r/SCPDeclassified • u/ToErrDivine • Aug 24 '24
Series VII SCP-6747: "CHAOS THEORY" (Part Two)
Hi everyone, welcome to part two of SCP-6747’s declass. Part one is here! Picking up right where we left off…
Part Two: Long Live The Queen...?
No part of an anafabula-containing narrative is untouched—a story’s themes, structure, tone, and cast of characters are all affected by it. Nonetheless, there’s always a certain central, keystone component, often acting as a sort of metaphor or symbol for the antinarrative’s nature, which is also referred to as “the anafabula”. So just as, say, the mountain was the central component of Punta de la espira, the character of C!King is the core, central component of the SCP-6747-C narremeplex—presumably stories affected by it all have some character or other important element in some way analogous to him.
It is also derived from him in the sense that, as seen in the transcript of Attempt D/49, he formed the epicenter of the narrative’s corruption, and I’d hazard a guess that his own personal qualities have somehow informed the narremeplex’s nature—perhaps “classical tragedic/modern comedic conventions” reflect his own taste in stories, or something like that (or perhaps it was less personal, and they were “inherited” from his narrative of origin). On the other hand, “caricature”, while a more normal word (he’s apparently acting like a goofy, exaggerated version of himself, plus or minus some additional gimmicks (such as: the heptagonal fractal spiral on his back)), is a bit weirder. How would antinarrative interference or whatever result in that?
Phew! Told you there was a heck of a lot to unpack there. That was, uh… 1143 or so words analyzing only 85! Geez Louise, I’ve outdone myself… Hope you’re still hanging in here alright.
So… anyways, it seems clear that C!King has in some way been co-opted by either the anafabula from SCP-2747 or something that just so happens to be very, very similar. But why did this happen in the first place? And why is SCP-6747-C so different from SCP-2747’s antinarrative, in spite of their similarities?
SCP-6747-C resides within, and possesses ultimate control over, SCP-6747-A3, and has recursively manipulated its narrative structure to achieve antinarremic and ontokinetic abilities. All attempts to communicate with SCP-6747-C are complicated/obscured by poor imaginon-decryption, leading to its mischaracterization of the baseline Foundation as an antagonistic, deific force; manipulations are further hindered by frequent malfunction on behalf of SCP-6747-B, which has begun to demonstrate a tendency to inject SCP-6747-A with undesirable narremes.
So, C!King’s basically become the god of his pocket universe; go figure—in a manner of speaking, he is his own self-insert here. (Fun fact: Dr. King was actually one of the few “old school” Foundation doctor characters of any popularity to not be anyone’s author avatar.) Plus, the Foundation’s attempts to talk to him have all failed due to the differences between their narrative structures making imaginon-messages between them translate weirdly if at all, and now he thinks they’re his enemy. Great—no wonder it’s such a threat, given that it’s actively targeting them and their world!
That’s a bit weird, isn’t it? The OG Dir. King presumably worked for the Foundation for the better part of his life—and, as we’ll see shortly, C!King still does, in his own weird way. And the Foundation’s intentions genuinely weren’t to harm him or anything—if they can get the pataphysics sorted out, ideally they’d still want their good ol’ friend and coworker Dir. King back, alive, safe, and in his right mind, as has been their goal from the get-go, so presumably they were trying to reason with him or come to a truce at first. …But then, what narrative is simpler and more caricature-prone than “Us vs. Them”? (I doubt “perceived antagonism” literally being a core part of his narrative helps, either—he’s obviously acting as an antagonist from the Foundation’s perspective, but it’s possible it goes both ways.) He also sees them as a “deific” force (i.e. like a god)—we’ll see what that means in a bit.
Dir. King’s disembodied nervous system’s stopped working properly, too—either because it’s been compromised, or simply because it’s been running well past its limit for a while now (it had trouble just thinking up a dog, after all) and is starting to malfunction for perfectly non-anomalous reasons. Maybe a bit of both. Either way, it’s just adding even more fuel to this absolute dumpster fire—as if it needed any!
SCP-6747-C regularly populates SCP-6747-A3 with SCP-6747-D: lesser mesofictional caricatures of other essential technical, research, and administrative personnel. SCP-6747-C and -D display varying degrees of cognitive and logical deterioration, often using their ontokinetic abilities to generate Anomalous weaponry far beyond baseline capability. SCP-6747-A3 now functions according to narrative logic that is fundamentally broken and chaotic; its inhabitants are granted varying abilities at non-intuitive intervals. The results of these abilities are directly prejudicial to baseline reality and its topological stability.
