I've had problems with this forum before, and I hope this isn't going to be a repeat of them. I think this idea is good enough to be worth the effort of trying to fix it; I'm not quite sure why people even think it needs fixing, but since it's continued to receive at least 5 downvotes *since* I improved everything I could figure out how to improve, evidently I need to try and work with the community on this one, despite my issues with doing so.
The basic concept of this piece is that SCP 343 is named "God", and for the purposes of this piece, that name is treated as being accurate (though an open question remains whether it is true *because* of the name, as opposed to being intrinsically so). Ergo, when 343 interacts in any way with SCP 4000, the risk of a Nomenclative Hazard breach becomes exponentially dangerous. Being omniscient, 343 is fully aware of this, and yet it is a consequence of his existence that he must sometimes "endanger" himself in this way, due to the generally paradoxical nature of literally infinite knowledge and power (the classic "can he create a rock too heavy for himself to lift" conundrum). I very firmly believe that the concept of these two SCPs messing with each other is an interesting one to explore, and am deeply convinced that my idea about how they interact is a correct one. So, in seeing that my story bombed, I presume that the problem is with my specific writing, that I need better analogies or more interesting interactions or a general better sense of flow and rhythm to the piece. Since I want this piece to succeed, and seemingly lack the skill to do it single-handedly, I turn to this community, hoping that they will be less dickish to me this time than they were the last time I tried. (I still don't understand why I got such a hostile reception before, and thus can do nothing to prevent it; I can only trust in luck to produce a randomly different outcome.)
Many of the negatives my piece received were apparently due to a perception of sexism, which I completely did not intend and have diligently worked to remove; hopefully that issue is entirely gone from the present draft, even if it retains enough other problems that it got a few more downvotes. The second criticism I got was that the story is about nothing happening, which was largely intentional, and is lampshaded by 343 himself. Though 343 himself is omniscient, the Foundation agents are not, and their attempt at getting information out of him might seem frustratingly unsuccessful, when in fact he has planted tiny seeds in their mind (doing the most that he can do while respecting his desire to preserve their free will, and allow them to pursue success within the "rules" of the "game" which he created humanity to play), which will eventually save their lives when they actually interact with 4000. The third critique of the piece is the one I can do the least to try and address, because it was that the piece lacked "narrative flow" or some similarly vague concept; I have no sense of poetry or musicality when I write, so readers who look for that sort of thing are never going to be satisfied with anything I write unassisted. Maybe someone reading this critique request can suggest where the "cadence" of the piece can be improved.
Without further ado, let's get into the original text of the piece (inserting my author commentary in italics; please mentally remove it when evaluating the rhythm and pacing). As with 4000, color coding is used to help identify characters whose names must not be spoken, including 343 himself (orange) and the two agents interviewing him (originally I put the woman in pink, and her partner lacked color coding since he didn't say or do enough to constitute a nomenclative hazard; the pink was hard to read, so I changed her to red and added brown for him, but now the brown is hard to read too, and I used enough other colors that I'm not sure what I could change him to.)
That certain ancient being sat within the containment cell which he had chosen to allow them to assign himself. He understood the paradox represented by his status perfectly. Infinite power is meaningless, if everyone has it; a wave can travel around the world at a thousand meters a second and never do any harm, so long as the world in question has no land whatsoever against which that wave can crash with its terrifying destructive force. No being could force him to be contained, but if he was unwilling to choose to be contained, then his infinite freedom to do anything he pleased would be meaningless, for he would have no reason to please to do anything. By accepting limitations, he defined an identity and a purpose for himself. And for the most part, he was quite satisfied with that trade.
This situation, however, was one of the exceptions.
In defining rules for not only this world, but all of the myriad other worlds which it would or would not be permitted to interface with, directly or indirectly, the ostensible creator of all things had managed to scatter a few metaphorical Legos upon his own floor, and accepted that every once in a while he would either suffer the pain of stepping on one, or the inconvenience of treading carefully to avoid them. And while he normally had no reason to bother entering the "room" in question, he had created circumstances with nearly infinite potential extrapolations, and thus it was a statistical inevitability that some of those circumstances would lead him into peril. As a being incapable of being destroyed or injured, mild annoyance was the worst of all imaginable fates from his perspective, and he had doomed himself to suffer it every now and again. Possibly the largest source of such inconveniences was the subject he contemplated now.
His containment cell was presently home to two other beings. (This paragraph should be expanded to near page-length with largely unnecessary descriptive details, simply to act as a spacer and heighten the effect of the color coding in the previous paragraphs. For those who didn't already know all this, the use of green text to refer to SCP-4000 is meant to be a bit of a dramatic reveal, as anyone who has read 4000 will instantly know what green text means, while those who have not will be puzzled by the coloring. An important point of this entire story is to establish the idea that 343 can't even THINK about 4000 without risking a breach; having to constantly and unfailingly follow the Nomenclative Hazard Protocols at all times would tax the concentration of even an omnipotent being, and that's the main source of tension for this entire story.)
The senior agent asked again. "You're certain that you cannot provide any information about the other dimension we're discussing?"
"As I stated," the omnipotent and omniscient entity stated, once again carefully censoring his own awareness of the various names by which he was normally known, "not only cannot I help you, but you are placing yourselves and your own organization (as well as, by a generous definition, me {see the earlier note about annoyance; this could become a footnote used in several places, if it disrupts the text too much for it to be a parenthetical aside}) in a great deal of danger. The less interaction I have with that frustratingly difficult-to-describe SCP, the better off you are."
