#hmes

I’ve been staring at this message for close to three hours. I keep coming back to this tab in my internal browser. The phrase ‘the president’s English’ is haunting me. I actually googled it, I think you’re only the second or third person to use that phrase, ever. I’ve certainly never heard it in real life.

I’m not sure why I’m so flustered by this. Is this a regional thing? Is the HMES helpline closed and you just sent it here? I heard they were having some issues with gremlins. I can’t imagine that would be bad enough.

Oh, uh. Yeah, the Doctor Dolittle. Might be a psychic shock. Like a wound. You’re probably not actually hearing a goldfish’s actual thoughts, there’s some psychic emanations you’re sensitive to and your brain is filling in the blanks. Like waving your hand in front of your face in pitch black. Give it 48 hours and if it persists, we may need to do metacognition checks. Don’t do anything out of the ordinary because a dog asked you to.

I was shot tonight.

It’s almost funny, seeing myself

lying like that.

Am I really that pale?

And my lips

cracked like drought-dried dirt

and I’m wearing dark rings

underneath lifeless eyes

and on a finger.

Not the right one,

but the wrong one.

How did I get here?

Baby, please put the camera down.

I want to talk.

Hello, and welcome to the community!

I only say that because you’re probably new - most people in the extranormal community grow up knowing about the Office here.

The Office for the Preservation of Normalcy is an American institution, but we have pretty strong ties to institutions in other countries. We consider Canada’s Royal Canadian Office for the Esoteric (RCOE) a ‘big sister’ organization as we were founded in 1927 after the appointment of William McKenzie King as PM. There’s Mexico’s Secretariat of Extranormal Resources, and His Majesty’s Esoteric Services in London. BAIK, the Bureau of Anomalous Research and Control, was the USSR’s organization started by the psychic Wolf Messing under Stalin’s oversight, and the RUS IoE took over after the fall of the USSR.

That's made me wonder about several other stories of that era, since you mentioned that it wasn't an uncommon cover-up method for extranormal incidents. I grew up with the tales of Captain Nemo, The Invisible Man, The Time Traveller, the expeditions of Dr. Lidenbrock and Mr. Cavor... All that being said, the possibility of one specific story having a grain of truth has bothered me more than any of the other possibilities

...Was there actually a Martian invasion in the waning days of the 19th century?

I mentioned this phenomenon in a previous response about Moreauvians.

I’m going to have to be a little vague here - some of that stuff I’m not sure if it’s classified or not, so I won’t try out of respect to my British (and other organization) colleagues. I will say that it’s definitely not “all of them” (of the ones you’re listing or in terms of ‘famous fiction’) or even a noticeable chunk of them. If you’re ever at an AbSci University campus or reading their material, you might be able to infer some things based on what’s on the big “illegal sciences” list.

As far the last one, I have to— hold on, let me get the - yeah, “M” for “Mars”.

….what?

Anyway. Ahem.

Is that a thing that you're allowed to do to a building? I've tried to contact the landlord but he won't talk to me about it. He just accuses me of "being a fed." I wish I could get the number of his "guy," because if it's legal, I'd love to make my own house bigger on the inside.

Woof, this is a complex one. (Apartment complex? Hah.)

The simple answer is this is illegal*. The complex answer is that in the 1930s, this happened a lot. Through various extranormal means, spatially-noncompliant architecture was a service secretly provided in a few metropolitan areas, New York especially. It was understandably in high demand during the Great Depression - if you could get your extended family under one small roof, rent was effectively cheaper. Even mundane clients knew about it, and either thought it was clever architectural tricks or just didn't question it. HMES had laws on the books about this for ages, but we hadn't yet, so a lot of the practitioners of those skills who still kept those secrets came over to ply their trade from the 1910s-30s. Extranormal organized crime was known for this, and abusing it - there's only so much you can stretch a place before it goes....wonky. Mother's Hand, Uncees, Five Stars, the █████████, all of them dabbled in one way or another.

In 1932 we commenced Operation Doorway, an attempt to catalog, explore, and if possible reverse spatially-noncompliant building interiors across the country. This was mostly successful - we reversed a good amount of them, but some were too far gone. It was agreed that some buildings would stay spatially-noncompliant, provided that access to those buildings would remain in extranormal hands (typically passed down in a family), and further spatially-noncompliant architecture is extremely regulated.

May we know the inciting incident behind the creation of the Office for the Presercation of Normalacy? Do we know anything about that other than that it started in 1927?

For sure. I've talked a little about it, but the big incident that started it was the appointment of William McKenzie King as Canadian Prime Minister in 1921.

At the time, the extranormal community in Canada and the US wasn't as....robust as it is now, but it was well known in witchery circles that King was a skilled psychic medium. The public at large didn't know about that part of his life until it sort of leaked out later - he was known as "Weird Willie" for a while in the Canadian press. Anyway, even though his occult life was more or less separated from his political life, he saw to it that members of the extranormal community found their way into Canadian government, and in the process founded the Royal Canadian Office for the Esoteric, based largely on, and with guidance from, His Majesty's Esoteric Services in Britain.

After that, Canadian diplomats in the know, so to speak, reached out to American diplomats and encouraged them to create a similar agency. It took a few years (partially due to President Coolidge's "hands-off" approach to governing and his hesitation to create another government agency), but with help from RCOE, the OPN was founded in 1927!

It started about a month ago. I took the last jug of milk and some entitled prick asks me for it. Really getting up in my face and screaming at me. I kind of run off with the milk to the checkout and the prick screams something I don’t remember.

Come the next day, something is Wrong! I am a natural blonde. Imagine my shock when I look in the mirror and see my reflection staring right at me with wide eyes, and smiling blankly as she sings Barbie Girl. I quickly found out that I perceive all natural blondes (and their reflections) as staring at me with wide eyes and smiling blankly while they sing Barbie Girl. At first I thought it was a noosphere indent thing, so I took a month off work, and got rid of all my mirrors, and didn’t go outside to avoid making it worse. It didn’t help. Though it didn’t make it worse either, which is a relief. So, I’m asking you guys for help.

If I seem calm I am not. I am pretending to be calm.

Yeeep, that's a curse! And not just any curse.

This is a wizard or witch that remembers the late 90's Eurodance Plagues. In the cutthroat world of Eurodance in the early 90's, a lot of groups were turning to secretly baking memetic undertones into their music to be the catchiest and most dance-able. It was an underground arms race - the horror stories from His Majesty's Esoteric Services busting British extranormal dance halls after a full week of victims dancing nonstop are a hell of a thing.

There were so many novel cognitohazards flying around the airwaves as Eurodance made it to North America that the Office and Canada's RCOE worked together on what we now call the Scramblers - algorithms utilizing quantum random number generation to scramble the memetic undertones and render them undetectable to most human minds. They were installed on every radio broadcast tower, music production hall, and cassette manufacturer on the continent, and became fairly standard worldwide. Nowadays they’re a little outdated. Extranormal music is hard to fully control, what with Limewire and later Soundcloud, but I shudder to think of what would we do with another Haddaway on our hands without at least a base level of Scrambling.