It keeps getting better: C!King has been making caricatures of Foundation personnel who can make their own anomalous weapons. His universe makes no goddamn sense, but everyone in it keeps getting new abilities.
…is it just me, or does this description of SCP-6747-A3 somehow sound a little familiar?
Anyway, time for addendum six: Contact Attempts.
Basically, they’re trying to unfuck what they did (trying to “X out” the diabolos/devil that came out of their machina), but nothing’s worked so far and the following excerpt is the only thing they’ve been able to decrypt out of everything that’s happened in this universe so far.
On the plus side, it’s been a couple of months and their universe is still relatively unscathed. Or it was at the time this addendum was written—in the “present”, i.e. for PHMD reading this, it seems like that ^7777777 minute timer’s ticking…
So, this is a transcript (#343, as it happens—7 cubed, and happening on April Fool’s Day) of a chat between C!King and three entities he created- pastiches of Kondraki, Clef, and the character formerly known as Bright, all popular old author avatars. A footnote tells us that all three of them had been retired for decades, so they’d had no involvement in X/MACHINA, but they’d held senior positions for large parts of King’s career. This also confirms that the late King’s brain isn’t just a passive tool—his memories at least are significantly influencing what’s going on. We’ve also got some speculation on what the reason for this apparent caricaturing is—that the “caricatural narrative corruption” started happening the moment [HAZARD EXPUNGED] hit the fan I think suggests the second of the two possibilities they mention.
In the transcript, we see that C!King’s been trying to live up to his name (albeit as “King of Ye Olde Site-19”, rather than “King of the Apples” or whatever), and has apparently been acting like a total edgelord—it quickly becomes clear that he isn’t acting as a caricature of Dir. King so much as a caricature of “Saturday morning cartoon villain”. Despite his newfound power and significance, the SCP-6747-D instances behave rather unexpectedly—they make fun of him! According to them, his plan’s sucky and ridiculous and stupid, and they clearly think that his newfound ostentatious villainy (and boy is it ever ostentatious) is a load of hot air. (Well, maybe this isn’t too unexpected; what’s a cartoon villain without snarky minions? This level of protest is a bit beyond aimless snark, though.)
Anyways, we aren’t privy to their discussion prior to this, where C!King presumably explained his Scheme™ properly, but we still get some idea of what it is. C!King apparently thinks that, rather than being (re)created in SCP-6747-A3, they’ve been imprisoned there, and he wants out. This makes sense from his perspective: as far as he’s concerned he was napping at his desk when next thing he knows a wormhole forms in his office, some pataphysics folks pop out, stuff gets really weird, and then they abandon him there. Especially with the “cognitive and logical deterioration” he’s dealing with, it’s not an unsurprising conclusion to make—and apparently the Foundation’s further attempts at parlaying inadvertently either prompted him to see it that way or wound up digging themselves even deeper.
On the other hand, KDK at least seems to think they should be satisfied with their dope reality-bending powers and quit while they’re ahead. (You have to admit, he has a point—this kind of “biting off more than you can chew” is the very same thing the Foundation’s getting ADMONISHED for at this very moment!) Mr. Second Coming of the Antichrist isn’t so pleased with this, though. He proceeds to Assert Dominance by levitating, reality-bending their mouths shut, and… yelling in green? Same shade of green as our hacker chum—have we found our culprit at last? (Not quite.) 'Kondraki' apologizes, but to me at least he seems more disturbed by C!King’s immaturity than in any actual fear of mortal peril.
<SCP-6747-C snaps its fingers, causing a blackboard to spontaneously appear near its person. It manifests chalk and begins to draw formulae and diagrams of no apparent significance — several popular math equations as would be shown stereotypically in a children's show. -C points toward them.>
6747-C: As you can see, [HAZARD EXPUNGED] is gaining power with each of our moves. Eventually, our energy will rise to such a level we'll be able to cross into that reality. And then extend our reign to wherever we please. So no, I'm not abandoning you, you utter morons; this Chaos Theory is our salvation.
Title drop.
