Mechanics

Magic

Magic is real in Tin Soldier, and it has played merry hell with science, history and sociology. Reality behaves as if a Game Genie were enabled, except you are Mario and if you glitch yourself through a wall there are no extra lives. 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. 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 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 especially obvious and get the brunt of the hatred. They might be denied housing, employment, or access to schools and hospitals because of perceived danger. Learned magic-users can hide their abilities and pass, but if they are caught doing anything too impressive in public, there will likely be social consequences.

Magic-Users (MUs)

Magic can be automated and made available to the unskilled masses. People who can actually perform the hacks themselves, and who are required to design and implement the automation, are called magic-users or, if we are being rude, magicians. There are two kinds, learned and innate.

Learned magic-users look just like regular people, which is cause for a certain amount of paranoia, but they are generally considered safer than the innate ones. Innate magic-users come in rainbow-colored skin tones and have white hair. They are capable (to varying degrees, a rare few being unable to manage it at all *cough* Mordecai! *cough*) 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 practice, 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. 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. There are a lot of different applications of magic and a page which lists them comprehensively is forthcoming. Until then, many are listed in the Glossary.

Anti-magic is a fast-growing application of magic. Police are especially concerned about rogue magicians who could tear them in half with a gesture. A lot of cells and pretty much all the handcuffs have anti-magic charms on them. Current technology seems to limit the effect of anti-magic to individuals and small areas. A lot of effort is being spent making it more-effective and cheaper, mainly for law-enforcement. Countermagic can remove individual components from a single spell, leaving all other magic in the area intact, but it is even more 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.

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 sticks to the wall like a post-it 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. 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. Your 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 above, 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. The Game Genie is supreme. If you’re having trouble fitting enough tubes in the radio, magic offers you multiple ways to cheat: instead of improving the tech itself, you can 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 is extremely 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 (not all of them call themselves gods, some of them claim to be angels, or fairies, or even dead people) are capable of taking over the body of an innate magic-user, and will do so upon request — in return for various things they like and can’t get wherever they exist usually. 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 innate magic-users 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.’ Colored 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 practiced 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. Never mind coping with whatever the god has been doing to you, such as depriving you of basic needs or engaging in destructive behavior. 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 (“You want to drink an entire bottle of absinthe? Okay.”) and dealing with the mess left behind (“Take this and vomit. Fast.”), 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 colors of innate magic-users. Speculation on strength and nature of ability abounds, as well as raunchy jokes about flavors, 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 color 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. Likewise, the dislike that some animal species display towards colored people may be the result of a design flaw, an mysterious intention, or just a divine joke.