 Hey guys, Sherm here. Halfway through this video you're going to hear me make a joke about making an insolent pencil t-shirt. And I wanted to let you guys know that I actually went ahead and did that. If you check the link in the description, you'll find a link to teespring.com, the insolent pencil t-shirt. I think it's a pretty cool design, and if you guys want to grab it, that would be great. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Sherm's Declassified Skip Survival Guide. Today we're going to be exploring the ever-baffling SCP-3999 by Lord Stonefish. For this deep dive, I'm using a lot of what I learned while recording an audio adaptation of this skip, which you'll find linked in the description below. I would also like to thank Lord Stonefish's description that he left in the discussion page of the skip, the SCP Explained Wiki, and the SCP Declassified Subreddit for my research. Now let's get started. The short version, SCP-3999 was a reality bender in containment at Site-118, who claimed to be an avatar of pure chaos. He is assumed to have been neutralized by Researcher Taloran, who spent several million years being tortured by SCP-3999. This torture took the form of destroying the entire universe and rebooting it an unthinkable number of times, all the while killing and unkilling Researcher Taloran and everyone he ever knew and loved. Quote, for the lulls. The Chaos Avatar explains why everything in the article is so crazy and messed up. That's all there is to it in universe. Now it's time for the deep dive. The first thing we have to understand about SCP-3999 is its writer. Lord Stonefish has not been shy about sharing that this skip was born of stress, frustration, addiction to the SCP community, and mental health issues regarding these things. SCP-3999 was also originally an entry for the SCP-3000 contest, which added no pressure at all, I'm sure. It's been noted that Stonefish has severely cut back in writing for the site since SCP-3999's completion. As we go through piece by piece, I want you to keep this image in your mind. Our author has a solid main character, but no story. They're going to write a story because the addiction won't let them stop until it's finished, but they hate every idea halfway in and have to start over, keeping the main character and placing them in new situation after new situation. And this is the SCP Foundation, so none of these situations are good situations. P.S., I apologize from this point on if I miss any cool references hidden in here. Please share them in the comments so we can all learn even more about this crazy skip. From the very start, let us go then, you and I, when the 11-day empire eats the sky, combines two references. Line 1 comes from T.S. Eliot's poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The poem employs a stream of consciousness narrative in a stylistically similar way to this skip. Line 2 references the 11-day empire, part of the Doctor Who spin-off story called Faction Paradox. In it, 11 days disappear from the calendar for unknown reasons, much like our reality bender and researcher Taloran do battle in what amounts to missing timelines by the end of the skip. That's a lot of thematic depth for two opening lines. Moving on, we have our first set of nonsense containment procedures. They continuously change as researcher Taloran and the reality bender struggle for control. Most of our strike-throughs stem from this, so to save time, I'm just going to point out that in the early game of the skip, the reality bender is mostly in control and torturing researcher Taloran. Later on, we'll see researcher Taloran begin to fight back. Metaphorically, let's remember our author having an idea and scrapping it every time this happens. After a while, we reach our first of two big cross-reference detours, the idea of using SCP-2432 to contain SCP-3999. Later on down the page, we'll also try to use SCP-2845's containment procedures for the same purpose. It's notable that 2432 was also written by Lord Stonefish, while 2845 was not. Metaphorically, our author has resorted to using other works, both his own and the works of others, from the wiki for inspiration now. In universe, the first cross-reference could be seen as the reality bender using another one of Stonefish's works to torture Taloran under the guise of pretending to contain itself. The second time could be seen as Taloran using another work from the wiki against the reality bender instead. More on that when we reach it. Also, sidebar, in this SCP-2432 excursion, can I just say how much I would love to have a mini-bar predator as a pet? Moving on. We have a little more push and pull of the reality bender throwing Taloran into conflicting universes, where he must stay together, he must stay apart, he must stay alive, he must be killed, etc. etc. And then we get our first interview. We get a clear look at Taloran's point of view, everything is so weird and dreamlike, as well as meta-jokes like the timecode being 03.99.90, or the ending timecode being omitted as optional and the closing statement just saying, small summary of what transpired, as if the author slash reality bender hadn't been bothered to fill them in. I greatly hope that the next line, including that Taloran should, quote, live with his mother until this whole thing blows over, end quote, is a Shaun of the Dead reference, but maybe that's just me. We get a format screw notice from Riza, notifying the reader that they may have been infected with a cognitoheserd, and then back to torturing Taloran for a bit. We dive into Harry Potter for a paragraph, and then back out into randomness with starburst candies and what I imagine might be an old self-insert type character's humanoid containment chamber. A