"Eventually," she repeats.

"Well, I guess I have less of a problem with having a life dictated by narrative tropes if the ending is happy enough to include 'literally everyone lives forever.'"

"I'd still really love to be able to leverage that, somehow."

"Well, if you have any particular ideas I wouldn't mind helping you implement them, but I'm not sure how that would actually work - Pedro and I could write some sort of gratuitously-overpowered-Sadde-meets-parahuman-Dusk-and-automatically-solves-Scion story, but that wouldn't actually have any effect on either of your worlds, it'd be a new one."

"Yeah," he sighs.

"You mentioned standard vampire backstory me goes on to find a magic key that opens portals and I get to meet interesting and sexy people and gain new magic... Who've I met so far?"

Glam looks at Sparkles then at Ade. "Why does she get sexy people and new magic and I get omnicidal aliens?"

"You do too, Glam, it's just that she's the template that all those instances of meeting people come from, and you're actually one of the instances of your template. Your world tends to attract characters with useful magic more than sexy ones, but there've been instances with an instance of Steel with demigod-level earth creation magic and indestructibility, an instance of Revan with really excellent telekinesis and indestructibility - first thing that one did was throw Leviathan into space, and so far she's gotten away with it - and an instance of Miles with two kinds of otherworldly magic, one of which makes really amazing guns and the other of which hasn't featured in the story yet but is contagious, and gives people wings and a durability boost and personal pocket dimensions that can be used for various things including fast travel. And the one with the Miles instance is dating him.

"For vampire versions... I feel like there's at least one I'm going to miss this way, but right now there's two being written, one of which mated to a boy demon-but-not-awful version of Bell with arbitrary item creation powers, and the other one is talking to a pair of highly magical brothers in a world with a complicated magic system based partly on pocket universes with various interesting properties."

(The keeper, now that the conversation has moved on from keeper-relevant topics, quietly vanishes.)

"I have no idea who or what Steel, Revan, and Miles are, but those sound interesting. I think I prefer dating Bella, though. And, boy demon Bell?"

She looks at Glam. "I'm suddenly much more curious about what your Bella's like. If I mated to him, that's pretty good news for you."

"Why?"

"The way my kind of vampire works, we don't fall in love normally, we just take one look at a person who's mutually romantically compatible with us—the word 'soulmate' is sometimes used—and we instantly fall in extreme vampire love with them. If I mated to another version of your girlfriend that probably means you two are 'meant to be.'"

"...that sounds kinda creepy."

"It can be, but nobody's written one that way since the original story - it takes some kind of unusual circumstances that we'd have to actually try to set up. Usually it just means what she said - that the characters in question are definitely stably compatible. It's not even a soulmate thing in the traditional 'one and only' sense, most characters can mate to a few different people. I wouldn't be surprised to see an instance of you mated to a Miles, for example - he's got the same 'save the world' thing going on that Bells do, but he takes it a lot more personally on an individual-people level."

"Well, that's... nice, I guess?"

"I mean I understand where you're coming from, but I did very much become immortal, I think it's a small price to pay."

"Uh, right, I want you to tell me all about that. How immortal, exactly?"

"Vampires live forever unless killed, and they can only be killed by fire - and unless you dismember them first they can just put themselves out, usually. And with the super speed and strength and stuff, dismembering a vampire is pretty hard. There are downsides to becoming a vampire, though - the three days of agony while you turn is the big one."

"There's rather more to it than that, but that's the tee el dee are."

"Mmhm."

"...that's not enough for you, is it."

"Would it be enough for you?"

"It wasn't." She turns to Adelene. "This might be a good time for an answer to the question of how your fast-forward power works."

"I go sit over there and stop actually being here, and if what I'm skipping is simple enough your author just says it happened and updates your knowledge and mood and if it's complicated or interesting or certain kinds of important to you I spend some time reading and doing data entry while he writes it out, and when he's done he lets me know and I come back."

