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Hi folks, Billy Hindle here, the voice of Alice Dyer in The Magnus Protocol. Today I just wanted to take some time to run you through some of the exciting Magnus merchandise, as well as affiliate links, a brand new way to support the show. You can find affiliate links in the description of all new episodes. If you are based in the UK, be sure to check out Phantom Peak, a unique, immersive, open world adventure in London. Use the link in the show notes or code RUSTY to get 15% off tickets.
perfect for fans of escape rooms. Next up, be sure to check out our bespoke merchandise from our partners, including exclusive perfume scents inspired by John and Martin and ex-Altiora. Find out more by going to www.rustyquill.com forward slash S-B-P. Find Magnus and Rusty Quill themed TTRPG accessories, including dice trays, dice towers, and beautiful coasters from Harpscore by going to harpscore.com forward slash rusty dash quill.
See the Magnus Archives polyhedral die set from Dice Dungeon, including an exclusive D16 featuring icons representing the fears. Visit thedicedungeon.co.uk forward slash collections forward slash rusty dash quill to find out more. There are also new designs available on our official merchandise stores for t-shirts,
Stickers, posters and more. Check the links in the description or go to www.rustyquill.com forward slash support. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoy the show.
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This episode is dedicated to Blades and Chris, two maniacs who by now have probably strangled themselves with red string trying to figure out the plot of this podcast. Rusty Quill presents The Magnus Protocol Episode 20 Social Stigma It better be worth all these theatrics. Okay, Sam. We're here. Just us. No computers. Go ahead. If this is more neurotic conspiracy shit about the Magnus Bloody Institute...
God damn it, Sam. It's important. Like, actually important, I promise. I just had to try and talk a colleague out of a full-blown paranoid delusion. I really don't know if I've got it in me to do it twice in two days. He doesn't seem paranoid. We're whispering in the break room. Grant it. Fine.
Let's roll out the conspiracy board again. Add some more red string. Why not? This better end with the Magnus Institute killing JFK or I'm officially done on your pet crusade. It's... it's more about who killed the Magnus Institute. Who? We did. Well, I think Starkwald did. On behalf of the OIR. The security company? They're more than a security company. They're a PMC. Mercenaries.
It's not impossible. Burned to the ground and killed everyone who worked there. That's what the protocol is. Not the goddamn protocol again. I told you that's not something you want to mess around with. Government conspiracies are a fun hobby until you piss off the actual government by exposing their actual conspiracy. But that's the thing. I don't know if anyone outside the OIR itself even knows about it.
You know that case I got yesterday? I remember it made you weird again. It was a letter from 1684. Sorry, your latest conspiracy theory is based entirely on a Freddy throwback from before they invented gravity. Well, it was actually about Isaac Newton, so... For God's sake! Alice, please. Okay, so...
It talks about the protocol, right? About how it was used to rein in weird stuff Newton was working on and it reminded me of what happened with the Institute. I mean, it's 300 years, right? No way it could be the same thing, right? Right. But? But I had an email when I got in tonight.
It contained a bunch of files from 1999, some paperwork between Sarkol or GSR security as they were back then and William Price, who you surround the response upon. The documents were very thorough and what wasn't redacted was pretty clear. They totaled the Institute. Who sent you the email?
I don't know. The email address was gibberish and when I tried to reply it went nowhere. So you're receiving anonymous info that at best could get you fired and at worst could get you killed? So you believe there might be something to it? Of course I do! That's why I've been trying so hard to protect you! Is that what you want? Yeah, I do! Because you're working to get us fired for unauthorised access to classified documents about something that happened 25 years ago!
I don't know what the OIAR looked like in 1999, but I know what it looks like now. And it's basically the five of us and Colin, who I might remind you, has already lost it. I seriously doubt we're still doing covert protocol shit. We can't even turn up on time. In fairness, Lena is secretive and Gwen is... Okay, class. Let's entertain the ridiculous notion that this kind of stuff is somehow still going on.
Now, do we think that sticking our nose right in the middle of that steaming mess and taking a big old whiff is a good idea or a terminally bad one? You can't seriously be okay working for such a shady organisation. Sam, we already know we work in a global atrocity factory. It's called the British Government. This isn't a joke, Alice. People died. They might still be dying.
Of course I'm not happy with anything about this. We're trapped in a vicious, petty, awful machine that rules over a vicious, petty, awful little country. I hate that that's how things are. I hate it. But that doesn't stop it from being true. And if I'm going to put myself and the people I care about in actual physical danger, it's not going to be over a matter of principle. It would need to be for something that actually changed things.
