Word Count: 1,737
A little history, if you’ll indulge me:
The year I wrote this, 2016, marked the 20th anniversary of Mataki’s journey as a character. She was created a few years earlier, but she didn’t really come to life until she got on FurryMuck in 1996 and started interacting with other people. She started small, but grew, both physically and conceptually.
As she did so, it became more and more of a challenge to portray her in a manner that didn’t come off as powergamey, God-mode, Mary Sue…whatever name you want to give it. I’d been on the receiving end of such characters, and I found them as annoying as everyone else. For that reason, she became more subdued, mysterious, and enigmatic. She gave hints here and there of her capabilities rather than announcing them to the room over and over and doing some Herculean task every other pose. I liked that about her, though she probably drove people crazy with her refusal to give a straight answer about herself. It was by design and by necessity in order to keep her interesting to me, and hopefully, to others.
Unfortunately, I think I went a little overboard with it, and that led to a lot of her story not getting told. I’ve spent a lot of time building Mataki’s world (and it’s a big one!), but it has only been completely shared with maybe three people. Perhaps that’s why these stories are starting to come out after twenty years; I’ve decided it’s time to let more of her out, and the roleplaying world has more or less moved on from what it was back in 1996.
That brings us to this story. I am a big fan of the SCP site, a place full of stories about creepy, dangerous, and bizarre objects and people. It’s a favorite time-sink of mine, and I love the approach and challenge of telling a story in such a bureaucratically awkward format. It’s what creepypasta would be if your manager at work made you write it and submit it to Corporate.
I wanted to write Mataki up as an SCP entry. I thought it would give me a chance to lay out a bit more of her structure without giving the whole thing away, as another thing I love about the SCP is the strategic (and often maddening!) use of redaction blocks to hide information. Teasing is also Mataki’s thing, though she doesn’t come out and say it in the story.
I doubt this will ever be submitted to the official site, and I have no intention of doing so. I think it’s too out there and personal for a wide audience, and I probably goofed on some of the established canon since I wrote this piece only from my own experience reading SCP entries. It was written mostly for my own enjoyment and the challenge of doing it.
Finally, and before this intro become s longer than the story itself, this work echoes some ideas from my previous two stories, Revelation 3:14 and Spiritbreaker. Some of those similarities are annoying to me as I don’t want to keep writing essentially the same story over and over, but I think this one’s different enough to be enjoyable. As to the "9653" number, it has no special significance other than being the numbers you get if you transcribe "WOLF" using a telephone keypad.
(Image credit in story: Nobody/NB/Enbee)
Read SCP-9653
Visit the SCP Foundation site
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