Magical Mechanics

Magic in this setting obeys a lot of rules, and they aren’t all obvious at a glance. Since the mechanisms and effects are starting to come up in more depth, I thought I’d talk about that, because they very much do matter. And they actually have more in common than you might think with theoretical physics in the real world. This is going to be a particularly lengthy discussion, and while it may come up over the course of the story, including it directly in the narration would be quite a bit of needlessly-technical exposition. So, while it might be an interesting example of how I think about the setting, it’s not necessary information to understand the story. That said, here are the basic rules about how magic works and where its limits are.

Causality is a hard limit, or rather, sequence is. You cannot see the future; you cannot change the past. These would require breaking the rule of sequential time, and that is not a thing that can be done. You can do all kinds of shit to the arrow of time, in ways that can often be mapped towards general and specific relativity. You can make its subjective passage weird, you can dilate it so far that the rest of reality is nearly at a standstill (but never actually stop it), you can do good enough stochastic modeling to have a very good guess of the future and then convert it into a sensory impression or information set. But you can’t actually break sequence.

You cannot ignore the basic principles of space and position. There are three spatial dimensions; it is technically possible to change this in a specific Otherside domain, but you have to have total control over the domain’s structure (i.e., made it yourself), you would have to be incredibly good at this, and you would still struggle to make it different in any way that you could actually interact with. And even there, you cannot change the basic concept in play of things being in places. You cannot be in two places at once (at least not literally; there are ways to cheat this rule too, edge cases, but directly breaking this law is not a thing).

Taken together, these two things (which are basically the concept of spacetime, conceptually, though the details vary) are the strictest limits. Many of the other things people say are not possible are ultimately deriving from this. There are other rules which are not as prominent, though, including some which are similarly based in theoretical physics.

Thermodynamics isn’t the most consistent thing, and the ways it varies are really hard to fully define. But the basic concept can be applied: Entropy exists, and exists as a physical quality related to the broader informational concept which is being applied in the specific case of physics. It refers to how much motion is happening within a system, which is effectively what heat is and what “disorder” means when applied to particles. Entropy is the degree to which you are not certain about information; when you’re looking at physical substance, the main thing you’re not sure about at the subatomic level is where you will find a given particle, which at the atomic scale is mostly electrons. Since most of the time adding more energy increases the number of possible places that it can be, the general assumption holds: The more energy is stored as motion within the particle, the more possible states, and thus the higher the entropy.

(There’s a reason this isn’t in the narrative itself.)

Anyway, that concept exists. Uncertainty cannot be fully removed. In that physics case, this means that there will still be ground-state quantum fluctuation even as temperature limits onto absolute zero. And entropy within a closed system cannot decrease, this is proven in the abstract at the information science level fairly confidently. This is why there is the thermodynamic law of “Entropy in a closed system will always be the same or increasing, not decreasing”.

But there are edge cases. There are superfluids, which exhibit zero kinetic entropy, zero friction; set one into a vortex and untouched it will spin forever. (No, this cannot be used to make a perpetual motion machine. The reasons are too complex and abstract for this note, which is saying things, but it can’t.) There are superconductors and plasmas which exhibit the same property with other types of energy, a complete absence of resistance. There are charged crystals which have a maximum temperature, past which they actually move into the negatives (in Kelvin) if you keep pushing more energy into it. Because there are limited possible states at higher energy in those systems, structurally; the higher energy orbitals are locked into a specific number of possible arrangements. Eventually, then, if you keep adding more energy to it (which would be very hard), you’re making it less entropic, and as soon as it comes into any system with a positive temperature in Kelvin, the negative-temperature object will be getting colder very, very, very quickly, shedding heat to the positive until it gets above zero.

So, we have a lot of complexity here. It’s not surprising that magic adds more. But it also shouldn’t be surprising, when there are this many edge cases and ways that the real world concepts aren’t actually what people tend to think of them as being (who here would have thought of absolute negative temperatures being hotter than any possible positive temperature?), that adding another whole dimension of analysis creates more quirks, and makes things possible that might initially seem like they shouldn’t be.

