Magic

Magic is real in Soldier On, and it has played merry hell with science, history and sociology. Reality behaves like an endlessly complex program that allows all of its users write privileges — except you are also part of the program, and if you erase your file, you can’t undo the changes.

Under the circumstances, research is halting and definitive answers are rare, but when something works it gets used — even if the reason why it works is uncertain. The source code is opaque, and may be a bit buggy. Invisibles and certain historical humans have performed hacks which the current understanding of the system can’t replicate for unknown reasons. The foundations of reality may be even more unstable than they appear.

Magic, tech, and the ability to call the Invisibles all got a real workout during the last — that is, the latest — war. A lot of people died, many in horrible ways, because of a judicious application of magic. The fact that people capable of committing such atrocities are naturally-occurring and just wandering around freely is cause for much upset.

Innate magic-users are obvious and get the brunt of the hatred. Warring political factions, with innate magic-users themselves on both sides, cannot decide between a general policy of assimilation (with liberal applications of anti-magic to depower all magic-users “equally” in public spaces), or separation. As a consequence, I-MUs may be allowed access to basic goods and services, housing, and employment — if they give up their abilities whenever required — or simply asked to go away. Nowhere in particular, just away.

Learned magic-users are still comparatively stealthy and accepted, but they must submit to testing, licensing and (sometimes) labelling if they are employed in the magic industry. The Registry keeps records and offers certification across Anatolia, operating as an extension of the passport system. It ensures public safety, quality control, and fair compensation for skill and experience. All magic-users are eligible to register, whether they need it for their jobs or not, but noncompliance (especially among the innate ones) is rampant.

Magic-Users

Magic can be automated and made available in friendly retail packaging. People who can actually perform the hacks themselves, and who are required to design and implement the automation, may be called magic-users, mews (from the Registry’s use of the abbreviation, MU) or, if we are being rude, magicians. There are two kinds, learned and innate.

Learned magic-users (L-MUs, el-mews, or, informally, lemmies) look just like regular people, which is cause for a certain amount of paranoia, but they are generally considered safer than the innate ones. They must practice and study to gain any ability, so it seems they’d be less likely to fly off the handle or make a mistake. Going the extra mile to pass the Registry’s exams and get certified inspires confidence like a diploma on a doctor’s wall. The competent ones may be employed to perform simple magic on assembly lines, and the really spectacular ones get involved in research and design.

Innate magic-users (I-MUs, eye-mews, coloured people or, informally, immies) are born with rainbow-coloured skin tones and white hair. They are also born with their abilities, but must progress through the stages of human development and practice to build their skills. They are capable — to varying degrees, with a rare few being unable to manage it at all — of calling the Invisibles and being ridden by them. Being ridden means losing all control over your body and ceding it to the Invisible you are dealing with.

Invisibles are capable of great and terrible things.

Learned magic-users, and innate ones without a god on board, can also be capable of great and terrible things, but it takes a lot of study and practice and most of them haven’t bothered to learn that much. Innate users don’t need to practise, they just need to make a call — however, some of them do pick up a trick or two from the beings they’ve hosted.

Cool Apps

There are different types of magic that can be performed by magic-users of either kind. The force is the same in all cases, the application is just different, such as electricity being used to power a microwave or a sewing machine. There are a lot of different applications of magic and a page which lists them comprehensively is forthcoming. (Maybe, someday, heh.) Until then, many are listed in the Glossary. We’ll just cover the basics here.

A merger is convincing two things that they are the same thing — Hyacinth repairs people by merging them with metal. A substitution is changing something just enough so that it can be used in place of another thing — Mordecai can make salt taste sweet. A transmutation is changing one thing into a completely different thing — the General can turn into a giant golden eagle.

Anti-Magic and Countermagic

Anti-magic is a fast-growing application of magic. Recent advances have made anti-magic a lot easier and cheaper to apply to objects, small areas, and oil-based tinctures.

Clear signage is required to warn the public when they are entering a Magic-Free Zone, and a person is usually required to step down or up, so that any magic-enabled machinery you may be using will not cause injury when it suddenly stops. There is a lot of magic-enabled machinery out there, so area anti-magic is considered as inconvenient and business-killing as a lack of free Wi-Fi. It is much more convenient to apply anti-magic to an individual via an object or tincture.

