"...If I am understanding you correctly, the problem with Spells is that they are essentially a self-perpetuating understanding of something alien, like - making an ant understand a" circuit board "ritual circle."

"We don't have that sort of thing, outside of the primordial forces themselves.  Even my translator can only work with what the recipients can understand."

"...I am concerned about the potential impact of releasing Spells upon my own ontology, but I think, to know whether they need to be quarantined, I would need to actually examine one."

Yeah, that must be very frightening if an elder god has never sat in your lap to give you performance reviews.

"Hey, that's slightly reassuring, thank you. I'm not going to immediately pull people off desperately trying to warn your plane, just in case those Forces made some kind of mistake, but still. For our own sake - the worry then is what happens when your magic meets ours. I am not actually a wizard but yours is quite a clever metaphor. The analogy I would use is... sometimes people see a sunrise, or read a poem, or meet a woman, or hear a sermon, and it shapes their whole life. That's why wizardry breaks people, really, that's what Spells are. And you have only ever seen a very nice and friendly version of wizardry. Naevys? Care to demonstrate some of the horrific highly illegal Black Magic you're hoping I don't know about?"

Is this how the Inquisition kills people? Do they literally frighten them to death? So there's no blood on their hands?

(No, they use swords. Sometimes fire. Even an elf won't die of this, and she has healing. It is hilarious, though.) 

"Er. I- I don't know how your magic works - Spells exist inside me, and across the planes, and - a Spell's effect isn't the same as its essence, mostly, though - ah - I only know of one alleged case of a wizard trying to examine a Spell inside someone - "

"I was there, his head exploded. Cast it."

...Evard's Black Tentacles.

She reaches out, shooting Galora a bit of an annoyed glance because there was no reason to rush, and grasps.

She is no true savant of Death as a school.  But if you need something to stay.  Still.  For long enough to examine it...  She knows that well.

...huh.

(The deep unpurple-black of the grasping Death magic slamming into the Spell - and not Naevys - is being slowly circumscribed with Arcane violet where it's been dragged closer to Alicia's field of influence.)

"...You have good taste in nominally forbidden spellwork, if this is what I think it looks like.  Evard's Black Tentacles?"

(The Spell lashes violently against the way it's pinned like a butterfly to a board, but it can't break out. It can't move or be instantiated. Astral winds blow silvery around it as it tries to take root in the world. In the air are occasional flickers of something dark and writhing. But it's only a Fourth Circle Spell, and it can't quite break out.)

...The Professor of Abjuration can do that, but not many others. That's scary. 

She swallows, hard.

"...Yes," she says in a small voice. "It's - old Conjuration magic - it has, um, uses..."

"I'm sure it does."  There's an undertone of, approximately, fond amusement to the words.  "You don't need to explain them, unless you actually want to."

"As far as how your magic and my magic interact, based off of this limited instance...

"...Hmm.  No, I'd best not say that, I have no desire to overpromise and underdeliver, but I do wonder how well that interaction would scale...  Death Grip is honestly a relatively simple spell.  If it could be laid into an installation to expand the range, powered sufficiently, and cued to snare the Spells You Don't Want Anybody Casting Anywhere Ever...  I suspect that might well help.  I have no desire to just sit there and let more potential apocalypses happen.  But...  Hmm.  I haven't run into the cognitohazard part of Spells in this examination, or if I have, I haven't noticed, which is interesting.  Is that - to be expected?"

"She's more than welcome to. I'd like there to be something in this conversation I could officially approve of."

No actually she's going to try to melt into her chair, is there a Spell for that?

"Anyway, that's exactly the kind of brilliant idea that could save us all! Or end the world next week, possibly. Magic normally gets stronger, and stranger, with time. One of the many, many important reasons her professors tell people like Naevys that it's harder to design Spells than it really technically is is that making them end cleanly is difficult. I wouldn't want to leave a Spell hanging around like that. But something like that is an extremely valuable idea, thank you. 

The Spell isn't cognitohazardous to you partly because you haven't examined its structure closely enough, partly because you don't understand wizardry well enough, partly because it's trapped, and mostly because this is the Last Bastion itself and there is a frankly ridiculous amount of protective magic and outright divine intervention here. I wouldn't have sprung this on you otherwise, that wouldn't even be funny."

(She does, at this point, know how to talk to wizards.)

...Yeah, she's been there.  She gives Naevys a supportive Spirit nudge before she actually manages to think about whether that's a good idea.

"I figure you'd probably just - keep someone or something else around to actually counterspell or dispel the Bad Shit once it got yoinked.  Could probably throw Anti-Magic Shell at that problem and make it self-reinforcing...  The neat thing about Death mana is that its degenerate state is just...  Nothing.  Stillness."

As for the bit about 'why hasn't the Spell tried to jump into my brain yet'...

"Ah.  Yes, that would do it.  ...Hmm."

She'll just pin that off just long enough to do - Shadow Clone - yes, it's the same name, and approximately the same function, but it's different in etiology so there - and pick the spell up again for more direct study in one of the possibilities, but not the other.

"Time to do something kind of risky, for !!Science!!!" // "And hopefully, it can only try to infect the version of me that decided to look."

She jumps in her seat. Anti-What Shell? That... shouldn't even be possible, that's like anti-mathematics or - she shouldn't say anything or someone's going to show up with an anti-mathematics field just to spite her. 

