The antimagic hides interactions between objects, is the limitation. If there's something with a spell on it that's activated by touch, and I touch it with my antimagic active, the spell can't feel the touch and won't activate. Same goes for spells on me that depend on me touching someone or something. But if it's triggered by time, or something about me, or if it's always on, the spell will work fine, the antimagic doesn't affect it at all.

Ah, okay.

Nod. It's still useful, just not for that. And maybe not much in your world, depending on whether it works on your kind of magic - we'll have to see.

It'd still be useful, since your kind of magic is going to get more common.

Maybe. Do you have any ideas for it?

Aside from watching out for trouble? Not off the top of my head.

The magic detection, yeah, that'll be useful for lots of things - it should let me make spells that can react to your world's magic, too. But I meant the antimagic - it's handy if there are mages around that you have a problem with, but hopefully we're not going to have that kind of trouble, and there's not really another obvious use.

I remain very confident about that not being a problem assuming we approach it sensibily, yeah.

Mmhmm.

She yawns.

Am I keeping you up?

Nah, I'm okay. Getting late, though.

She leans back and closes her eyes, and one by one the stone formations on the walls and ceiling light up with curls and sparkles of blue and green, some still, some moving in simple repeating patterns.

He laughs delightedly, and then starts singing, and watches it, and sleeps.

And she smiles when he laughs and watches it for a while and sleeps too, and in the morning the curls and sparkles are gone, but where they were shows yellow to the magic-vision.

That shows that magic was used in the past?

More or less. The spells're still there; I didn't put in a way to re-activate them, so they won't ever do anything, but unless something happens to the stone they'll be there forever.

Oh, so it shows a dormant spell? One that's been cast and hasn't been broken but isn't doing anything?

Mmhmm. A spell that was waiting to be activated or doing something you couldn't see would look the same, though, all you can tell from that is that there's a spell there and what forms it uses.

I can't tell from the yellow that it's currently inactive?

Right, look - she makes a patch of the cave wall start glowing a royal blue, dark enough for the yellow to show clearly against.

Huh. Why'd you go for this design, have you seen other ways of representing it...

I haven't, no. Mostly I just liked how it looks, and how it'll work with other designs if we end up having things with both kinds of magic on them; if you have a suggestion I can try it.

Not especially; I still don't have much sense of the process, perhaps you need magic to understand it...

I don't think so? I have pretty much free choice about how I connect the detection form to the light form; I can't do very complicated shapes, but aside from that I can do what I want - if I wanted to use color to show what world's magic it was and shape to show how many spells were there and movement to show what spell forms were being used I could do that, I just don't think it'd make as much sense or look as nice.

This way looks very nice.

Mmhmm.

Want to see some of the other ways I considered?