 Welcome back. I hope you had a great dinner. Or whatever you did. I'm not here to judge. So, magic. Anyone who can perform magic on a consistent, sustained basis is a type blue. Colloquially, a mage, a witch, a magician, whatever. The term type blue, the foundation lifted from the global occult coalition. The coalition classifies humanoid with anomalous capabilities using colors. We at the foundation mostly use their terms for green and blue. Green is a reality bender. Blue is a magician. Before coming here, some of you read transcripts of a lecture given to new global occult coalition operatives about applied thermatology. Magic, in other words. The rest of you will have access to some of those transcripts after this session. Your higher ups want you to read these because new GOC trainees still start off reading those, even though they're decades old. And some of the information is, I would quibble with its presentation. The important thing is that you know half the baseline our competition has started from. I'm here to give you the viewpoint of the other half. You already know that I used to be a member of the serpent's hand. You in the back, who raised her hand when I mentioned the coalition transcripts. For anyone who didn't cast that question, she just asked about that Hogwarts shit. She wasn't joking now. Hogwarts is the, ehm, international center for the study of unifying thermatology. It's not exactly Hogwarts. More of a university focused exclusively on research. But yes, it is on some level a school for wizards. Depending on your definition of wizard? Why haven't we contained and shut them down? Well, remember what I told you about Sigma 3? But sure, we don't need to use Sigma 3 for that. The real answer is that the center is protected by the global occult coalition, among other things. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that attacking it could trigger World War 3. Something I need to keep reminding people. We're here to secure, contain, protect, not blow everything into daylight, just to make sure we possess every paranormal artifact on Earth. By the way, it's not up to us. We're to leave the center alone, by order of the O5 council. But yes, it exists as part of the anomalous community. No, I don't think foundation members can attend. The hand and the GOC have a number of type blues in their ranks. With the foundation officially, we have no type blues. There are no foundation magicians. Of course, you know that's not true. Still, we have only a few. And almost every type blue foundation member is associated with Sigma 3. But all that aside, you want to know how I could talk to you in blue? Well, it's not especially easy. I did a few rituals before coming here, so I could do this a few times on cue. All with the permission of our higher ups in the foundation. Yes, there are people higher than me. Of course there are. I'm only a director. Point is, any and all magic that any of you will be performing will be done under strict supervision, unless you're out in the field and need to blend in. All of it will be done in the service of the foundation. One of you asked me a question when you were supposed to be having dinner. Z wanted to know, why can we talk about type greens? Reality benders, when we can't talk about type blues? Some of you have already guessed the answer. The truth, the truth is that none of you are to repeat in mixed company. Certainly, not to anyone else in the foundation is that anyone can become a type blue. Anyone can become a magician. Anyone could learn to perform magic. Many of you are going to at least attempt to learn. Most will not succeed, but it is possible for any of you to succeed. That gets a little wearing after a while, and a couple of you look ill. Sorry about that. Anyway, anyone can become a type blue, but there are some caveats. The first is sometimes called potential. At least it was called that when I was a member of the hand. A few people get potential through their genetics, but 99.9% of the population is born with a potential of nothing. After that, whether you get potential is like whether you get cancer. There are about a million factors. Some of it is how you think. Some of it is how you do or don't fit into society. Some of it is your kind of intelligence, and sometimes there is no identifiable cause. Generally, if you want to become a magician, a type blue, you first figure out what your potential is. What likes giving you? If you are lucky, you will find an established magic tradition that suits you. If you are very lucky, by which I mostly mean you are a type blue already and didn't know it, you can just go ahead and start practicing. Otherwise, you have to take a good, long, hard look at yourself. Because becoming a magician is hard. It takes a lot out of you. Something different from every person. It usually requires some kind of sacrifice. Question? Go ahead. No, I don't mean a blood sacrifice necessarily. Even in the anomalous community, that is very much not socially acceptable. When I say sacrifice, I mean physically, emotionally, spiritually. It's different for everyone. Why a sacrifice? Because it's about perspective. Not just your perspective, but the perspective of others on you. The perspective of reality. It's about changing how the world sees you. How you see and interact with the universe. You're confused. That's understandable. Let me try to rephrase. Becoming a magician is all about discovering and altering your metaphysical place in the world. This can be temporary or permanent. Temporary is easiest. Most people can create a really minor working or a spell. The serpent's hand members often start with making blue lily flower chains. Then they follow a really complicated set of instructions that, with the right materials and mindset, as well as membership of the serpent's hand, produce temporary potential inside them, which they can then use to work the flower chains to add magic to them. Anomalous effects. Those effects are different for everyone. It's impossible