Thanks to Kingwillpower, Dr XOUBLE D and Kloth for the forum crit, and Viz, Kaiser, Alma, Blairin and Fifth for the Discord commentary and good ideas.
I'd been vaguely pondering this as a 001 concept for months and months, and with the contest coming now seemed like a good time to post it!
Now, as for the images, all are from Wikimedia…
Kabbala Denudata Sefirot
Why don't you use the return to top of the screen when you have like six long tabs, this is pain
The article was pretty OK for the first few tabs, the GD messages were cool too, but the fucking ending was something else. I wasn't a fan of this idea when it was first discussed in the server, but you did a pretty good job at it.
+1 to nuking the entire world on our own terms.
I absolutely love the ending that undercuts everything. Please do not change it. It undercuts the entire anticipation and expectation behind the arbitrary qualifications of a 001 and allows the reader breathing room to reflect.
Really don't know how to feel about this one in all honesty. The idea of destroying the world on our own terms is very good and everything before the ending I adored. But the actual ending itself is just far too goofy for me to take seriously and I feel it somewhat goes against everything else that was happening. The end of the world just being a live action version of The Ultimate Showdown (Elvis during the battle of Armageddon, are you kitten me? Was 2pac there too?) is something that does not sit right with me. No-vote
Fair enough! This whole thing started, actually, with the single image in the ending of a fleet of thousands of B-29s appearing over a Pacific island and sort of grew from there. I know the ending is a lot but I think it's the part of this article I'm the most proud of, so it's staying come what may.
My only regret is that I couldn't include more culture heroes, I still have so many I can use.
The compositional prowess is peerless. I really liked the foreshadowing and subtlety of pulling up the table of contents of this massive collection of information, almost like a second containment protocols in terms of using it as a tone-setting tool. The character prose is so detailed and good that I had to stop and remind myself that this was fiction. I think the use of SCHL is really clever, because you find a justifiable and valid way to turn the containment fiction format into traditional storytelling voice via him. I appreciate the vocab. Tokenizing and catastrophizing the Sleeping King myth across cultures is enlightening and creative as hell.
Other points of impact imo are: using 001 as the thematic bridge between the Auctoritas & Authority; modernizing the atavistic ritual sacrifice into scientific paradigm (a debt of bioelectric potential energy); oh nice, there’s John Frum.
The historical studiousness that went into this also stands out, if a little over-delivered in terms of cameos in the last tab imo.
That containment document is one of the best-written and most conceptually evolved entries I’ve ever read. This article is a great champion of RPC-specific lore, as an 001 should be.
Well shit, lepers, thanks. That's about the nicest thing anyone's said about my writing. I did do a fuckton of research for this one, and dammit if I'm not gonna show my work to the point of obnoxiousness, hahahah!
V good article :)
The orange text hurts my eyes make it less bright
Overall this is a really awesome article and I'd be perfectly happy with it being an RPC-001. That said, I still have a lot of nitpicks and I have done a line-by-line as I promised. There's a lot of little wrinkles I think make the experience a bit bumpy and hopefully my crit irons them out.
As for the dream journal, I agree that it is pretty hamfisted as an ending, but it does work. I think this could be fixed if you changed it from "this single personnel had a dream about it who also just happens to be the senior researcher for some reason" to "everyone who spends a lot of time around the anomaly ends up experiencing bits and pieces of the end times in their dreams, and here is an account of the most detailed description any researcher has been able to provide."
Also I think Proto's criticisms are pretty weird. Only a single paragraph was goofy and it was short enough that it doesn't hurt the story at all.
Finally, I'm confused about the actual Sleeping Kings Protocol. At first I thought it was supposed to be something that would save the world from an apocalypse, because why else would the Authority want to activate something as soon as the world is about to end? But as the article goes on, I started to get confused about it. Why would the Authority want to unleash the apocalypse when something is already causing the end of the world?
| THIS TERMINAL IS SET TO CLEARANCE LEVEL 5. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS IS PUNISHABLE
| BY MEMORY ALTERATION.
Either make this a single line, or add another linebreak after "Level 5." because the first part is too long to fit without wrapping which makes it confusing to read. Feels like there's a random, awkward pause before "By memory alteration".
| 3.2. Contextual Documents: Auctoritas diplomatic involvement with the
| court of Emperor Ackbar the Great
Same deal here. Awkward pause after "with the". I would just make this all a single line.
| Addendum: For your own sake, read this first, Director.
This doesn't land very well because it's just kind of confusing. It's not a link so when I read it, I thought it was talking about the OAS-Admin log. I think this would work better if you merged the two tabs. Just take everything from "read this first, Director" and put it in a collapsible at the end of the Main Menu tab with the "read this first" text just before it, or as the collapsible text itself.
In truth, the history of RPC-001 dates back nearly to the founding of our institution, and the full file, which can be accessed through the Level 5 OAS database under the directory listing AUTHORITY GLOBAL PROTOCOLS/SLEEPING KING/RPC-001, is long, esoteric, and in many places tortuously dull.
