Magic only works if no one is looking; like a superposition collapsing when observed, or a shy child who will only sing wearing a mask. The effects of magic can be easily observed. A thing is suddenly a different thing, or the same thing but smaller. A fruit placed in a box is a different colour when removed. A pimple disappears. A heart stops, or a plane drops out of the sky. This one wrinkle in the physics of magic makes it infuriatingly difficult to achieve. A magic user cannot look at the thing they are performing magic on. No one can look at the thing. You can’t even look at it indirectly, look at the shadow or its reflection, or record it to watch later. For some reason, that no one has even been able to identify, if any human is observing the target of a magic effect, or even recording it so that it could be watched by a human, nothing happens. Magic, it turns out, is shy.

For people with no magic potential this often leads to the suspicion that the whole thing is a scam. Which is made worse by the fact that it sometimes is. But by and large magic is consistent and common enough that it is accepted that magical effects exist, not by everyone, but by enough people to make it a reliable (and monetizable) way of getting things done. Its applications range from skin care to inducing organ failure. The more complex the effect, the more ridiculous the conditions. The larger the effect the more powerful the required spark. But the most thorough and complex conditions, combined with the most powerful spark, do nothing if someone peeks.

One positive aspect of the shy nature of magic is that it makes it trivial to interrupt magic that is being used for nefarious purposes. It is trivially easy to defend oneself against a magic attack, so whereas mundane uses of magic are common and widespread, theft, espionage and murder are relatively rare. If you want to stop someone using magic to steal your jewels, look at them. Or even better pay someone else to look at them. If you want to stop someone stealing secrets from your computer, look at it. If you want to stop someone murdering you, go to a party or look in a mirror. For this reason, as long as there has been magic, there have been businesses dedicated to providing people to look at things. The barrier to entry is very low.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

And now of course there are cameras. Cameras everywhere, pointing at everything. Cameras pointed at other cameras, in case someone tries to use magic to disrupt either of the cameras. If you have two cameras you have a first line of almost impenetrable defence against the most powerful magic that might be pointed at your valued possessions, family, or in our case, a mixed media painting of an elderly woman on a brown shape that might be a horse. The more cameras you have, the more lines of defence you have. You don’t even need to be magic. Even an idiot can point a camera at another camera. Any organised and methodical idiot can create checklists and processes to make sure those cameras don’t run out of batteries, or memory, or tape, or fall off their tripods.

It’s the accessibility of this business to methodical idiots that led to Baron, Amy, and Thomas setting up multiple cameras, checking them with multiple checklists, then setting up further redundancies with other cameras (with accompanying checklists), in order to stake their claim to the easy money available in the magic security business. It’s a difficult business to fail at, but as they were about to prove, not impossible.