(Here comes what is probably one of the more questionable aspects of the story; it's the main exception to the "nothing happens" critique, but it also makes mockery of 343's infinite knowledge and power, that he either lets this occur or doesn't anticipate it.) "But surely, if you are indeed G—"
"DON'T"! he shouted, allowing his voice to be slightly too loud. The hotshot agent's coffee cup shattered on the floor; had the primordial power who shouted been even a little more careless, there would have been at least four ruptured eardrums, and this entire situation would be even more difficult for them to negotiate than it already was. He calmed himself and continued in a normal speaking tone. "Seriously, did you even read the documentation for this assignment? You should know better than to even try and do what you almost did just now. Honestly, I think your superiors should probably take you off this exact project, if you're going to be that astonishingly careless."
The junior agent spoke for the first time. Unlike his partner, he was an old veteran, well familiar with the minefield constituted by both of the "skips" he was dealing with, though perhaps not quite aware of the peculiarly dangerous interaction between them. (Said fact should have been blindingly obvious, but then this was an organization which regularly wipes the brains of its own operatives, to protect them against memetic hazards capable of killing them over an idle thought. The once-worshipped entity's infinite capacity for forgiveness had no trouble accepting that even hyper-competent investigators might not always perceive certain facts, which an average person would find clearly apparent.) "We're aware of the risk, esteemed guest of our facility. We wouldn't be pursuing this course of action if the matter at hand was not important enough to require it. And while my friend with the Harvard degree is very new to this assignment, she isn't incompetent; little slip-ups like this will help her to develop the reflexes necessary to protect herself while actually in the field to which we've been assigned."
"And it's a forest, not a field, so even there, you're slipping up yourself," the theoretically-imprisoned SCP pointed out, to which the humble man who sought to avoid the attentions of the powerful nodded. (This line is the first one I would consider taking out, since it seems kinda weak to resort to this sort of wordplay; the two descriptions are important character establishment, but what 343 says here could be something else.) "This sort of thing is always difficult to get right, which is why it's dangerous to even try and work with certain highly volatile materials and subjects…but that volatility is sometimes necessary in order to be able to get anything done. You invented automobiles, knowing that gasoline can explode; it's not my fault if you're dumb enough to smoke next to the gas pump."
"So why don't you just make us smart enough *not* to make mistakes like that?" the patient older investigator wondered playfully.
"Oh, you want me to control your mind, is that it? Such a pesky burden, all that free will I gave you. Maybe I should just return you to monkey and save you all the bother of dealing with this whole universe full of anomalies that you find so stressful to live in."
"Okay, I get it," the former graduate student said, though the dilation of her eyes still made it obvious that she was still getting her heart-rate under control, after that little scare. "I need to be way, way more careful, even when we haven't yet gone through the talking chimney. I'll request some extra mindfulness training sessions before we depart. But you haven't answered my question: why can't you help us? You claim to be all powerful, yet whenever we actually ask you to do something for us, you almost invariably refuse. If I had infinite power, I'm certain I could find a way to actually USE some of it, and do a bit of actual good for the people that I claim to love." (This line is me directly speaking through the agent, as one of the main reasons to establish these characters for future use is my desire to detail some of the ways in which an idealistic young person can imagine fixing the world if they had infinite power, and then exploring the ways in which that isn't as easy as it seems like it would be, which is why 343 and the 05s and other powerful beings haven't already fixed everything. A not-super-religious take on the philosophical Problem of Evil is something I'm extremely interested in; if I weren't beholden to the whims of an audience, I wouldn't try to disguise those discussions as stories, and would just expound at length on my theories to anyone who might or might not be listening. I basically never get tired of doing that; I'm a goose laying eggs, simply because it's her nature to do so, and I appreciate any assistance that this forum can provide in order to turn those base materials into storytelling gold. Or heck, even just a tasty omelet.)
"You're lucky I'm impossible to offend, unlike the anomalous beings which may or may not be humanoids," the subject of the interview responded, having run dangerously low on new terminology for the entities he must avoid referring to directly. "I forgive your arrogance, and perhaps some other time I'll explain exactly why I shouldn't do as you say, even if I wanted to. (I have a pretty solid idea of what he could say during that later discussion; I wanted to limit the length and meandering nature of this piece by avoiding such a digression for now, with the intention of eventually putting a link to a later tale in here.) But for right now, I'd really like to wrap up this conversation, before somebody makes another mistake and we have REAL trouble. I know, I know, you don't get it, you're frustrated with the lack of answers or progress; you're just going to have to accept that state of affairs as being necessary for right now. (A bit of me talking to the reader there, though it also works in-setting.) When in doubt, trust the council of thirteen individuals with variable identities; they've been working on this exact problem since before your parents were born." (This is a meaningful reference to the multiple 001 proposals that have contradictorily identified the 05 council, implying that they may in fact all be true, or at least more than one of them is. I eat this kind of stuff up, and am a huge fan of both Memento Mori and The Ouroboros Cycle, despite them being incompatible with each other.)
"Okay, well thanks for completely wasting our time. We'll be in touch," the barely-self-controlled agent said as she got up to leave the interview; her more seasoned partner shot the resident divine entity a long-suffering look before turning to go, which he returned in kind.
Only when the two had stepped outside did he permit himself to smile. "If only you understood, brash young lady who will someday realize her current character flaws, just how much you really did accomplish there. I almost can't wait until you comprehend just what the purpose of this meeting really was." I am unsatisfied with this entire paragraph, particularly the last line. The idea is to hint that this all has future significance, but writing "enigmatic meaningfulness" is not exactly an easy thing to handle.