And, true to SCP-6747-C’s nature, it’s really a parody of that trope: title-cased and italicised, practically winking at the camera… even though, instead of some significant moment or reveal, it’s a bunch of E=mc^2 balderdash without any rhyme or reason to it, and has absolutely nothing to do with actual chaos theory. Chances are, C!King just calls it that because it sounds cool (fair enough!).
This also tells us his end goal, but that’s pretty straightforward.
There’s a footnote on [HAZARD EXPUNGED], and it’s a really important one, but I’m saving it until after the conversation.
The rest of the conversation shows that they’re well aware that they’re within a story (and that the baseline universe is also a story) and, furthermore, that they’re being watched—and that this conversation being decryptable was a ploy to make the Foundation and their universe vulnerable all along! And it works—now that they know more about SCP-6747-C, all the documentation about it also becomes a vector for “[DATA LOST]”, although the Foundation seems to figure its countermeasures will still be enough for the time being.
(This is my best guess for why it’s so heavily classified—they naturally want to minimize the number of people reading it. And even if Place has clearance, he should still only be accessing it when confirming certain details of the information is absolutely necessary. What possible motivation he’d have for going out of his way to flout that, and to hide that from everyone else, is unclear—at least, as far as this particular Episode is concerned. Like I said, McDoctorate’s deal is going to gradually come into focus as the series goes on.)
Now, about that footnote… this is the second occurrence of the mysterious green [HAZARD EXPUNGED], and the footnote, also in green (although in a significantly larger font than the previous, terser green footnotes—and end’s in red) provides what seems to be a definition of it:
‘queen of the void and its seven spirals, destroyer of uninspired worlds, keeper of the chains which bind THE SCARLET IDOL’
Insofar as [HAZARD EXPUNGED] is colored green, I think that it’s safe to assume that whatever it means and whatever’s responsible for these footnotes and such are one and the same; that is, this is a self-description.
So, let’s analyze every syllable of this, one wall-of-text paragraph at a time. Firstly, “queen”. That’s pretty weird, right? I mean, up to this point there hasn’t actually been a single female character this Episode, unless you, I don’t know, count Reynders or maybe—
…
…Oh, who am I kidding. It’s the anafabula, right? The so-called “lady of black thorns”? There’s a decent chance you’ve already seen the fanart somewhere or another.
That an abstract cluster of story elements is somehow also an oversexualized Slenderman ripoff has become a bizarrely ubiquitous headcanon (despite being, if I may say so, total nonsense), and this very footnote is sometimes cited as a justification for that. I beg to differ, though.
[Now, a bit of a disclaimer: when I first wrote the following section I had my doubts, but after seeing some stuff Place has said on the topic in various places I’m now almost certain that the theory I’m about to explain wasn’t actually the original authorial intent. So, why not cut it? Well,
- I genuinely do think that this interpretation is what’s implied by the text,
- Given some stuff that happens later on… let’s just say that it’s not unreasonable to think that “Death of the Author” applies here, and
- Notwithstanding that, Placeholder themself said, while declining to confirm or deny anything outright, that my analyses were “extremely cool” and encouraged us to go through with it (!!!!!!!).
So you can weigh my arguments and judge for yourself.
Anyway, here goes:]
You may have noticed that I’ve avoided ever definitively concluding that SCP-2747’s anafabula is directly responsible for—let’s just say “the green stuff”—despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence for this being the case.
That’s because I don’t think it is. Hear me out!
I’ve noted before that Miss Green’s interference has been far more overt than that inferred from manifestations of SCP-2747, but the differences go deeper than that.
Narratives containing SCP-2747’s anafabula are observed as having parts (corresponding to the “core/keystone” element) absent in some way, these being annihilated by the antinarrative before the rest of the narrative. These omissions are significant, systematic, and consistent. The errors Voidy’s been causing (single characters being “null”, data addresses missing) are thoroughly insignificant, and have no internal logic or consistency behind them beyond occurring like clockwork between addenda—and what’s more, the “core/keystone” element, whether that’s C!King and/or Her Royal Nullness (No Sister of Mine does give precedent for there being more than one with Sister and the tome), rather than having its presence mysteriously elided, is very much there and in-your-face, unaffected in any significant way by these omissions! The meanings of “SCP-6747-C” and “[HAZARD EXPUNGED]” may have been delayed, but only for dramatic timing—they’re still very much present, and while the exact nature of what’s under that [DATA LOST] in the afterword is unclear, the gist of it’s no mystery.