to try to make every type blue make a luck charm, because almost everyone who doesn't believe in luck will reliably fail it. Except, oddly, actual statisticians who know what it could take to create actual luck. Point is, it's not directly predictable what any one person can and can't do. Let's have some more demonstrations. At this point, you've all heard me talk in blue. Let's see what someone else can do. Agent Navarro? What do you mean no one told you in advance you need to put on a show? I'm telling you now. You up for it or not? I thought so. Alright, everyone who doesn't know, this is Agent Daniel Navarro. Agent Navarro is a former and artist and, like me, he is a type blue. Director Moose hands Agent Navarro a slip of paper and a knife. Whenever you're ready, Agent Navarro? Agent Navarro glares at Director Moose. After a moment, Navarro picks up the knife and, with a dramatic gesture, slices across his left palm. A burst of iridescent fire blazes up from the wound. Navarro holds the fire in his hand. It whirls and twists in the dimmed room. Agent Navarro was born a type blue. He discovered his town when he tried smoking as a child and got an unusual result. He discovered the blood magic aspect of his town through resources in the Wanderer's Library. Navarro conjures more bubbling bursts of iridescent fire and begins juggling. A few people cheer in the audience. Alright, that's enough Navarro. You're getting blood everywhere. Sit back down. Someone give him a bandage. Go ahead, you in the back. Ah, yes. I mentioned magic traditions. I'm actually quoting Dr. Everett Mann here, who's done some interesting thamatology studies for us. Magic is magic. The coalition are generally taught the same basic framework for magic, stuff like hue and backlash and all that. The hand tend to be less consistent. Go more into really esoteric stuff. There are many, many traditions and almost no universals, unless you're talking rituals and such which are made to work for anyone. Potential is different for different kinds of magic. One old European pagan tradition may work for you and another originating from less than 50 miles away may not. And people like Agent Navarro don't even have a tradition in any real sense. Just some stuff that works. I mentioned Navarro was born a type blue. I was not born a type blue. I became a magician another way. I was talking about potential, right? Well, to do anything serious, you can't get by on temporary potential. It has to be permanent. And that means you become a type blue. Let's be clear here. That means you become an anomalous humanoid, even if it's in a way that's nearly invisible. Agent Navarro and I, anomalous humanoids. You might say, well, if we never performed magic again, we'd be indistinguishable from normal, too, right? We'll know. Beyond our anomalous capability, there's a type of anomalous radiation associated with being a mage. The GOC have scanners that can visually read this. So do we, actually. But we don't usually use them in the field. The GOC color code this type of radiation as blue. Hence type blue. So how do you become a type blue? You have to shift your perspective on the world. You know that center you mentioned. The GOC protected magic school. They have a standing 50 million prize for anyone who can identify a reliable, universal, standardized process for becoming a type blue. And no one will ever win it because you can't just make people reliably, universally shift the perspective on the world. Almost everyone in the world is capable of doing it. But almost everyone in the world is capable of cutting off the left hand. How many people are actually going to do that? Especially if it might not even do anything for you because little did you know you needed to lose an eye. Becoming a mage isn't always as awful as that, but for some people it's worse. There are three major avenues to become a mage. Some of them are acceptable to members of Sigma 3. Most are not. I hope that which is which will be obvious. Let's start with the easy way. This is to just hang out around magic. Simple exposure. People with high potential or outright type blues. Wearing magical jewelry. Creating minor workings. Becoming a member of a magically inclined organization or a cult of some eldritch deity. A big thing is spending time in a magic saturated environment like the Wanderer's library or Sigma 3's training facilities with Sigma 3 members who are type blues. This is one principle of magic beyond the scope of what we have time for today. Like affects like and like produces like too. Do this long enough and if you're lucky you'll become a type blue. Many people aren't lucky. The second way done alongside the first way is to forcibly drastically change who you are as a person. Move countries. Change religions. Redress your sexuality. See if you can find some suppressed aspects. Alter your mind directly with anything from spells to amnestics. Scarification and tattoos are common. Give birth to a child. Raise the child. Yes, even becoming a parent changes your potential in the nature of who you are. Either way, the idea is to give something up. Sacrifice as I said. It's simplest to give up who you are. Often this is the most appealing option. More appealing than it might sound. After all, you might end up a better person when all is said and done and a better person who can perform magic. For the desperate, this method includes making a bargain with a powerful anomalous entity. However, even in the anomalous community, this is rarer than you might think because most of these entities are predatory. Many will take everything a person values and give little to nothing in return. But there is no real limit to what you can give up. These are dangerous waters. One may sacrifice body parts, loved ones, pieces of the life, their future, and in some cases, that's even worked out in the Meditian's favor. Well, not for sacrificing loved ones. I hope I don't need to tell you all that sacrificing loved ones for magical power is never worth