"Let's back up a bit - what goes into a spell of yours, what are its parts?"

"Part of it. You're also speaking - what I meant originally is that, for instance, wizard spells have gestures, and words, and optionally intentional components, and still more optionally diagrams. What do your spells have?"

"Incantations, for most of them. An incantation is just - a name, a way of specifying which spell you're casting, out of all the ones you've got. Except long-form incantations also help define some spell structure and targeting. I don't have any spells that cast long-form, though, and I can't think of one offhand that would need to, so I don't have a good example. But a long-form incantation is a full sentence instead of a short phrase, and they're a little looser than short-form, you can change words or phrasings and still be casting basically the same spell but for a different effect. I think they go best with big area-effect spells and complicated matter manipulation. If I wanted to, I dunno, do some kind of complicated sorting on this whole library that filed all the books in the right spot on their shelves, I'd probably be better off making a new spell with a long-form incantation than trying to use the Category Sort I just invented. And the incantation might mention stuff like that I was sorting books into their places on shelves. Or if I wanted to make it snow on the whole school, I might make a spell with a long-form incantation for snowing on large areas. And the incantation would be a sentence about snow."

"But you're casting in the vernacular. How do you prevent people who are casually inventing spells from naming the same one?"

"You don't," he says, shrugging. "Two different people can invent two different spells with the same incantation. I guess it'd be a compatibility issue if they each loaded theirs onto the same Device... hmm, do I have a contingency for that? Yes I do, I get to rename one or both spells. There you go."

"...Huh. So you're working with local indices, not a shared one throughout the whole system like wizards do."

"Yeah! Wow, do wizards have to choose unique incantations? What happens if there's a collision?"

"Spell doesn't work, the invention doesn't stick and you have to pick something else. So old spells, and any spell people want to be easy to remember by referring to old spells as opposed to being easy to remember in some other way, are in gibberish or dead languages, and new spells get long descriptive names or short unique gibberish. For a while it was in fashion to just incant all your spells with your own name - plus whatever you have to add to make sure you don't share it with any other inventors - and then a number for which spell it is, but people kept botching those, they'd confuse the spell number with the power pull or two spells by the same inventor with each other."

"Yeah, that sounds weird and inconvenient, I'm glad my magic indexes per caster. - What happens if you make a new spell the same as an old spell with a new name? Does that work?"

"If it's the same in every respect it'll work just fine. If you changed something - there are some series of spells that have the same incantation but different power pulls for variant effects, like teleporting with assorted numbers of passengers is all the same wording but different power pull and intention."

"Huh. Weird. If I wanted to teleport with a passenger I'd just - include them, but teleportation isn't even an incanted spell for me."

"Anyway. Do those diagrams you make have to be flat?"

"Yeah. The ones I do come in one shape and it's the shape you saw, but even the other shapes diagrams could possibly be are all flat shapes. The details of that one shape are kind of - attached to me and the way I do magic, a little bit like how mana colours are attached to casters and incantations are attached to spells. I could probably figure out how to cast spells with a differently shaped diagram, or change the shape of mine, but it's basically cosmetic and I like the look of mine just fine so I don't care enough to try."

"And they can only do things if you make them as part of casting a spell, you can't just make a diagram to be a proxy for your own Devicehood to let people interact with stuff without having their own instance of your kind of magic?"

"Yeah, no, doesn't work that way. The closest I could get to a 'proxy for my Devicehood' would be making an independent Device. Which would still just be... an independent Device."

"So you've got incantations, which index differently and aren't present in every spell and sometimes get long and descriptive but are otherwise basically incantations, and you've got mana, which is roughly like spell power. What do you do with the mana? In the case of wizards we pull power 'through' our CCs and the big mystery is what the heck a CC is that it can have stuff pulled through it just so, is there an equivalent mystery for you or do you know the details of the procedure?"

"I get a pretty direct sense of what happens, but there's not that much to it. I generate mana, I can put it into spells and do things with it, I can - " he waves a hand and makes a spray of mana bubbles " - just throw it around to no particular effect."

"So you put it into spells - could you put it into anything else? Store it, maybe? Wizard power is storeable but there's never a reason to bother. And where does mana go after you've thrown it around or used it up?"

"It just - dissipates," he says. "Hmm, I've never tried storing it. The question's if there'd be any... ooh, huh. Okay: I've got enough raw power that for most applications I can think of, there's no point in hauling extra mana around to power spells, I'm not gonna run out. But there's no reason it shouldn't be possible to store a bunch of mana in some kind of - accessory, to give a Device a power boost if they're running low or want to cast something above their base level. I don't know how you'd do the same thing for a mage; the trouble is, with a Device you can design and install a system to take in the extra mana, with a mage you can't really do that. But it might be possible, who knows."

"What does dissipated mana do? Cease to exist? Diffuse to sufficient rarification that it's unusable, but continue to exist?"

"Well, you keep leaking; could you make something that charged up with stray or you-donated mana and then deployed it when handled in specified ways?"

"Mmmmmnot sure. I think I could come up with a spell that soaked up fresh background mana, but it'd have to be cast on the spot... and I think old background mana might just not be accessible that way. Probably easier to just charge a mana battery directly, so your magic thingy doesn't depend on how many big spells have been cast nearby in the last day or so. And then I still have the problem of figuring out how to design a magical object to work without a magical interface."

"Fair enough. There's ways other than button pressing - the lights, for example," he gestures at the glowing ceiling, "operate by intentionality, not by someone poking something."