Welcome back everyone ! Today I wrote this post using almost exclusively the voice to text feature of my Android phone, so please pardon any misspellings, or little parts that don't make a lot of sense, I haven't had a lot of time to proofread and fix. This may be the norm for these types of blog posts where it's not part of a story just because the voice feature is far more convenient and quick for me. Some of my post seem to keep me up late typing, where as I can use the voice feature from pretty much anywhere, even while driving, as long as I don't watch the screen, and speak clearly. If you find any errors, or typos, let me know in the comments here or on FB or Google+, and I'll try to fix them ASAP.
So for the last week or so, we've been working on the Santa society story. We've come up with the basic plot, history for the fictional world, and the character concept for what I hope will be the main character of the story. Or maybe I should say one of the main characters.
But to keep everything fresh, and perhaps even inspire myself, I think I'm going to take a very small break from that story, and think about the "Mage world" story instead for a little bit. It's amazing how stories can feed off of one another, or at least concepts.
So I need to work a bit on rules of magic for this world. Like everything in the universe, magic in my world has certain rules, limitations, and characteristics. If you don't have rules for these things, then suddenly all of your problems are solved by magic. In my world I would like magic to be the cause of as many problems as it is the solution. More in fact.
Basically in my world magic is another force much like gravity, light, radiation , and in fact the entire field of Physics. However magic is different from the things in that it responds to intention and will and consciousness. However caster does need to know everything about all of the forces involved in the so they're trying to cast.
So for example, let's say that a wizard wants to convert electricity into kinetic energy. In the real world this will involve passing electric current through coiled wire near a magnet. However for a mage this would only require knowledge, intention, and matter. This is more complicated than it sounds. The first thing that they need to know, is all the specific information about the electrical charge that they are trying to convert. Including things like the voltage, and amperage, and whether its AC or DC current. Then they also need to know how the kinetic energy will be employed, the mass of the object that will be moving, the force required to make the object, the doctor along which that object will be moving, and the distance of travel. But any time that you do a spell such as this it involves two forms of energy you must "sacrifice" matter, or more precisely you are taking the energy from that matter in the form of subatomic particles, which causes the matter to essentially disintegrate. Because of this you also need to know the atomic or molecular structure of the items that your sacrificing.
So yeah it's fairly complicated. Most wizards use mnemonic devices to help them remember specific spells . these work in the same way that for example F A C E and Every Good Boy Does Fine work to help you remember the lines and spaces on a music staff. (Anyone who's taken a piano lesson will remember that.) Only with wizards they tend to memorize charts and periodic tables, and force tables and different comparative charts between different kinds of energy. Then for the most part they tend to inscribe unique symbols in the places on the charts where Solutions tend to fall, then combine those with other solutions which are denoted by other symbols, until they have their spell.
Sounds complicated? This is why magic tends to be seen a something that nerdy engineering types do. It takes a lot of intelligence a lot of focus and concentration and a good memory to be able to reliably perform magic. Technically anybody can do it, and most people know how to do some very small simple spells, which they're taught in grade school, mostly so that people who are inclined to do magic can be discovered at a very young age, and encouraged to follow that path.
But what can you actually do with magic? For the most part it's all about converting one thing into another. Mostly you can convert what kind of energy into another, without mechanical intervention, though to a limited degree you can also convert matter into energy and vice versa. This however can only be done in very very small amounts, and is generally only ever been done by research wizards , who are working with physicists to try to uncover subatomic particles, and theoretical things. You can however, convert one kind of matter to another, through a kind of forced chemical reaction.
So let's give some examples. Let's say that you want to convert sound into light. First you will need a conversion catalyst. Usually this is something monatomic, because it's easier to work with elements , then it is to work with molecules and compounds. So for this example we'll say that you have a pure ball bearing of nickel, and that you're familiar with the atomic structure of nickel in this form. You then need to know the frequency and volume of the sound, so for this example let's say that's the frequency is 440 Hertz, and 5.6 decibels. You then need to know the frequency of light, and the amplitude, and the intensity. I'll be honest here, I have absolutely no idea about any of that, so I'm just going to say something like a red light of somewhat varying spectrum , and the intensity of an average light bulb. The easiest thing for most wizards to do is right down the symbols for each of these formula according to his or her on the mnemonic device. Then they focus their concentration on those symbols and what they mean, and on their catalyst then on drawing energy from the catalyst combining a matrix with the sound, then forming a new energy in the form of light. So as you can see it's extraordinarily complicated.
That said, there are quite a few wizards alive today, that have been in the craft for so long , and have memorized so many spells that they can throw fireballs and lightning from their hands , at the cost of a bit matter. However in the right hands, this can also be used for a variety of other effects. For example if you're fast enough with your calculations you can create a matrix which will contain a bomb blast . If you over calculate the amount of energy that's the bomb will produce, in both sound heat and pressure, you can create a trap that could contain a bomb blast and convert it into electrical energy for example. If you see a pile of bricks falling on somebody, you could convert their kinetic energy into something else, for example light. If you use the bricks themselves as the conversion catalyst then the bricks wouldn't even be there to fall on the person in the first place. Another useful application that I thought of is to make a person or people invisible to visible light. ( I get around the whole Sue Storm not being able to see argument but providing glasses there are set up to convert infrared and ultraviolet light into visible light.
So that's the idea, and that's how magic will work in my world. Of course my main character will have the unique quality but he doesn't have to think about his usage of magic in the same way the other people do. He can simply do it, as if just knows all of the formula and all of the molecular structures as if he has been born to it. He doesn't take this for granted however, and in some ways he sees this as a burden, and he will work hard to control his usage of this terrible skill.
Well that's all the time I have for tonight, but as always, comments suggestions are welcome. Thanks for reading!
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