DAY ELEVEN, SCP 967:
The Infinite Scrapyard
(READ IT HERE!)
I wanted to avoid SCP's I reviewed before, back during my first-ever "Halloween II" feature in 2012, but I only gave those SCP's relatively short, simple blurbs, and five years later, my tastes can adapt and change quite a bit. I like to think people who read my site will have already explored a fair bit of my past writing here, but whether you have or not, I doubt any of you mind me revisiting things I wrote about that long ago.
Infinite Scrapyard was one of my favorites then, and reading it again for the first time since, it's still one of my favorite concepts of the original 1000 entries; a junkyard that looks normal from the outside, but seems to go on forever and ever once you actually enter and explore it, containing scraps of technology that don't even exist in our timeline and all manner of animal or human-like entities made entirely of junk metal.
The star attraction of this SCP is the brief list of "tribes" some of these entities have organized into, ranging from fairly friendly to extremely hostile, and finally the baffling "Ballet Academy," all of whom have moose skulls for heads, speakers on their chests, and never do anything but perform a silent, 28 minute dance around anyone they meet. The stuffy and clinical foundation seems to want to categorize this tribe as nonsapient, but the other tribes say that the Ballet Academy is both intelligent and "terrifying," which I think is one of the most interesting hooks this one offers.
...But as quickly as we're introduced to these lovable trash people, the SCP is over. Back in the day, it actually felt like one of the meatier ones by my standards, but by now, we have many many SCP's the length of small novels, and this feels like one positively screaming to have included an exploration log, interviews and a more extensive catalog of its inhabitants. What we do get feels like a teaser to a world that could easily sustain its own fiction series, and the mind races with what else could be lurking in its confines. It might have earned a higher rating if my standards had remained the same, but today, SCP-967 feels frustratingly incomplete.
Infinite Scrapyard was one of my favorites then, and reading it again for the first time since, it's still one of my favorite concepts of the original 1000 entries; a junkyard that looks normal from the outside, but seems to go on forever and ever once you actually enter and explore it, containing scraps of technology that don't even exist in our timeline and all manner of animal or human-like entities made entirely of junk metal.
The star attraction of this SCP is the brief list of "tribes" some of these entities have organized into, ranging from fairly friendly to extremely hostile, and finally the baffling "Ballet Academy," all of whom have moose skulls for heads, speakers on their chests, and never do anything but perform a silent, 28 minute dance around anyone they meet. The stuffy and clinical foundation seems to want to categorize this tribe as nonsapient, but the other tribes say that the Ballet Academy is both intelligent and "terrifying," which I think is one of the most interesting hooks this one offers.
...But as quickly as we're introduced to these lovable trash people, the SCP is over. Back in the day, it actually felt like one of the meatier ones by my standards, but by now, we have many many SCP's the length of small novels, and this feels like one positively screaming to have included an exploration log, interviews and a more extensive catalog of its inhabitants. What we do get feels like a teaser to a world that could easily sustain its own fiction series, and the mind races with what else could be lurking in its confines. It might have earned a higher rating if my standards had remained the same, but today, SCP-967 feels frustratingly incomplete.
