R&C Occultics

R&C Occultics (R&Cオカルティクス) (also written as R&C OCCULTICS Co. Ltd and R∴C∴O ) is an IT company specializing in Magic.

Etymology
R&C is derived from the Rose and the Cross, which make up the Rose Cross of Rosicrucianism.

Principles
The company and its website's development is being guided by its CEO, the legendary Rosicrucian magician Anna Sprengel.

Nature
Due to the nature of R&C Occultics as something that hadn't been seen previously, there was a degree of uncertainty and difference as to what the group is considered to be between various individuals and organizations.

To most of the world and much of the Science Side, it was seen as a giant IT company, albeit one specializing in occult goods. The larger part of the organization conducted itself as one, including some of the more unscrupulous practices associated with IT giants.

Judging from the words of Stiyl Magnus and Kanzaki Kaori, Necessarius and the Anglican Church would consider R&C Occultics a magic cabal but also recognize that it was not just a mere cabal, having built up a giant IT company in line with modern trends to disguise itself and possessing a new set of values from the usual cabals. Rather than dismissing the worldly power of money and data, as most cabals, cults and other occult organizations generally do, R&C Occultics researched them and saw them as trump cards, on the same level as a typical magic cabal might consider curses, talismans, summoning, potion mixing, spiritual possessions, spiritual items and temples, and something they would work just as hard to protect. Additionally, although some of the more powerful cabals had funding, it was typically dirty money and their assets could easily be seized if their misdeeds came to light, whereas R&C Occultics had earned money above board.

Although the company's CEO Anna Sprengel is a legendary magician tied to the Rosicrucian Order and the Golden Dawn, and although there is more contact with the occult under the company than usual, most of the people under R&C Occultics in its face as an IT company were likely not versed in magic on the level of a magician, like one would typically find in a normal magic cabal. However, there were individuals that served R&C Occultics in some way who know how to make use of magic, from learning enough stuff on its website to cast a spell but being unable to control it and destroying themselves, as in the case of cooperator George Close, to being bestowed a rank and level of proficiency of a magician, such as with Citrinitas.

Anna Sprengel herself, in her encounter with Accelerator, referred to R&C Occultics as more than just an IT company and described it as simply the modern form of her organization. In building the company, she made use of the many reserves of gold and rubies that the Rosicrucians have hidden around the world. Some of its elements and approaches have also been compared to those of the Rosicrucians. While going information with Kamijou Touma during their fight against Anna, St. Germain noted at how the company spread all forms of magic, making the occult harder to detect like city lights hiding stars in the night sky, just as the Rosicrucians had utilized clouds surrounding them to conceal their truths, noting that if one understands the Rose's methods, the knowledge needing focus became apparent. Othinus also noted symbolism in the name of the Logistic Hornets and their function as a tool flying around the world for the massive IT company - a rose representing the organization, nectar hidden within the flower being knowledge, and hornets buzzing around the flower for experts seeking hidden knowledge.

The giant IT company was actually intended by Anna Sprengel from the beginning to be destroyed at some point. Having brought about a major incident, Anna planned for this to bring about a poisonous change in the world and its people. With regards to the incident(s) that Anna had intended the company to bring about, the initial approach was an indirect one, with the company distributing how-to guides to magic online. Once the headquarters was discovered and enemies moved to eliminate them, direct action was taken and a major incident caused directly, with the mass disappearance in Los Angeles.

Services and Products
Services and products by R&C Occultics include luck charms, fortune telling, home appraisals connected to cardinal directions and ley lines, witch's potions to dispel bad luck which can be brewed using readily available plants and herbs with a siphon coffee maker, yes/no forms from which an AI can determine problems and the right potion to deal with them, instructions for creating spiritual items using 3D printers, and lecture videos providing training sessions for basic breathing and meditation techniques.

There were also a number of indirect products that came about from the influence of R&C Occultics. One of these was a fad for custom donuts with decorations based on a person's birthdate, blood type, and lucky color, trending on Christmas Eve. Its spread as an occult-related fad was apparently used as a kind of litmus test to measure people's hearts, particularly in the scientifically-minded Academy City where one would normally not do well, and determined whether it was possible for them to be swayed.

