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capricornus-rex · 5 years ago

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The Flicker of Rebellion (1)

Requested by: @calkesttiss | Prompt:

Ooo what about Cal and reader going undercover and having to wear inquisitor or trooper uniforms

Cal Kestis x Reader

Next: Part 2 | Masterlist

1 of ?

A peacefulness washes over the temple hideout. It’s a normal day in Yavin IV.

Pilots and mechanics spend their break together in the hangar, bantering about dogfights and subjects of engineering. Medics bond with their patients as they receive stories before joining this rebellion whilst tending to their wounds.

Meanwhile, the forest was teeming with hidden gems of fauna—the cawing of the unseen bird amongst the branches, the rustle of the leaves as an apex predator prowls through the vegetation, and the rippling of the water as fish swim through the current—but in the midst of this lush, serene wonder, it was also the perfect place for two certain Jedi to ease their minds.

“Remember to turn in your heel when you do that stance,”

“Good block!”

“Okay, now try to block or evade this one!”

You and Cal exchange affirmations while sparring. It has become your joint pastime while everyone else was busy back in the base; the coolness of the trees and the chirping of the birds were an ideal ambience. The less distractions, the better either of you could work. In a few days’ time in staying in Yavin IV, the two of you already had your personal training course. Sparring was just part of the regimen.

“Ooh, good one!” Cal commented and then pushes you away from your interlock of blades.

“Thanks!”

The birds and tree-dwelling creatures have made a show out of your sparring. Peeking through the thick foliage and hiding behind the wide trunks, they watch curiously at these two strange creatures dancing around with buzzing rods of light.

The sparring was cut short when an alarm blared, it was coming from the base; it had startled away you audience in the tress back into their thickets and nests.

“Could that be the alarm Cere was telling us about?” you asked Cal while keeping your eyes in the general direction of the base.

“Most likely,”

Both of you turn to look at one another. An idea lit up the bulb in your head and your lips curled to a smirk.

“Race ya for it!”

Without waiting for Cal’s reaction, you booked it out of the woods and into the path leading straight back out the base. Cal eventually caught up to you until you were neck-and-neck. The rush flowed around your bloodstreams, the fresh air invigorated your lungs, and the wind blowing in your face made you feel free as a bird. The pair of you pop out of the bushes—startling some of the rebels who were lounging close to its shade—and continued your race from there.

The alarm didn’t stop blaring until for another seven minutes, even when most of the committee has already arrived in the room. You watch the members of the committee pour into the room as they come in, you weren’t expecting to know them but it helps to know who you’re fighting with.

The facilitator of the meeting was Captain Pardell, he took the stand and welcomed everyone first and foremost. He didn’t dwell in the niceties, he grabs the audience by the collar and cuts to the purpose of the meeting.

“As you were all made aware of: this meeting revolves around the subject of the Empire’s next step is. Senator Bail Organa will present his gathered data from the Senate Building all the way from Coruscant first; for those of you who don’t know, Senator Organa represents the planet Alderaan—he is also double-jobbing between us, the Rebellion, while serving his term in the Senate. He also has the most dangerous position among all of us.”

Captain Pardell stepped away from the front and gave the floor to Senator Organa. He thanked the captain’s introduction and spiel, like the captain, he went straight to the point.

“From my time in gathering data, I had the opportunity to join most Senate meetings regarding almost any kind of subject. The one I am presenting now is about the operations that the Empire has begun on Ilum. Like most, I’ve heard of it from our allies—Captain Pardell’s team of spies, Cal Kestis and [y/n]—and then confirmed it further upon my meeting days ago.”

He inserted a data card into the holotable’s data port. The image of the planet llum appears at the center of the table. Noticeable breakage on the planet’s surface and the massive crack along the equator disturbed the audience. Murmurs buzzed about on the benches, heads turn to one another as they comment and bombard questions in hushed whispers. Captain Pardell quieted the crowd with a single raise of the hand, Senator Organa continued.

“This is Ilum in its current state. The Empire has amassed an indefinite load of kyber crystals. The count is unknown, although they’re stored in heavy-duty transport crates—such containers are able to carry a load ranging from 50 to 85 tons. It is highly likely that they are able to hit that 50 or 85-ton mark with the crystals they’ve harvested.”

