There was something to be said for very basic technology.

Cade ran a finger over the transmitter, which was small but not micro, easy to use, hard to break, and relatively easy to conceal as long as your target wasn’t actively looking for it.

They had an agent working as a maid in the Grande Star Hotel, which was where their targets were presumably staying. They also had a busboy at the Templeton, and a front desk clerk at the Gaslight, because you never could tell with these particular targets if they’d actually go where you thought they’d go. The Hampton Inn, well, Cade had a room there.

You did what you could, and getting their staff jobs so they were being double-paid had advantages when you were scraping the barrel to give them a raise.

The witch – Fiora, her name was, and she was a lovely woman that probably would have been more at home in long floral skirts with her hair down than in the Agency skirt-suit with nylons and heels – produced her micro welding kit and another small transmitter. “So, if we start with this, and then right into the circuit board, here, we draw a sigil, it’s a basic one, but it encourages a lack of caution. Loose lips and all that. But if I add this one to the case, like thus, then it also transmits a signal if certain phrases are used.”

Very basic technology was nice, Cade thought, but very basic technology supplemented with nice, tidy little magic spells – now that was what the Agency needed.

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rix_scaedu asked for cats. Here’s some cats, with my camp nano protaganist.

This ‘verse really needs a name.

Jen liked cats, always had.

Face families weren’t allowed to have cats. They weren’t allowed to have pets at all — it was a point of change, a point of interest — but sometimes if the “host family” had kept a dog, they would have a dog for a little while.

If you used magic around dogs for too long, you ended up with a dog who was a lot more… dog. They were cleverer, more loyal, the sort of dog that waited weeks for their masters or learned how to open the doors and fetch the beer.

If you used magic around cats for too long, they ended up… strange. They were the sort of cats that slipped outdoors when no doors were open, seemed to be talking back to you (and sometimes were), trailed good luck or bad behind them like a flag and waved it at anyone who annoyed them — or sometimes at random passers-by.

Sometimes, she’d heard, you ended up with cats who would eat up a sign or a design, just rub against it and it was gone, and then spit it out later on a whim. You had cats who really, really liked their person, and those cats just vibrated with magic.

Jen wanted a cat.

The Stepford Angels didn’t have regulations the way Face families had, but they still had pragmatic rules. She was on the road more than she was “home;” she spent much of her time blending in, being invisible, much like she had when she was a Face. There wasn’t a lot of room for any sort of pet, much less one that might suddenly set off fireworks.

But it didn’t stop her from wanting the cat, staring every cat that wandered by, and, sometimes, leaving good-luck charms for the cats to rub against and take with them.

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To Lilfluff’s Prompt, ” Something relating to the agencies discovering each other?” This is more of my Camp Nano project

The Joining

Cade Ferrel’s organization didn’t even have a name, just “Agency 3-1-7″ and “Protocols 7, 9, and 12″. They didn’t have a budget line, or at least not an admitted one, and the money they got wasn’t impressive by anyone’s standards.

(There was a rumor his predecessor had once turned a surveillance job, posing as a panhandler, into a hundred percent increase in the month’s budget. While Cade was pretty sure that was an exaggeration, it still remained a very telling story.)

What Agency 3-1-7 had was a very open-ended mandate and a couple extremely open-ended laws about how they performed that mandate.

And Cade was looking at a witch who swore up and down that magic was real.

Now, Cade had encountered lots and lots of people who swore just about everything was real, from the Moon Landing to aliens to brain-tapping via tap water (“why do you think they call it tap water?”) to a magical ritual being what really killed Kennedy. But most of them didn’t have Top Secret government clearances and badges that matched Cade’s for obscurity.

This particular so-called witch belonged to Agency 3-2-9, with a sub-reference to Protocol 19. Cade had actually heard of Protocol Nineteen; even though Agency 3-1-7 didn’t fall under it, sometimes they used it for this and that. Mostly that, lately, where that meant bending the law because we don’t have any funding.

The witch was telling Cade that there were things that could be done to surveil without equipment. With the only cost being in time and getting one of Agency 3-2-9’s workers in place for ten minutes.

Ten minutes! Cade was in love.

Cade wasn’t going to have to panhandle to make budget this quarter.

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I’ve been doing some worldbuilding for my as-of-yet-unnamed-World for my Camp Nano Project, which is either called The Hidden City or Dealer’s Choice or Where the Wild THINGS Went.

clare_dragonfly asked: Do the three different capitalized types use different kinds of magic?

Yes!

Well, yes and no.

Okay, so most of the organized magic in this world works in Signs, Sigils and Designs, a Sigil being a more complicated Sign and a Design being a more complicate Sigil or pattern of Sigils.

But the different types of workers for The Agencies – Agents, Workers, and Faces, I said, but I think Agents are Hands. And I’m not entirely sure about Workers, they might be Eyes – well, each of them specialize in different sorts of those things.

For instance, a Face is going to be very good at nothing interesting to see here and there’s nothing strange going on. They’re all about making things appear as normal as possible, so that people don’t panic, even when their government, at least The Agencies in their government, are doing awful things.

An Eye is going to be good at surveillance signs, the sort of thing that tells them what happens, or if someone crosses a certain trip-line point, or if a specific person touches that sign. They set up designs looking for certain sets of words, or for certain complaints.

A Worker, a Hand, will use signs to enforce compliance, or to strengthen them, or to protect them – combat magic, more or less. They are aimed at being the elite forces of The Agencies, and magic is certainly part of that.

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The Agencies started as three small agencies connected to larger government organizations:

One devoted to the searching out, researching, and weaponizing-if-possible the magic that many people had known had existed but nobody really wanted to admit to.

One d aimed at finding and suppressing terrorist and other threats to the US by use of human and electronic surveillance.

One aimed at convincing the US public that nothing untoward was going on, that the world was safe, and that everything was okay.

Once the second two organizations found out about the first, they saw immediate uses for magic in the implementation of their mission plans; once the first found out about the second, it, too, found uses for them.

They don’t exist as budget line items, but they are well-funded. They slide their budget into small things (expensive toilet seats) use non-Congressionally-approved methods of gaining funding, and sell seized property for a profit when it suits them.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1302329.html. You can comment here or there.

(Setting: Modern-postmodern urban fantasy dystopic surveillance state. I wrote this on the bus, so totally up for logic holes being pointed out)

Magic in Jen’s ‘Verse works by encouraging or discouraging what’s already happening in the world. The more you go with the flow of the world, the less magic it takes.

So you can encourage water to flow a little more heavily over a spot, or to move to another spot. If it’s another low-lying spot, it’s not so much magic, but if it’s a high place, then that takes more magic.

Magic makes little pulls in the fabric of the world. Small pulls, only someone who is actively looking for them AND sensitive to the magic and to the pulls will find. The larger the pull, the more likely a magic-user will find. And really big pulls leave runs in the fabric of the universe that even laypeople will — and do — see.

Magic accretes where it is used. If you use a sigil to make yourself look younger, over and over again, eventually the pull is going to be visible in ways that a normal person will notice — you seem creepy, the wind goes the wrong way around you, grass dies or grows under your feet, you have witch-marks or the mark of the moon…

To move magic off of yourself, it’s generally clever to use more magic to benefit others than to benefit yourself.

The Agencies deal with this problem by delegating the magic use to Agents, Workers, and Faces.

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