During the events on Christmas Day, the fight between Kamijou Touma and Anna Sprengel ended up in a jewel store in a School District 7 mall, which had been touched by the influence of R&C Occultics and had elements of the magical information that they had released. Influenced services and products offered by the store included:

The magical information distributed by R&C Occultics included both pre-set methods, and components that could be assembled into methods of casting spells. An example of the spells learnt through this is a fire spell used by an esper girl manipulated by Anna Sprengel against Misaka Mikoto and Shokuhou Misaki, capable of melting and slicing a pedestrian deck in a bright flash of light, which invoked a verbal incantation involving the association of fire with the middle finger and four-legged animals, as well as the red of the blood and the heart, invoking the power of the four-legged animal extracted from the single finger, picturing a line extending from the center of the heart to the tip of the middle finger and releasing the roaring fire essence. Other members of the manipulated mob used spiritual items such as plastic wands, metal medallions and cards made with automatic business card printers, and their vocal spells produced beams of light, explosions, ice spears and humanoid forms.

Using information from R&C Occultics, though not fully understanding the truth behind it, Board Director Neoka Norito was able to use an adaptation of a sanctifying vocalization (which he mistakenly believed to a method of utilizing elementary particles to manipulate visible phenomena and called the "Minimum Collision Theory"), a rehash of a Golden-style method of of angels to manipulate Telesma. It utilized the association between the seven, the seven , and seven of the ten Sephirah, to reach the twenty-two channels connecting the ten spheres of the Sephiroth, influencing the tree to affect the world. Using two small spiritual items in the shape of twin-barreled assassin handguns, with angelic constructs referred to as "filaments" in the barrels, it utilized the idea that, based on the fact that the Sephirah are guarded by angels, the creation of a fictional angel could be used to create a fictional sphere, using a tangible metal to envision invisible Sephirah and embedding the extra sphere in the pathways between the existing spheres of the tree (described as being like a woodpecker and an extra 'nest') to alter the rules of the world and produce the desired effect.

During the events surrounding Los Angeles Mass Disappearance, Stiyl Magnus noted that there was no information pertaining to Citrinitas among the information released by R&C Occultics through the dark web (hence why he suspected a grimoire had been decoded and read for the respective spell). The online presentation of the information also omitted or downplayed most of the precautions, downsides and dangers associated with magic, including the rejection reaction that occurs when an esper tries to use magic.

Infrastructure
One of the primary income divisions and pillars for R&C Occultics was, which required a global delivery system. As the group did not want to let distribution centers and shipping routes reveal the location of its headquarters, it focused on unmanned distribution using drones, mobile launch vehicles and mobile aerial bases, which did not belong to any particular country rather than obvious stationary ones on the ground. The drones would never fly to and from headquarters, and product warehouses across the world were set up so they could be abandoned at a moment's notice. While the focus on drones had its advantages there were still electronic trails, with it taking less than a tenth of a second to send data round the world via fiber optics and satellite communication. This trail, coupled with a lead in financial data in a bank, is what eventually led the joint forces of the Anglican Church and Academy City to discover the company's headquarters in Los Angeles.

R&C Occultics had at least one satellite under its control, which had provided information on Academy City for a map app used by Anna Sprengel during her visit to the city.

At some point, the company tried to set up a server center amongst the numerous small nations which were rapidly joining together and splitting apart at the time, with artificial islands and ship-towed floats set up as bases for reconstruction in the wake of the Crowley's Hazards declaring independence, in order to exploit a legal loophole and gather information on people across the world.

Logistic Hornets
At the center of the drone distribution network were twelve massive aircraft known as Logistic Hornets, aerial launch platforms developed by Space Engage for safer, cheaper and more accessible space travel. R&C Occultics had no interest in space travel and the developer's original intentions, instead using the craft as the cornerstone of the global delivery system supporting its online shopping network.

Functioning like an airborne aircraft carrier, the Logistic Hornet has a built-in mass driver for launching spacecraft and objects into ballistic orbits from an altitude of 30 kilometers, with launches costing much less than a traditional multi-stage rocket launch, even if limited to ballistic flight. Outside of the atmosphere and without air resistance, the spacecraft can reach the opposite side of the planet in around 20 minutes. In addition to the mass driver, the craft's huge 5km wings can be used as runways, and transport planes and drones can be hung from bottom of the craft and accelerated for launch. Due to its immense size, the Logistic Hornet cannot use an ordinary airport for take-off and landing, and relies mid-air refueling in order to fly indefinitely.

