And there was light!  About one lightbulb's worth of it, falteringly at first but coming with greater ease as she gets more annoyed with the whole process.  Or 'with additional repetition', but that's the same thing.

With focus, she can shift the color-spectrum a bit 'warmer' or 'cooler', or reshape the 'bulb' into a few primitives like 'possibly bendable cylinder' or 'CFL swirly-whirly thing', but - it's plain old white light.  It's certainly not, despite her best efforts, suitable for lasers.  On the other hand, it is, still, light, from nothing.

"Amazingly enough, that worked."  Even she can't tell whether she's being sarcastic.

"...I wonder if I could make 'Tea.  Earl grey.  Hot.' by the same throughline.  Something for another time, I guess."

"...Right now, though, I'm just going to keep being kind of quietly amazed at the bit where I'm having tangible effects upon the world by wanting really hard.  Even if I swear I have all the finesse of a drunken gorilla attempting to play basketball, at the moment.  ...Anyway.  Alex out."

End video, share video, apologize to OcularStone for all the profanity in video...

Back to work; she has an anti-cognitohazard to design and hopefully implant stat.

It is getting late, by the time she approaches a complete design.

Perhaps the night emboldens her unduly, because, having finished this spell in some form, she proceeds to do something that a slightly less impulse-driven version of herself would call this present moment out for even contemplating -

She begins to cast it, insofar as one can cast what is, essentially, a short film script.

She hasn't quite worked out a one-speaking-part version that hits all the right notes, but she'll fix that in post - by which she means that as part of constructing the giver/recipient framework while still being one person, she will have done this ritual three times.  That will suffice to cover the power deficit.

(She believes it will, at least.)

So she cuts some lights, cues some others, puts some tape on a bulb just so, sets up for recording...

And proceeds to speak her parts, in their proper order.

"This world is not a world in which the SCP Foundation is known to exist, because were it to exist, I would perforce not know of it.

"That does not, however, mean that its name does not hold weight, when magic is real and words have power.

"That does not mean that its sigil cannot be a protection against things that go bump in the dark.

"In the eyes of the Foundation - or, at least, those parts of it vaguely familiar with the GOC - I am a Type-Green, or Type-Blue; a reality-warper, a practitioner of magic.  Something strange, something anomalous.  Something that stands out, that is special.  But the Foundation cares much more about what something does than how it does it, when they write these things down in their neverending quest to understand and render safe - and what I intend to do is nothing less than fulfill the Foundation's mission statement.  I intend to use the accumulated work of the Foundation to secure, contain, and protect.  I intend to make a general inoculation against cognitohazards, and spread it onwards via this ritual.

"A cognitohazard is, in its basest definition, information that is dangerous to know or perceive, because the act of processing such information exposes you to harms much worse than mere consternation or displeasure.  Perhaps you have heard of how hard it is to not think of pink elephants?  That is a benign, neutered version of the true danger.  Pink elephants are a strange thing to think of, but they will not hurt you merely for having thought of them.

"It is against those things that harm through understanding, that harm through perception - knowing or unknowing - that we must defend ourselves.  That we shall defend ourselves.

"We shall secure our minds from tampering - contain and isolate these hazards somewhere they cannot hurt us, so that we may better protect ourselves and others from those that would do us harm.

"If you have reached this point, you know what to say.

"What does the black moon howl?"  Silence, to eclipse the wills of those who would be gods.

"What must you remember, when the world itself would forget?"  There is no Antimemetics Division.

"What will we build, upon this Foundation?"  Safety.  Comprehension.  Peace.

"Good.

"Now go forth, and know that you stand completely protected from all sorts of cognitohazardous problems.  So I have said, and so mote it be."

So mote it be indeed.

It's time to pass out and hallucinate vividly for many hours, Alex.  You need the rest, after pulling that off.

The process of refining a ritual like this, until it clicks into place- Not entirely smoothly, not entirely cleanly, much more a 'close enough' fit than one that was made to fit together- Is half aesthetic, half logic, and half intuition. (Yes, that's three halves.)

But it does click into place. It feels like an internal brace, a block of concrete unreality standing in her soul, smooth glass geometry laid over itself in squares and hexagons: Protection of the mind from deviations. From curses, from virii, from unnatural shifts. A return to center.

OcularStone stops constantly bothering her to document what she's working on some time around 11 PM.

She's up until an ill-advised, if still somewhat self-consistent 4, sending the occasional status update.

And then the last few recordings are her going through the ritual.

Her dreams include the odd if somewhat explicable (given her recent thoughts) scene of SCP personnel securing a van-size six-tailed fox whose fur is made of fire. It complains to her that it just wanted to talk, then explodes and vanishes from the containment cell.

And also plenty of other semi-comprehensible dream things.

