drmaywater

Item #: SCP-XXXX

Object Class: Safe

Special Containment Procedures: Pending

Description:

SCP-XXXX is a phenomena that starts when a 35 second advertisement for a "Captain Chrono" wristwatch plays on the YouTube Kids app. As the ad plays, the speech of the children in the ad slowly shifts from the native language of the viewer to an unknown language; henceforth referred to as Chronal. Following the advertisement, all videos viewed on the YouTube Kids app will be in Chronal. Only children aged 3 to 7 years old have been served this ad and affected by the language. Children who have been triggered by the ad are not aware of the different language and can understand the content of the videos on par with their native language. Bystanders are able to recognize that the language is different and can let a video play out to the end in Chronal; however, replaying the video or going to another video will cause the language to revert back to normal. This effect can be re-triggered by the child again and takes approximately 3-5 videos before the ad reappears.

After approximately 500 hours of exposure to Chronal through videos, children will be able to converse with others that have been exposed. When someone starts speaking in Chronal, all those that understand it will experience a thought-based time dilation effect. In other words, from the perspective of non-Chronal users, the children could have what would usually be a 30 minute conversation in 1 minute. Code-switching a child out of Chronal breaks them out of the effect.

Once a child has reached a conversational level in the language further exposure to videos in Chronal are unnecessary to improve fluency. Simple conversation time with the other children is sufficient to increase fluency among the group. Increased fluency results in greater time dilation as well as an increase in the length of the words the children use. The current maximum time dilation factor seen is 240:1 with a median phoneme word count of 3. For reference, beginners have a median phoneme word count of 1.

At approximately 5000 hours of exposure to the language, children start to think in the language as well. This results in the child being able to induce a time dilation effect without the need of a conversation partner.