preservationofnormalcy - Tumblr blog

[preservationofnormalcy]

Jenny, uh. I know you’re busy but the files are starting to pile up, and-

NORM. Do you understand the kinds of mountains I am trying to move here? Wren pulled *literal* miracles out of their ass year after year for this event, called in favors from actual gods, and I'm just one intern who makes like nothing an hour. Everything needs to be perfect, everyone needs to have a good time, and if I keep getting interrupted when I'm FINALLY off hold with the goddamn food truck, I will burn this entire campus to the fucking groun—

Hi! Yes, I'm here! This is Jenny Cold, with the OPN, I wanted to know if you'd be interested in helping out with our pride event...hello? Hello???

….I can pull some strings. My moleman contact does fried rat that’s actually pretty good—

I have to do it myself, Norm.

[preservationofnormalcy]

Hey, everybody. Sort of a serious OOC message today.

Jenny's writer @skipperdamned 's cat has been diagnosed with FIP, and is in need of help transitioning to palliative care. To help, I wanted to run a little fundraiser.

For the next week, if you donate at least 5 USD to Penny's ko-fi, I will send you either a free art card or a small handful of the black and white mini stickers. Send an email to normatopn@gmail.com with a screenshot of proof of donation, your choice (and choice of art card), and your address if you feel comfortable with it. I'll probably wait a few days so I'm making as few trips as possible. Remember that you can find the galleries of all my designs (and thus the art card designs) in these two posts.

I will include the free art card in any upcoming orders for the next week if I also get proof of donation. If you have ALREADY donated to Penny's ko-fi, this offer is retroactive - send me an email and I'll put you on the list.

Take care of your furry friends, everyone. Thanks for reading.

[preservationofnormalcy]

Paralegal Jim here, got a request for Chronology that can't go through usual channels. We've got a time traveler on our hands who entered into a blood debt while they were timehopping. Out last Monday afternoon, arrive next April, get in trouble, standard contract to get out of it, back last Monday morning. (My head hurts.)

The other party is trying to cash in now. They say the debt has been in force since Monday morning because there's week-old signatures on a contract that won't exist for another twelve months. (My head hurts even more.)

We're fighting it of course, haven't lost a blood debt case yet, but we've never had to deal with time travel. Not-asking-for-legal-advice you-are-not-our-lawyer, but if you had a personal opinion about whether we've got a shot that'd be great. I've spent the past seven hours on Westlaw and let me tell you they got nothing.

Hoo boy. I’d have to double check with Relativistic Scheduling but my understanding is that all agreements undertaken (contracts, debts, etc) while engaging in nonstandard chronology must be agreed to under a system of informed consent.

Meaning that our time traveling friend must have informed the holder of the debt that they were engaging in nonstandard chronology in order for the agreement to have been valid at any point in chronological time. This could render the contract null and void since one party was not informed of the complication, but that party can now seek restitution for blood debt fraud. You may want to tell your client that.

Not-a-legal-professional but I’d contact Foras, Gwyll, and Zendion-1 & Associates. They specialize in all kinds of extranormal law.

Hey, Alanna, it's Jenny. I was wondering, I'm trying to plan a pride thing for my job, and I wanted to get some musical acts. Do you still talk with Billie? No, I realize all sirens aren't related, but she's literally your cousin.

[preservationofnormalcy]

Do you have any favorite types of crypto-botanical plants?

I think this was meant for Hazel a few months back and it got lost in the system, but I might as well answer it.

Cryptobotany usually refers to the study or cultivation of terrestrial plants, but more broadly it can refer to plants (or plant-adjacent organisms) from other planets or planes.

My…someone special to me once brought a plant called a Gateleaf from Paradise. It grows around the gates there. Don’t look for one, it’s technically illegal to import, but…it’s all over now so.

It had this…pearlescent quality to it, shifting patterns in the broad green. She always said it was reflecting light and energy from Paradise itself, including sound. It was a reminder of home, being able to see, feel, and hear it any time. To my human senses, it took some getting used to. Even a reflection of the light from Paradise acts differently here, and the sounds were not exactly….you could hear the Choir sometimes. The Choir was…unearthly, literally. The voices weren’t human, and that’s easy to say. To hear it is another thing entirely. I think it’s called hauntology, like listening to a past version of yourself. Your brain fills in the voices, partially. She’d be sitting reading next to it, start humming along. It was…haunting, and beautiful. Like she was.

It died, unfortunately. But I miss it. That’s my favorite type of cryptobotanical plant.