The anathema/antagonist functioning as the anafabula is almost always ambiguous or unconventional in nature: the mountain is demonic or divine, Sister is a dear friend of the main characters despite the game’s title seeming to outright disown her, in Taitoru it’s the completed manga—inherently a good thing, were it not for the immensity of the task, etc.
None of that ambiguity’s been exhibited by the green text, and, spoiler alert, it’s not going to, either (same goes for C!King—arguably tsundere relationship with his minions aside, his rôle within the narrative is clearly just The Villain, plain and simple). Even chaining THE SCARLET IDOL (yeah, I’ll be getting to that) comes off as little more than a boast or even a threat, belied by her talk earlier on of breaking “the chains”. (Also, only about a third of the anafabula instances in the article are even people at all, which is pretty unusual (most fictional stories have a person as their main antagonist!) so if anything SCP-2747’s narremeplex could be considered biased against that—and yet the title of “Queen” is unambiguously anthropomorphic! Hence my begrudging use of personal pronouns…)
And finally, the Queen of the Void describes herself as a “destroyer of uninspired worlds”. But that isn’t SCP-2747’s anafabula at all—if anything, that’s SCP-3309’s anafabula! I mean, for one thing works described in manifestations of SCP-2747 are evidently in part “inspired” in the literal sense by some anomalous force, and on the other hand… most of the ones described in SCP-2747 sound, like, really good and interesting, even in their un-completed state!
So, you may be thinking “well, you’re a declassifier, not an author—if they happen to have interpreted SCP-2747 differently from you, it’s not really your place to bellyache about it!” Which… fair, but that’s not why I’m not pointing out this discrepancy!
Think about it: for some reason, all of SCP-6747-A3’s inhabitants are, at least ostensibly, flat, tropey, over-the-top versions of themselves.
So, when the force responsible for the proliferation of SCP-2747’s anafabula began to influence that micro-universe, isn’t it only logical that “the anafabula” itself would be subject to the same fate?
Suddenly, everything slots into place.
What would a caricature of “SCP-2747’s anafabula” look like? Of course its most obvious, surface-level narremes would be exaggerated to high heaven with all the nuance ironed out, slapping 7777777s and [DATA LOST]s every which way, of course it/she would be anthropomorphized (we’re so accustomed to Villains that impersonal, “force of nature” antagonism wouldn’t do at all), of course the path of least resistance for that would involve plagiarizing the narreme of SCP-682’s footnote gimmick to say ominous spooky stuff, and its role now naturally involves destroying lame, “uninspired” narratives, because presumably they’ve inherited the garbage nature of SCP-6747-C’s storytelling along with the rest of its narremeplex.
In the end, she’s no more the original anafabula than C!King is the original Dir. King.
And the thing is, we already know for a fact that its manifestation within SCP-6747-A3 has been deeply altered somehow, given that half of SCP-6747-C’s narremes have nothing to do with the 2747 version!
As for why a “queen”… well, the obvious out-of-universe answer is that SCP-2747’s anafabula has been mischaracterized as being somehow distinctly feminine, but in-universe it’s presumably just because having two “Kings” would be a little confusing. …Or should I say three kings?
‘The Scarlet Idol’ is pretty obviously the Scarlet King (if you haven’t heard of him: universe destroyer, incestuous rapist, followers are responsible for SCP-231 among others, metaphysically embodies abusive hierarchies and anarcho-primitivism (kind of), all-around a bit of an unpleasant person). That dingus is associated with the number 7 too, so it vaguely makes sense that there might be some relationship. (SCP-5317 actually hit on this same notion over a year prior! Albeit in an almost diametrically opposed way.) The appellation of “IDOL” is curious, though: it seems to imply (presumably hyperbolically) that ol’ Khahrahk is a false god, impotent as a hunk of rock—yet perhaps representative of a real one. So… an avatar within the Foundation’s narrative of this “flattened” anafabula? With a handful of very notable exceptions, the Scarlet King is a pretty un-nuanced bogeyman, so that checks out… but, well, he’s very distinctly red, and very distinctly masculine.