Anti-magic handcuffs remain popular with law-enforcement, as well as anti-magic flares — the latter of which creates an area effect wherever the light touches, for emergency use only.

Absolute Zero is a brand-name, government-certified anti-magic tincture, available for free in three basic flavours. (Custom blends are available from various shops for a little bit extra.) It comes in a small plastic cup with a foil or paper lid, not unlike coffee creamer, and does not need to be held under the tongue. Absolute Zero is safe for the elderly and children over the age of six — as far as anyone knows or cares. 

A reliable anti-magic tincture is considered necessary for the safety and convenience of I-MUs and the general public, due to the adverse effect of seasonal atmospheric magical variances (or magic storms) on the innately magical. But even if there is not a magic storm at the moment, the nicer establishments will invite (require) any immies to disable their powers for a few hours upon entry. Just to be polite. Absolute Zero will also negate the magical ability of an L-MU, but if they don’t make themselves too obvious, they probably won’t be asked.

Countermagic can remove individual components from a single spell, leaving all other magic in the area intact, but it is difficult and expensive. It can only be performed by a human being and only stopped by another human being of equal or greater skill. With foresight, anti-magic can be used to prevent countermagic, but only by banning use of magic altogether.

Charms, Enchantments and Spells

Magic as applied to create a particular result is separated into different levels of complexity: charms, enchantments and spells.

A charm is a fairly simple function that does not need to interact with anything else. Paper that clings to the wall like a sticky-note is charmed. A piece of orange cloth that wiggles to look like a prop flame is charmed. Charms do not stack, they do one thing and that’s all they do. It is possible to run charms in parallel, each applied to a different area on the same object, but it’s inefficient and annoying to do that for more than a couple.

Enchantments, on the other hand, can be constructed and applied to work together, either at the same time or in series. A suitcase which is both bigger on the inside and lighter than it should be is enchanted. A toaster which does not need to be plugged in is enchanted.

A spell is a group of such functions — which may be enchantments, or further spells nested like matryoshka dolls — designed to produce an effect and usually activated by a word or gesture. It is analogous to a computer program, which can be as complicated as it needs to be, from “Hello, World” to World of Warcraft. A basic flight spell would have components to allow for positioning in three dimensions, simple physical control of this positioning, inertia and an allowance for the motion of the earth through space, all of which would be too complicated to specify from scratch every time.

(This subtle use of vocabulary is subject to author error, try to bear with me.)

Automation

The components of a spell can also be activated by mechanical motion — for example, anchored to individual teeth in a gear and engaged in a series as a crank is turned. This allows for the “casting” of very complicated spells with perfect precision by people who have no more magical training than the ability to turn cranks or push buttons, although a skilled magic-user must first program the gear.

Mechanical items which run spells, enchantments and charms are often said to be programmed, even though you can apply magic to an object that requires no gears or motion to activate. If it looks like it has gears in it, like the enchanted toaster example, most people will assume it’s running a program.

Whether programmed or not, magic that is applied to an object can work in tandem with, and be augmented by, mechanics, electricity, and other technology, reliably and without interference. Provided you’re fairly intelligent about it and don’t accidentally kill yourself with either the magic or the electricity, of course.

Magic vs. Tech vs. Science

Magic works perfectly well with tech and science, we just run into problems because it can also work around tech and science. If everything is code, nothing is permanent — anti-magic itself is a result of rewriting the code to deny write privileges. If you’re having trouble fitting enough tubes in the radio, you can code yourself any number of cheats: you might rewrite reality so the radio holds more tubes in the same space, or make the tubes smaller, or make a toothpick a tube.

A magical solution will still require research and design, and will be subject to spectacular failures, but often it just seems easier. Thus magic is a powerful force for the advancement of society, but it can dissuade people from fully investigating mechanical solutions or how the world works unaltered.

On the other hand, the glitches, the consequences, and the total lack of a save file feed an opposing desire to stop messing around with reality — and stop other people from messing around with it. It is damn near impossible to stop people from using an all-access natural resource on a global scale, and determined individuals (such as disgruntled mathematicians messing around with the value of pi) are able to break things that a lot of other people are using.

