"I see your logic. You may come in," she says.

"Thank you."

Promise comes in too and once indoors de-invisibles.

"Welcome. I suppose it would be rude to offer you food, but there's tea for Tea."

"I don't know about rude per se, but I wouldn't have taken any." Promise has her notebook. "What did you try before you got to chess magic?"

"I didn't keep a list. I've been working with geometric forms since I've been doing magic at all; I played with a few ideas early on for how to extend the system sensibly, chess was the one that clicked, and then I built from there. I didn't construct any elaborate systems that went on to fail, or anything."

"What constitutes 'sensible' against such a backdrop?"

"'Sensible' in this case means 'in a way that made sense to me personally'."

"Do concepts along the lines of 'geometric forms' have features that make them useful to grab hold of in those terms apart from what happens to fit neatly in one's mind?"

"I'm not sure I understand what you mean."

"I'm not sure whether that's a meaningful question, or how I would find out the answer if it was," she says. "Geometry-focused traditions definitely exist. So do traditions that don't seem to interact with geometry at all."

"Do the geometry focused ones have anything else in common?"

Shrug. "I'm not familiar enough with all of them to say. Off the top of my head it doesn't seem like they do, at least not in a substantial or obvious way."

"Can you go into more detail about how you attached magic to what I presume was previously a nonmagical board game?"

"I'm not sure if I'd say that I attached magic to chess. I might prefer to say I attached chess to magic," she says. "Chess is still the same game, it's just that now I can do magic with it, separately from what anyone else does with either thing. And most of the process involved... trying things and then finding out that they worked. I've read enough to know that this is not normally what happens when someone tries to invent a spell, let alone a whole new magical tradition."

"How did you avoid the more usual results?"

"I don't honestly know for sure," she says. "Maybe I'm just lucky. Maybe I have a talent for guessing which things are going to work. I do think I have an unusually strong sense for what works and what doesn't in magic."

"Is that sense... itself magical, or practice-based? And if it seems likely that you were just lucky why were you willing to take the risk?"

"When I started out I was a lot younger and hadn't heard some of the more dire warnings, and as far as I knew the worst that could happen was a spell failing to work. That still is the worst that's happened to me. If the sense was practice-based, I'd expect more people to have it, and I'd expect my history of spell invention to involve more and worse failure than it in fact did."

"But you don't know any more detail about the magical sense you may have."

"It's very hard to test."

"Safely, anyway... is there any subjective quality to it or does it only feel like guessing?"

"It feels like guessing, or like having aesthetic opinions. Not like anything overtly magical."

"Maybe I should not attempt to invent a magic system that suits me. At least not at this time."