This concept sprang from a discussion in the Writer's Lounge about the relatively small number of Hard to Kill Reptile-like monster RPCs we have. The natural train of thought was… well, what's the opposite of a hard-to-kill reptile?
Thanks to CecPec, Ascriber, Ezekiel, Deveal, Clockwork and everyone else who gave crit or helped with the initial brainstorming.
Image from here.
Hello Von Princier, I'm writing a tale about RPC-286 writing it's personal thoughts. In this tale, i'll reveal RPC-286's origin and identity. And once I get it done, and critiqued by people, do you want the tale be featured in the article?
Please PM either on the Site or preferrably on the Discord about this.
This is really good. I like the sense of dread that it gives, the worry that one day, we will drown in its corpses. However, you could just fling it into space, so it doesn't interfere with canon.
But I feel it's not an intentional oversight, to leave out the "throw it into space" part in this article. Maybe revisit that?
During the initial brainstorming we figured out what would happen if you threw it into space- basically, the Squirrel dies over and over again until it forms a large enough clump of bodies that they begin to clump together under their own gravity, and eventually you have an asteroid made of dead squirrels, which slowly grows into a planetoid of dead squirrels, but by that point its gravity well is so intense that it's fucking up the entire solar system. Either that, or it falls back to Earth, and the planet is shotgunned by millions of frozen squirrel corpses.
I'll write a Tale about it someday.
But theoretically, if you threw it into a remotely controlled space ship with enough oxygen for an amount of days, while the squirrel was within, you could have it reach the outer edges of the Galaxy like the voyager.
voyager took years to exit the solar system, it would break out in that time
also if it got to the outside of the galaxy it would eventually get bigger than the galaxy
The vastness of space is far more than anything we can do on Earth, even with only a 15% buildup per year. And it's only a squirrel, correct? It can't possibly have the strength required to break through the materials built in a space ship.
I think just saying "it would break out" is a copout.
That would work… except that every three days it dies. And it will keep dying every 3 days until the spaceship is full. And then the spaceship explodes.
What exactly is "unoccupied space"?
Do gasses count as unoccupied space? If not, then it would have to create a vacuum before it could respawn.
This would imply that gasses do count as unoccupied space, therefore wouldn't keeping it in a chamber with a highly corrosive gas be useful to killing it before it can do anything?
That's an excellent point. I'll add a footnote explaining what is meant by 'unoccupied'.
Overall, I like the article. However, please change the number. I get that this is meant to be an “inversion” of SCP-682, hence the number 286 being 682 in reverse. We should try to have the RPC Authority stand on its own, without intentionally drawing parallels to the Foundation.
Good luck keeping that out of your bird feeder.
This article was really great. The section with the squirrel manifesting within itself and initiate nuclear fusion really peaked me.
However, on numerous occasions RPC-286 has gone without food for long periods of time, as the time of its natural expiration occurs well before its time of expiration from starvation or malnutrition (see below).
This line seems really convoluted to me. Could be a lot clearer.
the aid of calculating aids
This reads kind of weird and redundant. Maybe change "aids" to "devices".
In all cases, injury or modification to a previous instance did not carry over to the new instance.
Pretty nitpicky but I think this would read better if "new" was changed to "following" or "newly formed" or "subsequent".
"The new instance" sounds like some singular entity to me rather than referring to every instance in relation to the previous.
