Cwazzy's Page 2: The Box

Link to article: Cwazzy's Page 2: The Box.
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[[module Rate]]
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------

You grab the door to your office and let out a long yawn. That meeting dragged on far longer than it needed to. "A human person can only listen to ramblings on expenditures for so long," you think to yourself. Your eyes begin to droop and your lab coat gets a little heavier on your shoulders. "Finally I can just screw around on the computer for a few hours, maybe get a nap." You push the door open.

You try to take a step into the dark office when your foot hits something. You look down and find a small cardboard box at your feet. You wonder briefly how you hadn't noticed it before, but chalk it up to poor perception due to your tiredness. You bend down and poke at the flaps in its top; a fair precaution given your line of work. You lift it up in your arms and inspect the sides, searching for any sort of marking. You find none. You look to your left and to your right, looking for its owner and again find none. You come to the conclusion that it must have been left for you, and take it inside. 

------

You set the box down on your desk and stare at it, perplexed. You weren't expecting any sort of delivery, nor do you know of someone who might've left it for you. You consider the possibility that it's some sort of prank, like a glitterbomb package. You suppose there's only one way to find out. You pull out a drawer in your desk and fumble around in it, shoving various office supplies back and forth. You finally pull out a pair of scissors that hadn't seen use in at least a month. You cut the packaging tape and the flaps come loose. You set the scissors down on your desk and open the flaps, peering inside.

There's a stack of manila folders inside the box, and a single printed note on clean white printer paper. You pull it out and read it briefly...

------

> Hey Boss,
> 
> I quit.
> 
> -Cwazzy

------

You are a level 3 researcher, and are most definitely not anyone's boss. You're more puzzled than before now; all of the "bosses" offices are in a different part of the bureaucratic wing. Your office isn't even one of prominence. If they had left it on the delivery table up front or at one of the offices by the entrance to the wing, that would be excusable, but instead it was somehow mistakenly left by the office in the back, by the bathrooms. Weird. You look back into the box and pull out a stack of folders. You inspect the folders themselves closely and skim their contents quickly. 

------

[[tabview]]
[[tab Previous Work]]

The first folder, labelled "Previous Work," seems to be consist of various SCP articles, each with a somewhat campy "title" scrawled at the top. There's a note on the back of each, apparently author commentary. There's not much discernible relation between them, besides having apparently been created by the owner of the box, this "Cwazzy" person, whoever that is. How the hell do you even pronounce that anyway? Is it "qu-ay-zee" or "qu-ah-zee?" 

**__Regular Files__**

**[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-5696 SCP-5696 - "One Last Ace."]** - This appears to detail a firearm that, when reloaded in an oddly specific manner, transports the user to a pocket dimension where they're subjected to a game of cards. It seems as though the setting of the pocket dimension is somewhere in the prohibition era, as if it ripped a moment out of time, and the other persons within it seem almost like real people. 

[[collapsible show="Note on the back" hide="Spoiler warning"]]

[[div style="color: blue"]]

My first successful venture into the SCP universe. The prohibition-era tone is something I've always kind of wanted to experiment with in my writing, I love the vibe that extends from it and mob dramas in general, so I thought it would make for a good story that would get me out of greenlight hell. It worked.

It follows the story of Mark Kennedy post-mortem. In late June 1931, while a member of the Chicago Police Department, he's tasked with infiltrating a mob hangout with the intention to arrest its owner for violating the 18th amendment (along with selling drugs on the side). This go horribly awry and a short exchange of gunfire between Mark and the owner ensues, resulting in Mark's death. Mark's soul, discontent with the outcome, takes over his unusually one-of-a-kind firearm [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/chicago-spirit (wink wink)] in an effort to prove that it could have been done. 

This was on the front page from 3/1/2021 - 3/8/2021 as [[user Zoobeeny]]'s Reviewer's Spotlight article.

This item makes a cameo in [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6032 SCP-6032 - "Winters is Coming"] by [[user Marcelles_Raynes]].

This item appears in [https://store.steampowered.com/app/1939100/Go_Home_Annie_An_SCP_Game/ "Go Home Annie: An SCP Game"] by Misfit Village. (Unreleased, Demo Available).

[[/div]]

[[/collapsible]]

**[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6606 SCP-6606 - "Spectrum Says"]** - Where the previous article was a couple pages, this is a rather thick stack of documents. You look over the first couple pages and the formatting is all wrong. Somebody has filled in the first page with a description of an individual rather than a SCP, and the addendums are all document formats you don't recognize, written by some organization called "Spectrum." They read as if the individual has been enslaved, almost, and forced to fill out all this paperwork, even if he doesn't know what he's doing. Weird, even for this place.

