Author Post
I had a bunch of fun writing this and I hope you enjoy reading it.
RPC-403 / Discussion
Forum
» Hidden / Per page discussions
» RPC-403
This is the discussion related to the wiki page RPC-403.
You spelled "deceased" awfully wrong. Other than that, I don't see any grammatical errors. I see your reason to make a new item type for something as mysterious and volatile as 403, but I don't see why not just assign it as Beta or a tentative Alpha, which is more familiar.
However, it's a nice short story. The athmosphere of a forgotten project with unstable logic that may or may not be more dangerous than it looks is well done here. 4 stars since the dialogue is good too.
This is one of my favorite articles I've read from this author, but goddamn is there still a lot to go through. Of course, it's not perfect. I first read this article about a year back when Almarduk and
Superspambot recommended Chrome's best/"better" articles to me, and they're pretty vocal about how little they care for his writing.
False explosive pinecones that can also teleport you. It's a cool idea at first, especially the development of cheap botanical weapons, but after reading, it seems more like a vessel for the article to do its thing than an interesting object on its own. The research format doesn't do much for the actual article, but it adds some visual flair and variety. It's just a little bonus, I suppose.
Who knew classified thaumaturgic documents were so much like programming tutorials? To be frank, it's kind of boring. Maybe it's just because I spend every day programming, but it's a lame way to frame magic rituals. Where's the mysticality? Simply put, bringing the anomalous into mundanity makes it mundane. Plus, the "voice" of the GEAR document is bland and hardly, if at all, distinguishable from how the author would write an Authority document. It seems like lazy authors have two modes for recovered documents: "clinical just like the Authority" or "the writer was absolutely insane". Just because you inverted the colors of its text doesn't make it a different character. Sneak in some workplace culture! At the very least, I expect to see names. No, GEAR is just a cardboard prop.
The experiment log is where things get adventurous. I like the setup, taking a strange established property and cranking up the unknown, and it twists the article's straightforward progression. The world on the other end feels strangely close to that of RPC-669, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt and assume it's only coincidence. This article's disadvantage is, once again, that all the characters have the same flat personality and voice.
The exploration of the forest itself, though, I enjoy. It tries a little too hard to sell how creepy it is ("I don't mean that it was a black sky, I mean that there was no sky. So if you would look up you would see nothing"), but I earnestly enjoy the mental images it creates, or the lack thereof. It's a special kind of intrigue where it doesn't even use clues; it can point to a clear nothing and get me interested. I assume this is some sort of anomalous glitch space? In the face of many overzealous attempts at intrigue, the simple quality of the "No, but I don't remember what happened between me turning the handle and appearing here" exchange at the end is remarkable.
This article's got issues, but I think it's good fun. 4/5
(Dr. Scriber? Officer N. Krum? Oh dear.)
/forum/t-13399453/rpc-403#post-