Sure, it’s true that you can’t violate the laws of entropy. But the laws of thermodynamics as typically conveyed are sort of like Newton’s laws of motion: Applicable at most human-relevant scales, but much as general relativity established that Newton’s laws are not universal ones, modern quantum mechanics has done the same for thermodynamics. Motion is not what Newton thought; heat is not what early chemists thought. Change how the system is constructed, and you can make really, really weird things happen without actually breaking those rules.

But doing so is hard. As is often the case, a lot of these tricks require full control over a domain to do at all and even then it’s very hard. There isn’t much that’s impossible in this setting, not really. But there are a lot of things that are so difficult that they limit onto impossible, and the difference doesn’t matter for most people. You could, in principle, alter basic cosmological rules at the local level with a spell, and alter the passage of time so that it seems from your perspective as though everything else is static, frozen. Doing so is so hard and requires so much power that when people teach magic they don’t bother mentioning it. No more than they teach the laws of motion as reconstructed within general relativity in high school. Lies to children educational models are sometimes the best option, and the vast majority of people will never need to know how the underlying framework of relativity works to get through life.

So, then, there are only a few rules that are truly inviolate. But there are some which are close enough that they get taught as inviolate, and in terms of understanding how a given effect happens in the narrative, it makes sense to treat them that way. With that in mind:

Workings are not perfectly efficient. (Spell is a narrower term for a magical working which is a single-instant effect, and this rule also applies to other workings, like enchanting or ritual spells). This gets compared to thermodynamics really easily. If you draw a certain amount of magical energy, and you put it into a working, you’re going to have the equivalent of waste heat. This, then, is why there is such a complex interplay of “strong” and “skilled” in-setting. “Strong” more or less refers to how much energy you can pull up (and what that means will be discussed more elsewhere), while “skilled” in this context often means that you can create a very efficient and elegant system, moving that energy in ways that exhibit little waste, tight focus, and controlled effect. Skill can make up for a large deficit in power in many scenarios. You have a dozen times as much power as someone, but if they’re fifty times as skilled in its use, you’re still probably outclassed. If you can force them into a brute-power contest then you would win, but doing so is…very unlikely.

Next rule: The more things you have to change in order for what you’re doing to work, the harder it is. This is going to essentially be a place where skill shows particularly strongly. The main reason for this is that the mental structures you’re forming as you create the working have to define what you’re doing, but trying to perfectly define things ex nihilo is extremely difficult and virtually impossible on the fly. It is easy to say “I want to make fire. By which I mean fire.” Saying “I want to make fire. By which I mean a reduction-oxidation reaction happening using local atmospheric oxygen as the oxidizing agent, applied to that thing over there, using this working manipulating mostly molecular-scale potential energy related to kinetic and electromagnetic forces of the following qualities,” though, is very, very difficult. Trying to do it at-speed is ludicrously out of reach for any normal human.

So, pyromancers. They’re using magic to make fire, which is the mental model they have, the sort of cognitive construction which dictates what their magic is. (This is part of why human magic, in all cases, is strongly related to a person’s personality, cognitive patterns, and mental focus or discipline.) The more they have to change or determine in detail what kind of fire they’re imagining, the more difficult it is. So, you throw a fireball, that’s easy. Heat wants to expand (I use anthropomorphic terms; yes I know it’s bad practice, no I don’t care). Making a pocket of really intense heat and flame explode into a large area is going to be entirely in line with what would happen if that type of energy were affecting that gas. Making that fire stop cold at a ten foot radius, and there not even be a warm breeze outside that, requires a great deal more skill. This is a case where no amount of power can substitute, too. Pumping more energy into a clumsy heuristic magical working will not make the definitions involved any more effective at being something other than what the heuristic is.