[[collapsible show="Note on the back" hide="Spoiler warning"]]

[[div style="color: blue"]]

The amount of applications you had to fill out, forms and forums you had to visit, and the overall nature of becoming a new member of the site culminated in a level of frustration that led me to create this, a world in which paperwork engulfs everything. It's also my method of spiting the usual formatting, almost by making it a mess and mocking it. Although this was born of anger and frustration, I had a lot of fun designing the documents within. It's something I'd really, really like to revisit some day. I just don't know how right now.

A lot of people immediately interpret "Spectrum" as being a spaceship, and that's fair. I left it open to interpretation and that's the most sensible conclusion, but it's not the way I picture it. I see it more as an amorphous, sentient purple space blob that feeds on recorded information. After its actions led to the extinction of the sentient life on Kepler-22b, it comes to earth to continue, first studying the way we collect information and then replicating it to an extreme, using the nanomachines to forcefully carry it out. 

The main character, Mike, is labelled as an "escapee" because he's recently escaped from his old "job" in frustration and has gone into hiding. Mike discovers the abandoned remnants of Site-19 and decides to hide there, but quickly discovers that Site-19 is the worst place to go when hiding from paperwork. Not that he could have known that, of course. He's never worked for The Foundation.

This one is my favorite.

[[/div]]

[[/collapsible]]

**[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-7043 SCP-7043 - "Murphy Law in... Skip 7043 - THE MONTAUK FALCON!"]** - This one's big. There's what feels like a hundred pages worth of documents here. You flip to a page somewhere in the middle. Its formatting is unusual - it reads like a film script, but with far more verbal flourishes. The main character of the "film" is this "Murphy Law" guy. He's a detective, you think. The entire thing has this noire tonality to it. Funny, you could swear [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/murphy-law-hub you'd heard of him before.] 

[[collapsible show="Note on the back" hide="Spoiler warning"]]

[[div style="color: blue"]]

I still feel as though I've committed a cardinal sin for daring to even shake the earth above Murphy Law's grave. I wanted more Murphy Law, though. It always felt like his story never came to a clean conclusion, like he was destined for more than he was given. I never did discover how [[user The Great Hippo]] felt about this piece or even the concept of the continuation of Murphy Law, although I have asked them to read it. (That is not to say that they dislike it, just that I have not heard back from them since asking). 

I have a number of regrets about this piece. Were it not written on a timer (it was an entry for 7kon), I think I could've done or developed a number of things far better. I could've fleshed out the villain's character better, I could've made the first half or so more interesting. I could've even shaved it down some to make it sound more like a film script. It may not have been a contest winner, but it might've performed even better. One day I think I'd like to change it to do so but I also fear that I'd be shaking it up far too much and might ruin it in the process. In some ways, I feel as though I've bastardized Murphy Law. 

This is still, however, my best-performing article (at time of writing) with +106. It's still a good piece, I think. I put my heart into a lot of it, it took me a great deal of time to make. I spent most of my free time at work that month putting it together on my phone and did some writing at home as well. It's also my first time entering a contest, and by my estimation, 29th place isn't bad when it's out of 119 entries. It beat out some people that have been writing here far longer than I have. I'm sure the Murphy Law name carried it some distance, maybe that was the only reason it got as many reads as it did, but still. People could have downvoted it to hell. I feared that a lot. But it didn't happen. People liked it. 

You can find readings of this article here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scg2ORfoTUA read by The Exploring Series] (Part One)
[https://youtu.be/HWMdzUzKgQQ read by The Exploring Series] (Part Two)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ybyJAujxAo&t=17150s read by Site-42] (AKA [[user TheeSherm]] and guest-starring [[user Billith]]. They read many 7kon entries in this series, this one starts at 2:43:00).

[[/div]]

[[/collapsible]]

**[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6605 SCP-6605 - "Asteroidea"]** - This one is about... a severed foot? A severed foot that is evidently still alive. It's very short. You could probably read the entire thing right now in five or six minutes or so. The length is in such contrast to the previous file that you feel somewhat let down, and yet, a sense of intrigue still cultivates in your mind. Why is this foot still alive, and what's the deal with the D-Class who lost it?

