"What's the power range, though? Like, what kind of things can a ten do, and a five, and a one?"

"The difference is in variety, not power, and it varies from form to form - again, I'll be tweaking this for specific stories, but not all forms have the same range of utility. On the extremes of the scale, though, someone with a one can cast a single specific spell with no modifications, and someone with a ten can do anything that conceptually comes under that form's heading, within the realm of things this kind of magic can do at all - for example someone with a perfect form for fire magic still couldn't control fire at a distance. A ten usually or possibly always gives that person a specific usage that nobody with a lesser power can do, though - for invisibility it allows limited phasing through solids, for teleportation it allows making one-way portals that people can see through, and actually one of the other authors and I were talking and for his one character who gets really crazy amounts of magic, she would find a crystal that gives her a form of magic that lets her create various forms of energy, and the capstone power on that one is that she can charge crystals.

Another thing, with this, is that not all fives are the same five, even for the same form. Different people get different subsets of their teacher's version when they get a lesser one, mostly as a function of their own and their teacher's interests."

"That's cool." Pause. "I'm out of questions."

"Me, too. I think I have a good model of how that system works in my head now, unless there's something you haven't told us. I mean, I'm guessing the actual casting of the spells is something that people sorta learn with their mage sight and stuff?"

"There's more to say about casting, actually.

The big thing is that casting a spell doesn't directly make whatever effect you're going for; when you cast a spell, you're always casting it on someone or something, maybe yourself but usually not, and then the effect comes from whoever or whatever you cast on. A spell always has trigger conditions, too: the trigger condition can be 'now', but it can also be 'in five minutes' or 'whenever the specified part of the object is touched' or 'when the spellbearer wants it to activate' or 'under the light of the full moon' or what have you. The triggers are up to the mage, which does mean that a spell can be put on someone that will activate under conditions not of their choosing; a spell like that is called a hex, and hexing people is considered very antisocial; you only really see hexes when a mage really wants to screw someone over and has decided to let their worst nature run wild, or as a particularly nasty tactic in wars.

Any mage can cast a spell using mundane triggers, which are anything that physically affects the enspelled object, thoughts and desires and emotions in the case of people and animals, and time. Generally speaking a mage who's enspelling an object to trigger based on a non-time effect will want to subject that object to that effect and see what exactly that looks like for this particular object, but for very vague triggers - 'when exposed to light' yes, 'when exposed to moonlight' no - or very familiar ones this step can be skipped. They can also incorporate simple counting and sequencing - 'when this object is touched in this spot and then touched twice in this other spot within five seconds of the first touch' is a valid trigger - but can't use any other calculations or contextual information - in particular, there's no way of telling whether a specific person is trying to activate the spell using only mundane triggers.

Magical triggers - like the magic-detection form I mentioned - and other metamagic forms can allow for more things than that, but they're comparatively rare. One that exists but might not have gained traction, for example, allows for on-the-fly modification of what an existing spell does, without having to break it and re-cast it, in limited ways - a lot of the magic forms work like programing functions, where they take certain variables and spit out a result based on them; usually, you have to fill in the specific variables for a given spell when you cast it, and they can't be changed later - so, like, the self-filling water jug that I mentioned earlier will always and forever fill itself with water - but this one form of metamagic lets you set up an option to change one of the variables later, so for example you could have a multipurpose self-filling jug with a little cup on the side, and you fill the cup with whatever liquid you want and press a button and samples the liquid like a mage would do when casting a fluid-creation spell and then fills itself with that."

"How do you choose triggers? If they can be rare? I mean, how exactly are they a limited resource?"

"I meant rare compared to other forms of magic - nothing here is a limited resource once you have it, choosing a trigger is just a matter of doing it at that point, but some things are harder to get ahold of in the first place than others. Trigger and metamagic forms have that 'the person who finds it has to get another mage's help to actually get anything useful' problem, and with learning from crystals being unknown or at best a legend in most cultures and the reluctance of most mages to teach anyone not actively sponsored by their community as trustworthy not to hex people, that's not trivial."

"What I meant was, how do you determine what triggers you can do? How do you learn to do new triggers? Or can you just set them up arbitrarily within those constraints you mentioned?"

"Ah. That's part of the knowledge you get automatically if you find a crystal, and from there it's taught in a pretty mundane way - once you know you can do those things, and the procedure for checking what an effect looks like, it's pretty straightforward to put it together from there, but the fact that you can isn't immediately obvious. There's a specialized language for talking about the mage sense - it's actually a written-and-drawn language, not a spoken one, and not every culture knows it; there might be more than one version, too, I haven't decided - that helps with describing how to do it if someone does get stuck. The time trigger is the least intuitive of the mundane ones, and emotions and desires can be tricky too, but more in the sense of figuring out how to find the right thing to incorporate into your spell than in the sense of figuring out how to do them at all."

