howdy
so this is a rewrite of SCP-1712, a Roget article. I decided to focus on the absurd aspect of the original article.
Thanks to Modern_Erasmus,
Roget. and
Captain Kirby for looking through before posting!
SCP-1712-B is a tabby kitten with black and white fur. It weighs 8 kilograms
C H O N K
I really like the weirdness, but there are two "technical" things that seem like genuine mistakes to me, so just in case I'm correct and you want to nerd-proof it:
He's going at 20km/h currently. It seemed incredibly slow to me, so I checked. Assuming he was always going below 20km/h relative to the sun, then he would have travelled less than 10 million km in 60 years (525600 hours * 20km/h), so even if he was going directly away from the sun, he would have reached an eighth of the orbit of Mars, not the outer rim of the solar system! If teleportation occurred, it seems weird that it's not acknowledged (especially since the pic of him leaving the atmosphere makes it seem like he was just propelled away like any normal rocket would).
Also "observable solar system" bugs me… It depends on the albedo, it's not a proper "boundary" like the observable universe is, right? A quick google scholar search shows it's used (rarely) to refer to the collection of all known solar system bodies, which makes the concept of "leaving" it sound as contrived to me as saying a kid hiding in the closet "leaves the observable population of the house"! Maybe "Visual contact with SCP-1712-A is expected to be lost within 5 years", or "SCP-1712-A is expected to leave the heliosphere" would be more clinical.
(+1 anyway since it's well executed, and I enjoyed the placid silliness and the early 60s feel of the interview.)
The image used in this article is non-compliant with the SCP wiki's license (CC-BY-SA 3.0) due to it being a shutterstock photo, thus being only for non-commercial works AKA "NC". As such, the image has been removed.
EDIT: A new, cc-compliant image has been added in place of the old one.
Mm Mm Good
(ay author if you're reading this, I found an image of the same statue under Wikipedia Commons, it's a different image than the non-compliant one, just with a different angle of the same statue, it's here if you wanna replace it)
So like… Does the cat turn the ground to stone? Is everything stone in the cat's enclosure? Does it only turn animals that touch it to stone? I was unclear on that part.
Also, as has already been calculated by 440Hz, 20 kph is awfully slow for something that far out. Neptune is about 4.5 billion km from the sun, so he would have needed to be traveling closer to the neighborhood of 20 km/s to be even close to there by now.
It's different, though, I like it!
Edited for metric vs. barbaric.
Maybe I'd view this differently if I'd read the original article first, but this doesn't do anything for me. Sorry.
So there's a cat that turns living things to stone, as well as anything they're touching out to a meter. Fortunately this only affects living things, so the cat can still eat… except bacteria are living things, so presumably the cat has no microbiota and should not be able to digest. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but that's how I do.
Aside from that, when Boyd turned to stone, he fell up. No reason why, it's thus far unrepeatable, and there's that problem with the maths not adding up to his distance. It just seems like a second anomaly that got tagged on without a proper connection. It also seems like a wasted opportunity, since a cat that consistently turns living things into flying statues (or cut out the stone bit and it just makes things fly away) is more interesting to me. I like the idea of a cute little kitten that goes around rubbing on people's legs for attention, but if someone actually stops to pet it, or happens to be wearing shorts, they go orbital.
Lastly, I didn't enjoy the interview log. Just not my kind of cheese, I guess.
This did inspire a little headcanon for me though, where the same person/group is responsible for all ageless anomalous animals (3828 is the only other one I can think of offhand, but there's gotta be more).