More murmurs filled the room, you and Cal watch the unhinged committee members in the room turn to one another and whisper their comments.

“They’re killing the planet!” one of the committee members burst while remaining seated.

“What are they going to do with that amount of kyber?!” another faceless voice followed.

Moments later, more and more questions from the crowd were starting to sound like jeers. The both of you had eyes shifting left and right, following each committee member standing up from their bench in an impulse just to voice out their thoughts.

“Enough!” Bail Organa bellowed, and with that the crowd behaved. “As of now, the Office of the Senate was ambiguous as to what they plan to do with this tremendous amount of kyber. This is where our directive comes in.”

Bail introduces Admiral Luthus, a Mon Calamari, like the former speakers the admiral followed the same pattern. He replaces Bail’s data card with his own, as he spoke, projections popped out one after the other.

“Our data specialists managed to take hold a handful of encryption codes from Imperial ships, these encryptions have been programmed into chips such as these,” an image of a sample data chip appeared from the holotable’s projectors.

“Our engineers have retrofitted selected ships so that the pilots can pass through the Imperial blockade since their scanners will register their own code in our ships. Save one Imperial shuttle that we’ve salvaged, repaired, and reprogrammed.”

Another projection pops out, but it was the said Imperial shuttle that the fighters have salvaged from who-knows-where. Admiral Luthus continued.

“Captain Pardell has gathered a small team of spies who will board these ships and infiltrate the Imperial base. He will fill you in on the details. Captain?”

“Once through the blockade, we will land in the planet of Cheth. It is a temperate, tropical planet located in the Scarif system. Reconnaissance tells us that the Imperial has an established base in the planet,”

Captain Pardell flashes a projection of the base’s blueprint and zooms in on certain areas as he explains.

“In this base, there is an archives vault where they store copies of their plans. Security will be tight there, all necessary precautions are exercised there; but we have a trick up our sleeve. Cal Kestis and [y/n] will gain access to the archives vault. While they do their part, my men and I will create a diversion to keep troopers away from the two so they can worry less with close contact and more in retrieving the data.”

The meeting was adjourned, the committee dispersed—some remained inside conversing with today’s speakers, while the others stepped out of the room including you and Cal.

“This is a big mission,” you thought out loud to Cal.

“Yeah. Even when nobody’s telling us, I can already feel their dependence on us on my shoulders,”

“Hey,” you gently tap him by the chest and smile. “Share the load. I got your back.”

The weight that Cal had put on himself somewhat lightened, your comforting words and beaming smile was all the reassurance he needed.

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holy-mountaineering · 5 years ago

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This spread is for @Latasha-kills

Here’s the full Qabalistic Tree of Life Spread that I do. What I’m going to do is go through and briefly explain each card, its position on the Tree, and then I’ll give you a summary/synopsis of the spread as a whole. You know the routine.

Think of this spread as a sort of quantum map, or even the land of a regular map, everything is happening at once, in each place. It’s important to think of yourself as moving “through” the map but you are also simultaneously everywhere at once. For the sake of this specific experiment, think of this as a map. Maybe as a person, the Qabalistic Adam Kadmon.

Where we’re starting the journey from is Kether, the monad, the first sign of creation. We’ll call this your hometown, since it is where you’re from originally. Here we have the Princess of Wands, the earthy part of Fire.

This is the material substance that comes from fuels action. Think of this: you have to make a fire because it is cold. You have a set amount of wood. You can make a big ass, bright ass fire that will leave you cold later that night when you’re out of wood, but jazzed while it’s happening. Or you can make a smaller, less exciting fire that will keep you warm all night.

There is also a message about the last step in any action is really to become the actions and to let them become you. When your very Earthly substance is in it, you are no longer doing you just are.

Don’t burn yourself out and exhaust your resources on what you’re tackling in life right now. Do this and you shall live to dance and party another night.

In Chokmah, which is like your freeway getting you out onto the road out of your hometown is the Ace of Disks, the root power of Earth or the material.

