#rcoe

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.

Cats are weird, man.

It’s been pretty obvious, though understudied, that our feline friends aren’t totally “in this universe” on a good day. We’re not really sure why, and anyone that tells you they know is lying to you. We’re reasonably sure cats aren’t alien, or Outsider touched, or even sapient. Typically.

A lot of them can at least see into the various planes that overlap realspace. That’s why cats aren’t allowed on Office grounds, except the main Library in Archival, because our resident archivist expert Miss Cece is a persuasive lady.

Thank you for uploading the picture, by the way. The cognitohazard scrubbers come back clean, so….ah, yeah, I’ve seen this before. Good news and bad news. The good news is your cat is helping you with your [REDACTED MEMETICS DETECTED, SCRUBBERS ENGAGED. PROTOCOL DANGERMOUSE ENACTED. PLEASE STAND BY.] infestation. The bad news is you have a [REDACTED MEMETICS DETECTED, SCRUBBERS ENGAGED. PROTOCOL DANGERMOUSE ENACTED. PLEASE STAND BY.] infestation. This should honestly go away in a few days. Don’t look at them, don’t touch them with bare skin, and for the love of god don’t let the carcasses touch any right angles. You can burn the carcasses according to local fire regulations. If burning is not an option, contact the Office Esoteric Waste Management team and we’ll dispose of them properly.

I remember the first time I saw a colony of [REDACTED MEMETICS DETECTED, SCRUBBERS ENGAGED. PROTOCOL DANGERMOUSE ENACTED. PLEASE STAND BY.] in an abandoned building in….was that Toronto? Yeah. I was helping RCOE with a [REDACTED MEMETICS DETECTED, SCRUBBERS ENGAGED. PROTOCOL DANGERMOUSE ENACTED. PLEASE STAND BY.] colony that had been seen in the building. Causing all kinds of ruckus in the local fabric of reality, let me tell you. Worse yet, Toronto has one of the nodes for Yukon Prime, Canada’s National AI project. My Canadian friends might know that Prime is a little eclectic at the best of times so they were concerned.

At first I thought it was just a sore throat, but I coughed up a little skyscraper this morning, and there was a whole city when I looked in.

It seems pretty unhealthy to keep it in there, but I don't really know what to do about it?

Ooof, okay. This is gonna sound gross but do not induce vomiting. You might be tempted to, but extranormality aside there is no reason to induce vomiting without a doctor present. Friendly reminder. Don't hurt yourself like that.

Youse sound like a good dad, Boss.

Aren't you supposed to be playing poker?

Anyway - try to be on a liquid diet until you can come in to a physical location. If that's not possible, it's probable that this will pass on its own. Usually memetic diseases will sort of rumble softly and leave quietly as the mind's natural memetic inoculation takes over. Because that's probably what this is, a cognitohazard presenting more like a physical virus. That's a really interesting topic, actually, because we think that the human brain's memetic defenses operate almost entirely on a principle we call noospheric rebound or more colloquially the "not my problem" effect. Of course, it is your problem given it's in your throat, but a few nights of sleeping will reinforce the consensus reality that a city in your esophagus isn't normal, so it won't be normal, so it'll stop happening. Noosphere stuff is cyclical like that.

Yours,

James Vandermeer,

Clerk of Foreign Affairs,

The Royal Canadian Office for the Esoteric/Le Bureau Royal Canadien pour la Ésotérique

Hah, usually you’d send this through the normal channels, but I gather ol’ Yukon Prime is acting a little wild up there. No worries. We had our own AI issues earlier this year so I can’t blame you.

I’ll just double check our unusual incidents file.

Oh. Is this…hm.

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!