[preservationofnormalcy]

A friend of mine completely broke contact with me for months now after he apparently "found something", and just recently he texted me. It was...complete nonsense, but the only part that made sense to me implied that he was going to burn down the nearby forest to "make those feyfolk pay". He's probably having a mental breakdown, and I'm trying to find him right now, but I'm asking if there might be something more to this.

Sometimes, the weight of the myths and legends and real events throughout history can….break someone. It’s a risk you run when you operate behind a veil, as is our longtime policy.

With so much history and myth, someone finds out werewolves are real, they want to become a “hunter” - not remembering that these are people. Witches, wizards, vampires, whatever. Most people that pass through the veil, as it were, are hopefully given context for what they’re seeing. That was my primary job when I was active duty, first contact with folks who hadn’t interacted with the Office, whether that’s in-veil or outside it. For people not in the veil, we’d hopefully explain things away as normal. Sometimes that wasn’t possible, so I and other agents like me would help provide context and support to these folks, to avoid what you’re seeing now.

Sometimes that doesn’t happen. So many years seeing these things as storybook monsters with no depth, and it gets to people. They’re treating other people like objects, like things. As a wise woman once said, the trouble starts when you start treating people like things.

Now, this is all on the assumption that your friend was not in the know before this. If they were that doesn’t change much, but the more likely scenario is they weren’t. We can send you some resources on staging an intervention, and if that doesn’t work we can step in before he does anything drastic. The goal here is to keep people safe, including your friend. Maybe he was victimized by a specific fae or group of fae, and in that case we can give him resources for legal redress. Fae nomenclature theft or literal-wording scams are illegal, and we’re going to help him in that case.

Be careful, be safe. If he’s stockpiling iron already, call us.

Jenny, do you want to get some intervention packets ready? And put LEP Recon in the loop.

Hi, I was wondering, are your bouncy castles talon and claw resistant? Hello? Hello? They hung up on me.

…I got it.

[preservationofnormalcy]

Are there any other harmful extranormal religions to look out for? Other than Radiant Heart, I mean.

I’ve actually been meaning to put out some information on this. We’ve been seeing a lot of weird stuff lately in certain areas of the country and we haven’t yet collated it into an official statement. I checked and I’m okay to give you a rundown of this ahead of a more detailed overview later on.

If you’re in the southeast of the United States, please keep an eye out for an organization of interest that seems to be self-identifying as Cult of the Coaxial. Currently several members of their organization are wanted for—

You might wanna put a content warning on this one, Norm.

Oh, right. That’s smart. You okay?

I hear hold music in my head when my phone is across the room.

Yeah, that’ll do it. Anyway, uh, content warning for explicit mentions of violence here. Theft, murder, assault, brain uploading, extranormal mutilation and/or vivisection, torture, attempted apotheosis, transmogrification, attempted creation of a post-post-post-human being via cyborgification, trafficking harmful extranormal items, the list sort of goes on.

We’re still trying to nail down a belief system or ontology. The ones we’ve managed to corner are not super…talkative. But we think that they’re related to The Signal, an extranormal force/phenomenon our AbTech division dealt with in the 1980s. We don’t know much about that either, but what we do know is that it travels or exists entirely within analog transmission devices and exerts a cognitohazardous effect on humans or near-humans.

Now, we don’t know how widespread they are, but we’re asking people to keep their eyes open for the following warning signs:

- cathode ray tube televisions behaving oddly

- an abnormal amount of static in televisions or radios

- a heightened interest in cathode ray tube televisions in the local population up to and including theft of such devices

- abnormal appearance and behavior of visually standard coaxial cables including growth, self-propulsion, splitting and “ivy” behavior

- blood or other substances “leaking” from the aforementioned devices

- persons using the aforementioned devices in place of surgically removed body parts, or integrated into the body. This includes coaxial cables, televisions, radios, VHS tapes or players, etc.

- graffiti or markings relating to any of the above

Please report any and all deleterious analog activity to our Office tip line.

[preservationofnormalcy]

Cubes have 9 sides. Iknow they have 9 sides but every time I try to say it it comes out as 9 sides. 9 sides. Nine sides. I know they have nine sides and not nine sides, but I can only say that they have nine sides. I have a geometry research paper due and I can't have it saying that cubes have 9 sides. Help?

Easy now. What you're seeing here is a normal case of what we call noncompliant mathematics, when your personal perception of mathematics is altered such that it does not align with the consensus on how numbers work. I once knew a guy who couldn't shake the notion that 2 + 2 = a small rock. That one was contagious, actually, but we reverse engineered the coghaz on it and released the memetic inoculation to the surrounding area via the local stop signs.