This is the foundation which all your solid structures are and will be built on. This is the very root of your real world/material life situation. While this doesn’t mean you must tear everything down or that there is nothing in your material world that you've built, it does mean you must look at the source from which you've built your material and everyday world. If you have no foundation you can have no structure. If you have a shoddy foundation, you'll have a shoddy structure. Look to what things were like before you began building. Is there sand beneath you? Are you in a swamp, building castles of stone that will bind to the mud and be pulled down much sooner than later? Did you account for the raise in elevation when you laid your foundation? Look down to the base of what you've made and what you've made it upon.

This is an engineering job, you’ll need tools to measure and level everything out. The occult might not be the best place to find these tools and it is possible that you have issues much more base than you're willing to cop to. There are many tools you can use to look at your foundation provided in psychology and meditation from other sources. The Universe throws us extreme situations and more often than not, this is the only way people see their basest of instincts and behaviors really act out. If you can, take a look at what connects you and what you’re building to the Earth before an earthquake, tornado, volcano, or other act of G-D forces you to pray everything was fine. Check the strength of your foundations before the strength of your foundations are checked.

Get down to the base fundamentals of what is going on in your material (things, money, living situation, literal stuff) and build from the ground up if you must.

In Binah, which is ruled by Saturn and for the sake of this reading we will call the first stop on your roadtrip. You haven’t really arrived anywhere but you’re stopping and getting a chance to repack your car in a more efficient way. Sitting in Binah is the 7 of Swords, Futility.

This is the main thrust of the Will through the mind being thwarted by in helpful organization of ideas. Each sword with a planetary sigil are like the spikes in a parking garage, one way. It isn’t that the ideas or aspects represented by these swords are “bad” just that their placement and yours are not lined up in the best way right now.

Mentally and communication wise pull back from what you’re going at and work on how you’re organizing the information in your head.

In Chesed which is ruled by Jupiter and again for the sake of this experiment we’ll say involves your influence and benevolence in your current trip is the 6 of Swords, Science!

This is thinking and communicating in its idealized form. This is the system building card where individual thoughts are organized into a repeatable formula. Mercury’s intelligence is flowing through the Water Bearer Aquarius and coming down to useful data gathering techniques.

Organize the way you’re thinking about what you’re doing to reflect all of the information you have available. Be scholarly about your thought process and write shit down goddamnit.

Across the Tree in Geburah, which is Mars Town, where you find your drive and what you’re trying to accomplish/conquer is VII The Chariot, Cheth, Cancer.

I like to think of the Chariot as an armored train. The Four elements are the engine pulling the otherwise stagnate charioteer of Cancer down the predetermined path. While they pull him toward his goal he stays in his armored shell focusing on his moving center. This is not about “going off the beaten path” at all, this is “staying on track” to take care of yourself and Yourself, if you catch my meanings. The armour of the night is “not to keep others out, but to keep the Knight focused in.” to paraphrase. The rotating center is the Knight’s center, from His perspective, the center of All.

Stay on your path, you might not be driving the train but it’ll get you going where you need to be. Focus on your soft inside bits like the crab does, you can only fit so much in your current state.

In Tiphareth, the Sun and center of gravity holding all this in place, the heart pumping the blood through this, your heart is IV The Emperor, Tzaddi, Aries.

The Emperor is the activating consort of III The Empress. He is King of Spring, the sign of Aries being his energy. He has the energy of the Sun, who in spring gets closer to the Earth and revitalizes the plant growth. The Emperor is formulated, active energy that causes force and growth.

This is new growth brought about like the spring that Aries heralds. Like the season of Spring, this card is activating the potential growth of the Earth, that is to say, the time is right to spring forth and grow as you can, with what you have.

Get formulated and active. Put things in their place or notice the NATURAL orbits of things. What works is that which grows from your energy.

In Netzach, Venus town, where you have the realization about how this is going to change you as a person with a personality is the (often misunderstood, like you) 5 of Disks, Worry.

Like all of the 5s in Tarot, this is the microcosmic or human number . Don’t believe me? Stand up, stick your arms and legs out and counting your head, congrats, you’re a pentagram. Lord knows people worry like motherfuckers about how they are going to get by in the “normal” world, so there is a stress and strain in this card that everyone late on a bill can understand. This is the worry that you’ll get your intelligence (Mercury) smothered by the laborious strain of Taurus. This is, like all 5s a human limitation issue.