And I'm sorry, but going to the press with British government did another bad thing in the past doesn't exactly scream revolution, does it? What about you, Celia? Are we sure it was the wrong thing to do? Destroying the Institute? Well, that's a take. Celia, it killed like 40 people. I know, and that's awful. But from what I found, the Magnus Institute was after some pretty bad things.
Catastrophic, world-endingly bad. Okay, rein it in, Nostradamus. What makes you say that? Never mind. The point is, we don't really know what happened. And as horrible as it is to say it, for all we know, this protocol thing was a necessary evil to stop something worse. Maybe. But that still leaves us working for evil. I'm sorry, but... I know. I can't help you with this...
You're in way too deep, and I'm scared for you. And for me, and for all of us. So if you're dead set on shoving your face into this hornet's nest, you'll have to leave me out of it. If you need me, I'll be filing cases. We're falling behind again. And you, keep me posted. Hello? Hello? Is that Grace Wilde, a.k.a.
Ink soul. Police? No. How do you find me? We, uh, have our ways. I don't do walk-ins. I don't... I'm sorry, are they alright? Hmm? Oh, hang on. Nope! Still dead. I see. Well, Grace, I'm here to, um... You got any ink? Excuse me? Tats, you got any? No. Shame. You've got lovely skin.
Yes. Well, I'm actually here to present you with an opportunity. Don't need sponsors. I really think you should listen to what I have to say. Oh yeah? Why? I'm with the Office of Incident Assessment and Response. Don't need insurance. We're not. We're part of the civil service. Government!
Shit. You guys really do have it in with a small business owner, don't you? I'm here to recruit you, actually. If you want. You don't say. Need a lot of tattoos in the silver service, do you? Not exactly. We have some use for someone of your type. And what's that exactly?
Sorry? What's my type? I'm sorry, I don't... You tell me what's happening to me. I don't understand. Tell me what's happening to me. Something is happening. I can tell. I'm not... I mean, there's... I'm changing and there's all these... I don't...
Tell me what I am! I don't know. I'm sorry. They haven't told me. All I know is we call you externals. External to what? Your department? Society? The world? I don't know. All of them? Sounds like you know jack shit to me. I only just got promoted. Congrats. Thank you. You know, I don't want this. I just wanted some views. Wanted people to like my work.
How does that turn me into an external? I honestly have no idea. How did you end up here? Here? Just hiding. From police? From everyone. I just... Have you ever had followers? Fans? Ever gone viral? Can't say that I have. It's weird. It does something to you.
Some weird hormone thing. I shared an article about it once, but can't say I really understood it. It's amazing and it's horrible. Like, there's these strangers you never even heard of and they insist you've changed their life and you have. They've marked themselves because of you and shrined you onto their skin and yet you don't even know who they are. That's so much power.
too much of it and you're an addict. I remember the first time I blew up. It was a wolf design I inked over a client's heart. I'd never have thought of it as my best work but I took a photo of it for the feed anyway. My hand had slipped ever so slightly at the edge of the mouth. Nothing the client would notice but it turned the snarl into more of a cheeky little grin. Everyone really liked that.
It was reposted by hell yes tattoos and suddenly my 79 follower count was getting thousands of favorites, hundreds of new followers and so many lovely messages. They were trawling through all my old work, really amateur stuff, but still, they left the nicest comments.
Next came the haters, who were sick of smirking wolf. Sloppy work, they said. They didn't see the appeal, didn't understand why everyone was sharing it. Those messages hurt. They hurt a lot more than the nice ones boosted me, but it was still thrilling, you know? Knowing that a stranger looked at you and saw someone important. Someone worth getting angry about. I didn't feel good, but...
I felt...important. Maybe I should have resisted that feeling more, but why would I? These people wanted to hold me up, tell me I'm better than them, I'm special. Why should it be on me to convince them otherwise? Why should I spend my life scrabbling in the dirt telling them I'm just like you, honest, when I'm not? I'm better than them. I must be, otherwise they wouldn't all spend so much of their time thinking about me.
The next year was hard. First my follower count plateaued, then it started to drop. I was churning out arty shots of my work, but nothing was catching anymore. Nothing was making it past my little ring of hardcore fans and out into the culture. No one was looking at me.
At one point, I made a bit of a mess of a client's Satan design and it got posted on that Oops Tattoo blog. It got more traction than all my other recent posts combined. So for the next few months, I deliberately started having accidents with clients' tattoos. All it got me was a black eye and a handful of refunds. I was getting desperate. I needed to be seen again. That's when I found Oscar Jarrett.