couple more random jumps, a reference to Penny Lane by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Pat Noswalt shows up for a moment, and then Riza again with some hard insistence that SCP-3999 will explode your brain. We get a great format shift to a film slash theater script format for a scene of Taloran trying to escape the reality bender's containment chamber at site 118. He almost digs his way out, and then the reality bender punishes him in the most cruel and unforgiving way imaginable. He traps him in an endless loop of the aristocrats' joke. For those unfamiliar, the aristocrats is a famous non-joke. Comedians use the flexible format of the middle section to keep the joke going, telling the raunchiest story they can for as long as they can. This fits the theme here perfectly, as the reality bender can just loop the joke again and again to torture Taloran. We also see for the first time that whatever is recording the goings on here, it can't comprehend the direct speech of the reality bender. We are treated to multiple volleys of battle between Taloran and the reality bender, each one getting a few punches back and forth. The reality bender throws another Riza notice format screw at Taloran, including the wonderful insolent pencil insult of which I'm going to make a t-shirt you wait and see. Taloran punches back with meta-insult about being fictional, commenting on the author and the community of loser horror writers he's being written for. A few more punches are thrown back and forth, and this section ends with a random reference to the delightful 1993 hit Walk the Dinosaur. In the description section, I believe that Taloran is trying to assign a form to the reality bender that will stick. We cycle through a barrage of references to sight, lore, and pop culture, including some of my favorites like you reading this, because we are part of the problem. SCP-055, an unknowable entity. The SCP-3000 contest, another part of the problem. Cliché lists that looked like they were written by a crazy person, a sight staple since Dr. Bright's list, and another never-ending article. Max Landis, a fun name drop. I have no mouth and I must scream. If you've never read this, just know that it's such a direct analog to what's going on in this skip, and AM, the supercomputer, could be twinsies with the reality bender. Check it out on TV Tropes later. Every bee that ever lived, great sight reference and fitting for the theme of ever-increasing madness. At the end, the reality bender becomes resistant to Taloran's attempts to define him, so Taloran switches to try to contain him using the special containment procedures of SCP-2845. Wow, we made it this far, guys. Near the end of this, you can see the reality bender breaking out again as we devolve from containment procedures to attacking Taloran's college roommate's pet to utter chaos as the avalanche of omlies fills the page. Halfway through, Taloran is looking for help. Three-fourths of the way through, taunting from the reality bender. And then we move towards the turning point. Taloran's interview slash badass boast could be considered the beginning of the end. After millions of years of torture, he has numbed to the reality bender's actions. His resolve is finally able to build, and he's becoming confident that he can end the fight. We even get a little bit of philosophy in the form of our pure chaos avatar being unable to exist without at least a modicum of order. Importantly, we are still unable to comprehend the voice of the reality bender. Until, next paragraph, we are given a straightforward monologue directly from the reality bender as author. If you made it this far, your reward might as well be a giant flashing sign that says, this is what this skip really means. He walks us by the hand through the stress and issues with writing this article from the outsider's view. We are shown a couple of failed story scenarios and Taloran's position in each one. Then we hit the dream sequence. The specter of Taloran and other monsters from the wiki swarm his dream bedroom and berate him for wasting his time with the crappy horror stories rather than making something of himself. He ruminates on every awful thing he's ever done, another piece of the anxiety puzzle. He tells the specters to kill him already and they grace us with a gory scene of guts falling out before the author awakes. Death of the author trope indeed. That nightmare both caused this skip story and ended it. Poetic, isn't it? The ending wrap-up is mostly clear. We get to see the real world restored due to the sacrifice of researcher Taloran. There are some who theorize that Taloran managed to kill SCP-3999 but lost his life in the process. Others interpret it as Taloran destroying the reality bender by killing himself. I would like to propose a sort of symbiosis between the two theories. Throughout all of the skip, we see Taloran being tortured by the reality bender. In the author monologue, we see that the author feels like he is being haunted by researcher Taloran. This is two sides of the same coin. We are seeing the story slash battle from inside the fiction as well as outside of it from the author's point of view. The nightmare was Taloran's final, successful attack on the author. He had to convince the author to stop backpedaling and finish the story so that they could both finally be done with this seemingly eternal torture. We made it! Thanks again to Lord Stonefish for this amazingly deep and stylish skip, as well as my research sources. And of course, thank you for watching. If you liked this explanation and want to see more, do the like, share and subscribe Mumbo Jumbo and let us know what skips you'd like declassified in the comment section. See you next time!