SCP-7381/Paranatural crossover

...So this thing kills you once you understand it. It took us a while to figure that out, obviously; we didn't know why our research teams kept suffering casualties.

We don't know why it kills you. Maybe it doesn't exist and the idea itself is fatal to the human mind. We are hoping that it is conscious and just extremely observant, powerful, and paranoid, because at least then we have some hope of dealing with it.

After all, people do keep dying. Every death adds to our knowledge, leading to more deaths. So we find ways to cover up the deaths, attributing them to other causes.

We have a plan. The sleeping mind is not sane enough to comprehend anything coherently. So we work in our dreams and recruit the dreaming. It's safer not to tell most of them what is going on. Some serve as experimental subjects in the effects of various lines of thought. Others attempt to cause pain or injury to the hypothetical being, which may be more dangerous for all we know.

For obvious reasons, we wipe all their memories on awakening. They may remember a few details for a few seconds, but they'll be too groggy to hurt themselves.

My point: Next time you have a nightmare you can't remember, I wouldn't worry about it. Or think about it at all, in fact.

The Scarlet Pimpernel (in progress): What is (not) going on?

I picked up The Scarlet Pimpernel for a lighter, more fun work. I'm on chapter ten and I'm bored. I'm BORED with THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. This was not supposed to happen.

SPOILERS AHEAD, probably.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is about daring rescues, romance, political intrigue, and dastardly espionage, except so far without any of those things:

• The most exciting action: The story told about the heroes by a bad guy in the book's introduction.
• The best romance: The repeated assurance that two characters were totally going steady on the trip here.
• Political intrigue: Mostly people complaining about their government. Actually, maybe this book is not about political intrigue.
• Spy stuff: All the spies are bad guys. They (hyperbolically) wear fedoras with balaclavas and snicker in French. Their sneakiest move is (actually) to slip under the table and hope that nobody notices that they vanished. Their operations have so far succeeded smashingly because the British conspiracy-theorize about the presence of French spies and then trust the spies implicitly, and since no British character is doing either intelligence or counterespionage, their success will probably continue.

The drama camera has been pointed at a character who is about to be blackmailed into helping the French spies; a character whom everyone thinks is a revolutionary for denouncing a French aristocratic family so they could be executed but (claims to have) had extenuating circumstances (but tells pretty much no one about them); and a character who secretly loves her husband but despairs of reciprocation, and thus refuses to show her love in any way. These are all the same character. Most recently, she was on an hours-long road trip with her husband, neither of them talking the whole way, but she looking forward to spending time by herself when they got there.

If I know what the fun bit of a book is supposed to be, I can often focus on that and not overthink the rest. What am I supposed to be focusing on here?