Well it won’t unless you only see your limitations and make it happen. Be smarter about you material situation so you don’t have to work harder.

In Mercury Town Hod-ville, where all the Universities are and everyone has real intellectual shit going on is XX The Aeon, Shin, Fire.

Think about where you are now and how you go about doing things in general. Do you remember a time before this point in your life when you acted differently and didn’t have this kind of understanding of the world? The Aeon is a new understanding and thus a new way of acting in your life.

Harpocrates giving the sign of silence has to do with the meditative process of accepting this new law of life. You must truly grasp the meaning of this change in order to act in the new “spirit of the age” if you will.

You are being born anew through fire and blood, you are emerging from the egg in the background and coming forth. What you take away from this will be with you forever but one day will also be improved on and brought to a new level.

On the Moon in Yesod, the receptive and reflective place that is alot about the feelings that you’re picking up from all this is MY GIRL, XI Lvst, Teth, Leo, OUR LADY BABALON.

This is the Serpent motion of the True Will. Both Teth and Leo represent the Snake. Leo was later attributed to the lion but originally it was a snake as you can see by the shape of it’s glyph. The top of the card itself shows snakes (obviously stand ins for sperm) drawing near to the newly torn horizon BABALON has ripped. There are human figures meekly praying beneath the Beast that she rides with the stirrups taunt because SHE is in control of this act. The practical implications is the drive and Will to Do What Thou Wilt at the expense of the weak who would drag you to their grovelling level without a second thought.

You might need to move “irregularly” like the serpent but very few predators take on snakes and they get to go about their snaky business generally unharmed. In short do what you Need to do, nay sayers be damned. Move powerfully even if you’re so far off the “beaten path” you’re smashing through the thickets.

Down here in Malkuth-istan, the everyday life mundane, waking up pooping, and going to work world is the The Knight of Swords, the fiery part of Air or acting on thinking.

This is the breeze blowing the forest fire across a road. Our Knight has a sword in each hand as he dive bombs a fixed point. He has his airy bird friends in tow and his steed is as fixed as the rider.

You understand what you must do. Now, you must gather all available force to throw at your new focus.

So, there’s a lot ahead of you on this path so work on pacing yourself so you don’t just burn out quickly. It will help to start from scratch, look at the foundation of what you’re building to ensure that it is solid. If you feel like there is a lot of pressure on you right now, back up and reexamine how you’re approaching things. You have (intentionally or not) called forth things that are supposed to assist you on your travels, but they are big and scary if you come at them wrong. Find the path of least resistance, things being very difficult doesn’t mean they’re right.

That being said, take those big things you see as “in the way” and reorganize those shits so you can use them! This is a bit like “Captain Planet” (terrible cartoon reference that dates how old I am) in that when you combine all these powers they’ll serve you much better. And this may not be news to you, but the direction you’re heading is the right direction as long as you reliquish some control over it. You’re on train tracks, they’re moving one way and again, stay the course, there are forces that wish to help you down this path, trust them. Once you’ve got this idea in your head, the idea that you can use these powers around you to your benefit, you will feel a lot more ordered and in control of the actions you’re taking. Feel that power and vigor and know that it is good and what you’ve been needing.

You are growing and evolving at the correct rate. Don’t rush yourself or get too impatient with yourself. You are just human and so is everyone else, so don’t put too much on yourself or others and realize you’re just a person. However, you are going to be coming to a new realization about the world around you and your place in it. This is the knowledge that comes with age and experience and there’s no way to rush it or explain it before you’re ready, just know that it is happening and begin to work on understanding it for yourself. This is going to involve some “irregular Strength” in the way that it may seem odd to other people, but it is just the way you need to move right now and you should surround yourself with that energy that allows you to make your own moves, your own way that are powerful and individual to you.

And when you have that friend, you shall take all that you have and throw it at this task to get it done, but as in Kether way up there, in a way that isn’t going to just burn you out. DO, but do for you, as you must, in your time!

Ta Da! Hit me up with any questions!