"...I suppose that's no worse than figuring out I'm fictional."

"The amount of time passing in their world compared to here is probably all different anyway."

"Yep, I'm on day three here, which isn't unusual at all."

They retreat to a secluded booth and take the opportunity to summon two more characters in similar bursts of brown sparkles - the young woman in the oversized hoodie instantiates a glass of pear juice and sips at it quietly, but the other, feral-looking one makes a brief scene, hissing at the hoodie-wearer and climbing into the rafters to find a hidden place to lurk.

And the Saddes converse for an uncertain amount of time.

And, eventually in multiple unrelated senses, they return to the bar, kobold and hoodie-wearer in tow. "Better?"

Sadde is hugging Glam and patting him on the back. "His world is terrible."

"Yeah."

The kobold gives Glam a 'would you like me to sit on your lap and you can pet me' look; the young woman leans sideways into Adelene, not quite making eye contact but still looking sympathetic.

"This is Dusk, by the way."

Glam, not being terribly versed in kobold body language, does not get that. "Nice to meet you, Dusk." He looks at Adelene. "Do you know if being turned into a vampire would do anything bad to my powers? From her description it'd do something good to them but given that our universes are held up by narrative causality..."

Dusk nods an acknowledgement; the kobold hangs out nearby instead of pushing the issue.

"It hasn't been decided yet in the general case - they could decide that being a vampire interacts badly with the parts of your brain that relate to your powers, but they could just as easily decide that it doesn't. For you in particular Pedro does point out that vampiric super-senses are very squinty."

"Oh. Right."

"That's a pretty annoying limitation, you know." She looks at Ade again. "So. What are we here for, then?"

They take a moment to consider their wording.

"Okay, so, hopefully you've noticed that even though you're fictional I don't think you're morally irrelevant. That goes for my own characters, too, and more so since I have a higher degree of responsibility for them."

"Yes?"

"Lurker's take on what it means for her to exist is that stories about her get written and read; what happens in them matters, but more in the sense that she's herself in them rather than that good things happen to her or even that she survives the story. And we're running into a problem where there's not a lot of stories she can be in - she doesn't come in human, or most humanlike species, and while I can bring her out of her world as a kobold, she's not very stable if she's away from her tribe for a long time, and being with her tribe limits what she can do while she's away in some inconvenient ways. What we'd like to do is be able to bring other characters into her world, especially as native versions, but her world has a magic system that I made up, and it makes perfect sense to me, but I haven't been able to figure out how to describe it to any of the other authors, which means that any character who'd need to get magic to be instantiated properly in the world - which is most of them - can't be. And you're good at asking questions about magic stuff."

"...that's an interesting concept."

"Um. I mean, okay, I guess?"

"I do have a basic overview that I can start with if you like? And I do know the underpinnings, mostly, I'm just having trouble figuring out how to organize the information at all."

"Sure. We can probably do random questioning but having somewhere to start definitely helps."

"Okay, so, to start with, there's two parts; one is being a mage and the other is having any particular sort of magic. Being a mage comes with a few things, the most noticeable one being a sot of 'casting sense', which I've been modeling as a field that the mage can extend into and through things in three dimensions and then anything within that field, they get a sort of synesthetic awareness of all the physics stuff that's going on, but no actual translation of what any of it means - there are patterns that are learnable, so an experienced mage can go 'okay, I want to look at this bit for temperature and that bit for light hitting it', but for any kind of detail work it's a good idea to actually apply whatever conditions you care about to the item in question and see exactly how that affects this particular thing. Also, in Lurker's world souls are real - and animals also have them - and if you extend your casting sense into something with a soul you can see its thoughts and emotions and things, though, again, with no translation of what what you're seeing means."

"Um."

"What he's thinking is that that last part is a liiiittle bit terrifying."