This is kind of a jumble of commas so I recommend switching in some parentheses here:
In truth, the history of RPC-001 dates back nearly to the founding of our institution, and the full file (which can be accessed through the Level 5 OAS database under the directory listing AUTHORITY GLOBAL PROTOCOLS/SLEEPING KING/RPC-001) is long, esoteric, and in many places tortuously dull.
de Montserrat had spent many years as a Jesuit ambassador
Shouldn't "de" be capitalized? It's the start of a sentence.
It would seem that, a few months ago at the temple of Raghunathji, the source of the sacred river Ganga, certain signs were seen by priests that would indicate the ending of what the Hindus call the Kalijuga, in their beliefs the coming of the End of Days.
This is also a bit confusing so I would add "which is" before "the source of the sacred river" for clarity.
Ackbar's advisors, both Muslim and heathen, feared that might this be some false ending of days, or some demonic portent to the will of Satan himself.
"That might this be" is a little confusing because it sounds like it's setting up the equivalent of "if x is true, then y", but actually it sets up "what may be true is x". I would change "might this" to "this might" to clear it up. Sorry if I didn't explain my thoughts well on this, it's a bit convoluted.
CXIII takes the form of whichsoever figure of faith or legend that the beholder believes, once believes, or has been taught will someday return to right wrongs or bring about paradise on earth.
Is "once believes" supposed to be "once believed"?
He’s blue, man!
This got a good laugh out of me.
it’s your problem now, not ours.
This feels a little too casual. Maybe you could change it to something like "it's your problem now, not ours to persist."
The subsequent 150-odd years of squabbling over the fate of what was eventually designated RPC-001
Didn't you say way earlier that it was already designated as RPC-001 in the 1700s? Right here:
So, with characteristic understatement, de Montserrat and a group of unnamed Muslim courtiers to the Mughal Emperor began the containment of the entity designated now RPC-001
by a factor of approximately 104213
If you include the footnote inside the superscript, you can actually make the footnote double superscripted. Like so:
by a factor of approximately 10421
I think this looks better. I did it in C&D Briefing.
thaumaturgic personnel from the Blacksite Division.
16. This method of detecting the future activation of RPC-001 is currently being investigated by Blacksite researchers, as it is unclear exactly what information would be preserved in this way or how it might be identified.
Dr. Alessia Carvalho is the current Senior Researcher assigned to RPC-001 within the Blacksite Division.
These should be "Black Site", not "Blacksite". Also, it's definitely not a division. You could say "Black Site Department" but I don't use that personally. I usually just call it "Black Site" with nothing added after.
RPC-001-A
I think there is just too much text in this sidenote. I'd imagine that on a lot of people's screen sizes, it just wouldn't fit on a single screen, which would make it a bit of a hassle to read. Maybe you could break it up into two or three consecutive sidenotes? Or just take it out of the sidenote and make it an additional Containment Addendum.
RPC-001 functions as a memotic singularity with an as-yet poorly understood capacity to increase in energy from close exposure in the infoplane to beliefs in apocalyptic, sleeping king figures or folk heroes.
This sentence is just a mess. I read it a few times over and it just doesn't feel right. I get what it's saying but it's really clunky.
Thus, RPC-001 is continually absorbing memotic potential energy from every memotic ground on Earth, most notably every human being who has lived since the anomaly’s first appearance in 1599.
Alright, memotics idea dumping time.
The way you describe "energy" existing in the infoplane is really vague and doesn't build on anything in other memotics articles. The only thing I can imagine as energy would be the velocity of memotic vectors. (Maybe this could be described as "information velocity" which I think sounds pretty cool.)
However I'm not sure it really makes sense for the anomaly to be affecting the velocity of memotic vectors in the infoplane, pulling them in. That kinda suggests that the anomaly is literally taking information about Sleeping Kings from people, which would cause those people to forget about the sleeping kings. Instead, I think you should introduce some new lore. Maybe a new type of memotic particle or waveform within the infoplane which represents the collective consciousness, the well of all shared ideas, rather than representing individual bits of information. This collective consciousness could be an element of the infoplane created as a kind of blurry shadow cast by all information stored within memotic grounds, and the only way to influence it is through theogonic magic. This would explain why the singularity isn't acting the same way as the singularity that is RPC-131; it's a different type of singularity altogether.
And the kings and lords [sic]
Why is this sic here? What's the error it notes?
Juan Bobo and Bernardo Carpio, broken free from his chains
Shouldn't this be "free from their chains"? Or was only one of them in chains? It's unclear.
gazing skywards at a thousand thousand B-17s roared overhead
at -> as
I saw the deaths of billions, and cities reduced to ashes, and whole countries thrown into the sea. It was beautiful.
Suggestion: end it with "It was terrible. It was beautiful."
Thanks for the line-by-line, Viz. I'll make a lot of these changes.
Why would the Authority want to unleash the apocalypse when something is already causing the end of the world?
The idea of SKP is that it's only activated when the world is already beyond saving; it's the global equivalent of "you can't kill me if I kill myself first." Basically, if some horrible alien creature comes along and Outside Context Problems us to death, we can least choose to die at the hands of our own myths and legends and gods instead of at the hand of alien wing-wong.
Oh. I think that could be clearer unless I missed something. Seems like the kind of thing that would just be said outright, maybe at the end of the first tab. "Help is on the way" didn't really land for me anyway so something like "If the world is going to end, it'll be on our terms." would work a lot better IMO.