#tarot spreads #tree of life tarot spread #occult #magick #divination #cartomancy

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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Internet Occultists Are Trying To Change Reality With a Magickal Algorithm

Symbols carry an undeniable power—whether it's the Ankh, the crucifix, or the golden arches of McDonald's.

For thousands of years, runes, glyphs, and icons have been used in occult rituals and spiritual practices to mess with reality. Today, drawings imbued with the desires of their creators—called sigils—are undergoing a resurgence. Advocates insist they really work, and a new app called the Sigil Engine automates the whole process, aiming to make inventing reality even more accessible.

A sigil is a symbol used for magickal practice, typically created from scratch by the practitioner, and imbued with psychic energy to influence events. (That's magick with a k, to differentiate these rites from pulling rabbits out of hats.) Aspiring sigil creators could already tap into a wealth of resources to learn how to draw their own magickal signs, from online libraries to how-to guides on TikTok, or influential "chaos magick" texts like Liber Null and Condensed Chaos.

The sigil creation process usually goes like this: write down whatever you want to achieve, remove any vowels and repeating letters, and then position the remaining letters into a pleasing arrangement. Finally, you've got to "charge" your creation. Methods for this vary, but you could meditate, sing at, or, most commonly, masturbate to your symbol, before finally destroying or forgetting all about it and awaiting the results.

Skeptics might balk at the idea of drawing our own realities, but others may also find themselves surprised at the results, which believers say work best when they're within the boundaries of your day-to-day life. "There's no point charging a sigil to win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket," chaos magician and comic book writer Grant Morrison once wrote. To test out sigils, Morrison famously modeled a character after themselves in The Invisibles and began to see cruel events inflicted on the fictional figure, such as burst lungs, actually transpire in real life. They decided to be kinder to the character after that.

Users of the Sigil Engine, though, rely on code to do much of the legwork. When visitors land on the URL, they're greeted by a sparkling black background and a prompt to type their "intention." Doing so will set the Engine in motion, drawing the sign in bright red. Co-creator Darragh Mason, who hosts the Spirit Box podcast, describes this flourish as "a prayer or a moment of reverence to the goddess Babalon," found within the Thelemic system first synthesised by British occultist Aleister Crowley. The backdrop alludes to "the great expansive void from which all things spring".

"We wanted to create something that actually felt magical when you used it," Mason told Motherboard. "For a lot of people in their magickal practice, the aesthetic helps give it more potency, so we were very conscious: we wanted to have the process of creating a sigil—removing the vowels, removing repeating letters, creating the actual symbol itself—to be experiential, something that drew you in and [gave] it a sense of wonder."

A unique sigil generated by the Sigil Engine by typing "Protect the Perseverance Rover on Mars"

To ensure the final sigil is almost guaranteed to be unique, the application logs the speed of typing, the time between keystrokes, and compares these to the entirety of the Liber Cheth vel Vallum Abiegni, a Thelemic text that's contained within the code.

The measurements are combined to return a unique value for each of the base characters, says co-creator David Tidman. More number-crunching normalizes a very large figure to between 0.0 and 1.0, which is finally used to position each character on a point around the circle—for example, a character with a value of between 0.51 and 0.54 would be located at the 11th of 21 points in total. At the moment, whatever the user types is stored temporarily and then deleted, but Tidman says in future this information won't be stored at all, and that there are no personal identifiers logged when visitors type their intentions.

The final illustration generated by the Sigil Engine is placed within a circle—a nod, its creators say, to the Goetic seals of demons in the Lesser Key of Solomon, a medieval "grimoire," or magical book, from the mid-17th century, that more recently made an appearance in Ari Aster's Hereditary.

Released in late 2020, the Sigil Engine has now been used more than 300,000 times, with people typing their magickal intentions spread across seven continents. According to the creators, at least some of the Engine's users say it works, with success stories covering everything from home renovations to fertility, and even those who have made automated sigil production part of their daily routine.

It was important for both Mason and Tidman to have the aesthetic drive the application, and keep the whole process feeling experiential, magickal, and accessible. "We wanted the input of the intention to feel like part of the app, so we created our own keyboard component from scratch instead — each key touch pulses red, with the key components slightly transparent so particles show through, which really connects the keyboard to the app itself," Tidman told Motherboard..

