SCP Foundation

Second Jamcon entry! Do you feel a prickling in your brain…? Thanks so much to Sebarus and stormbreath for their very helpful feedback!

Image here, CC-compliant.

I liked this initially, but as Marcus’ dialogue progressed I kept feeling like I’d seen all the story beats before in SCP-3001. This could have distinguished itself by having Marcus use his technical expertise to escape properly, or even having a second person for Marcus to exploit by having them trigger 5330 for him to escape.

If SCP-5330 enters the potential field of vision (regardless of visual acuity or ambient light levels) of a human

What's the limit? I assume the effect doesn't trigger if the human is separated from 5330 by a solid wall.

So couldn't Cromwell hold his hands in front of his eyes? Or some other material? Though that doesn't explain why eyelids don't work.

I liked the idea and the incident log initially, but after reading it I found myself asking "what's the point?" The incident log doesn't reveal anything new about the SCP; no new effects, no backstory, just a guy who saw it and, when he did, 5330 worked exactly as expected.

3001's logs were necessary for understanding the SCP itself and its discovery, but Cromwell is, unfortunately, unimportant. Unless I'm missing something, he's nothing more than an unsurprising casualty.

For the most part I enjoyed this but as pointed out it is a bit too similar to 3001.

Aside from that though my biggest bugbear with this story is the the part where he mentions the door being on the other side of the room just beyond the scp. This would be fine if the door was unlocked but it's mentioned in the article that it's a sealed bulkhead. Again this would also be fine as the researcher may not know this but even if they don't know that to be the case why don't they just close their eyes?

Also the "we die in the dark so you can live in the light" line fits this scp perfectly. Even if it is a bit on the nose I feel like it should have been in there somewhere. Maybe at the end a bit saying the researcher was posthumously awarded something or other, then that quote. If I was doing that though, I'd probably want to make the death a tad more meaningful. That could be done quite easily though.

If it was me if probably increase the length of time from seeing the object to head exploding. I'd make it so that it was apparent from d class testing that there was something more to the explosions. Perhaps the victim becoming aware of some unbelievable truth before hand but due to threats against d class being useless when your blowing them up anyway the foundation haven't been able to figure out what they know. The heroic action performed by the researcher was simply explaining the process of death via this object. Whether or not the reader finds out what this truth is, is secondary in my view.

That justifies the posthumous award, the fitting (if slightly obvious) quote and also addresses the above users criticism of the log being kind of redundant.

The only problem, after typing all that out, is that making it a story about a foundation employee describing death via an scp object unfortunately makes it even more like 3001. I understand the problem writing a story like this a little bit more now and as a result have to say I've enjoyed this story more than I initially thought.

I don't really see the point of the story about cromwell. I mean it doesn't seem to show anything about the scp. The beginning was intriguing, but when you get to the end you go like WTF that's all? If he can have a look around while staring up at the ceiling and set a bomb without actually seeing it, why don't he set a small bomb beside the lock of the door WHILE LOOKING UP AT THE CEILING? He's not gonna get so badly hurt if he used a bomb that can only break a lock right? Is he an idiot or did I miss something?