Hammond waddles his way up to his last stop of the day. The sun is just starting to set in the distance. Today has been nice — mostly venturing through the Italian countryside — but it will be nice to get home for dinner.
He straightens his tie, and gives the door a firm knock with his flipper.
She scrambles for the door.
"I'll get iii..." oh, wait she's alone.
She looks through the peephole to see if it's someone they know.
She unlocks the door but keeps the chain on, as her mum told her to do for strangers.
"H... hello?"
"Hello! Do you have a few minutes to answer some survey questions about magic?" Hammond inquires.
"Would that require opening the door? I'm sorry, but mum says to never let strangers in. I don't think she was considering talking walruses but you know, better safe than sorry."
"Oh, no, that's quite understandable," Hammond agrees. "I would tell my calves the same thing, had I any."
"But no, I'm content to put questions to you from out here, so long as you don't mind conversing through the gap."
"No, no, that's fine. This is most probably a dream anyway, walruses can't talk in real life."
He huffs a little.
"Perhaps not in your world," he admits. "But in mine it's perfectly usual. I've been able to talk since before I said my first word."
"And anyway — it might become more common here pretty soon. I've been sent around because your world has grown enough that it's about to develop magic, and I'm surveying people on what form magic should take here."
"Wait. How does that work? If you haven't said your first word yet you haven't talked? I'm confuddled."
"Wait, we're getting magic? For real? Oh, I really hope this is not a dream! Which kind of magic? Is it like Harry Potter? Like the Lord of the Rings? Are you magic? Can you use magic?"
Hammond smiles.
"Well, if I hadn't been able to talk before that point, how would I have said my first word?" he points out. "As for your more important question — that's rather up to you. The Will of Magic is still trying to decide what kind of magic to be, so it sent us out to ask for people's opinions."
He looks to the side.
"... well, technically it didn't send me; I'm a subcontractor. But it's close enough! Anyway!"
He makes a show of consulting the clipboard.
"Are those the kinds of magic that you'd like to have? Magic isn't so limited that it has to match what you're already familiar with, but if you have a kind of magic in mind already, it might make sense to start there."
"I mean, not precisely? Harry Potter's magic words are just silly. 'Wingardium Leviosa', really? Magic should be more dignified than that. And Tolkien's magic is uncommon and often subtle. I want everyone to be able to learn magic. Well, maybe not everyone. You should be smart enough or something. People who are not good at thinking would be dangerous with magic."
"I definitely want spell diagrams! And portals!"
He writes this down.
"How do you feel about the question of 'hard' and 'soft' magic? That is, should magic be based on mechanistic, mathematical principles, or on less rigidly defined concepts such as language or emotion?"
"Definitely hard. I think it's neat if you can choose to use your emotions to influence magic, like feed your rage to make a fireball more powerful, but if you have a spell diagram for light, it should do light, consistently and predictably."
"So I think I'm fine with emotions affecting spells, but if you're calm and comfortable then magic should feel like math, not art."
"That's an excellent distinction!" Hammond comments, scribbling this down on his clipboard. Somehow.
"You mention spell diagrams — if that's how you want magic to work, could you explain a little more about what that means to you?"
"I think... I really like the æsthetic of a big ritual circle on the floor, and I also enjoy smaller spell diagrams. Maybe they could be helping tools? Like, when you're first learning you caaaarefully draw the diagram for the null spell, then cast it channeling your power through it. Then as you get better you can just visualize the diagram and cast more intuitively, so circles would be mostly used either by the novices or for very complicated spells, like ones requiring multiple people or for spell research!"
"Ah, yes, I see. Do you picture the spell diagram as defining everything about a spell, or would you be able to tweak things on the fly once you get to that casting-intuitively stage?"
"I think it would be mostly fixed if you use a physical diagram, whereas the intuitive stage allows you to tweak it. I kinda see it as a recipe? It's easy to add more or less salt, cook slightly longer or shoeter, but if you change something major on the fly it has a good chance of going badly. Like burning your sauce."
"So that's why you want diagrams for spell research. Less probable to explode the room."
"What do you see the process of spell research being like? Constructing new experimental spell diagrams and testing them? What else?"
"Building and testing diagrams is definitely a good chunk, yes, but also trying to build theories on how the symbols relate to the effects? Actually I'm unsure if I'd prefer that to be something known or something that needs exploring. On the one hand, science, on the other hand, what if we never discover the most efficient form for something? I'm conflicted."
"It's not usually a component of hard magic systems, but some forms of magic do have a notion of predetermination or destiny; how would you feel about it being predetermined that people would eventually figure out everything there is to know about magic?" he asks.
He's deeply tempted to point out that, if the magic ends up compatible with creating processes that last forever, something like a Gödel search will almost certainly result in that being the case anyway. But he's really not supposed to get sidetracked into abstract computer science.
"I don't think I'd want that. Destiny seems... stifling. Especially destinies of the self-fulfilling kind."
"What if magic was like... physics, in a sense? We don't know everything, but we can look inside atoms, and at galaxies, and learn things in a way which feels... It feels like eventually we'll be able to know enough? That made more sense in my head, I'll be honest."
She ponders for a moment.
"What if the building blocks are very easy to discover and then magic is such that you can build any possible spell out of those basic building blocks? Like you do in programming. There are still an infinite amount of programs that we haven't written yet, but we have the building blocks, and anything we want to build we should eventually be able to?"
"What if magic was like programming. So a magic circle would just be... a program? And the reason that you need them for bigger rituals or experimentation is that you need to write down what you're doing to check it. But like, you can definitely write an hello world from memory if you've ever programmed, and you can write - like - a calculator from memory if you have even a small amount of experience and so on."
Hammond smiles widely.
"Oh — when you have the time, you should really look up an explanation of Gödel numbering; I think you'll find it very interesting," he advises her. "But yes, that's definitely a way magic can work; is it your opinion that it should be like that?"
"It makes sense to me? But maybe there should also be space for something more... magical?"
"Maybe this should be like, the mainstream way of doing magic? Like with folk medicine? It's mostly superstition but then you find out that willow bark works because it contains... something?"
"I don't know, it feels really neat to have magic as programming, but it also feels... reductive"
"Salicin," Hammond supplies. "It's a precursor to acetylsalicylic acid, which I think people around here use for pain relief. It doesn't work very well on walruses on account of our delicate skin."
He relates this with the air of someone repeating rote facts while his attention is elsewhere.
"And I do see what you mean, I'm just trying to think how to phrase my natural follow-up question ..."
He drums his tail in thought.
"Earlier you made the comparison of spell diagrams being used as a kind of mnemonic, to guide the creation of the spell — how would you feel about a system where there are multiple competing kinds of mnemonics, such as different kinds of rituals, some of which are programming-flavored and some of which are more esoteric?"