reader or the Foundation care?
When: When do we discover it? When did it start existing? When did it start giving off wifi?
Who: Who discovered it? Who made it, if any?
Where: Where is it located?
How: How do we discover that it do what it does? How it does it? How does the Foundation found out about it? How do we know that it's not some IT/Networking students with too much time in their hand?
You don't really have to answer all these question, it's given that something is anomalous because there are unanswered questions about it, but "Why" "Who" and "How" are the questions I would generally expect from an article to build the narrative.
Well, it's not a bad starting point, but you need more than just an anomaly to make an SCP. Scips are things that the Foundation thinks are interesting, weird, or hard to contain: what makes this more than "anomalous tree #148"?
SCP-2393 ("Trees These Days") is along these lines, but not to the exclusion of this idea. Might even be a good one to draw a connection to- maybe this is a server hub for their networks or something.
SCP-3900 ("The Internet of Things That Are Wolves") is also vaguely similar, and makes a good example of where the Foundation's weirdness threshold sits, so you might want to look at that one, too.
Thank you for the replies Rigen and
Scorpion451 (both articles are awesome, btw). Those are very useful.
However, I found myself overwhelmed by the many possibilities surrounding this idea. Questions like:
- Do I need to include the biochemical processes involved that might produce the wifi frequency?
- Does it the wifi have to be connected to the internet?
- Do I have to include complicated wifi mechanics? (Because I have been reading stuff about wifi all day and all they say is that its radio waves and information is transferred like binaries, things like that.)
If not for all of these, I could focus on the effects, which are:
- People who connect to this network casually receives emails, text massages and missed calls (just missed calls, though) from an unknown number. (I'm gripping on the idea that hackers can get private info on people just by connecting on the wifi their connected)
- Some that they receive are audio files, images, and in some very rare circumstances, SCP documents, secret infos about the Foundation etc.
- In the end, it'll be revealed that they don't actually receive things, the network is just so volatile and tangled that some data are unintentionally taken and passed between connected devices. (including things from the Foundation) I don't know, maybe the tree is also a cloud storage or something.
- A back story where a person receives love/death texts from an unknown person every time he/she's in the willow tree, only to be revealed that the messages he/she received are from the messages of a victim during a murder that occurred on that same tree. It could be a hint that the tree contains the spirit of the victim the might've resulted to its wifi abilities. Personally, this backstory might be a good way of discovering the SCP.
Anyways, so yeah, so many possibilities. Which I think is a problem of not making the SCP overly complicated with facts but the same time believable in the SCP sense.
You're thinking in the right direction. The amount of technical detail you need all depends on the story you want to tell, really.
For instance, I recently posted the hyper-technical SCP-2871. The overall idea itself came together fairly quickly, but it took almost a year of off-and-on tinkering to hammer out the tricky part: Finding an interesting way to describe a device that amplified the Strong Interaction1 without falling into just-throwing-sciency-words-around-technobabble or getting in the way of the actual story: a containment log recounting a very bad day at a paratech startup company.
On the other extreme, you really don't need to explain anything. SCP-2915 is one of my favorites from the short SCP contest a couple years back. The few technical aspects mostly serve to further the vignette of a fast food establishment forsaken by the rational world.