"Yeah, that's actually one of the more minor reasons you don't want a hostile mage getting their hands on you. That said, it's genuinely pretty hard for a mage to get even an untranslated look at someone's mind without getting their permission or overpowering them; the field has to touch the mage, and while they can shape it pretty arbitrarily it can only be so big - a couple cubic yards if my estimates are right, the narrowest possible beam formation can extend about a city block - and it's hard to aim if you can't see what you're doing, and the casting sense is distracting enough that you can't tap into that and do anything else at all, so in a culture where mages are a known thing you're really not going to get away with doing that in public unless people really trust you."

"Can you feel someone using mage sense on you or something?"

"No, but if someone suddenly closes their eyes and goes still for several seconds, that's a pretty good clue that something might be up. And there's cultural safeguards, too - I've only really fleshed out the kobolds yet, but for them, you don't get to be a mage in the first place unless your tribe trusts you to behave yourself with it, and if you don't, they'll retaliate possibly up to the point of kicking you out of the tribe, which is basically a death sentence."

"How do you become a mage? Is that something anyone can learn? And can't someone, say, try to do it from a distance, without your seeing them? And is there any way to know what the mage's 'looking at'?"

"I still think the thoughts-and-emotions thing is kinda creepy," he opines.

"They are kind of creepy, though I think you're really overestimating how much information can be gotten that way - conscious thoughts in particular vary from person to person a lot more than most things do, so even if a mage has sat with a cooperative friend and put in the time to know that this particular combination of blue and red and the sound of wind chimes and the smell of orange peel means they've just decided to have a ham sandwich for lunch, that same combination of impressions probably won't mean anything even remotely similar for anyone else."

"There isn't a way to know what the mage is looking at from the outside - you can sometimes guess by body language, there's enough spatial awareness of that they'll tend to orient themselves toward whatever they're 'looking at', but that's not completely reliable and it's pretty subtle. Using the mage sense from a distance is possible but hard, and having something between the mage and the target makes it harder - distant, moving targets are basically impossible even with a clear line of sight due to steering problems, they're not going to be able to keep the field on the person as they move around. This does all assume human-like cognition, though - it's primarily attention-based, so a mage that was your kind of vampire would actually be pretty alarming in this regard."

"Learning to be a mage, yeah, anyone can do it, provided they can get a mage to teach them; what's involved with that varies from culture to culture, but it's generally considered a career, not something to dabble in - to give you an idea, a very large kobold tribe of 150 members would probably not have more than three mages, and might only have one. The actual process of learning involves another mage special ability, which is a limited touch-range telepathy: the teaching mage meditates, usually on a particular form of magic, and anyone who touches them while they're doing it becomes a mage and can see the magic form and learn a little bit about it. This world's magic doesn't allow for telepathy aside from that, but if another wold's telepathy is in use while a mage casts, anyone who's in the telepathic bond with them will become a mage and learn whatever magic form or forms they were using to the same level of detail that they know them, though they still have to go through the process of learning to cast in order to do that safely."

"It's also possible to learn magic directly from its source, but that's rare: The source of magic is naturally-occurring charged crystals, and touching one makes you a mage, instantly teaches you about casting to the point where you can do it as well as someone with 20 years' experience (which is actually a weird property of this world more than a magic thing, instantly learning skills can happen in other contexts too but can only happen to a given person once), and gives you perfect knowledge of one form of magic, possibly one that nobody's ever seen before. Most people don't even know that this is a thing that can happen; worldwide it happens maybe once every ten years or so."

He looks at Sparkles. "Did you get all that?"

"Yup!"

"Right, eidetic memory."

"Mmhm! Okay, so, I have a bunch of questions, should I assume that your mysterious god-author powers include also being able to react to long strings of questions?"

"Cheater," he mutters.

"Guilty as charged!"

"Yeah, I thought we might run into this, here." The bar top changes from woodgrained to a plain white screenlike surface, with a transcript of the discussion so far printed on it and automatically updating as the group talks.