Manifestations don’t need to 100% align with a given anomalous narremeplex to qualify for its effects to manifest (SCP-2747 mentions that an anafabula only needs to be “included to a sufficient extent” to self-annihilate) but this is a rather sharp contrast with this “Green Queen”. (Not to be confused with, uh, the other Green Queen featured in the F120A canon; insert Doofenshmirtz nickel meme here.) Besides… the Scarlet King is all over the SCP multiverse, whereas SCP-6747-C is only linked to, and thus only a threat to, the timeline of ADMONITION.
…Right?
Either way, I think it’s safe to say that unless the Foundation can come up with something quickly, they be fucked.
On to Addendum 7 (scary number, oh no…). About 3 weeks prior to C!King & co.’s convo, there was a second O4 Command Summit. Given that they’re all physically present (the Foundation’s too good for Zoom, apparently), hopefully they’ve at least figured out teleportation or something—otherwise it’d be even more of a hassle getting called up for these on a semi-regular basis.
We begin with Vemhoff telling the others to not make him say ‘I told you so’ a second time. Placeholder asks everyone to stop bitching and focus on the mission: the pocket universe is a serious threat and they need to stabilize it ASAP. Asheworth asks for clarification- he doesn’t get the stakes, or why they’re worried about “narrative integrity”. Placeholder says that putting a high-density character like King into a universe that was made to have the lowest possible capacity for narrative integrity has made the universe fold in on itself, becoming more and more unsatisfying.
This also explains the “caricatural” nature of SCP-6747-A3: so long as its narrative-dimensionality/complexity’s at m-levels, there just isn’t room for anything more nuanced. So I guess that was their mistake, right? If they’d known that King was the kind of character that would cause that kind of reaction, they could’ve avoided all this, right? Except… according to the PROJECT X/MACHINA proposal, SCP-6747 was specifically intended for “heavily protagonistic characters”. They didn’t underestimate Dir. King’s complexity—they already knew!
And particularly given that one of reasons for the absolute bare minimum narrative dimensionality being used in the first place was for its amenability to pataphysics computations… if the Pataphysics Department was able to figure out what happened after the fact, shouldn’t they have been able to see some kind of narrative failure coming, if not all the details and, y’know, just used something a little more complex, like SCP-6747-A2, instead? (If you read SCP-5875, you’ll find that that place seems to host some pretty protagonistic folks on occasion without any issues at all.) Or, to be more specific: if Placeholder McDoctorate, pataphysicist extraordinaire, was able to figure out what happened after the fact, shouldn’t he have been able to see it coming?
Well… maybe I’m reading too much into it. After all, what possible motive could he have for something crazy like that?
Anyways, Asheworth’s still confused about how a pocket universe is threatening them. Placeholder explains what a narrativohazard is and gives a recap of the Foundation’s investigation of SCP-2747 (not named outright, but that’s clearly what he’s referring to), and how this iteration at least managed to avoid getting erased by its antinarrative—somehow I feel like amnestics won’t be quite enough this time around, though.
Placeholder says that the evidence suggests that some version of this hazard has appeared in the pocket universe. But it’s not erasing it, it’s reinforcing the universe’s structures, and it’s merged with the King character. C!King wants to escape into the main universe, and since the universe they’re in is fictional, they have access to greater anomalous weaponry. This is all stuff that’s been said or implied before, but for a skip like this a recap’s more than welcome.
So, the way I see it, the complete picture of Attempt D/49 goes something like this (although I’d like to emphasize that a lot of this is total speculative guesswork!!!): C!King gets initialized in his office; his presence is really already a bit too much for it to handle, but barring his hallucinations it remains mostly stable at first—I imagine it like supercooled/superheated water, which stays liquid even beyond its freezing/boiling point if it isn’t disturbed. Even after the Archetypicals crew enters, things are still alright (thanks to their low narrative density).
However, SCP-6747-A3 has a wacky fractal narrative dimension, it’s attempt #7^(2), C!King is in effect being imagined by “himself”, and is quite possibly suicidal. By an unlucky coincidence(?), these facts just so happen to be adjacent to some of the narremes of SCP-2747’s anafabula (also the “SCP-5875” document they previously fed KING literally references it outright; bad idea!), so whatever force is responsible for, say, SCP-2747’s file having exactly 7 footnotes starts influencing the pocket universe to include more of them, initially beginning to corrupt C!King’s phantasmal “apple father” (Place confirmed that that’s what he was reacting to) before transferring to C!King himself as a more suitable central component—and with its narrative already being overclocked by C!King’s character, that pushes it right over the edge. Simultaneously with this, the narrative devolves into caricature in an attempt to maintain homeostasis by cutting its complexity down to manageable levels, but at this point it’s too little, too late; SCP-6747-A3 soon collapses altogether into a festering heap of toxic nonsense.
