726: Reconstructive Maggots

I really wasn't sure what to do for our very last day, but yesterday's maggot-infested meat-hole-man leads kind of nicely into what I settled on, since my own first SCP was also a meaty and maggoty one, written long enough ago - In 2011! - that I'd have probably done it a little differently by now.

I naturally had the urge to cram multiple things I liked into my first-ever SCP, and the results are a little mixed. The SCP consists of maggots that, instead of breaking down and eating corpse materials, are somehow able to "re-compose" dead flesh, acting backwards to turn a dead body or even a small piece of flesh back into the animal it came from. A forensic entomologist's dream! ...Or maybe not, I guess, since it would have put them all out of a job rather quickly.

That wasn't really alarming enough for me, though, so I figured, what if everything brought "back to life" by these maggots believes it's a fly? A big, confused fly that tries to eat garbage (and worse) by spitting on it and all the usual fly things and eventually mates with others of its "own kind" only to produce more SCP-726. Yes, this means afflicted humans just squat down on roadkill and spurt a bunch of tiny fly eggs all over it, in case you wanted confirmation of that.

I think if this were someone else's SCP, I'd be saying at this point that it could have and possibly should have ended there, but I always got a kick out of SCP's with increasingly weird experimentation logs, so I latched one onto mine and delved into all sorts of hijinks as the maggots are applied to fast food items and even the same, repeated samples, making more "mistakes" each time. I feel like a lot of that comes out a little over the top, but I know the mindless meat-slug they produce in the end was a big hit with early commenters and upvoters, so I guess I'm ultimately glad I put in all this extra goofiness.

It wasn't actually on my mind at the time that this was a significant threat to almost all terrestrial animal life if it spread unchecked, but commenters were quick to point it out and are at least somewhat right. The effect could still only reach corpses normally attractive to blowflies and the predators or scavengers who might ingest their tissues, so most aquatic organisms, herbivorous insects and a lot of remote, specialized species would be safe, as would plenty of humans as we caught on to the source of the problem, though a great deal of damage would certainly be done to the world as we know it by then.

On a final note about this one, the town of its discovery was one I lived in for about one month of my life and still a very eerie little place in my memory, cut off on almost all sides from the rest of civilization by at least a hundred miles of mountain, and you may note that it's the same state Mothman calls home.

1904: Play Tubes (disturbing image warning)

My second SCP, written almost one year after 726, resolves some of its problems with what I think is a simpler, more focused concept, although in retrospect I feel as if it's more "mean spirited" than the maggots. Severe congenital mutations can be pretty fascinating and we had a grand old time at the Mutter Museum not too long ago, but I'm not sure the current me would have written a horror piece using an actual photograph of deformed fetuses.

Mutant babies weren't even the beginning nugget of this one, either. I just wanted to do something gross and creepy with those colorful, plastic playground tubes still common to certain fast food restaurants. My only personal experience with these things was my single childhood visit to Chuck E. Cheese's, and all I really remember from that experience was having to crawl through some other child's sticky, congealed puddle of urine to get back out again and couldn't physically do so without sticking my hands into it. Sorry if you didn't want that thought in your head, but I'm the one who still has to go through life with those same hands on the ends of my arms.

So I guess the fact that these things are designed for small children was what spurred the idea to write one as a habitrail for mutant babies, but that left the question of how the mutant babies got there, so I thought...what if this horrible thing is somehow giving birth? Of course babies made by one of these sticky piss mazes are going to come out all wrong. So wrong that they even just keep growing and growing if they're kept alive. Growing, but not aging. It just seemed like a natural addition from there that any human actually entering the tubes would come out similarly altered, which is ALMOST, but obviously not quite, as wretched as touching cold bladder-ade on your way out.

The final "twist," I guess, comes when the Foundation attempts to disassemble the tubes and store them away. Suddenly, the town surrounding its original location experiences a wave of abnormal births in an ever-expanding radius, and it only stops again when the tubes are put back in place. This is another detail kind of "darker and meaner" than the kind of uplifting horror-comedy I personally prefer to write now, but what I was trying to imply here was that the tubes are kind of a "stopper" or "filter" for some other force, something indescribably foreign to the logic of our world. Whether it's some sort of cosmic pollution causing extranormal developmental errors or some sort of entity attempting and failing to commandeer earthly flesh-vessels, I really wouldn't know, I think any interpretation is as good as any other.

I'd also like to say that the "gagging and choking" noises emitted by the play tubes are absolutely not, as some people have suggested, supposed to be sex noises. I honestly just thought that would be spooky.

I said I didn't think I was in any place to "rate" my own work, but I think if these were somebody else's SCP's I'd probably rate them a "fairly okay" three to a "needs just a little more work" three and a half.

Reviewing SCP's for kind of a month straight (with many, many missed updates, sorry) proved to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. Coming up with detailed things to say about them is one of those difficulties. Another is simply deciding what to choose out of over 3,000 possibilities. For now, I'd like to put up one more bonus page collecting a bunch of quick mini-reviews, and maybe consider doing this all over again for the next Halloween II, but until then, I'm probably all SCP'ed out!

If you'd like another way to enjoy some quality skippies, I highly, highly recommend the horror-comedy animated youtube series, "CONFINEMENT," which updates as slow as a mostly one-person series can be expected, but does an excellent job of capturing the dry humor and darkness I love about the Foundation. At the very least, treat yourself to this absolutely wicked promotional short: