season two: in which the council notices our heroes
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"I was kiiiiind of hoping we could move in after Michael is gone? Which is only gonna be another few weeks now."

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"Uh, okay. Why?"

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"I really really don't wanna have to live in the same house as Michael and Azalea at the same time."

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"Alright, fine. Might limit the books to the ones it wouldn't be a disaster to have stolen, but I think that's most of them. You'll be fine."

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"Thanks."

She picks up books, combs over them with Wishbone and Dennis - she's pretty sure this'll go faster with Dennis - and eventually puts together a list of spells that might be good to try. Since she's doing this with Dennis, they naturally settle on a classification system based on D&D.

The vast majority of spells are what they settle on calling divine magic - they work by calling on a higher power and asking for assistance. Some of these are clearly not permissible under Catholic law, as they involve obvious worship of other gods. These end up on a list labeled "Forbidden Magic". Some of them are ambiguous enough that they don't want to write them off entirely, and those go on a second list labeled "Favors from Aliens". Some spells call on the Christian God, and those end up on a list titled "Cleric Spells". Some spells don't appear to call on anything; this is especially common for low-level detection rituals or other things that merely react to existing mystical energy, such as the method of detecting a witch. These end up on a list labeled "Wizard Spells". The final category of magic consists of spells that rely on the caster's own reserves of mystical energy; these are frequently very dangerous, particularly for an inexperienced caster, but they don't typically call down the wrath of any other outside entity. These go on a list labeled "Bard Spells".

Next week, she has a sizable list of cleric, wizard, and bard spells that seem safe enough not to be completely terrible ideas, with stars by the ones that seem particularly useful. She and Dennis hang out in the gym after school talking about which ones seem like the best ones to start with.

Faith doesn't show.

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Hey, Faith, anything eat you?

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Just taking a day off.

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Okay, cool. See you later.

 

"Looks like it's just us today, anything you've been wanting to get to?"

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"I still wanna learn how to pick locks and learn de-escalation words in a bunch of demon languages, but the first order of business is definitely magic. Dennis, you wanna - "

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"Yeah. So we've grouped spells into five categories. This is a little simplified because some spells are hybrids, but it works to a first approximation. First, we have wizard spells, AKA magical science. These are the safest and most reliable, since they don't sap your own energy and aren't going to piss off anything else up there, although as with regular science you still have to be careful not to metaphorically mix anything that'll give you an explosion or poison gas or anything. They mostly work by manipulating reactions to existing mystical energies. The majority of these are detection spells, but some of them also do interesting other things. No hard-line limitations on these, you just have to be careful that you don't cause bad chain reactions.

"Second, we have cleric spells, AKA prayers with punch. These work roughly the same way as other kinds of divine magic, but Karen can do them because they're specifically asking favors from the Christian God. The limitation on these is - according to Wishbone, anyway - if your heart's in the right place and you have faith and trust and whatever else, and you only ever use them to do the will of God and help other people, they should just work for you, every time. But if you start using them for selfish reasons or to make your life easier, they'll crap out on you, which means it might be a little hard to practice them, although of course you can still run through the rituals ahead of time so you know how to do them for real when you need to.

"Third, we have bard spells, AKA the power was within you all along. Not a great class name, but it was the only thing left. These are spells that don't call on a higher power because they work by tapping into your own reserves of mystical energy. Different people have varying qualities and amounts. It's possible to improve the way you tap into your energy with practice, so you can do more, but a lot of these are a little ooky, and if you do them wrong or overspend your reserves, you can seriously hurt yourself, and in extreme cases you can end up dead or comatose. 

"Fourth, we have alien favors - spells that work by calling on higher powers, but which don't involve outright worship or anything clearly out of bounds, so we thought we'd collect them just in case they ever seem like they'd be a good idea. The big dangers here are that you might piss off the higher being who's helping you, and you also might piss off God and cause your cleric spells to start crapping out. They're also about as unstable as the aforementioned bard spells, and magical backlash is often a really serious consideration. There's some cool stuff here, though I don't think we should use any of it until we know more about the specific entities we'd be asking favors of.

"Fifth, we have forbidden magic, stuff that's definitely in the category that Karen can't do, and that anyone else should be super careful when handling. Concept here is simple - you worship a higher power, sometimes offering it something in exchange for its help, and in return you get to have magical powers. At least half of spells seem to be in this category, maybe more. We're not going to do them, but we did - OK, I did - write down some ones that seem like they might be useful in real emergencies, if we ever want to know what all our options are when everything's going to hell in a handbasket. 

"We have a lot of stuff here, but to start I think we want to limit the potential for backlash as much as possible, so we've got a list of a few useful things that should be pretty safe. We found a wizard spell for detecting poisons and another one for detecting whether an object has magical properties, and we found a couple bard spells that shouldn't be too taxing even for a beginner - one to cause a light breeze, one to discern north, one that limits the negative effects of staying awake for too long. We also found one that does telekinesis and one that does telepathy, but the backlash risk on both of those is way too high for a beginner, we're gonna have to revisit them later."

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"Huh! Now I super want to match this up against the miscellaneous formal classification schemes which I read about and then promptly forgot about because they were boring and stuffy. I bet it's similar, those all sound like - natural categories. Do you mind if I check really quickly whether the ones you think are safe are also thought by miscellaneous other experts to be safe -"

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"Yeah, go ahead."

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He checks. "All right, they also think this is unlikely to kill you!"

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High school students look very pleased with themselves. "So - we can start practicing them now?"

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"Yeah, go for it. Stop if anything unexpected happens, including 'wow more of this ingredient is missing than I thought', pay attention to your judgment seeming altered in any way, if you burn down the school call the fire department, you know, the usual stuff."

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"Solid. We were thinking, uh, one at a time, so that maybe the other people not doing spell things could intervene before anything happens that might burn the school down. Given the way that things in general tend to go for us."

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"Sounds good."

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They try the breeze spell first, since (given that they're not tired and already know which way north is) it's the only bard spell which will have immediately discernible effects. Neither of them can get something powerful enough to do more than cinematically blow someone's hair around a little bit (and in this case it doesn't even do that, given that Dennis's hair is too short and Karen habitually ties hers in a bun for combat readiness reasons), but they're pretty sure they're both getting something. The spell to detect a spellcaster agrees with them; the potion they create turns blue on contact with their skin.

"So I guess we - keep practicing this stuff, see if we notice any increases in power at any point in time, maybe look through more books and see if we can get anything that seems useful and that works at this power level?"

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"Seems good to me, yeah. Even minor telekinesis would have a lot of combat applications, if you could get there with practice I think that'd be a good goal from magic for people who don't care to specialize in it."

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"Yeah, that makes sense. It sounded like that was a thing you could do without, like, excessive numbers of years of training."

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"...given that I am not otherwise specialized and there are superpowers lying on the table now, and I am, full disclosure, totally going to investigate them, anything I should be doing to check in with you guys about it?"

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"Tell us what you're trying, hang out with us regularly so we can notice if it's affecting you weirdly, if something doesn't have the intended result tell us even if it seems like nothing happened?"

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"I can do that."

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"How concerned do you think we should be that Faith skipped practice?" he asks Angel that evening. "From 'that's so wildly out of character I can only blame mind-control' to 'if she never skipped that'd be more concerning'."

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"Uh... I don't know her that well, but a lot closer to the second one."

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