This doesn't seem too bad of a case - I used to have a pamphlet about this, but as a first step, you're going to want to take a few days off work. Get some food and supplies and just try and do as little as possible for about 48 hours. The goal is to do no math at all in that time, which is difficult - as humans we do math when figuring out distances, amounts, in music and other hobbies. It'll be boring, but it's like a muscle injury. Continuing to exercise that mental muscle is only going to cause problems, and you need to rest it in order for it to "heal" and for your perception to snap back to normal.

Jenny, could you get ready to send this person our noncompliant math survival kit? It'll have a pamphlet and some suggestions on things to listen to, non-repeating white noise mainly--

-is Ambrose still in that Weezer cover band? Wiizard, or whatever?

Uh, I think so. Why, are you -- oh no, I wouldn't hire them. Ambrose wouldn't accept money, but to be frank, you get what you pay for with them.

[preservationofnormalcy]

Hey, everybody. Sort of a serious OOC message today.

Jenny's writer @skipperdamned 's cat has been diagnosed with FIP, and is in need of help transitioning to palliative care. To help, I wanted to run a little fundraiser.

For the next week, if you donate at least 5 USD to Penny's ko-fi, I will send you either a free art card or a small handful of the black and white mini stickers. Send an email to normatopn@gmail.com with a screenshot of proof of donation, your choice (and choice of art card), and your address if you feel comfortable with it. I'll probably wait a few days so I'm making as few trips as possible. Remember that you can find the galleries of all my designs (and thus the art card designs) in these two posts.

I will include the free art card in any upcoming orders for the next week if I also get proof of donation. If you have ALREADY donated to Penny's ko-fi, this offer is retroactive - send me an email and I'll put you on the list.

Take care of your furry friends, everyone. Thanks for reading.

[preservationofnormalcy]

Hey, everybody. Sort of a serious OOC message today.

Jenny's writer @skipperdamned 's cat has been diagnosed with FIP, and is in need of help transitioning to palliative care. To help, I wanted to run a little fundraiser.

For the next week, if you donate at least 5 USD to Penny's ko-fi, I will send you either a free art card or a small handful of the black and white mini stickers. Send an email to normatopn@gmail.com with a screenshot of proof of donation, your choice (and choice of art card), and your address if you feel comfortable with it. I'll probably wait a few days so I'm making as few trips as possible. Remember that you can find the galleries of all my designs (and thus the art card designs) in these two posts.

I will include the free art card in any upcoming orders for the next week if I also get proof of donation. If you have ALREADY donated to Penny's ko-fi, this offer is retroactive - send me an email and I'll put you on the list.

Take care of your furry friends, everyone. Thanks for reading.

[preservationofnormalcy]

Sorry it's a little short notice but I'm going to be at this market on the 25th in Calgary!

[preservationofnormalcy]

Hello! I had a rather ...uh pressing question regarding noospheric entities?

Is it normal for them to be manifested into physicality but not visibility? I have a bit of a hulucination issue (long story involving some things I'm not proud of) and uh starting last week, a 6 foot tall duck began to show up, now normaly I can handle it but when that duck ate a sandwich that a person was putting together that's when I figured somthing up. Any advice on how to deal with it?

Ah, the old imaginary friend.

In these cases the first thing is to discern whether the entity in question is a subjective or objective experience. You’ll have to be careful with that - remember that perception is reality.

Say an entity or phenomenon exists entirely in your personal perception. If that entity eats a sandwich, the majority of the time, that sandwich is gone. To you. Entities that exist within one person’s perception can get away with a lot because we are by nature self centered and may not check other people’s perceptions. If something has changed for you, it often doesn’t matter if it’s “real” or “exists” outside of you. You sometimes still need help.

The crucial thing is if you were able to verify if other people perceived the sandwich as gone. The more the better. If that’s the case, that changes how we approach this. Let us know and we’ll see if we can get you checked into Metacognition.

Clowns, maybe? Norm, do Clowns find it offensive when other sapients dress up as them?

I don’t think so. Helps their cover. But you could just hire clowns. You know, clowns clowns. I should have Columbina’s number somewhere.

[preservationofnormalcy]

Hey there folks! Dr. Saltpeter here. I figured I'd see if you had any advice on a real hum-dinger of a headscratcher we've got goin on. See, I'm in charge o' a project over at [REDACTED] and we got sent this set o' rune-carved bones some of the boys dug up over in [REDACTED].

Obviously we set to doin the standard safety stuff with it, but wouldn't ya know it, we comes in to work today and now we got two doctor Johnsons and no sample!

It's real emberrasin', ain't my face red, but we was wonderin' if you fine folks had any input on how we could figure out which of the doctors johnson we got here is the real one so's we can all go home. [REDACTED]'s a real stickler for not lettin' anybody out when this kinda thing happens doncha know?

