Group seed: Doc R.C. Mason’s All-Seeing Eyes Family Opticians.

Blame this.

Doc R.C. Mason’s All-Seeing Eyes Family Opticians

Yes, it’s supposed to be that obvious.  Let anti-Illuminati investigators obsess over the company all they like; its corporate structure and staff are both relentlessly mundane. True, it took a little doing to find an ambitious optician with entrepreneurial sense and the right kind of humor, and then quietly encourage her to express both without her ever realizing – but when you have the resources of the world at your fingertips, you can get the outcomes that you want. And apparently be a little whimsical about it, too.

But why create this company, then? Oh, the Illuminati have their reasons.  In this specific case their interest is in being able to distribute special eyeglass frames of their own design among specifically targeted demographics.  Eyeglasses are such useful items, really.  For one thing, it’s so easy to install a scrying spell (or whatever the supernatural/esoteric ability is in the specific campaign world) on one that you almost don’t have to be a mage to do it; it’s always easier to enchant an item with a spell that’s symbolically similar to it, and glasses certainly match up well with vision or information-based magic. Also; everybody wears them. Even the people with good or corrected vision still wear sunglasses.  There’s a reason why the Conspiracy hasn’t pushed the populace to embrace laser eye surgery more thoroughly, after all.

One thing that should be made clear here, if you’ll pardon the pun: the Illuminati are not putting mind control technology into the frames.  I mean, seriously.  There are seven billion people in the world: even with the latest advances in metasyntactic neurolinguistic programming you’d need about three billion people to monitor the controls, and an additional billion people to watch them.  The entire point of having an Illuminati is to have a secret conspiracy of rational people running things for their own benefit.  Exactly how does it benefit anybody, let alone the Secret Masters, to have a situation where they’re constantly stuck making decisions for meat puppets, when the meat puppets are actually perfectly capable of making those decisions themselves?  This isn’t actually 1984; not every Illuminati is a secret masochist.

This doesn’t mean that the Illuminati are benevolent, mind you. At least, that they’re not required to be benevolent. But the entire idea behind the concept is that they’re not dumb