"I trust that my men would not have reacted this way if you had not attempted to do something untoward," O5-A says to the exploding kitsune.  "But come in peace and peace will be kept.  I bear you no ill-will; my work is to understand and defend, not to aggress."

That was, frankly, far more comprehensibly incomprehensible than her usual dreams.  And she succeeded in something in that part.  Hoo boy, she's gonna need to actually start a dream journal.

I think I made that ward just in time, yikes.  There was a kitsune? in my dreams last night that pissed off a Site staff, complained that she just wanted to talk, and exploded.

OS messages again at about 9 AM:

I have Actual Work TM

We're not being scientific about this at all

If you hoped to do an academic paper

But I'll do my best to summarize everything and try to

idk 

Make a general model of magic?

And later:

Research suggests some entities target newbies in various ways

For recruitment, scams, deals, kidnapping... Eating

And a lot of them are sensitive to active magic use

Succubi are frequently mentioned to be at least.

So uhhh

Yeah

...Yeah this wasn't particularly scientific.  Sleep-deprived me has horrible impulse control.  But it was clearly necessary, even if it probably also sent up the flare that drew attention to me to begin with, I think.

Good luck with your Actual Work (tm).

...Huh, I wonder if that was what a Tinker fugue is like, come to think of it.  And I can at least lay out the design theory.  Try to reverse-engineer what matters and what's set dressing.  ...Though there's a sense in which the set dressing matters in and of itself...

...I should probably really make sure I can use the Force for self-defense, in other news.  If, uh, eating is in the cards.  Because getting eaten would be bad.

Time to find the campus LARPers...  There's gotta be some.

She might even have met any, through a potential mutual interest in videogame music performance.

...Anyway.  She's going to poke at her ward a bit, see if she can get some information on what happened overnight --

Report begins:

At 0737 Eastern, entity-0001 entered the defended area oneiromantically; entity-0001 merits at least Uncontained(Euclid[2])[!]/Keneq[3]/Warning[3] designation under ACS, and plausibly Uncontained(Keter[3])[!]/Keneq[3]/Danger[4], if its oneiromantic abilities are substantially equivalent to its physical capabilities.  It is unknown whether Entity-0001 qualifies for any Esoteric containment class.  At 0740 Eastern, entity-0001 attempted to deploy a thaumaturgy with perceptual effects targeting the visual system, tentatively classed Decommissioned(Safe[1])[0*]/Vlam[1]/Caution[1].  Entity-0001 retreated when cautioned.  Site-AM did not sustain damage during this exchange.

Report ends.

-- ...She is only a little bit surprised at this.

...Well, apparently my brain or magic groks enough of the SCP technical style to serve up an incident report when I ask the ward I made for information on what it blocked.

Secure. Contain. Protect.

First hypothesis: Magic requires thinking of things in ways that match cultural zeitgeist and this is why lots of spells call on similar things- Salt circles, pentagrams, candles, chants, etc.

Second hypothesis: Magic is based almost entirely on users' will and imagination, with patterns the user's brain can imagine or understand being those that occur and reality.

Underlying mechanism for either of these: ??????

How to test: ???????????????????????

Ain't that the truth.  Part of the reason I'm switching majors to the 'soft' sciences if I don't get caught up in something.

I think we have some data on - required volume?  Something about cultural saturation...

...Hm, I feel like I might actually be feeling the effort on this one, too.  Like, I can definitely feel the weight of this ward.  Dunno what in particular caused that yet, but I'm leaning towards 'it's hard to do this' over 'not enough base oomph'.  ...I wonder if mana capacity expands with exercise, like muscles?

What, find some obscure fanfic that uses really weird tropes and patterns and try to spell off those?

Yeah, something like that.  Use someone's random worldbuilding they never published or w/e.  See if it still works like this or if it only works as well as an invocation of the shared tropes.

And try throwing a spell that references things I have no knowledge of at me, I suppose, though I think those blogwitch spells are dang close already.

Brb looking up the weirdest spell I can

Do you know much about India?

Unfortunately I know more things than I should to properly be considered blind to the cultural milieu; I've read enough stuff that dealt with Hindu mythology in some form to understand the principles.  And it overlaps with like, cultivator shit.  Try Africa, I don't know nearly as much as I'd like to about the whole damn continent.  ...Which is to say, I know Anansi exists, and little else.  ...That or...Hm, South America is probably out, too...  Maybe Mongolia?  Or non-Hindu and non-Islamic stuff...

...This is going to be a huge fucking pain, isn't it.

Yeah. All we can do is give it our best shot.

Or design something as purposefully context-free as possible.

I wonder if I could do something like mantle a D&D character sheet.  The game itself has enough cultural saturation, and I've certainly got some characters...