We've got a pack a playin' cards if that helps ya out any! I think I remember hearin' that kinda thing can be useful!

As thanks in advance I attached a recipe for chicken casserole down below!

[REDACTED]

Oh hey, Doc. How’s the kids? Still at AbSci? Let them know Uncle Norm says hi and they should swing by Social Media. Especially if AbSci is working on anything. They know how Norm likes to keep tabs on that. Because I have the utmost respect for AbSci, who are definitely not mad scientists. I’d get in trouble for saying they were!

And yeah, you know how it goes with unexplained doppelgängers. You’re probably already in lockdown, both Doctors Johnson in solitary confinement until we can sort it out. Remember: we don’t shoot until we know the nature of the doppel! We want to avoid “I’m the real” scenarios.

With the playing cards, you probably know the drill, but for our readers - a deck of playing cards is a great tool for determining if something is a cognitive construct. It’s at least a good first step, for two reasons.

One is a sociocultural context. Often, a lot of human-replicating entities or constructs will be pretty okay at passing a sort of organic Turing test, but lack any sort of context for what they’re saying. You can try and play poker with one, and they might of might not be technically good, but ask a construct whether two black Aces and two black eights is a good hand and they’ll usually not even mention the infamous Dead Man’s Hand.

Two is familiarity. Playing a card game is a good activity to gauge whether the thing before you is in fact Doctor Johnson. Memories typically aren’t transferred, small quirks are lost in the shuffle. It’s not about playing the game, it’s about gauging the people you’re playing with.

I’ll still see if we can get O-Sec down there with doppel procedures. Jenny, could you-

One sec, Norm. Hi! Im planning an event for my workplace and was wondering, how short of notice can you get me the rainbow flower arch from your online catologue? ...Sure, I'll hold.

[preservationofnormalcy]

[preservationofnormalcy]

The mountain I live on is always singing about how lonely he is, and while he has a very nice singing voice it's also very loud and all the sad songs are starting to bring down everyone's mood. We tried talking to him but I think he wants another mountain friend. Any way we could help him out with this?

Aww. Poor guy.

Genus loci are always a little tricky, balancing the needs and comfort of one larger sapience with the needs and comfort of others - typically ones that live on or around the former. We actually just had a rough case in California, someone rigged up a true “smart home” and we had to shut it down. We’re lucky that terra loci like this are often pretty chill.

However, since ETCetRA (the European Thaumaturgical Centre for Research and Analysis) banned geomancy on this scale sometime in the…40s, I think, it’ll be hard to really fulfill a request like this. I can pass this on to Applied Thaumaturgy.

…hm. Might also slip a messenger pigeon to some folks in the West Virginia office. We’ve got some druids on the payroll. If anyone would know what to do, it’s the folks with a connection to the Green.

[preservationofnormalcy]

Ok, so, I just got introduced to the paranormal, it's a lot to take in, but I have a question that I haven't been able to find any answers on from sources familiar with the supernatural.

Is the Antarctica really that barren past the coasts? My good pal (who I just found out is a fairy or something similar) has no clue.

I've always had a deep-seated interest in the place and a desire to go there, but I want to know if there's gonna be anything inland besides ice and wind.

Anything? You mean besides a thriving polar desert and underwater ecosystem, with a remarkably intact food web and very little sapient interference?

There's phyto and zooplankton, fish, krill, the penguins and squid that eat them, the seals and whales that eat them...

Just because it's not hospitable to most humanoid sapients, people write it off as being nothing but ice and wind! Ughhh, anthropocentrism really boils my kra'thak! And that's not even getting into the complex ecological and social interactions of Cryptid species like the Outsider Penguins, or Ice Ghosts...

And of course, the Sovereign of Antarctica.

Well, obviously the Sovereign of Antarctica.

[preservationofnormalcy]

I gave a goose that had uh...a few more heads than normal a piece of toast, and now it's following me around and..Yelping? I don't really know how to explain it, but the bird has gained at least two more heads than the original three since I fed it-

We put out a statement last Thanksgiving re: the whole AbSci University Farms debacle. A lot of people bought "extra large turkeyzillas" and lo and behold, when you use dubiously-acquired zetan genetic engineering technology and apply it to a holiday dinner, sometimes you get heat-activated rapid evolution and results in a critter that eats the family dog.

I'm not saying that the kind folks at AbSci have disregarded our warning about that technology and continued experimenting, but I am saying that AbSci's Forbidden Sciences Compliance Board should really be looking into some things on campus.

Put the bird in the bathroom, don't feed it again. For my sake.

[preservationofnormalcy]

Sorry it's a little short notice but I'm going to be at this market on the 25th in Calgary!