SCP Foundation

Picture someone straight, white, male, middle class, reasonably young, British, mediocre and nerdy. This person is about as close to being me as anyone is ever going to get. I enjoy reading, writing, drawing, shitty puns, meta-humour, repeating myself, and meta-humour. The internet takes up a larger portion of my life than it perhaps should.

To put it bluntly, I write in terms of colours, feelings, and themes. That's how my works start; the metaphorical seed from which they grow. A sense of an experience, a set of related ideas, and some key words or phrases are usually enough to set me on the path to an article or tale — it's sometimes the idea that comes first, but usually not. SCP-3663, for example, was stained, dirty cardboard, lying in a puddle in a dark tunnel, while SCP-2856 was brownish-red, bloodstained, with slightly rusted metal and dirt-encrusted tools. SCP-3617 was idea first, and I really struggled drafting it: a clear indication that, for me at least, the process works. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but it's how I write best.

As for how I get my ideas, I've always had a slightly warped imagination, and I enjoy writing about things that scare me. This has ended up meaning that the majority of things I've written have a core theme: Repetition, inevitability, failing despite your best efforts and being powerless to break out of a pattern of behaviour. Grim? Possibly. Good fuel for writing? You bet your ass it is. SCP-2668 is probably the best example of this, what with its story of twisting a vaguely enjoyable experience into an eternal prison, but 3663, 3617, and "The World Forgetting..." all follow it as well. To be quite honest, the only things I've written that don't fall into this category are SCP-3317 (as it was the first article I successfully wrote for the site, and didn't have the central aim of being horror) and SCP-2856 (which was part of a nightmare I once had, and so was terrifying for a whole host of other reasons).

Anyway, those are the two main aspects of my writing process. I may go into more depth at some point, but this is all you're getting for now. :P

At the heart, in my experience, the core concept for an SCP has to be cool. If you can write something that's just a really cool, interesting thing, then you're halfway towards a completed article. It's clear that this is what I do, I think: I've got a toaster-headed murderer, a coliseum filled with animatronic Romans, a teleporting monster made from cardboard and an MTF that can travel through time. These ideas were conceived of and shelved in various ways, shapes, and forms, and then slotted in to any narrative that would take them.

So don't just have a large metal cube or [REDACTED]-brand hairbrush, have a giant mechanical dinosaur or a living network of glass tubing. Have a shadow creature that can walk through dreams, or a person made of amber that can manipulate static charges. Be creative, and make your ideas awesome — it's the shortest route, in my mind, to a successful article!

The other tabs were getting too long to reasonably fit on the page, so this is a sort of cover for the section. There's no useful stuff here, so feel free to disregard it and move on to the pages containing actual information.

SCP-1313 is an anomalous series of logical processes, capable of being defined as a mathematical equation to which the answer is a single female specimen of Ursus arctos…

I don't even with this one. It's the most popular thing I've ever done, and I wrote it in a couple of hours because I wanted to try something humorous and people in IRC kept encouraging me. I posted it against my better judgement because there were a bunch of new Series II slots open, and I'm currently in a state of switching between "I love this and I'm really proud of it" and "I hate that this is my highest-rated article". What can you do, I guess. Sometimes you just gotta take the good with the bears.

SCP-1917 is a sapient biomechanical humanoid of abnormal strength and size. It stands 3.5 metres tall, can lift weights upwards of 1,500 kg, and has demonstrated sufficient knowledge to repair, maintain, and make minor improvements to its own structure. The entity possesses two additional arms extending from the shoulderblades, continuous track mechanisms in place of the feet and lower legs, and interlocking metal plates replacing all skin below the neck…

Commentary pending.

URA-9611, formerly SCP-2235, is a potent material infohazard affecting data about numerous historical figures. Any non-organic medium storing information about these individuals (termed Class 01 subjects for consistency) or URA-96112 will undergo a process of autonomous alteration and/or accelerated decay…

Coming ev̸e̸n͠t̸ually̧.

SCP-2668 is an extradimensional region resembling the Roman Colosseum (undamaged, appearing as it would have at the time of its construction) and a small quantity of surrounding landscape.