"That's not bad at all," he says, rereading what Adelene had said.

"Let's see, then, string of questions. What are the forms of magic that there are? How do you learn these forms, in general? Is it possible to learn new magic without touching a mage or one of the crystals? How do you learn to cast things? How do these crystals come about, what are they charged with, where can you find them? What do you mean by weird property of this world? How do you learn other skills instantaneously? What is it that can only happen to a person once, learning a specific skill instantaneously or learning any skill instantaneously at all? And why are crystals so rare?"

"Reordering those a bit for ease of answering...

The world is actually loosely based on a video game - Dwarf Fortress, if you've heard of it, but I won't be surprised if you haven't, it's not very well known even here - and that's where the weird skill thing comes from. The original game doesn't have a magic system at all, but it has a mechanic where each dwarf in your fortress can (but only about 5 or 10 percent of them will), once in their life, go into what's called a strange mood and make an artifact, and at the end they get a major boost to the relevant item creation skill and also to their mood. The game is in beta; artifacts are eventually supposed to have magical properties, but in the current version they're just really fancy and indestructible, and that's what I'm going with for my world's version - the magic system I'm using makes magic items, we don't need two ways of doing that. From an in-person perspective, a standard strange mood is basically a week-long fugue state; once the person comes out of it they don't really remember what happened during that week, but the knowledge feels like they just naturally learned the skill, and the mood boost feels like justified pride at having made a really cool thing. I'm actually treating the ability to go into a strange mood as a property of natives of the world, so someone teleporting in from outside doesn't have the capacity and someone from this world teleporting out might have a strange mood while they're on their trip. If you try to do statistics to it, who it happens to and when it happens is completely random - it doesn't happen to babies but can happen to small children - but if someone has any experience with crafting, their artifact will be something that uses the general type of material that they usually craft with - metal or stone or cloth or what have you - and if they don't have crafting experience, it's always stone, wood, or bone.

The magic-related strange mood thing is different in that it's instantaneous and doesn't result in a physical item - I'm actually using 'magic form' as a concrete noun, here, and that's the created thing - but it's otherwise the same, including using up the person's capability to have a strange mood. Also, magic is an exception to the rule that if you have experience with a type of thing that it's possible to have a strange mood about, that determines what kind of thing you make - it's impossible to have a magic-related strange mood without a crystal; mages who get moods get them for the craft they have the next most experience with, or are treated as inexperienced if they don't have any mundane crafting experience.

The crystals are a naturally occurring thing - it's technically possible to make one, but there's no in-world way to see the background magical field you need to take into account, and anyway it takes hundreds or thousands of years for one to charge... I haven't determined a whole lot of detail about that, just that generally speaking the answer is 'no'. They do have to go a long time without being disturbed, so they're almost always found away from civilization, but it's not impossible that you'd find one in some ruins or even an abandoned place in the middle of a city if it's been abandoned long enough; this also explains why they're so rare and hard to find, though - you need just the right conditions for one to form in the first place, and those conditions have to be in a place that's protected from people and animals, and then whatever was protecting them has to not keep the person from finding the thing. And they're effectively single-use, too - if you touch a charged crystal and then leave it alone where it was, it'll eventually recharge but not within a humanlike lifetime; if you move it without touching it it'll retain its charge until it's touched, but moving a crystal from the situation that it charged in means it won't be able to charge there again at all unless you can put it back absolutely perfectly and not disturb anything nearby in the process.

An interesting thing about the charged crystals, while we're on the topic - once one is ready, it takes on a property related to the kind of magic it'll give, so for example the crystal that gave the original version of Lurker invisibility magic was invisible and she only knew it was there because she had a spell on her that let her see magical things, the one that gave the other version of Lurker her teleportation magic 'found' her rather than the other way around, that kind of thing.