"Looks like I'm not out of questions after all! Why is the specialized language written-and-drawn?"

"The mage-sense is very sensory and the specific sensory details matter a lot; it's hard to describe sensory details in something as abstracted as words, but it's much easier in something that's already sensory, like drawings. Like, theoretically you could take a painting and describe it in words accurately enough that someone could pick it out from a group of similar ones, but it'd be easier to draw a sketch of the most relevant defining features instead, and supplement that with words for the bits you couldn't draw. That's not exactly how the language works, there's still a translation element, but it's like... it's like how musical notation is done as drawings rather than as English words, except more complex than that; it's nonlinear, for example. You could actually think of it as more like a mapping notation than a language, if you wanted to, but instead of the mapmaker getting to pick which markings they want to use for towns and cities and roads and train tracks and make a key, there's a standard set of symbols that everyone uses, which is large enough that calling it a vocabulary is pretty appropriate."

"Cool. Out of questions again."

"Me, too."

"Cool." They grin. "This looks pretty comprehensive to me, too, but I'd like to run it by the other authors and see if there's anything we missed. It'll only take a moment."

"A moment in this world, I presume?"

"Yup." Grin.

"So here's what they asked about and what I came up with:

Regarding spells on people, it's possible for the trigger to be purely mental, purely physical, or some combination of both. Clapping your hands or making a particular hand gesture are both valid triggers. It's also possible to set up sequential triggers, including in such a way that third parties can activate the spell without it technically being a hex - for example, one possible use of teleportation would be to enspell a fighter to automatically teleport to a hospital if they fall unconscious in battle - but there's no way to specify 'in battle' and just having it teleport them there whenever they fall unconscious at all would be a hex (albeit a benign one), so how that's implemented is with a sequence; the fighter has to do the mental action of 'wanting to turn the spell on', first. It could also be set up so that instead of - or in addition to, though this would technically be two spells - automatically teleporting them when they go unconscious, it teleports them when someone nearby says a particular pre-set code word, again after they've decided to activate the spell.

For breaking spells that are on people, having your soul be sapient and choosing not to reinstate it doesn't work (and yes, that's a thing that can come up); reinstating the spell is more reflexive than breathing. Targeted amnesia-inducing magic alongside breaking the spell can potentially do it, though, as will sufficiently strong dispelling magic.

To break a spell, you don't actually need to break the object into entirely separate parts; a sufficiently large crack will do it in most cases. The mage who casts the spell in the first place can set how hard or easy to break the item is, as a function of their coordination; the default is sort of medium-durable, where a hairline crack won't break it at all but a fluid will break almost immediately from the molecules moving around and not being next to what the spell is expecting them to be next to any more. This also means that if you, for example, tie the ends of a piece of twine together and cast on that at the default setting with the entire knot included in the object, and then untie the twine, the spell breaks.

It's totally possible to make a computer with magic. You need a particular metamagic form if you want the computer's memory to be in the spell instead of being made of rocks or whatever, though.

The magic detection form's capstone ability - the one that a crystal-taught mage gets and can't pass on - is the ability to detect the world's magical field, which allows them to place crystals in such a way that they'll be charged. It still takes the same amount of time for them to charge, though.

There are other fields besides the main magical one; there's a form that detects these other fields and allows for finding certain types of things at a distance, even though this kind of magic doesn't otherwise allow for affecting or being affected by things at a range. (Reacting to sound isn't 'being affected at range', the trigger there is the enspelled object's own sound-related vibrations.)"

"How long did that take in your world?"

"I'm kinda curious about the physics there but don't have any questions about that per se. But I do want to know what other kinds of fields there are."

Glam gets an amused grin. "Couple days. I was kind of busy, though, had to take the cat to the vet the first day and I'm about to move and we were packing yesterday.

For the fields, again, I want to keep the option of adding more things later. But there's the magic one, and then a set that... they don't have a one to one correspondence with specific types of materials, but they correspond to how the materials show up to mage-sight, so you can use the dowsing form and the mage-sight appearance of the material you want to make a spell that detects those fields and can tell you what direction to go in to find the material it's set to look for, or the general type of material if it's one that has enough mage-sight traits in common to specify it."

"Cool. And this lack of time syncing is... a bit disconcerting, but I guess not unexpected given our fictional nature." She sighs. "Now I'm out of questions again."

"Yeah, me too."