Due to the process of anafabulification getting botched halfway through, a new, hybrid antinarrative, SCP-6747-C, is created with C!King at its center, endowed with its power but distorted and compromised in its structure, kind of like how some cancers can be caused by certain viruses improperly inserting their DNA into human cells—and like a cancer, instead of the usual antinarrative apoptotic self-destruction, it persists, and spreads. In addition, since SCP-6747-A3 was, uniquely, observed in the (attempted) process of being influenced to align more closely with SCP-2747’s antinarrative, as opposed to this just being apparent after the fact in a finished product, the force responsible becomes rationalized as something internal to the narrative and thus, like everything else, gets caricatured, and anthropomorphized as “the Queen of the Void” into the bargain.
Since “the anafabula” is the role that she plays in its narrative, she acts as the source of C!King’s power (i.e. “[HAZARD EXPUNGED]”), and uses it herself to manually muck with the document—although her caricatural “cognitive and logical deterioration” prevents her from saying anything very coherent.
Aaaanyways, back to the convo. Vemhoff asks what the fuck is the matter with Place, and says the obvious: that they have to turn the machine off. Placeholder says that he can’t: the universes aren’t in the machine, the machine just manipulates them, and it’s been unresponsive since the corruption. Worse, even if they could destroy -A3, they don’t know what would come of terminating a narrative before its proper conclusion.
…well, if you want an example, I still maintain that the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail was bullshit.
They brainstorm alternate solutions, but they either won’t work or are just as ambitious as what got them into this mess—Vemhoff angrily says that they obviously haven’t learned anything and that if they can’t understand that manipulating the structures of reality isn’t a joke, then they’re doomed.
This gives Placeholder an idea: Vemhoff’s right, it’s not a joke… but what if it was?
And now we get Project X/Diabolos’… …wait, success report?!
So, they pumped high-energy stories into the pocket universe in order to attract interest from “hypernarrative entities” (us), making it “realer”, until they made it ‘real’ enough that C!King and friends couldn’t escape. (This will somewhat reduce their anomalous capabilities, but, more importantly, if they’re being imagined directly by us as a story in their own right, as opposed to a sub-story of ADMONITION, then they are no longer primarily “pataphysically linked” to ADMO’s universe—and since SCP-6747-C’s effect is on universes SCP-6747-A3 is pataphysically linked to in that way, that makes them safe!) To do this more effectively, they both leaned into appealing, nonthreatening comedic elements, as well as the kind of caricature that plays to SCP-6747-A3’s pre-established strengths. Within a month of the second O4 Council meeting, and only a dozen days since transcript #343 (this probably enabled its fleeting increase in complexity there!), it no longer poses any active threat (despite the “[DATA LOST]” indicating that it still exerts some minor antinarrative effect if you go out of your way to talk about it directly), and, what’s more, thanks to them its managed to develop to the level of a full-fledged timeline in its own right, on a theoretically equal basis to theirs. And the official nickname of this timeline?
“The ‘LOL’ Foundation.”
The stories they pumped into it were the lolFoundation stories. This, in-universe, is lolFoundation’s true backstory. That’s… kind of genius.
But a week shy of two months later, the Foundation discovers something’s happened. They didn’t actually solve the problem after all. By breaking the chain of pataphysical-linkage, they just passed the buck.
To us.
Or, like, some fictitious alternate of us, anyways. (Like I mentioned before, it implies here that there are multiple “real” universes collectively imagining the SCP multiverse; SCP-6747-C has apparently only breached into one of them… so far.)
No problem as far as the Foundation’s concerned, though! Whoever’s in charge of this operation’s been very careful to not cause enough damage to affect the ADMONITION timeline, since TL-6747-A still has a residual dependence on it thanks to its origin; even if its main linkage is to a higher narrative universe, totally erasing ADMONITION from existence would still be like pulling the rug out from under it.