This is systemic. The more you want to make a phenomenon or a power type or whatever be not the same thing it would naturally be, the more difficult it becomes. Often, when someone’s trying to either do magic easily or do magic that they aren’t great at, this means that making the phenomenon be pretty close already is going to make it easier. You want to make the natural definitions of the forces and materials you’re using to do as much of the work for you as possible. Could, for example, the mages in the very first chapter have wiped their prints using something like olive oil? Sure. But since olive oil does not naturally exhibit the same “when magically charged this is a strong solvent” property, doing so would be orders of magnitude harder. With acetone all you really need to do is give it more oomph behind what it’s already doing. Anyone capable of manipulating magical energy at all can charge it like that, and a gorilla with a spray bottle can use it.

Those qualities are often not obvious, of course. Like Kyoko mentioned then, it’s true that many substances have some form of relationship between physical properties and more abstract ones related to what happens when magical energy is added to the system, but you would not be able to rely on that. There have been centuries of research and development by mages the same as by chemists and physicists, and they can identify these qualities. The really advanced scholars among them can even predict and explain them, and know the reasons behind many of these properties. They are few and far between, though. For most people, it’s really more like chemistry at the undergraduate introductory level. There are data tables with various substances and information about their qualities, which in some cases will have defined terms similar to density, and sometimes have generalized descriptions like “acetone is a great solvent”. This is comparable to how for most chemistry you don’t have to know anything about why the valence shell of fluorine is unstable enough to make it the most electronegative atomic element aside from noble gases. You just need to know that fluorine is awful.

(I know, this explanation has been very long. Also, yes, this became much easier with modern database software.)

Now, one thing to keep in mind is that Kyoko doesn’t know all of this material very well. Some of it is completely outside her usual modes of thinking or things she has never had reason to learn. Some she knows, but doesn’t know enough to intuitively apply it on the fly in the narration. So, for example, Kyoko herself is throwing around a ton of electricity and sometimes making it do very unnatural things. As a very obvious example, there’s the fact that it is always a shade of green no natural lightning is.

Because it’s not natural lightning. But it’s not human magic, and that matters. To some degree, the comments about skill and power apply to every kind of practitioner; but some of the details don’t. In this case, Kyoko isn’t making her own definitions at all. She’s just using an existing definition of “lightning” she innately has, because it’s innate in what it means to be “raiju”.

It’s similar to how human mages are invariably focused on something related to their own personality, and I would actually go so far as to say that’s a specific application of the same general application in use here. Kyoko’s lightning is an uncanny shade of green. But she would have to do a ton of work to change that color, because doing so would mean moving the manifestation away from its natural definition, even though it’s not natural in manifestation within the world.

Now, apply the basic observation that has been made about humans: They can always use a single type of magic that is always in some sense natural to them or related to their personality and identity, but they can with difficulty branch out into other fields. This is just another way of saying “The nature of human magic is such that it is defined by someone’s personality and identity. So the less something is like who they are, the harder it is to make their magic be what they want it to.” This is true for them just like Kyoko’s lightning is always green. Changing either is hard because it’s naturally what it is, even if it’s not a natural thing.

And since human magic is so much defined by this mental identity, shaping it within their focus still requires mental structures. Kyoko, on the other hand, just…leans on a particular detail of something that’s already there. She doesn’t need to tell her magic what it means to be physically strong and how she wants it to manifest. She just uses the preexisting definition of “raiju”, which includes a concept of “strong” that she doesn’t really need to change at all, and it happens at a preconscious level. If she wants lightning, the definition of raiju means that it becomes a vibrant green electrical storm and creates those unusual patterns. Meanwhile, if she puts the same kinds of effort in to learn and branch out, she can use those more conscious definitions, just like a human can use those that aren’t part of their own identity.

So, these are more or less the core rules of applied magical theory in this setting. You strictly cannot violate sequence or translational space, and you cannot violate laws of informational entropy (nor can you negate pure mathematics and logic, for that matter, though it’s arguable whether that’s a law of magic or just of logic). Efficiency of a working is limited and requires skill or elegance of design in order to optimize. The greater the change from what natural or metaphysical rules something follows, the harder it is both to produce enough power and shape clear enough definitions to do so. What this power is, how it works, and why these laws of nature exist is all even more abstract than this note and will be elaborated on more over the course of the story.