"I guess that does sound plausibly mechanistic, if you're doing the design work just like I'd have to for a complicated conjuration."

"Yeah. We usually consider it more like a branch of chemistry or physics than like magic? It works, the same way mixing reagents or dropping large weights works."

"How much of the process is mental? Could a better and a worse alchemist getting different results say and do the same things while trying their thing?"

"Standard alchemy's an array that you activate, materials, and visualization, usually of array components you haven't drawn. Visualization is entirely mental, but how important it is varies with array. My and Em's method is almost entirely visualization, but that's rare, and what we're visualizing is the array - we're just not bothering to draw it, first."

"Huh. That's sort of both like and unlike a wizard spell."

"There's actually a risk of someone untrained accidentally setting off an array that's complete enough, too, which's why you're not supposed to leave them lying around - and textbooks usually present them in parts."

"That's different. Enchanted objects can be set off accidentally but that's when they're designed like that."

"Yeah; part of why we consider alchemy more a science than anything else. Chemicals also don't care how much training you have if you start mixing them."

"I don't know a whole lot about chemistry but I can see why you'd make the comparison, yeah. It does show up to detect magic though."

"It makes more sense that it's technically magic if it's not universal, I think? Or not universal to places running on physics as I understand it."

"How do you mean?"

"Like - if a universe has people who need to breathe air, and who need to eat food with specific nutrients, and they have gravity and light and all, I'd also expect those people to have specific underlying biologies like cells, and for chemical reactions to work basically the same as they do here, and for magnetism to exist, and all that, since those are basically the really small... Bits of the thing that make the whole work? But I'm not really surprised a world like that could exist without alchemy?"

"Huh, I like that distinction. By the same token it doesn't seem that weird that you don't have magic I'm familiar with here, that seems extra and optional. Though there are a lot of kinds of people in my world who need to breathe air and eat food who are also inherently magical in various ways and I suspect I'd feel differently about the separability of magic if I were one of them."

"Yeah, that makes sense, too."

"My species does actually have a few innate spellcasting abilities but they don't feel importantly innate."

"We just have the one sapient species, I think, and no one's got any abilities that aren't just alchemy..."

"How do you suppose alchemy would do the shadow thing?"

"Probably some kind of esoteric alchemy? Like what binds my soul to my armor - theoretically you could alter the array doing that so I could just move my soul around. The 'shadows' could be some kind of base matter a soul's bound to, which is either damaged by light or very absorbent or both."

"I guess it could have just been some sort of black thing. I asked someone once what darkness looked like and we concluded it was like having a black blanket over your head."

"Yeah, though it's also hard to say for sure, especially from a description..."

"We can guess it was able to conventionally see, since it followed my illusion."

"Yeah, though I can too despite lacking eyes - we still haven't figured out how, but it might be a general awareness of my surroundings I'm filtering through senses I was used to having when I had a body."

"Sure, but it's not using hearing, or tremorsense, or echolocation."

"Yeah, especially since it didn't act like it could see an invisible you - which does suggest it's mostly interacting with light."

"How does alchemy normally interact with light?"