On standby at various positions around the world at an altitude of 30 kilometers, the twelve craft acted as mobile delivery bases, receiving and dispatching products via drones (which carried products to individual addresses), as well as recharging and performing maintenance on the drones. Spacecraft launched by the mass drivers were used to carry cargo containers between the Logistic Hornets. Ground cargo sent to the Logistic Hornets was launched using unmanned gliders from mobile launch vehicles (similar to ones which launch ballistic missiles) to keep costs down and maintaining the focus on mobile facilities. Given the conpany's intention for stateless mobile bases, it was speculated that a refueling approach requiring ordinary stationary airports, such as with air tankers, was probably not taken, with the considered possibilities of sending up tanks attached to giant balloons to refuel from land or sea, or using gliders and launch vehicles to provide fuel and maintenance equipment in the same way as cargo deliveries.

Under the control of R&C Occultics, the Logistic Hornets were also utilized as a meteorological weapon, given their immense cargo capacity and global coverage. Using either drones or the mass driver, large amounts of naphtha or liquid nitrogen were delivered to calculated precisely-calculated aerial coordinates and released to rapidly heat or cool the high altitude air. Through this temperature manipulation, changing air density and controlling atmospheric pressure, the wind could also be manipulated. The scale on which the manipulation had to be carried out to control the weather meant that areas of 50 or sometimes even 100 kilometers have to be covered. As well as acting to defend the Logistic Hornets, it gave the company the capability to bring about meteorological disasters, being able to target any part of the planet.

The Logistic Hornets were controlled by the drone management server at R&C Occultics HQ, with the vulnerability that the server's destruction would neutralize them and shut down the global distribution infrastructure and meteorological weapon that it formed the cornerstone of. However, the Logistic Hornets also housed a prototype optical neurocomputer, referred to as Project Code: Secret, built but left incomplete and not hooked up due to uncertainties amongst its developers and circumstances that would have to be overcome to finish it. According to documents found by Stiyl Magnus in an Academy City base, Secret would allow the machines to handle accepting orders in any language, analyze and manage individualized advertisements, plan and execute sales, carry out sales analysis and map customer bases, locate likely illegal accounts and prevent mass buying/scalping, and monitor each other, allowing the Logistic Hornets to manage themselves, allowing their controllers to constantly receive huge amounts of money while just sitting around. If Secret was brought online, it would also have eliminated the previous vulnerability - even if the headquarters was taken out, the computers in the aircraft would take over while monitoring each other, with R&C Occultics able to manipulate everything from the economy to the weather of any targeted region or country on the planet.

Headquarters
The headquarters of R&C Occultics is located in downtown Los Angeles, in the largest of a group of high-rise buildings. It houses R Rose (Rローズ), the drone management server controlling their global distribution network. It is an old-fashioned supercomputer, covering a space larger than a basketball court, and requiring human maintenance, the destruction of which would shut down the global distribution infrastructure.

Although R&C Occultics was a global company not bound by national borders and they did not need an HQ building as an obvious central point, one was built as without one it would be impossible to tell if they had been defeated, as Anna Sprengel had set up the company to be destroyed from the beginning, though measures were still taken to keep its location a secret until then.

Background
R&C Occultics appeared on the internet at some point after several large conflicts made hiding magic from the world at large increasingly difficult. A key figure in its development was Anna Sprengel, the legendary Rosicrucian magician who played a role in the foundation of the Golden Dawn, who had recently been restored to her body after Madame Horos had stolen it for over a century. At the same time as Anna was restored, following the Crowley's Hazard invasion of the British Commonwealth and the attack on the Queen Britannia, Aleister Crowley and Lola Stuart, the two main figures behind the Magic-Science Treaty, were gone.

In constructing R&C Occultics, Anna utilized various hidden reserves of gold and rubies that the Rosicrucians had across the world for funds, and approached various people to manipulate them so they would set things up for her company, legally or not, while also setting them up to eventually self-destruct and cut off the trails they would leave.

With the initial website likely beginning as a fortune telling site, R&C Occultics expanded quickly, selling occult services and goods while gathering personal and private information on many people in the name of helping with troubles and testing romantic compatibility. No one knew where a corporation of its size and capital had come from, or in which country its headquarters were located. The Magic Side was unable to stop the IT company as they had no experience with someone loudly announcing existence of magic yet remaining completely hidden, and the Science Side, while controlling the internet, could not properly detect the threat and did nothing about it. With neither side stopping it, R&C Occultics continued to spread and grow in the gaps between them.