Learning the forms uses that same touch-telepathy I was talking about - the way I'm modeling it is that each mage has a sort of metaphysical structure in their head for each form of magic that they know; it starts out very vague and undefined and unusable, but they can refine it by copying details that they see from another mage's copy via the telepathy. It's a lossy process, beyond a certain point - you can never get a better version of a form than your teacher's, unless you have more than one teacher who learned their versions of the same form from different people with different detail patterns, and copy bits of the same form from each of them, in which case you still can't get any details that one or the other doesn't have. Whether you can in theory get your form to be as good as your teacher's depends on how detailed their form is in the first place - there's a point past which the forms don't degrade unless someone just doesn't bother to learn the whole thing, but it's hard to get more detail than that and impossible to get a perfect copy above that level - the telepathy just doesn't let you see it in enough detail. The teacher's version being better does help, learning directly from someone who got their magic from a crystal helps significantly if you can put the time in to get everything you can from it, but there's always some loss in the process.

Without otherworldly magic, crystals and the mage-telepathy are the only ways of learning this magic. With otherworldly telepathy that has enough detail to it to allow communication and isn't strictly limited to something like a voice channel, if you're in telepathic contact with a mage who's using the mage-sense or meditating at all you become a mage, and if you're in telepathic contact with a mage who's actually casting a spell or meditating on a magic form, you get copies of the magic form or forms that they're using, at the same level of detail as the mage's. This is usually true even if the telepathy usually wouldn't allow for that - in particular it tends to be involuntary even if the telepathy usually only does voluntary communication, and it's especially likely to be involuntary on the mage's part. Other sorts of otherworldly magic, particularly anything like mind-reading, might be transmission vectors too, but I'd have to look at specific cases.

Learning to cast once you have a magic form is pretty intuitive - the form is a tool and a guide at the same time, once you have enough detail to use it at all you can figure out how just by looking at it - but there's a further wrinkle; there's a skill that's roughly equivalent to hand-eye coordination except purely cognitive that's involved in moving the things you see by mage-sense around to actually make the spell, and until a new mage gets good enough at that, their spells will inevitably go weird and then kill them, unless the spell is broken first. Breaking a spell that's on an object isn't hard - depending on how you cast the spell it can be as simple as picking the object up - but it's still something a new mage has to take into consideration: their spells will last a few days at most, and they have to be careful not to lose anything they've enspelled and to check them often enough, and they technically can but really shouldn't cast on people or valued animals during that period, since spells on living things can only be broken by the spellbearer's death. (Crystal-taught mages get to skip this part, it's included in the 'knowledge as if they'd been practicing for 20 years' thing. They don't automatically know that they can skip it, but if they're not familiar with mage training they probably don't know that there's a danger in the first place.)

I haven't put together a comprehensive list of forms, and I'm probably not going to - I want to leave the option open to add new forms if that's necessary for a particular character to be instantiated; it's entirely possible that the last practitioner of a particular form is living in some obscure village somewhere, or one of the animalperson species knows a form that nobody else does and the character can be a member of that species or do something to get them to teach it to them, or whatever, even without crystals involved. I can say some things about the kinds of forms that can and can't exist, but I think I need to talk about how spells themselves work first - we're missing a whole big chunk of how magic in this world works in practice, still."

"Where do the crystals come from? Are they just regular crystals that get charged up with magic, or do they just appear mysteriously, or what? After you've learnt magic from a teacher, can you then surpass them by practising? Why are spells cast on living things more permanent? Can you dispel something you cast on a living thing?"

Glam is still reading the transcript of the whole thing.

"The crystals are just regular crystals, though I might fudge the world's geology a little to make it a bit less implausible for people to randomly find them - on the other hand, cut gems and things still count, so I might not need to.