DATE: [N/A - PROJECT TIMESPAN EXCEEDED]

STATUS: CRITICAL

ONTOLOGY: ACRIMONIOUS

HIEROPHANTIC MYSTERY LEVEL: DIAMOND

LOCATION: THE COSMOS, THE FIELDS WE KNOW, ARWIS, THE FARTHEN WOODS, THE LAST BASTION, INQUISITORIAL CHAMBER, SECOND COUCH FROM THE RIGHT

TIME SINCE LAST LOCAL ERROR REPORT: 1357 YEARS 

MORTAL # [UNKNOWN - REFER TO PROJECT OVERSEER]:

MORTAL PERMISSIONS: [N/A, PROJECT ABANDONED]

GREETINGS. 

YOU HAVE ENCOUNTERED A LIMITATION IN THE CURRENT PROJECT ARCHITECTURE. THE NATURAL LAWS YOU WISH TO MANIPULATE ARE CURRENTLY UNSUPPORTED. TO CONTINUE, PLEASE REQUEST PROJECT HIATUS. WARNING: PROJECT HIATUS MAY INCREASE RISK OF EXTREME LOCAL DESTRUCTION. FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONSULT OFFICIAL ARCHIVES. 

HAVE A NICE DAY. 

-- or not.

Fucking.  Ow.

"...Are we all aware that physics is in active development or is that new information?  Because I just got an error report saying that the operation I wanted to perform was unsupported because it wasn't implemented yet jammed into my brain.  Also, yeah, no, it's a kind of misleading name, Naevys; what it actually does is - reprocess any mana that attempts to cross its bounds."

"Or I mean I'm assuming that that's why, but it didn't actually say."

"...If this is the flirtatious kind of trying to scare me, I'm flattered but married."

"...I didn't understand a lot of those words but I think that's a bad sign. What were you... Trying to do?"

"Alas, no, I was not flirting, though you are terribly attractive."

"So.  I'd whip up an actual physical demonstration of this but I don't know if it would work either - but, let us take it as read that the thing I'm about to try and explain is how a lot of universes work, including all the ones I've yet visited."  Sure, that's n=2, but she's fairly confident this will continue to hold.

"Light.  The mundane sort."  She snaps one into existence.  "Light is a very interesting thing.  Because it can behave both like - grains of dust, bouncing around in water, and also like a ripple on the surface of that water - being probabilistically more likely to be somewhere where there is a peak, less likely where there is a trough - and this depends upon whether you're trying to pin it down or not.

"This is proveable by something called the double-slit experiment."

She sets up the image of one.

"The double-slit experiment is relatively simple.

"On one side of a set of, you guessed it, two vertical slits, you have a source of - singular quanta of light, photons.  On the other, you have a detection medium.

"You release one photon.

"The detection medium," and here she actually does animate the process somewhat, "measures two impacts.  The singular photon passed through both slits."

"They spread out into a recognizeable pattern if you do a lot of that, but I'm not that invested in particle physics.

"Now.  You put detectors in the slits, as well as on the other side.  And that changes what happens.

"The photon will only pass through one of the slits if they're set up that way."

She demonstrates, again.

"On a human scale, this is pretty much entirely negligible.  But it's the same shape of thing as I was trying to do, sort of.

"I was attempting to establish... the possibility of me-investigating-the-spell and me-not-investigating-the-spell as two separate probabilities of existence - such that I could later collapse them back to one truer reality in my favor.  There's a bunch more in there I've elided, like how there is a fundamental uncertainty in measurement of particles and that also involves wavefunctions, and how, well, technically the thing I'm doing - or trying to do, at least - is based on a misunderstanding of all the underlying physics, but that's the gist of it.

"Of course, it's Void magic, so if I can imagine it anyway, it works.  Void is such bullshit when you have a multiverse to steal the good ideas from.  But I digress."

Something comes back around, the error message still sitting there, sharp in a way that memories aren't, with all the finality of a tombstone.

"...Wait a minute, why did that say PROJECT ABANDONED?  Did.  Did someone leave the universe.  Unattended.  Are we out of the long-term support window for the great cosmic machinery.  I don't.  I can't.  Excuse me just a moment."  She's lost her grip on the tentacles by this point, her thoughts just reeling from the implications.

She puts up a mild-to-moderately obfuscatory barrier (violet, semi-translucent, sound-dampening), for politeness' sake, picks up the nearest compatible soft object, buries her face in it, and goes "AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!"

"...Right.  With that panic attack out of the way.  I'd like to see if I can put my cosmic-machinery people in touch with your cosmic-machinery people so that maybe someone can actually administrate the blasted cosmic machine.  Which is a thing I have no idea if I can actually do but dammit somebody ought to be driving this thing!  I shouldn't have received that error message!  ...They might work for a random-omnipotent-being who's kind of weirdly into, effectively, romance novels - that gets kind of complicated in further detail, but it's close enough for now - but they did do a good job on the last project.  ...Sweet mother of fuck this is.  I do not think I have sufficient words, and I like to think I have a good supply of those!  Some sort of - fractally apocalyptic disaster area?  How do you have - where did the local administrator fucking go?!  Was there some kind of War In Heaven and they got blown the fuck up?  Who leaves - fucking, Mechanus - unattended!  I'm just!  Going to go scream into a pillow again!"  Because, fucking, AAAAAAAHHH!!!!!!!!!!

This shit is so fucked up!

Right.  Calm.  Game face on.  Be strong for Naevys' sake, if nothing else.

"Did something happen 1357 years ago, incidentally?"

See, this is why nobody likes wizards.