Christmas Eve Arc
R&C Occultics was trending at the time of Christmas Eve, with Neoka Norito aiding its spread after being alerted to its existence through his automatic investment algorithm, by having his cracking servers make parallel posts to bring it to the top of the trending lists, so that he could utilize its resources while having the ubiquity prevent it from being specifically traced back to him (though Kumokawa Seria still learned of his involvement). From the site, Neoka learned how to use a sanctifying vocalization adaptation, which he mistakenly thought of as the 'Minimum Collision Theory'.

At the same time, a new fad had been spread in the form of custom donuts with decorations based on a person's birthdate, blood type, and lucky color. The spread of an occult-related fad, which would normally not do well in the scientifically-minded Academy City, was apparently a sort of litmus test meant to measure people's hearts and determine whether it was possible for them to be swayed.

After Kamijou Touma's battle with Neoka, while considering the ramifications of the online distribution of magical knowledge, he encountered Anna Sprengel who updated the R&C Occultics homepage, saying that despite trending it still needed her to look after it directly until it really got on track.

Christmas Day Arc
On Christmas Day, R&C Occultics was continuing to spread, with various incidents occurring around the world due to the magical knowledge it had distributed (including the self-destruction of Anna Sprengel's cooperators). The effects were particularly severe in Academy City, where hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties, suffering injuries from the rejection reaction from espers attempting magic (with a Christmas good luck charm ironically prominent among the causes). During her encounter with Accelerator, Anna referred to R&C Occultics as simply the modern form of her organization.

Operation Handcuffs Arc
Late on Christmas Day, Coins of Nicholas, wish-granting spiritual items which had been randomly distributed to various people in Academy City earlier in the day (as per Anna's intentions, with a user manual appearing on the official site shortly afterwards), in the hands of members of Anti-Skill and the Dark Side of Academy City, greatly distorted the course of Operation Handcuffs, turning it into a slaughter.

Los Angeles Arc
On December 26th, having discovered the company's HQ in Los Angeles, Academy City and the Anglican Church commenced a joint counterattack, Operation Overlord Revenge, to destroy R&C Occultics. In response, one of their agents, Citrinitas (actually Vice President Darris Hewlane, who had betrayed and intended to usurp President Roberto Katze) used magic taught to him by Anna in conjunction with the meteorological control of the Logistic Hornets to make the city's entire population disappear, trapping them in sand while trying to frame Melzabeth Grocery for the crime.

After Touma defeated Citrinitas and rescued the city's trapped population, facing an attack from the Anglican and Academy City forces, executives at R&C Occultics HQ intended to dismantle and transport R Rose out of the building and go into hiding, but they were all gruesomely killed by Aleister Crowley, accompanied by Kihara Noukan, ahead of the joint force and in the process sending a message to the absent Anna Sprengel, who had planned for the company to be destroyed from the beginning.

Post-Handcuffs Arc
By December 29th, the fallout from R&C Occultics and the Trial of Accelerator had given rise to the anti-elite Winter Cleaning movement, as Anna, then entering the Bridge Builders Cabal, had planned.

New Year's Arc
During discussions on January 1st and 2nd, it was mentioned that Anna created R&C Occultics as an analytic model based on the Bridge Builders Cabal in order to understand the organization's structure and vulnerabilities through a form of role-play, and how the Winter Cleaning she had instigated through the company's havoc, together with her manipulations concerning Alice Anotherbible, had led to the hidden Bridge Builders Cabal being exposed and seen as an evil organization, with the Transcendents wanting to execute her for her betrayal.

While being attacked by Trismegistus on January 3rd, Touma accessed cached fragments from R&C Occultics on other sites (the main site having been taken offline) in order to find information that could help him against his attacker's spell.

Trivia

 * On February 8th 2020, a day after  was released, a Twitter account was made for R&C Occultics, with themed tweets throughout 2020.
 * The tweets made on February 8th were based on adverts and promotions found within the volume itself, while subsequent tweets were styled as ones not present in the novels, some written for products present in the novels and others for ones which were not. While written and styled as an in-universe advert for products distributed by R&C Occultics, many of tweets link to pages promoting or selling items of Toaru media.
 * February 13th: A counter-observation magic circle, said to block all eyes, be it the naked eye, surveillance cameras or ghosts
 * February 13th: A how-to video for making a pet golem
 * March 11th: Product catalogue
 * March 31st: A necklace that reacts to, capable of lie detection
 * July 11th: An elixir of immortality
 * September 25th: Something for figuring out the right kind of friends for a customer
 * November 10th: Coin of Nicholas