It seems likely that if the gods were able to influence the design of the world, they gave the people in it the resources to break it as often as possible. After all, if it doesn’t break, you don’t need to call tech support to fix it.

The Invisibles

The gods are testy and they meddle in the affairs of men. Some of them also have a fondness for liquor and cigarettes.

The Invisibles (many call themselves gods, but some claim to be angels, or fairies, or even dead people) are capable of taking over the body of an innate magic-user. They will do so upon request, in return for various things they like and can’t get wherever they usually exist. These range from the ridiculous (a bowl of cereal) to the sublime (a night at the opera) and everything in between (sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll!).

If you have need of a particular skill, you can probably find a god who will do it for you — if you’re willing to pay the price. Cereal isn’t so bad, but a three-day heroin bender can take a toll on the body, and the Invisibles don’t always mind about food or sleep or bathroom breaks.

Personalities range from honest and forthright to devious and derisive to utterly alien. Care must be taken when making deals, as some may obey the letter of the agreement and not the spirit, or the spirit and not the letter. Failure to come through on your end of the bargain can be met with all manner of retribution, from a class of being that is often capable of setting people on fire with a thought.

Innate magic-users were either altered by the gods or designed differently from the ground up. You can never get the Invisibles to agree on a creation story, and savvy immies know not to trust them on any matter beyond what they want and what they can do — sometimes not even on what they can do.

Being the chosen people and operating differently enough that they can never forget it is not much fun, nor is knowing they really do have a reason to be alive, and that reason is: invisible beings want to use their bodies for an eternal game of “horsie.” Coloured society has responded with a deeply-ingrained desire for independence and intelligence, and toxic levels of cynicism and isolationism. Nevertheless, the temptation to call a god to solve a problem is always there, and most succumb at least once, with a few making a career of it.

The chosen steeds of the gods have a wide range of capacity and capability. Duration of occupancy can range from a few minutes to a few weeks, with most bodies giving out after a few days, maximum.

Accuracy can also be something of a problem, as the Invisibles will do their best to confound and confuse and get you to choose them instead. The weak-willed may find themselves coming home with a practised finger-painter rather than someone who can defuse the freaking bomb. Your best recourse in such a situation is to fulfill the deal quickly and try again, because a god will not leave until it has what it wants and it’s done what it agreed to do — or until the body it’s riding gives out.

Even under the best of circumstances, it is difficult to be dragged around in your own body, completely incapable of moving or speaking or objecting in any way. Emotional trauma and forgetting how to speak or move are common consequences. Nevermind coping with whatever the god has been doing to you, such as depriving you of basic needs or engaging in destructive behaviour.

During the Prokovian Conflict, helping people cope with the presence of gods became a job, and quite a necessary one. These handlers had the schizophrenic task of fulfilling divine demands and dealing with the mess left behind, as well as being reassuring to confused people in altered states. Soft foods and hypnosis were frequent aids.

There does not appear to be any real meaning to the colours of innate magic-users. Speculation on strength and nature of ability abounds, as well as raunchy jokes about flavours, but this is no more scientific than saying there’s something about green M&M’s. The gods and their magic do take on the colour of the person they are inhabiting, so it may be a way to tell each other apart, like board game pieces. Or it may be something as simple as preferring to drive a red car.

The idea that these “gods” and the gods of established religions are not even the same kind of thing is regarded as a fringe theory, but it is gaining traction in some places. If an Invisible might impersonate a dead person, why not a god? This carries with it the sinister implication that their chosen “people” may be something under than human, but made in imitation of humanity for some opaque, evil purpose. It is well known that some animals cannot abide the presence of innate magic-users, displaying behaviour that looks much like fear. Maybe they know something that people don’t. At the very least — some might say, with a sniff — it is an undeniable biological fact that coloured people are not meant to share spaces with normal humans who can pet dogs and ride horses.

More on the Mechanics:

[Look, I keep meaning to do more Mechanics, but it’s my weakest area. Maybe I’ll finish those other pages eventually. I finally did the one with the gods!]

• I-MU FAQ — Facts about innate magic-users, otherwise known as “you don’t belong here.”
• L-MU FAQ — Facts about learned magic-users, otherwise known as “oh, gods, they can look like anyone!”
• Magical Applications — Common uses of magic.
• The Gods I Know — A list of gods in-story.