it. Not even in practical terms. The third and final way is to change the world, or wait for the world to change. Of all these avenues of gaining supernatural power, this runs the most counter to the goals of the SCP Foundation. Yes, even more so than sacrificing loved ones, we want to preserve normalcy. The world can certainly change on its own terms, but the Foundation doesn't want the world to be forced to change by anomalous means. The servant's hand does not want to change the world. And to some extent, though you won't hear most of us in the Foundation admit this, they've succeeded. While we don't have exact numbers, we know for a fact that there are more typeblues today than there were 50 years ago. More than there were 10 years ago. At least some of this can be attributed to the recent swelling in the ranks of the hand. The chaos in certainty also understands this. This is why they wish to change the world to the liking. That's why they're called the Chaos Insurgency. It's not just a cartoon supervillain name. I mean, it is that, but it's also a statement of purpose. Sigma 3 only works with factions of the hand who do not want the world to change, at least not to the extent that the Insurgency does. They may want more typeblues in the world than we do. They may want to eventually break the Masquerade. And we don't want that, and we can't, and won't help them with that. But they still want the world intact, like we do. There are a lot of dangerous things out there, some of them people, some of them far beyond people, who have immense motivation to change our world for their own benefit. They're the worst of the things out there who want to drag us all back into the dark. In most cases, they aren't even evil. They just want to rearrange the At-Hills to make themselves the new Queen. Hopefully, now you understand why a little better. This is the only thing we can understand about some of those things, because they're unknowable in every other way. There's another side to all of this. The ultimate reason why all this type blue stuff has to be kept secret, and why we in the Foundation can't just become a cult of magicians. If the entire Foundation embraced magic, if every researcher or MTF agent took advantage of the power, the real, significant power that magic has to offer, if everyone outside of Sigma 3 all became type blues like me, then our perspective on the world would change. And if that happens, we might not be able to hold back the dangers to reality any longer. Everyone at the Foundation, at a sufficiently high level, spends their time around anomalies. We contain them, and honestly, very effectively, even with the odds so strongly against us, with science and concrete, the vast majority of our containment procedures, with exceptions made only when strictly necessary, are non-anomalous in nature. You could say that we believe in science and concrete. Can you imagine what would happen if we stopped believing? If we changed the way we saw the world, if everyone at the Foundation became mystics, it could be the end of containment, forever, the end of the Foundation's preservation of normalcy. And then we'd all be at the mercy of the horrible things out there, the old gods and demons that would ensure humanity does nothing but huddle in caves around campfires and scratch on the walls, forever. Your mileage may vary on whether this is true, but let me be clear, your mileage is only allowed to vary within the specific context of Sigma 3. I say Sigma 3 because everyone else here already knows this. No one else in the Foundation is to be exposed to this perspective, or they might not be able to contain threats to our reality. This is also why most members of the Foundation don't even know magic is real. Sounds small, but it starts small. Say a researcher fantasizes about casting Wingardium Leviosa, or an agent with an unfortunate romantic streak, and it ends with being unable to believe that Cthulhu can be contained behind sheets of steel and walls of stone. But it's not my job or your job to keep Cthulhu's containment from failing. That's the job of the rest of the Foundation. Your job is to do the things the rest of the Foundation can't. Your job is to find out what everyone else knows about Cthulhu that we don't. We share their perspective, something no one else in the Foundation can risk. In this way, we preserve the world and serve the primary mission of the SCP Foundation, in a way no one else can. Any final questions? Okay, that's a lot of hands. I'll just take one for now. Uh, yes, you're right. I didn't tell you how I became a Thai Blue. Well, I'm not going to go into detail. Let's just say I took the second way. I made sacrifices. Major sacrifices. Among other things, I deliberately did things to my own mind that I absolutely do not recommend. Many of my friends did similar things. Some did worse and failed. Some did not survive the experience. And I will never get back some of the things I gave up. Such is magic. Such is the anomalous world. But even now, I can still do something like this. Director Moose takes out a small object and places it on our lectern. A small carved Moose figurine she leans over and whispers to it. There's a gust of wind coming from nowhere in the indoor hall and a massive black cloudy figure towers over the audience, the shape of a demonic Moose with antlers stretching across the ceiling and many eyes shining like coals from within the rolling mass. Someone screams. The Moose resolves into a cartoon of frowning face with antlers, ruining the intimidating effect, then shifts and dissipates into smoke. Director Moose leans against your lectern, looking strained. The Moose figurine is gone. After a moment, she smiles. Now you know how I became director of Site 19. A joke. Just a little joke. Right? That's enough for today. I'll take questions after an hour's break from anyone who sticks around. Thank you all for coming. And see you on the other side. And a file. 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