This magic system doesn't have a way of dispelling magic at all, just breaking spells, and what happens with people and animals is that the soul 'learns' the spell and reasserts it any time it would break, otherwise with how spell breaking works you almost wouldn't be able to enspell living things at all. How spell breaking works is that when you're casting a spell, the first thing you do is define what you're casting on, which can be an object as we usually think about them but can also be part of an object or more than one object - also including liquids, though they don't hold spells well - and then if-and-when the 'object' is 'broken' into multiple parts, the spell breaks and stops existing - which is how 'you can break a spell on an object by picking it up if you cast right' works, 'casting right' means including a little bit of the table under the object in the spell, so picking it up disconnects it from that part. But if it was just using that rule, an enspelled person might be able to breathe without breaking the spell, if the mage was careful enough to not include the air in their lungs as part of what they were enspelling, but eventually they'd sweat enough to break it, or have a strand of hair fall out, or whatever.

For how good of a mage someone is, there's three factors, and you get the lowest common denominator of the first two and then whatever your aptitude is for the third one.

The first is what details your magic forms have, and for that you can't surpass the sum of your teachers - you can't research it or anything, what you can see from theirs is what you can get.

The second is the hand-eye coordination thing, which isn't hard enough to learn to be a major factor in most cases - it certainly can be for someone learning directly from a crystal-taught mage; if they can't manage fiddly little details they can't cast spells with effects that require them, but for someone a few steps down the teaching chain those details will be lost anyway and a couple years' practice will be enough to let them do anything they can do.

The third one is spell design, and this is where it's possible to do new things and surpass your teacher. The forms determine what you can do, but it's kind of like legos, or programming - you can just build from the directions, but you can also take the pieces that are on offer and put them together in new ways to make new things. Not very novel new things, you're not going to get a whole new magical effect under any circumstances, but the same old magical effect in a new context could still do something interesting - like, you could take the form that lets you create fluids and repurpose it from making self-filling water jugs to filling a dirigible with helium, if you had a sample of helium and an inventor-ish turn of mind, as a fairly dramatic example."

"I'm not sure I quite understand the hand-eye coordination thing? Why is it harder to learn for someone learning directly from a crystal-taught mage?" he asks, after he's finished catching up with the reading.

"It's like... okay, detail on a scale of one to ten - a crystal-taught mage gets a ten in hand-eye coordination and a ten in the level of detail of their magic form. Someone learning from a crystal-taught mage can get their copy of the magic form up to a nine, and then to use that nine as a nine, they also have to get their coordination up to a nine. Someone who's learning from a general mage who has the usual level of detail to their form can get that same level of detail on their own form, which is like a four, and they only have to get their coordination up to a four to use it to the fullest extent possible - as they get more practice their coordination will get up to a nine or ten level anyway, but they don't get any benefit from that because they don't have a form that's detailed enough to take advantage of it."

"Is there anything making sure magic doesn't just die out, other than luck and narrative causality?"

"Most cultures have a pretty steady supply of apprentice mages to learn the forms that are common to that culture, and those forms aren't in any more danger of being lost than any other form of knowledge. It's not particularly uncommon for newly discovered forms to fail to gain traction and die out, though, especially the ones that aren't useful by themselves - for example the 'detect magic' form can be combined with the 'emit light' form to give magic-vision - the emitted light is produced very dimly in front of the spellbearer's eyes - but it's useless without a second form to actually do something in response to the presence of magic."

"Oh, so for a low enough level of detail you don't lose any more when learning? I hadn't gotten that."

"Yeah, they'd mentioned something like that."

Nod. "Yeah, at a four out of ten or below it's possible to get all the detail that's on offer. It is still possible to lose detail over time - if, say, the last mage who knows a form has an apprentice and only manages to teach the apprentice up to a three before they die, then there's no way to get back to a four from there, that kind of thing."

"But that sounds exactly like the kind of thing that can easily be patched with the occasional crystal, I think."

"If someone gets a crystal with the same form and shares the knowledge, yep. Given a long enough time span, any form of magic can come back."

"That's an interesting system. Definitely better than the strictly personal, strictly unique kind we've got going on back in my place."

"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."