The Sigil Engine was first conceived as a vast, participatory art project, but the sheer amount of interest has made their original idea to project the sigils one after the other in a public place impossible. For Mason, though, the purpose of creating the Sigil Engine was not only to build an experiential, useful tool, but to better understand whether magick could be made to work within a digital context.

Belief in magick has persisted throughout history, and technological advances have changed mostly the scale, accessibility, and form in which it is executed. In antiquity, magickal rites were performed first through repetition of speech. Then came writing, books, the printing press, and now, the internet and social media. "There's always been that kind of tension between the shift of technology: does it devalue? Does it still work? What's the next step: can it work in digital format?" said Mason.

People have tried to elevate their consciousness, influence reality, and gain special insights with signs and symbols for thousands of years. If you look closely at modern Chinese characters, for example, you can see that they're ancestrally related to something called 'Oracle Bone Script'—where emblems were carved into bone and used for "pyromantic divination," or fire magic—dating back to the 2nd millennium BCE. The Greek Magical Papyri, a book of spells, hymns, and rituals with some components from the 100s BCE, also continues to capture the imagination of practitioners and academics today.

But sigil practice as we recognize it can be traced to the work of English proto-surrealist Austin Osman Spare, one of the most "charismatic characters to come out of the occult revival of the late 19th and early 20th century," writes David Keenan in his book England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground.

Spare believed that sigils enabled "effective communion with subconscious levels" and the "lodging of a desire or wish at subconscious levels without the conscious mind being involved or aware". In other words, the mere creation of a sigil helps to nest the idea within a person, who can then go about fulfilling their wish, perhaps automatically. "By virtue of the Sigil you are able to send your desire into the subconscious (the place where all dreams meet)," Spare once wrote.

Technology like the printing press has allowed magick to scale, but the Sigil Engine is not the first experiment with sigils of its kind.

A collective called Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth (TOPY), formed in 1981 with Throbbing Gristle founder Genesis P-Orridge and others from England's transgressive industrial counter-culture, held sigils at the heart of their practice. This included concerted sigil creation on the 23rd hour of the 23rd day each month, and even mass-masturbation events that coordinated orgasms in tandem. "[The Temple was] remarkable for setting up a non-hierarchical system to explore sex magick and sigils in a co-ordinated international level," P-Orridge is quoted as saying in England's Hidden Reverse. "Nobody else has synchronised literally thousand of orgasms to a single purpose, just to see what happens!"

To Owen Davies, a history professor at the University of Hertfordshire and the author of Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, the latest digital iterations of magick are not far away from their origins. The internet and computers, he says, do not vanquish belief in magick, but create new ways to engage with it.

"The relationship between magic and technology is entwined," Davies told Motherboard. "When we first move from papyrus to books, that's a big technological change—it also shapes and changes the way in which magic is written, disseminated."

"When you get the advent of moving from carving on clay tablets to inks, that's a new technology," Davies continued. "When you introduce inks, you can have ink of all different types, and different types can have new meanings and potencies. Then you move to the printing press again, another new technology, which once again democratizes in the sense the production of sigils."

As technology marches towards an even more direct relationship with the physical world, the Sigil Engine may also follow this trend. Mason and Tidman are already considering generating AutoCAD files, so that sigil designs can be easily exported to 3D printers. They are also toying with the idea of creating a full mobile application, which would allow users to save the sigils more easily to their devices, or "dissolve" them permanently within the app, mirroring the destruction of paper sigils in more traditional practice.

With the exception of the ultra-rich, most of us can agree that reality has been especially shitty lately. As Grant Morrison said of sigils at the 2000 Disinfo Conference: "I'm here to tell you to try it when you go home tonight because it fucking works … We're dealing with some kind of operating system that can be hacked, using words, and words seem to be the binding agent for this thing, whatever it is."

There's no guarantee we can magick our way out of the various crises we now face. But with the Sigil Engine taking less than 10 seconds to spin up, at least it's easier than ever to give it a metaphysical shot.

Internet Occultists Are Trying To Change Reality With a Magickal Algorithm syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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