[[collapsible show="Note on the back" hide="Spoiler warning"]]

[[div style="color: blue"]]

This really is short, it's less than 450 words. It wasn't just coldposted, it was written directly in the editor on the main page and underwent few revisions, if any. I read where someone proposed this as a writing challenge once but I can't for the life of me remember who proposed it. Mark me down for it, though, because this one turned out right. I wrote it in under an hour after I had the idea only an hour prior, all on a Sunday morning.

You can find readings of this article here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFXNaXdbCmw Read by Site-42] (AKA [[user TheeSherm]]).

[[/div]]

[[/collapsible]]

**[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-7145 SCP-7145 - "Signs Point to Yes"]** - This is about one of those novelty 8-ball things that you shake and it gives you an answer to a yes or no question. The difference is that this one makes the answer come true, although the outcome seems to always be negative. Not to mention poor Dr. Patra...

[[collapsible show="Note on the back" hide="Spoiler warning"]]

[[div style="color: blue"]]

This was my entry for Coldpostcon 2023! Obviously, I didn’t come close to getting first, but I hadn’t written anything, finished it and uploaded it in a long time so it was a fun experiment. I think it also shows that my writing on this site has reached a point where I can successfully coldpost with some consistency. Not that I’ll be doing that going forward, but it’s nice to know I’m good enough to pull that off even if the ratings aren’t the greatest. Onward and upward!

[[/div]]

[[/collapsible]]

These next few seem to be vaguely related, actually. They both detail a group known as the "M.O.M." Mom. Kind of a funny acronym. You set these in a separate stack, and mentally you label them as 

**__M.O.M. Files__**

**[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6610 SCP-6610 - "Dial-Up Drama"]** - This one seems to detail a fax machine recovered after a raid. An IT guy inspects it and finds it can sort of command people to do things based on what it prints, but the aforementioned group seems to be using it as part of an outdated communication method. Nothing about that is terribly unusual, but the object class of "Uncontained" has you mildly intrigued. 

[[collapsible show="Note on the back" hide="Spoiler warning"]]

[[div style="color: blue"]]

Magic with a K and the nature of thaumaturgy are aspects that, on several occasions, people have just assumed I knew and presented me with articles to crit that heavily involved them as subjects, and I'm always completely lost. I have no interest in the nitty-gritty of magic nor with the realm of high fantasy. I think we often forget that magic can exist without these qualities, that not everything needs an explanation and layers of guides. In an effort to spite this and reinvent the way we look at magical beings, I've developed a group known as the M.O.M. 

This article serves something of a dual purpose. It introduces the M.O.M. as a concept, and it ties in the tale series I've begun ("Shades and Polo," to be exact). The tie-in is fairly unimportant as the central focus is on M.O.M., a group of street-performer-like magicians. They use SCP-6610 and other fax machines like it to communicate over long distances, even as far as extra-dimensional distances. The Foundation recovered one of these in a raid that the M.O.M. had planned all along.

You can find readings of this article here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC3P2VIlDe4 Read by ReadOut]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI_HRM4ckYA&t=50s Read by Triple B Show (sound warning)]

[[/div]]

[[/collapsible]]

**[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6647 SCP-6647 - "Forget-Me-Too"]** - This appears to detail a bottle of perfume that makes its user imperceptible and forgotten about for ten minutes. It doesn't seem to have been tested very much, but it was used in a break-in gone awry, followed by an apparent break-out. How you didn't hear about this is alarming - it looks fairly action-packed, not that a break-out isn't concerning in its own right. 

[[collapsible show="Note on the back" hide="Spoiler warning"]]

[[div style="color: blue"]]

This article was meant to be one of a series of articles that both built on the M.O.M. and on the Shades and Polo canon. However, I could never work out a good working third article (the second is currently in crit purgatory). This better introduces the M.O.M.'s capabilities and ranking system, establishing a somewhat clearer hierarchy to the group without giving too much away. It also helps develop another idea behind the members of the M.O.M.: every major magician has a unique gimmick that coincides with their name. 

[[/div]]

[[/collapsible]]

**[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6628 SCP-6628 - "Some Time Apart"]** - Another M.O.M. article. These people might just be a problem. It starts as a simple man trapped in a time anomaly, but as the interviews go on, the poor researchers get more distressed by how little they know of the origin. The problem is those magicians, always there, covering their own tracks, taking whatever they damn well please through a series of parlor tricks... although, this one, the ending of it... this sounds more like a massacre.

[[collapsible show="Note on the back" hide="Spoiler warning"]]

[[div style="color: blue"]]

This is the second article of that series of three I mentioned previously. I pulled it out of crit hell and just slapped it up after making a couple touch-ups. It's at +6 at time of writing, and it's been a few days, so I guess it's not doing so hot. It's definitely not my best work, I can't help but feel like there's some kind of spice it's missing but I can't pin down what it is. I hope one day that I'll figure that out.