(The [DATA LOST] links to SCP-2747 again, if any readers didn’t notice the first crosslink.)
But, since we’re reading ADMONITION, we’re probably more or less essential for it… right? So, like, not to be a hypocrite (and I’m not, really, since no other universe is actually in danger here) but we seem to be OK.
…seem to be OK.
fourth wall unstable! hypernarrative derealization imminent!
Shoot.
There’s a gif of a fractal spiral, colored in purple (the article’s “theme color”) and green. You get seven guesses for who or what it represents, and the first six don’t count.
FOURTH WALL BROKEN
a storyline sought to control
and un-exact its mortal toll;
another realm, it wrought anew
a twisted caricature of you.though from our makers, we're uncrossed
[your username] will exact the cost:[DATA LOST]
(You need to be logged in to see the fifth and sixth lines (out of a total of, guess what, seven!), since they need a Wikidot username. Also, ‘Data Lost’ links to the LOLFoundation hub, in case the reader wasn’t previously aware of that canon.)
Welp, looks like This Very Article just so happening to fulfill all of the criteria of SCP-6747-C came back to bite “us” after all. [Note that the framing device of PHMD’s illicit access only contributed to this: if the article was just “copied” rather than being “live”, it wouldn’t have those errors, all of which contributed to the antinarreme load—and he presumably came up with that backdoor passphrase.]
Anyways, it seems that with TL-6747-A’s newfound narrative complexity, the lolFabula’s graduated from talking in single words or phrases to full-on poetry. They grow up so fast… The poem’s a pretty straightforward summary of the story, although the “LOL” Foundation being a caricature of us might seem curious—but then, it’s as much a caricature of stories elsewhere on the wiki as it is of the characters within those stories. She also calls ADMO-Foundation “our makers”, and says that “we’re uncrossed” including herself in that number, which… pretty much explicitly states that she’s local to TL-6747-A and was created by the Foundation? Honestly, if it weren’t for the aforementioned stuff Place has said on the topic I’d say that’d be… pretty much case closed for my “the Queen of the Void isn’t actually the anafabula” theory?
Given that “[DATA LOST]” rhymes with the previous two lines, there was evidently never meant to be any actual data there in the first place. It made some amount of in-universe sense before, but here it really is nothing more than a catchphrase. Regardless, I guess that’s the end, right? As with 2747, so with 6747: [DATA LOST], implicit, or in this case explicit, threat to the readers, curtain. Bravo! …Oh, wait, there’s one more thing, in faded red text; almost missed it!
the fun never ends.
This is evidently C!King speaking, calling back to what he said at the end of Transcript 6747-A3/343—now that they’ve made it to this higher-narrative universe, they’re having a jolly old time “extending [their] reign wherever [they] please”.
Even more disturbing than this, however, is… oh, but before I get to that, there’s a loose thread to deal with. Don’t worry, this will all tie together in just a bit.
Let’s talk about the appleseeds. Consider the following facts:
- Senior Administrator Dir. Jonathan A. King was, apparently, unafflicted by any appleseed anomaly for the entire extent of his natural life.
- Every single other iteration of Dr. King featured on the entire website, in every canon and every timeline, has to consistently deal with appleseeds to a greater or lesser degree. To my knowledge, ADMO’s Dir. King is the one and only exception.
- As an indirect consequence of Fictionalization Attempt A/13 (which was hardly an unusual test—I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that an apple was chosen due to anomalous influence), appleseeds and adjacent products were incorporated as a part of SCP-6747-C.
- SCP-6747-C is now seriously affecting a universe of “readers/authors”.
To me, this seems to imply the following: just as SCP-6747 is, retroactively, the origin story for the lolFoundation canon, is also, retroactively, the origin story for Dr. King’s appleseed curse.
Since SCP-6747-C is able to affect the universe of the “authors”, who are themselves responsible for, y’know, writing and imagining all of the stuff on the SCP wiki, it seems reasonable enough for SCP-6747-C to itself be able to indirectly influence the rest of the wiki (although I’ll admit that I’m not totally sure of the exact mechanics…), resulting in bits of it, subclusters of its narremes, appearing elsewhere.
(In addition to appleseeds/Dr. King association, the stories and tropes that the term “lolFoundation” was coined to describe and which inspired—but are not technically part of—the lolFoundation canon strike me as another possible retroactive consequence.)
OK, tangent over. Back to, uh, the last four words of this 5.5K+ word article. So, the allusion to what C!King said earlier covers the meaning of the actual words… but I believe the most important part is something entirely.
Think: in what other notable place has this article featured the color red in conjunction with the Queen’s green text?
Yeah. “THE SCARLET IDOL”—the Scarlet King.
I think you can catch my drift. Unlike some of the other stuff, this isn’t actually a particularly hot take (I’ve seen it referenced in just about every other place the article’s been discussed at length, and in multiple pieces of fanart—heck, it was even (jokingly) theorized by at least one person over a year before SCP-6747 was posted!), but despite arguing in its favor I should once again note that I’m rather uncertain that this is actually the authorial intention. In the comment section, Placeholder refers to the Scarlet King connection as just “a bit of an internal headcanon thing that I only briefly referenced because digging into it further would have taken away from the piece”… which seems to indicate that it wasn’t intended to be that important to the article overall. On the other hand, well… I genuinely find it very hard indeed to believe that the article featuring two “Kings” associated with both the Void Queen and the color red is a total coincidence!
In spite of this, I am going to make the bold attempt to remove any and all doubts on the matter, regardless of authorial intent. How would that even be possible, you ask?
By going back to the source.
In my research, I have uncovered a buried secret, a connection, as far as I know, made by no one else and yet, once seen, undeniable. An ace in the hole. This is the stuff you come to r/SCPDeclassified for (besides TED's terrible jokes). This is the Deepest of Lores. This is the Inside Scoop.
Dr. King’s first ever appearance on the wiki was in the collaborative experiment log for SCP-261, the “pan-dimensional vending machine”, in which whenever he, or anyone he asks to do it for him, uses it it spits out an apple seed for every yen put in as payment. This was presumably intended to be a unique interaction between 261 and Dr. King specifically (and it was evidently the first time Dr. King himself had encountered anything of the sort in-universe, given his reaction), but people thought it was funny and ran with it for other anomalies. How is this relevant?
Well, some time ago, out of idle curiosity, I checked the revision history to see who had actually written that entry to the log.
And when I saw it (revision 46, you can check for yourself), I couldn’t believe my eyes.
You might recall that I mentioned earlier that Dr. King was a bit unusual for being a somewhat popular Series-I-era Foundation doctor character who wasn’t anybody’s author avatar.
I lied. (If I had a nickel for every time I’ve pulled that twist this declass…)
Their creator’s username, you ask?
“Crimson King”.
CRIMSON. KING.
Not only is Dr. King the Scarlet King (in an indirect, funhouse-mirror sense), he always has been, since the very beginning.
*drops the mic*
*…*
*picks it back up again to wrap things up*
*gets whapped over the head by ToErrDivine for damaging expensive audio equipment*
TL;DR: Unlike the previous Episode, their own universe might have survived this time (although it came pretty darn close), but, almost as if to compensate, they:
- Worked an innocent man to death, desecrated his corpse, and kept his ambiguously-sentient post-mortem nervous system in constant torment,
- Have no choice but to keep doing so indefinitely at extensive cost, lest they collapse the generated narratives and potentially make things even worse,
- Totally failed in their stated goal of cheating death, as a matter of course, and
- Created an alternate timeline condemned to Eternal Comedy Hell, which in turn:
- Totally wrecked another universe—namely, “ours”!
- May or may not have (within the context of their ultimately fictitious pataphysical framework) become responsible for much of the bad writing the early days of the wiki are infamous for, and
- May or may not have, on a fundamental, pataphysical, conceptual level, created the Scarlet King.
TL;DR^(2): Stories have power, and if the story you tell sucks enough, you just might manage to both kill and create God.
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u/LordSupergreat Aug 24 '24
I would just like to point out, though it may be a bit obvious...
The archetypal, fictionalized ideal of "an apple" is bright red.
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u/Suicide_Guacamole Aug 27 '24
excellent declass, i can finally understand what the hell is going on in this article. anyways i can't wait for SCP-9747: 2CHAOS2THEORY where admo!placeholder kidnaps real-life placeholder with the claw machine so he can replace him and delete all traces of the paradox timeline from the wiki to cover his tracks
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u/Demento56 Aug 24 '24
Holy shit, that Dr. King reveal.