There are a couple of things it is important to know about magic.
First, nobody understands how magic works. People know how to use it (some more than others), but even the most experienced magician has no idea why the things they do result in the magic it does.
The basic method for using magic is simple. You set up the conditions, you ignite the magic. Igniting the magic requires someone with magical potential summoning magical energy, mentally containing it, then releasing it with enough force for it to affect the physical world. In practice this consists of a lot of huffing and grunting, squinting and grimacing, squinting eyes and clenching fists. Only the magical practitioner knows how much of this is theatre and how much is genuine effort. When the magic is released there is no sound, no light, no smell. Even if the release of magical energy has an enormous impact on the physical world, there is no indication other than the resulting change and theatrical yelps and huffs of the magician that anything has happened.
Very few people can muster a magical spark, even if they have some magical potential. About a quarter of the world’s population is magically sensitive, that is they can sense when magic is in effect. Only a slither of those are able to extend that sensitivity to summon magical energy and create a spark. If you can ignite a magic spark you have a clear and well trodden path to status and wealth, with only your own ineptitude standing in your way (as was the case with our car park magician).
Amy was magically sensitive. But she was no ‘magician’. Being around magic unsettled her, it gave her a sense of something gone wrong, of a relationship damaged, of a small undefinable loss. She could not, and did not want to, create a magical spark. And denying other people the ability to make a spark was a source of great personal satisfaction and an almost successful business.
When in the business of preventing magic, disrupting the spark, or rather disrupting the magician so they couldn’t create a spark has not historically been very effective. It typically required very physical interventions that were just as likely to incapacitate the security team as they were the magician.
A much easier approach was to disrupt the first part of a magical event, the conditions. The conditions! The stupidest part of magic.
If creating a spark represented everything heroic and romantic about magic, setting the conditions represented everything that was annoying and weird about it. Everything from the humidity of the air, to the amount of paper in the room when the magic is ignited, to the intent of the people nearest the magician at the point of ignition might affect what would happen when the spark was ignited. And if the conditions weren’t perfect the thing that would happen would be nothing. Because everything had to be just so to create any kind of magical effect at all, let alone a useful one.
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The baffling and annoying thing about conditions is no one had any idea how they worked.
No one knew what magic was.
No one knew why some people could sense and sometimes create magical energy.
No one knew why some arrangement of seemingly unrelated conditions at the time of magical ignition caused a magical effect.
They just knew that it did. Well, they sort of knew that it did. Because although the conditions were the most annoying part of magic, they weren’t the weirdest. People had learnt over time what arrangement of conditions caused what magic. Through trial and error people learnt what combination of magical energy and specific conditions would produce repeatable and consistent effects. But no one had ever been able to identify any underlying patterns. There were no consistent or identifiable combinations that ever led to an understanding of why a pile of dirt and discarded shoe would knock out every alarm in a 1km radius. Removing or adding an item did not lead to a similar but different effect. It just collapse the whole thing and created the effect that magic without the correct conditions always created, a big fat nothing.
Sensing, creating and sparking magic had identifiable patterns that could be used to build specific theories about the nature of magic, even if those theories could not be conclusively proven. But conditions gave scientists nothing. They seemed utterly random, as if someone was playing a joke on us and mocking our abilities to understand the structure of the world. They suggested that at its grandest level the universe might be mysterious and unexplainable. Contemplating conditions was humbling. It was also very irritating. It led to scientists wasting life times trying to unpick a possibly unpickable mystery and it led to otherwise sensible (if deeply flawed) magicians pouring fried chicken onto car parks and spitting in tourist guides.
Amy continued to argue with Thomas as she checked her hand drawn plans. They showed the arrangement of cameras that would cover the small exhibition area. Three cameras pointed at the painting, and each other. Six cameras pointed at the other three cameras, and each other. Every camera was being captured by at least two other cameras. Some cameras didn’t capture the exhibition at all. If you didn’t understand how magic worked, the whole thing would seem baffling. A room full of cameras, all pointed at each other, most ignoring the objects of value they were supposed to be monitoring.
Which is why there is one more weird thing that needs to be understood about magic.