Somebody in chat, whose name I can't recall, was writing about a time-loop battle with a bear or something, and asked for ways they could prevent the protagonist from just running away. I semi-jokingly suggested allowing them to live a long and happy life away from the bear, then have them re-spawn when they died of natural causes. Quite rightly, they thought this was both a) too convoluted and b) not something they'd wish on their worst enemy, so it was left up to me, months later, to finally incorporate that idea with a basic concept I'd had a while earlier — an extradimensional battle arena where you could fight against abstract concepts and real people.

Funnily enough, M. Forth started off as an author avatar for myself, and it says a lot about my bibliocidal tendencies that they immediately got trapped for eternity fighting a monster made of forever-shitting ladybugs. I'll try again with the whole 'AA' concept at a later date — Researcher Lloyd seems to be heading that way, so there's probably room for it there.

SCP-2856 is a large warehouse located on the outskirts of Leipzig, Germany, formerly owned by █████ Logistics…

My third SCP and my most successful to date¹. The ToasterHead scene was ripped almost entirely from a nightmare I had (it's a strange day when your subconscious is a better writer than you), and the narrative just seemed to congeal around it. I knocked out a first draft in a matter of hours, as I do with a lot of spur-of-the-moment concepts, but didn't return to it for months — I'm extremely glad that I did. While it went through modifications to fit various different formats (including a tale about 'I Am A Toaster' that I was sorry to abandon), it returned to something resembling the original SCP article and did surprisingly well for itself.

There's not much more to say about this one. It's dark, it's got body-horror, and I've hidden a very, very subtle Easter-egg relating to a fairly popular Series IV scip by a notoriously political user whose works I very much enjoy. 500 MalicePoints™ to anyone who can find it.

The designation SCP-3176 refers to a series of temporal anomalies, revolving around an as-yet unformed Mobile Task Force. The Task Force in question (MTF-Eta-Then, "Cause and Effective") will apparently be created with the aim of retroactively preventing containment breaches…

Aaaaargh I love time travel so much. This started off as a writing exercise in which I laid out increasingly convoluted time-travel scenes and attempted to wrap my own head around it — it then developed into an SCPverse-centric concept, and finally re-structured into an article. The fact that I made it an MTF is essentially my own love for that particular element of lore, and the idea of a team of time travellers jumping about and solving problems is sufficiently cartoonish to make me grin. I do not have a sophisticated sense of humour.

In the end, it's pretty much what-you-see-is-what-you-get. The concept is time travel, the content is extremely convoluted time travel, and the theme is how convoluted and difficult time travel can be. Eventually (read: possibly) I'm going to use it as the basis for a DoTA series.

SCP-3317 is a composite narrative, manifesting entirely through text presented via the written word…

This was my first SCP, and went through a butt-ton of editing and revising before metamorphosing into the beautiful pseudo-Communist bibliovore you see before you today. Initially, it was a fairly basic format screw, with the Supreme Government of the Amalgamated Union of the Textual Plane taking over the 3317 slot. While reasonably interesting, it (ironically) lacked any kind of narrative, and the format-screw angle was eventually ditched in favour of the current layout. Regarding the political angle, and there's been some discussion over this: it's a parody of people misunderstanding Communist ideals. The way the entity chops and changes fragments of concepts, mutilating them to fit its own goals is allegorical of the way certain people wilfully misunderstand Marxist ideologies. This did not, unfortunately, come across as well as I'd hoped. I still love it to pieces, despite its many foibles.

SCP-3564 is a humanoid creature (sans head), approximately 3 metres in height. The entity exhibits unusually high levels of muscle mass, tumorous growths in multiple limbs and organs, and appears to have been grown via anomalous means from the remains of William Shakespeare…

This is a kind of tribute to CadaverCommander, who I regard as one of the best new-ish writers on the site. He's certainly better than me, anyway. He has a strong talent for writing brilliant characters, and I wanted to emulate that with a concept I'd fallen in love with: the giant zombie mutant clone of William Shakespeare. I don't really care that it hasn't done particularly well, it's certainly not my best work, and character-oriented scips are nowhere near my strong point; I'm just happy it succeeded, so I can use it as a basis for future works in a similar vein.

