“I’m sure most of you have heard these colloquialisms before, but despite everything we do being easily described as ‘magical,’ there have been some subdivisions formed for the different aspects of our powers.” I was back on the practice field, sitting vaguely near the other students, watching Rebecca make wild hand motions while explaining some stuff. We hadn't been assigned a replacement instructor for MAMC yet, so instead of half-assing trying to do some workouts or other physical training, our teachers had decided we would be getting some theory out of the way.

“The obvious- but not obviously connected- one is our costume. How do we change from normal clothes to it? Where does the other outfit go in the meantime? How do its protections work? The simple answer is, of course, magic. The slightly more helpful answers are: very careful teleportation on the parts of our Semiseelie, into a specialized pocket dimension, and super advanced force dispersion enchantments.”

One of my peers used the brief pause for a breath to ask, “what about the effects during transformation?”

Without missing a beat, Rebecca answered, “pretty lights. We’ll get to this later, but the cultural idea that there should be some special effects when transforming makes them appear out of the confluence of energy formed during the process.

“Anyway, the next portion of our powers is in the form of whatever other equipment you decide to use. This means weapons, tools, additional defensive measures- you get the point. Most of you are probably a little light on stuff in this regard unless you know someone who’s really into machining or you use slightly modified off-the-shelf stuff.

“If you haven’t already been told, here at SEYA, we have a whole big building with a lot of fancy machinery for you to get stuff made with. If you haven’t figured it out yet, your Semiseelie have access to… something that’s really good at design and engineering. You can request pretty much anything be custom designed and made with our machines- for a few tokens. Just another element you need to balance your spending of those with, alongside custom perk creation and upgrading.”

I was briefly confused by what Rebecca had said, and threw some of my computing power into thinking faster to consider the implications. “Hey, Cleo, what’s this about perk creation and upgrading? Haven’t you just made, like, a good chunk of mine with no charge? And upgrades?”

Almost as soon as my message had been sent, I received the block reply, {Those have never really been important enough to mention, for a few reasons. The first is that perk creation costs are completely up to the Semiseelie’s sense of fair trade, and your generally forced circumstances- especially at the start- made charging for those services feel wrong.

{Upgrades, on the other hand, never felt more worth it than making an item that would provide a similar improvement while having other applications. Take your mask, for example: makes [Unremarkable] better, but also filters and stores air, can make noises through a speaker, and adds additional protection for your face. The only catch with that is that it required the advanced CNC machines and nanites to make- which only exist in a few places on the planet.}

With the message received and processed, I tuned back into what Rebecca was saying, only having missed a second or so.

“-so it might be a pain to budget for, but I really recommend trying them out!

“Anyway, The next portion of our powers are the perks we use. This is where most people draw the line of actual-literal-magic, however, I disagree- but we’ll get to that later. I won’t bore you with what they are, just a few fun facts about how we think they work. First, when you buy a perk, the knowledge it contains is directly added to your brain; most people get some nausea from that. The second thing it adds is most of the relevant muscle memory and ULE manipulation required to make practical use of the knowledge.”

Rebecca took a few seconds to pull a water bottle out of nowhere and take a drink, before getting an excited glint in her eye. With a good degree more enthusiasm, she continued, “the thing about perks is that while they only contain so much information, with practice and creative thinking, you can push the boundaries of what it quote-unquote ‘should’ do. This is where I draw the line between magical effects and real magic. If you really click with a perk and work hard at stretching what it can do in terms of utility and power, you can create your own form of true magic.

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“The issue with this is that the universe really doesn’t like when something breaks its laws, and tries hard to correct the inconsistencies- which we feel as a mental pressure or resistance that is sometimes called ‘fact checking.’ The abilities granted by perks have been optimized to slip by the detection as much as possible, which is why unless you’re going hard for a while, those don’t cause that feeling. As you practice, you naturally learn how to also sneak around the universe’s watch or get it used to what you’re doing. Basically, magic lets you have a theoretically unlimited amount of power relating to a specific focus- so long as you put in the time and work to get there.

“Now that’s a lot of talking, so for my next point, I’m going to do a demonstration.” I got a bad feeling as Rebecca locked eyes with me and smiled sweetly, “since I know that you’ll be perfect for this, Silvia can you come up and help?”

Keeping a sigh to myself, I stood up and walked up to stand next to her- the tip of my tail flicking in annoyance before I caught myself and vowed to figure out where the program doing that was hiding. “Great! Can you produce and stabilize your really burn-y chemical?”

Complying with her request, I transformed and pulled out my canister of chlorine trifluoride before realizing I needed clarification. “Which one? I have silane, chlorine trifluoride, magnesium powder, nitroglycerin, and thermite.”

I held back a snort as she looked at me and blinked a few times. “When did you get those last three?”

“I had some time this week to make up some new, more specialized canisters and send them off. Also, do you want me to just spray whatever on the ground, or make a container for it?”

“I guess a bowl or something of the ClF3?”

I nodded and tossed the canister of compressed super dangerous chemical to my tail and pulled out both my polybenzimidazole and cyanoacrylate. Ignoring the surprised looks from my peers, I formed a bowl out of the cyanoacrylate, then covered it in a layer of the polybenzimidazole to hopefully make it a bit more resilient to the heat and reactivity of the ClF3 I filled it with.

As I was doing this, Rebecca continued her lecture, “now, there are two subdivisions of true magic: physical and conceptual. What Silvia is doing is an example of physical magic; it requires and technically follows the laws of the universe- with an MG’s ULE supplying the energy needed to make very improbable things happen.” My bad feeling got worse as she turned to me and asked, “want to explain what you’re doing to make that happen?”

I didn’t, but I went along with it anyway. “In short, my magic gives me control over how reactive chemicals are. To make the bowl, I selectively and massively catalyze the glue’s polymerization reaction to form the shape as the liquid reached the locations I wanted. Right now, I am constantly using my magic to do the inverse and keep the contents from bursting into flames, splattering all over all of us, and creating an… unhealthy amount of chlorine and fluorine gas- among other things.”

When I finished, Rebecca piped up again and told me, “alright, can you throw that away from us- I'll deal with it.”

A bit hesitant given I didn’t want to cause excessive property damage, I lobbed the bowl high and away from us. At the apex of its arc, a beam of light tore through it and I inverted my control over the ClF3. There wasn’t an explosion so much as a cascade of incendiary drops that burnt up before they reached the ground or were broken up by dozens of smaller lances of light.

“Conceptual magic, on the other hand, relies entirely on how people think the magic should work- with the largest impact coming from yourself. Why can the light I create be extremely directional while also being visible? Because that’s how we think light magic should look. Why can I create partially physical constructs? Because there’s a precedent in the media for mages doing stuff like that.

“The trade off is unlike Silvia, the only power my magic has comes from the ULE I give it- no preexisting mass or chemical energy to do the work for me- so it’s much more ULE intensive and gets resisted by the universe much more.

“Anyways, enough with the theory- it’s time to do some actual training. Doing so is remarkably similar to building up physical muscles: applying resistance. And the best way to get that is to to pair up and contest control over some ULE!”

For some reason Briar shuddered and almost manically sought someone out to practice with as soon as our instructor got close to finishing.