He was a pupil of Sutherland MacDonald. Do you know anything about him?
He was this pioneering tattoo artist back in Victorian times, really popular, tattooed Prince Albert's cock or something, and everyone adored him. Anyway, he had a bunch of students and one of them was Oscar Jarrett. I learned later there were all sorts of stories around him, rumors of him doing hand-tapped tattoos with sharpened human bones, mixing strange chemicals into his ink, all that sort of stuff. I doubt any of that's true myself.
Don't get me wrong, his work was unique. But I know better than anyone how important branding is.
He probably just needed the mystique. Either way, not many of Jarrett's original designs are still around and he's not very well remembered. I stumbled across an old photo of one of his designs in a 1930s book. I'd taken to hunting down vintage ink work boxes. People were less likely to notice when I lifted a design from some old obscure artist. My own stuff clearly wasn't cutting it so I had to try something else.
Anyway, this photo. It stopped me in my tracks. The guy was old, clearly in his 70s or something, but the skin under the ink, pristine, smooth as a newborn, and the design was so crisp it might have been done a week before.
It was this abstract sun design on his shoulder, shaded in this dull, muted yellow. And there was a black dot in the center that, if you really squinted, you could see was an intricate network of cross-hatched lines. The round edge of the sun was ragged and wavy, and I could almost feel the warmth of it.
It was labeled Fig 3, one of the few surviving examples of Oscar Jarrett. And I knew right then that I had found the design that was going to save me, that would put me back into the spotlight.
He was called Harry, the man who would bear my mark. He'd asked for a tarot-inspired sun on his back, and I knew this was my best chance. I worked for almost a full week to try and properly copy the design from the photo. I didn't quite manage, but it was close enough that it gave me a bit of the same sense of heat. Of course, Harry didn't like it. I think he just wanted a basic riff on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
So I lied and showed him a safer, tacky, magic shop design that he loved to get him on the table. After all, once he was face down, I could put whatever I liked into his skin. Don't forget, I'm the artist. He was just the canvas. Besides, I had slaved over that design. He started screaming about 20 minutes into the session.
He said it burned, that it felt like his whole shoulder was on fire. He didn't move though. It was like he was nailed down as my ink spread across his skin, the smell of scorched flesh filling the room. He stopped screaming by the time I finished. Just whimpers at the end. I cleaned off the blood and took my photos, and for all the smell, it didn't look like there had been any burning at all.
Harry stumbled out like the drunk he was, not even bothering to put his shirt back on. At first, I was worried for when he'd be back to complain about the design I had actually given him, but I never saw him again. At least, not in person. Saw his picture on a news site, though. He'd been killed in a house fire. The story got decent exposure, actually.
Didn't matter though. His part was already done. Canvas complete. What mattered was what people thought of the work and oh, how they loved it.
Followers, views, messages and sponsorships. It wasn't much, really. Almost nothing in cash terms, but it wasn't about the money. I have a small inheritance that takes care of that. It was about the respect, the adulation, the love. They started calling me an influencer, a bold new voice in skin art. I started making all these connections, hanging out with other influencers whose follow counts dwarfed even mine.
I had arrived. My old friends didn't get it, of course. They might have even believed it when they said they were worried for me that it was out of love. But it was just plain jealousy. Not a great loss to me when they dropped away. They were never very photogenic.
But a handful of pictures do not a career make, and so, after another lull where I pushed through some more of my own designs, I had to admit to myself that my skill, my real skill, was in adapting Oscar Jarrett. If anything, I was doing him a favour. Nobody remembered him at all, but thanks to me, his designs were fresh and relevant. Besides, it's not like he was around to miss out or anything.
Finding other pictures of his designs was difficult, but not impossible. There were a few obscure corners of the central European tattooing scene that had some records of him, and for a while, I was able to get pictures of ones I hadn't done before. But after those dried up, well...
I'd managed to source an old ledger from his shop that listed most of his clients, and I had discovered an interesting little quirk of his ink. None of the skin touched by it decayed at all. Even after death, they were all flawless. Soon, I had quite the collection.
The other problem, of course, was that designs based on Jarrett's originals were brilliant for socials, but not so good for the client. Those old Victorian inks seemed to last forever, but my adaptations definitely didn't. It was very difficult keeping canvases still on the more complex designs, and after I was done, they would usually end up having...
grotesque experiences. That didn't matter so much to me once the pictures were captured and posted online, but after a while the police did notice a definite, if unprovable, connection between my tattoos and a series of rather disturbing accidents.