SCP-3617 are small, semi-insectoid creatures composed from various types of human body tissue…

My least favourite article I've written for the site, and one of my favourite concepts. I don't think I did it anywhere near justice, and I hope one day to be able to go back and give it the re-write it deserves. The plot is contrived, the body-horror on-the-nose, and the inclusion of conceptual stuff confuses more than it explains. There are elements in it I think are great, but the way I tied them together is frankly awful. It shouldn't be anywhere near as well-liked as it is. But hey, I suppose that's life.

On that note, if you feel like you know a better way of doing the concept, hit me up over PM or on chat — I'd be more than willing to collaborate on an improved version, or even allow a complete re-write if you're a cool enough dude.

SCP-3663 is a humanoid entity constructed primarily from cardboard (in the form of boxes and tubes), adhesive tape, and twine…

Ah yes, my second SCP article, and my first real attempt to convey a structured narrative. I had a much clearer picture of what I wanted to do this time round (see the "M" section of this page), and got to posting a lot more quickly than with 3317. Certain details have been changed along the way, and the narrative's been re-ordered and clarified more times than I care to count, but the central theme and ideas have remained the same throughout. Consider this one an experiment into the lands of humanoid Keters, and one that's been moderately successful. I'll probably get around to re-writing the dialogue at some point.

SCP-3766 are semi-metaphysical creatures, capable of feeding on the conceptual base of anything deemed "man-made"…

This was a strange one for me. It was written for Day 2 of the 2018 Jam Contest, and the theme was "tropical". Accordingly, I started thinking of tropical imagery — rainstorms, dried grasses, bonfires and so-on. I remembered reading about cargo cults, and subconsciously inverted it to get creatures that actually cause vehicles to crash through some kind of retrocausal voodoo. The metaphysical bit was then added to give the creatures a reason to do it, and the addendum was the most logical extension of the concept for me.

I have no doubt I could do it better if given more time, but considering the time limit I was working with I'm extremely happy with what I managed to churn out.

SCP-3856 is a probabilistic anomaly affecting all iterations of Foundation Researcher Samuel Lloyd across all known variants of the Foundation, in all known life-supporting universes…

This was, without a doubt, the single most procrastinated piece of writing I've ever produced. The first draft was made before I'd even conceptualised my first scip (SCP-3317), and looked nothing like the finished product. It was an SCP about a stone sphere that shifted through universes, dragging all information about itself along with it — in addition to this, it would prevent any universe it was in from being destroyed; as a kind of 'backlash' to this, any universe it left would be destroyed shortly afterwards. The Foundation would have had to battle an army of extradimensional invaders who desired this protection, while also dealing with millions of SCP articles from different universes filling up their database. The story here² would be presented in the journals of one Researcher Lloyd, who worked with the anomaly in almost every universe. I hope to revisit the concept one day.

As a corollary to the above, it's worth noting that I used the name Samuel Lloyd as a kind of placeholder name in a lot of drafts — I'm not very imaginative, and thought it had a nice ring to it. The first of these drafts to be posted was "The World Forgetting […]", and so when the time came to pin down the multiversal Lloyd draft I'd had in my mind for a year, I had to make it fit with my established canon. 3856 was the result.

So there you have it. My most popular article One of my most popular articles is a mishmash hodgepodge of scrapped ideas, multiple iterations, unfinished concepts and accidental continuity. I wouldn't have it any other way.

SCP-4774 is the hypothetical "Planet Nine", a trans-Neptunian gas giant potentially orbiting the sun at a distance of around 700 AU. If it exists, SCP-4774 would be two to four times the diameter of Earth, and approximately ten times the mass….

Commentary currently non-existent, please try again later.

SCP-4856 is a 2.4 metre tall humanoid entity capable of willingly transferring itself forwards and backwards through time at increments of exactly one hour…

Commentary coming if and/or when I get around to it.

They open the door, and my body freezes. The light is so bright it burns, and although I have no eyes to see it I know it is there. They move slowly around me, and I cannot run. I can never run, even when they no longer see me. I am a slave to myself, and to my shapeless limbs.

