Galatea

[pedromvilar]

Spells
Spells are sequences of symbols that have been made magical by an arcanist (or, as before, metamancer). The magic is more a property of the mage than of anything external, unlike artefacts, but that's not the whole of it.

Like with artefacts, the mage has to come up with a sufficiently precise definition of what the spell is supposed to do, but arcanists have more leeway with precision than enchanters do. When specifying the spell effect, the mage must define what a valid target for the spell is (themself, inanimate objects, other people, an area, etc), a duration, and an effect. A flight spell could be described as becoming, for a certain length of time, unaffected by the planet's gravity and being able to accelerate in any direction up to a given acceleration value through an act of will.

Then the mage must come up with a sequence of symbols that will activate the spell - this is called the spell's incantation. Symbols include gestures, poses, sounds, spoken words, written words, the use of various implements, drawings, and possibly other things I haven't thought of. A possible example is saying a sentence out loud while dancing the macarena. Once they've done that, they must mentally associate the two things in a way that is not very intuitive and very ineffable, and the spell will click and they will know how much mana it costs to cast. Thenceforth, whenever they perform the relevant actions and there is a valid target within their awareness and they have enough mana it will be cast. Thinking about the target while doing it will ensure it will be targeted, otherwise the spell will affect a random valid target.

There are two kinds of effects spells can create: instantaneous effects and extended effects. An instantaneous effect is something that happens as soon as the spell is cast and doesn't have lasting magical effects, but may have lasting nonmagical ones; for example, sending someone a telepathic message or switching one's biological sex are instantaneous effects. An extended effect is something that lasts for a given amount of time; an example is extended flight or telekinesis.

There are a number of things that affect how much a spell costs. There is always an intrinsic fundamental cost to a spell that depends on what its effect actually is - and, incidentally, when a spell mimics the effect of an elementalist blessing that cost is always superior to the blessing's. Longer extended effects cost more, flexibility in effect and/or targets costs more (spells that only target oneself are in general cheaper), shorter incantations cost more, incantations that are unrelated to the spell's effect make it cost more. The cheapest spells are ones that target the caster, are instantaneous or short length, and their incantations are full-length descriptions of their effects, possibly with embellishments and gestures.

A spell's cost is determined for an arcanist upon spell creation, and thenceforth fixed. Given the way symbols work, they take stuff like how common and/or commonly understood symbols are (this is the part that's "not the whole of it" as mentioned). Arbitrary strings of letters don't mean anything until they are used for communication. But given the tradeoffs between spell cost, incantation length, and incantation meaning, arcanists as a group have long ago developed a conlang that they use to write books, teach magic, and sometimes talk in. Every noun and verb has two versions in this language, and the syntax and grammar are very expressive, with some truly staggeringly complex concepts sometimes being reduced to a couple of words. Arcanists often bind their spells to words in that language, and from then on only use the alternative to it when speaking in that language. There is a concerted effort to keep the language alive and not allow fashions to run some words out of common use, for the good of arcanists everywhere.

In addition to all of the above, arcanists can also create scrolls - written records of their spells. The arcanist describes the actions needed to perform their spell in written form and dumps mana into the scroll. Then, other people - even nonmages - can read the scroll and perform the steps as explained, which causes the scroll to be consumed by a cool blue fire effect, and the spell is then cast. Sticking spells to scroll form costs significantly more mana than just casting them - somewhere between 1.5 and 2x their original cost - but is a fairly lucrative business, with temperature control spells, telekinesis spells, and flight spells being particularly common.

Metamancers can detach an arcanist's spell from a string of symbols, freeing it up for upgrades or things like that. They can also help arcanists actually attach spells and incantations more easily, and let incantations be upgraded by holding them still while the arcanist dumps more spell concepts into them - similarly to what they can do to help enchanters.

[Unbitwise]

arcanists as a group have long ago developed a conlang that they use to write books, teach magic, and sometimes talk in. Every noun and verb has two versions in this language, and the syntax and grammar are very expressive, with some truly staggeringly complex concepts sometimes being reduced to a couple of words. Arcanists often bind their spells to words in that language, and from then on only use the alternative to it when speaking in that language.

This is slightly interesting from a cryptography/steganography perspective: you are encoding a bit-string in every sentence, every bit of which is 1 when xor'd with the bit which is the arcanist's choice of magic word in each pair-of-words.

