 Tell me all your thoughts on God. And tell me, am I very far? Counting blue cars. Dishwalla. Welcome to Object Class Explained. This series is brought to you in partnership with the SCP Declassified Subreddit. If you'd like to learn more about a particular SCP or you just want to read their declassifications, head on over there. I'll have a link in the description. Today's episode is going to be discussing SCP-2343, how I got to Memphis. That's right, two-three-four-three. But don't worry, this one is also about God. Let's get started. And so I asked him, what's a kid from New Rochelle doing singing about Memphis? And he said, Memphis is a stand-in for wherever you are right now. What it really means is, that's how I got here. Charlie Skinner, the newsroom. So when I talk about this SCP, I'm going to start off with the obvious question. Despite the superficial similarities to 343, the original concept had really nothing to do with that series one article. I was watching the last episode of the newsroom and the characters inexplicably started a jam session where they started playing a song referenced earlier in the episode. And that song was How I Got to Memphis by Tom T. Hall. And I'd heard the song before, but it really hadn't stuck with me until listening to it in that episode. And after that, I listened to it on YouTube a few times and then I listened to the original, pretty much on loop for most of a day. You know, sometimes something just gets stuck in your head for a while and really that's what happened with that song. Everyone has a different process for writing, but for me, at least half of my articles started with a title and then I just figured out what I could write from the title. And this is one of those times. So SCP-2343, as mentioned earlier, is called How I Got to Memphis. The song is just a country ballad about a guy who's trying to find his wife or a girlfriend who has left him. And during the song, he appears to be in Memphis somewhere looking for because he believes that's where she's at. But there's also a very subtle hint that he might be asking in a bar. There's a line where he says, I know if you'd seen her, you'd tell me because you were my friend, which is a very drunk person thing to say. And that his drinking may very well be why she left him. But regardless, the SCP-I wrote hinges on the title of the song and another line buried in the middle where he says she would get mad and she used to say that she'd come back to Memphis someday. And so I said to myself, what would make this situation anomalous? And that's when I thought, you know, what if they ended up in the wrong Memphis? See, Memphis is about the city in Tennessee and an ancient abandoned city in Egypt. So this is where I thought of the angle of making the man and woman ancient Egyptian gods. I'm not incredibly familiar with Egyptian mythology, but I am familiar with it. And what I know is that Egyptian myths evolved over time. And while Amun Ra was the eventual god of gods, there was a time when Ptah, the patron of Memphis, was also the creator god. So I just started to build around that. Ptah's wife, important in the context of the song, was Sekhmet, a very destructive goddess of war, which I thought tied pretty well into the she-get-mad-and-she-used-to-say line from the song. And from there I just crafted a story in my head, which, you know, it doesn't really show up too much in the article, but somewhere out there in the land of the gods, Sekhmet gets super drunk and angry at Ptah, and she plans to go to Memphis, Egypt, because the city is a place that worships her and her husband. Only she's so drunk she forgets that the city's been abandoned since about 700 AD, so instead she ends up in Memphis, Tennessee, and Ptah follows her. Through an extraordinary sequence of events, they end up reconciling, sobering up, and, you know what, deciding Memphis isn't so bad. And they settle down, and they start a family, and they live peacefully until the foundation gets involved. If you tell me she's not here, I'll follow the trail of her tears. That's how I got to Memphis. Tom T. Hall. How I got to Memphis. So now we can talk about the SCP itself. The piece is incredibly focused on the central character, Peter Panepi, which Peter is obviously a stand-in for Ptah, but Panepi is also a name for Ptah, and it sounds vaguely like a legitimate last name. He gets into an argument and maybe a physical altercation with his wife, Sasha Panepi, who is Sekhmet. Now note here, I wanted to subvert traditional domestic violence tropes and have the wife be the one who hits the husband. Now this is actually me writing from some personal experience that I'm not going to bother getting into right now, but since this is Sekhmet, Goddess of War and Destruction, it's not a stretch to have her be the one who throws the punches. Now him fighting with his wife isn't new, it's how he ended up in Memphis, and it's how they've lived their lives for quite some time, but this time around the police end up getting called, and Peter ends up saying some very strange things to the police about unmaking the world, because he is incredibly drunk. And I should note that Peter and Sasha decided when they first ended up in Memphis to live like normal humans. Fight though they may, that hasn't changed, but they both drink a lot, and their self-control isn't what it should be, because both of them are incredibly powerful gods. Now Peter's power lies in creation, and Sasha's power lies in destruction, but here they are, living in a Memphis suburb on a construction worker's salary. Now the Foundation sends a guy to interview Peter on a whim. That outburst was probably nothing, but they've done interviews for less, and there's no harm in checking it out if they have somebody in the area. Now during the interview, Peter creates a pack of cigarettes and a lighter so that he can smoke. I'd been searched beforehand and he was searched afterwards, and those don't appear, so it's subtle, but the Foundation doesn't miss this sort of thing, so they bring in a reality anchor until they can figure out what to do next, because this is a reality bender. And this is where the story diverges from what I think most people would consider a traditional story about reality anchors, because it doesn't work. Now a reality anchor is something the Foundation developed to stop reality warpers from using their powers, and in most of the stories prior to this one, they've worked pretty perfectly, but while this may be reality warper, it's also the creator god, and once they set it up he escapes fairly quickly. This whole thing leads to a game of cat and mouse around Memphis with an increasingly high amount of reality anchors until they finally manage to have the right amount in the right place at the right time. And that's when the article itself starts to shift, because even the huge amount of resources they devoted to containing this reality bender isn't enough, because clicking the next collapse will lead you to a different version of the same document, and this one is only subtly different at first, he's made himself a little taller, a little skinnier, the picture shows more of him, and the containment procedures call for a lot less reality anchors. Incidentally the interview is also subtly different, more information is imparted to the reader there, and clicking the collapsibles again leads to the article shifting. This time he's not trying to hide anything, he wants the Foundation to read this. It ends on a final note from SCP-2343 saying very simply that his wife is coming for him, and the Foundation does not want his wife to come for him. He's the only one powerful enough to calm her down, and incidentally the only one she likes enough to be calmed down And that's where the article ends, so what happens next is up to you dear reader. One final note, the number SCP-2343 was an intentional choice. The earlier drafts were often compared to SCP-343, in fact I don't know how many times people told me this is 343 but done correctly, and while I have a particular distaste for the original article I'm not above making it a spiritual rewrite, so the number was available and I chose to use it. Because no matter what your opinion is on either article, both of them are basically the Foundation trying to contain capital G god. Anyway, I'd like to take a moment and thank my patrons from November. The Sherm, Rockney Matthias, Lerker G.G., Jonas Hubenechter, Jake Korpschinski, and Daniel Ruiz, who are all pledged at $1, Plaguebearer, who is pledged at $2, Faye, who is pledged at $5, Dr. Letters and Samuelism, who are pledged at $10, and finally Dead Danny, who is pledged at $20. Thank you guys so much for making this content possible, and if you'd like to support this content yourself, you can always go over to my Patreon at patreon.com forward slash de-samarion, and that's it. Thanks for watching.