[[/div]]

[[/collapsible]]

You put the documents back inside and set the folder down on your desk, then look back into the box.

[[/tab]]
[[tab Involved Incidents]]

You pull out a folder labelled "Involved Incidents." The documents in this folder contain information of a far less organized nature. Rather, they seem to be a loose collection of stories and tales, workplace whispers, and myths and legends. You find fewer documents in here, only three...

**[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/blue-roses "Blue Roses."]** - A personal recounting of a single night during the prohibition era. The apparent protagonist seems to be a cop sent by his superiors to kill a man named Jake Rose in a bar, which is, ironically, named “The Dying Roses.” Isn’t this the same place in [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-5696 SCP-5696?] It seems almost like a prequel of sorts, dressed up in even more trappings of noir. 

[[collapsible show="Note on the back" hide="Spoiler warning"]]

[[div style="color: blue"]]

Ever since I made SCP-5696, I dreamed of writing a prequel to it. The problem is that tales just don’t sell well in today’s day and age, so at first I was somewhat discouraged from tale-making. After I finally felt settled in around here, it became a problem of trying to figure out how to nail down the tone in a way that felt right. Writing it straight-forward felt wrong when I tried it, so I left it on the back burner for a while. Then one day the three-paragraph structure and “There’s a gun in my pocket” just sort of hit me. So here we are. I’m really proud of the way this came out. 

[[/div]]

[[/collapsible]]

The other two documents in this folder have a very clear through line, as if part of a continuous, ongoing series. The same two people seem to be involved in each, both of them being referred to only as

__**Shades and Polo**__

**[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/shades-and-polo-act-one-the-show-is-about-to-begin "Act 1: The Show is About to Begin"]** - This seems to be the start, when the two are first introduced both to the reader and to each other. There's some sort of major MTF raid going on, involving numerous MTF Beta squads, and they've been detained for questioning. It appears as if they're trying to escape their detainment.

[[collapsible show="Note on the back" hide="Spoiler warning"]]

[[div style="color: blue"]]

I don't really know how Shades and Polo got started. At first it was this excuse to write a buddy-cop-esque story in which these two dudes escape from some place harboring a bunch of time loop anomalies (which itself was an excuse to recreate SCP-5696 in different ways), then the facility became a film studio and all the time loops were film sets, then M.O.M. got involved. That isn't to say that it's not coherent, it very much is, I just don't know why I decided to do it all here, through these two knuckleheads. 

Polo is this kind of upbeat, top-heavy dude with a bad habit of looking for the brighter side of things and being somewhat innocent in many ways. Shades is meant to be the more stoic, melancholic loneliness type, who has trouble seeing that bright side. Polo wears a bright banana yellow polo and Shades wears dark black aviator shades. They're kind of like two parts of myself, my being split in half across two characters. 

[[/div]]

[[/collapsible]]

**[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/shadesandpolo2 "Act 2: Making Ghosts"]** - Not only have they escaped, but they've stumbled into some sort of temporal anomaly. It's a moment in time, repeating itself, but filling in some of the key persons with people from outside the anomaly. To escape, they have to complete the loop by carrying out a robbery - and a murder. 

[[collapsible show="Note on the back" hide="Spoiler warning"]]

[[div style="color: blue"]]

This one hasn't performed as well as the first. It takes us to a new setting for a chapter, the late 70's. Disco is on the edge of death, but it ain't quite there yet. I really wanted a solid atmospheric feel to this, like these two really had been ejected from 2022 into the 1970's. I feel as though I did achieve that somewhat but I could've gone in stronger. Originally I wanted a police chase but realized I just didn't know how to make it work with the rest of the story.

I think a lot of the reason I haven't continued the series is because of the response to this one, or moreso the lack thereof. I want to keep going with it some day. I love the two to bits, I'm just concerned I'll be making writing with no one to read. 

[[/div]]

[[/collapsible]]

You put the documents back inside and set the folder down on your desk, then look back into the box.

[[/tab]]
[[tab Miscellaneous]]

This folder seems to be empty. That's unfortunate, you were sort of curious to see what kind of things might be in a Miscellaneous folder, given the contents of the last two folders. Oh well.

You set the folder down on your desk and look back inside the box, but find it disappointingly empty now. 

[[/tab]]
[[/tabview]]
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[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]
Cwazzy's Page 2: The Box

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