Believe it or not, this was my first successful contribution to the site. It was (as far as I can recall) a coldpost, and was written in an evening for the 173-fest. It's a little too purple, a little too pretentious, and could have been structured better, but it holds a special place in my heart — it's lack of failure gave me the confidence to start writing more, both on the site and off.

It wouldn't be a proper blackout/memory-loss drama without a poorly worded message from his previous self.

Remember when 055 didn't have multiple contrasting headcanons? Me neither. This was my first narrative, and my first original character. I'd been bouncing the idea around for weeks, but finally plucked up the courage to write it after seeing the (moderate) success of "Ex Nihilo Nihil".

As for why I chose fifty-five as the subject, I suppose I've just always loved it. It's insanely popular, so was obviously one of the first I read, and I just found it to be one of the most creative, cleverly-written entries I've ever seen. I was desperate to explore exactly why it was Keter class, and wanted to write something pleasantly cynical and futile — throughout the drafting process Lloyd essentially turned into my self-insert.

I'm planning on revisiting it eventually, once I've sorted out the rest of the story, so, uh… watch this space, I suppose? I was probably going to say something else about the tale, or 055 in general, but I can't for the life of me think what it was.

Over my time at the Foundation, I came to hate time-travel with a burning, firey passion.

I don't often do author commentary for tales, but this one had an interesting enough development process that I reckoned it was worth the effort. It was written for Day 1 of the 2018 Writing Jam, and I love it more with each passing day. The original idea was one I had a couple weeks earlier, while daydreaming about how the Foundation would talk to a kid. The time-travel aspect flowed in quite naturally (which should tell you a lot about how my mind works), but it was missing a catalyst — something to act as a conduit for tension and a way of achieving a narrative climax.

Cue the Writing Jam, and the prompt: "Murder Mystery". It became clear then what I had to do. I had to take that time travel aspect, ramp it up to eleven, and then use the ramping up itself as the central theme. I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, and it is (to my knowledge) the first example of a murder mystery in which the killer, victim, bystander and investigator are all the same person.

The title is a reference to a pet theory of mine relating to any fiction involving time travel: that the level of bullshittery required to make the story work is always the same. Whether you have one major logical flaw, or spread it out subtly over extended lore and worldbuilding, it's always there.

It was a dark and stormy night, and two men sat in a cave.

When I was a young child, my Grandad used to tell me this story (or at least, the story this is based on). I found it simultaneously haunting and encapsulating (he was a very dramatic man), and it's been lurking in the depths of my mind since I first heard it. Curiously, and perhaps ironically, it's one of the few things nowadays that exists pretty much only in the oral tradition — there's very little written recognition of it, but it has still been passed down through generations and spread across the world. If you look around, there are still a lot of people who know about it, and were told it by their own parents and grandparents.

When I saw the topic for Day 3 of the Writing Jam was "It was a dark and stormy night…", it seemed obvious to me what I had to do: write about the story my Grandad used to tell. So I decided to go a little meta, included Fred (who I've always had a soft spot for), and let my mind delve deeper into the madness. As I said in my author post, I'm incredibly proud of it.

More to come!

SCP-1763 is a semi-metaphysical entity capable of excising itself at will from various aspects of reality, both real and imagined. SCP-1763 is currently both invisible and silent, possesses no heat-signature, can render itself selectively intangible, and is capable of exerting a strong memetic effect on nearby humans…

Coming at some point…

At this point, you're probably thinking something along the lines of "is there anything this guy can't do?" Well guess what, I've done an art page as well! I update it semi-regularly whenever I can be bothered, take requests, and the art is mediocre but improving.

You can find/investigate/hunt down/plagiarise/downvote my 'art' under the semi-hilarious title of Malicious Content.

I needed something to fill out my page a bit, so I guess it would be good to show off some other people's stuff.³ "But Malice!", I hear you cry, "This is your author page, why would you show off the works of people who are clearly superior? Does that not make you look worse?" To which I reply, shut up.

Mendelssohn

Flawed

SpookyPizza

SourBacteria

SpookyPizza

WindyCat

pastarasta1

I really like Mobile Task Forces, and use them a lot. Here are the ones I was responsible for!