Eventually, it was easier to just use some chemical cocktails to keep clients quiet and become a bit more nomadic when it came to studios. Funny thing, all this only seemed to add to the mystique. The fans ate it up and all these empty warehouses gave me some space to think and reflect. Everyone wants a piece of you when you're this famous.
I don't remember when my own tattoos began to change. I know it was around the same time I started craving the look more. Not the pleasure in a client's eyes when they see their new skin, but the one I saw just before they went under. Terror. Helplessness. And the certainty that they would wake up changed in a way they could not understand.
It filled me up in a way I can't quite explain, but I've never felt any other time. And as it did so, inside my skin, the ink... Do you see it?
Jarrett doesn't matter now. The ink flows through me and out of me, transforming the lucky into something newer and more beautiful than their own shallow taste could ever have conceived. I don't understand it. There's something inside me that remembers worrying about... I'm not sure. Did I always want to hurt people? To make them afraid?
It's so much a part of me now that maybe it always was. Have I changed or have I simply emerged? What am I? I'm... I suppose it's too late for remorse, isn't it? And why should I be sorry? This is what I deserve! I don't even need to wait for clients anymore. I can do it to anyone whenever the mood strikes me. But then I wouldn't have anything to remind all those people that they are right.
I am better than them. Besides, I wouldn't get to see the look. That's very eloquent. What's that supposed to mean? Nothing. Just helps me understand you a bit more. That's all. You understand? You can explain to me what all these changes, these hungers are. Well, um, it sounds like perhaps through your actions you made contact with some sort of power? Yeah.
And it's changed you. Really? Wow. Thank God you came. There's no way I could have come to that massively obvious conclusion on my own. Look, I'm just here to make you an offer. That's all. You think I'm so goddamn thick, don't you? Just sign on the dotted line and become a nice little attack dog? That's not...
We're offering you the opportunity to continue to do what you do, just in a sanctioned manner. Doing everything on your terms. Nah, I was never good at following orders. You've got completely the wrong idea. Piss off.
Maybe send someone a bit more senior next time. Someone who actually knows what they're talking about. I know what I'm talking about when I say you're being an idiot. It's a good deal. And the only way your story doesn't end in a where-are-they-now article that no one clicks on. So just sign the damn contract while you still have a chance. You've got plenty of ink, and I'm sure even you can manage to write your own name. You want ink? No, I just...
I just meant you really do have the skin for it. I'm sorry. This is the part where you start running. The Magnus Protocol is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 international license. The series is created by Jonathan Sims and Alexander J. Newell and directed by Alexander J. Newell.
This episode was written by Jonathan Sims and edited with additional materials by Alexander J. Newell, with vocal edits by Lorianne Davis, soundscaping by Tessa Verou, and mastering by Catherine Rinella, with music by Sam Jones. It featured Billy Hindle as Alistair, Shahan Hamza as Samana Khalid, Anusha Battersby as Gwen Bouchard, Lorianne Davis as Celia Ripley.
The Magnus Protocol is produced by April Sumner, with executive producers Alexander Jane Yorke, Danny McDonagh, Lynn See, and Samantha F.G. Hamilton, and associate producers Jordan L. Hawke, Taylor Michaels, Nicole Perlman, Cetius DeRaven, and Megan Nice.
To subscribe, view associated materials, or join our Patreon, visit RustyQuill.com. Rate and review us online, tweet us at TheRustyQuill, visit us on Facebook, or email us via mail at RustyQuill.com. Thanks for listening.
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Summer is supposed to be an opportunity to slow down. But when you look at your kids, you can't help but notice that your kids are growing up fast. Help them build independence as they grow with Greenlight. Greenlight is a debit card and money app for families where parents can keep an eye on kids' money habits while kids learn how to save, invest, and spend wisely. It's the easy, convenient way to raise financially smart kids. Get your first month free when you sign up at greenlight.com slash podcast.
Hi everyone, it's Anusha here, voice of Gwen in the Magnus Protocol. Today I'm here to advertise a very exciting back-kick crowdfund that we will be using to raise funds for the Magnus Protocol Mystery Board Game. We are working with the amazing and talented team from Indie Boards and Cards, the team behind some other extremely successful board games such as The Resistance,
Coup, The Sherlock Files, and Flashpoint Fire Rescue. The Magnus Protocol Mysteries will be an easy-to-learn puzzle game, bringing you a series of engaging cases to solve and supernatural problems to resolve. The game will also feature brand-new audio recordings from the cast.
For more information, or to sign up to be notified of the launch of the crowdfund, go to www.rustyquill.com forward slash board game, where you can sign up for email updates. Or, for $1, you can also sign up for an early backer reward.