Er, actually, that's not as interesting as I first thought, because it has zero interaction with the sequence of words in the particular sentence. Oh well. Still a nifty idea in itself! It's sort of like the “euphemism treadmill,” but less tedious.

[pedromvilar]

Blessings
The third type of magic is also the most intuitive and user-friendly of them. Elementalists perform magic exclusively on themselves, and while almost everything they can do can also be done by arcanists, it's much cheaper, easier, and better by default for them.

There isn't a list of things elementalists can do, and there is a similar definitional thing in that the elementalist has to sufficiently precisely describe the effect they're trying to achieve. However, the precision can be really low. For instance, an elementalist can decide to have the power of flight, and that's all their magic needs in order to grant them this power. When the effect has been decided, the elementalist can apply it to themself, and that's their current blessing, displacing whatever blessing they had active previously. It is impossible for an elementalist to have no blessings active.

Although there are an infinite number of possible blessings, each has its own "mana gauge" which is finite unlike those of arcanists and enchanters. This mana gauge is consumed whenever the blessing is actively used (so flight mana is used while the elementalist is flying) and recharged whenever it's active but not being used. If you switch out your blessing before it has fully charged it will pause recharging and resume once you switch back to it. It's impossible to switch out of a blessing while it's being actively used, and to do so while it's not used only takes as long as the elementalist needs to think about their new blessing. Unlike arcanist spells, which need to specify details like "maximum speed of flight" and stuff like that, elementalist blessings are more general, and the variation in power is merely translated into a variation in mana consumption - flying faster consumes more mana per second than flying slower, for instance. Elementalists also have the most direct intuitive access to their mana of all mages, almost like they could see the little mana bar at the bottom of their screen.

They're called elementalists because, in the past, a very common group of blessings were elementalisms - basicaly AtLA-style elemental bending. The types of blessings an elementalist can have are very varied - flight, telekinesis, speed, strength, memory, cognitive power/speed, elementalism - but they're all strictly "self" powers. They can't give other people powers (like an arcanist can grant other people flight or turn them invisible or whatever), and they can't make objects magical temporarily (like arcanists) or permanently (like enchanters).

Metamancers can help elementalists by permitting inactive blessings' mana to recharge, or by transferring mana between an elementalist's different blessings. This latter thing is only possible between the active blessing and an inactive not-fully-charged blessing; when a blessing is fully charged it gets "locked" for these purposes. Metamancers can also "steal" an elementalist's inactive blessing if they're close enough, and it becomes inaccessible to that elementalist until the metamancer gives it back. The metamancer can't recharge any mana they spend while using a blessing, so eventually they'll run out and will need to give it back anyway - but this can only happen by having the blessing's original owner within their awareness (i.e. close by, more or less) again.

[Kappa]

"almost like they could see the little mana bar at the bottom of their screen" <333333333333

[DanielH]

Can a metamancer make an elementalist have no active blessing, or is it still impossible even then?
Do new blessings start fully charged, fully discharged, or what?
If new blessings start charged, can you cheat at mana by using multiple similar blessings (flight, antigravity, inertia manipulation, etc.), or would they automatically be lumped together?

[pedromvilar]

It's impossible for an elementalist to have no active blessing even with metamancer help.

New blessings start fully charged.

Very similar blessings are automatically lumped together.

[Kappa]

What governs what blessing an elementalist starts with?

[DanielH]

When an elementalist attempts to Express magic, they pick their first blessing, and use it. Relatively speaking, elementalists have the least chance of a negative consequence upon Expression, since they can stop doing whatever magic they got as soon as they get it, and they have a pretty intuitive understanding of it. Consequently, there aren't any typical precautions taken by people attempting to Express for the case they turn out to be elementalists.

So it sounds more conscious than the others, although probably not completely because it’s still relevant that they can stop.

Could an Elementalist choose a harmful-to-themself Blessing?

[pedromvilar]

I actually phrased that badly, changed it to:

When an elementalist attempts to Express magic, they try to pick a blessing, with no control over what it will turn out to be.

So it's not conscious at all, actually, it's random.

There are no blessings that are directly harmful to the elementalist. Some can be indirectly so, like picking flight and then dropping from fifty metres up, but the regular use of blessings can never hurt the elementalist.

[DanielH]

What definition of harm does that use? Could a Joker elementalist get a pain-enhancing blessing? Could a nonmasochist mint? Could a nonmasochist nonmint?