Strowlers:Origins of Magic
MAGIC
A MAGICAL WORLD
In the Strowlerverse, the laws of nature are the same as those in our own universe, with one glaring exception: almost everybody believes that magic, in one form or another, is real. While modern arcanologists would argue that magic is nothing more than another branch of the sciences—psychodynamics, as they call it—stories from the social and cultural fringe claim that arcanology is a single facet of something bigger, weirder, and more apt to break or expand the physical laws of nature.
The official story, however, is that “magic,” as traditionally defined, does not exist, and that “magical beasts” are merely constructs or illusions created by arcanological accidents.
Focusing and “Burning”
The development of modern arcanology began with England’s Royal Society in the 1700s, and was systemized formally during and after World War II—a titanic global conflict in which a fusion of occult practices and scientific procedures allowed arcanologists to, first, split subatomic bonds and, then, to create the weaponized psychodynamics that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
An arcanologist who channels pure psychodynamic energy, without specifically defining and determining where and how that ener- gy should manifest at a molecular level, risks having her subconscious mind affect the overflow power. For example, a supernatural being is nothing more than a physical projection of some subconscious inhibition or obsession. For this reason, arcanologists are not allowed to practice their powers until they have been Focused: a process that theoretically separates their reason from both their emotions and their physical urges, and so allows them to practice high-level arcanology without the risk of creating something that a layperson would call a “monster” or a “magical creature.”
An unfortunate, but necessary, element of Focusing involves stripping away the subject’s emotional expression, resulting in a person who has an aura of clinical, dispassionate, and often unnerving coldness. In certain subjects, especially those of a highly-emotional nature, Focusing results in a sort of emotional, and often cognitive, lobotomy. The subject becomes hyper-focused on singular tasks, but uninterested in anything or anyone else. Due to the radical changes in personality and relationships in which this procedure results, it tends to be known unofficially as Burning.
The Source of Power
An arcanologist can manifest psychodynamic effects by using either of two key methodologies: transformation and manifestation. The first, transformation, uses her connection to The Source—an unlimited supply of psychodynamic power—in order to exert force on existing physical elements, from large-scale to the sub-atomic. For example, she might push a chair across a room or com- bine elements present in the immediate environment at an atomic level to create a small explosion. The second, manifestation, draws raw power from The Source and and creates, or manifests, new matter and/or energy. This second method is far more dangerous, powerful, and difficult. An arcanol- ogist trained in manifestation can create anything that he can imag- ine—or worse, that his subconscious mind can imagine.
Discussing The Source is typically forbidden among low-level ar- canologists. They are taught how to draw on it, but not how or why it works. According to upper-tier psychodynamics theory—the study of which demands both a high security clearance and having under- gone the Focusing process—The Source is rooted in the psychic ener- gy that is generated by the human Id. As postulated by Freud (whose psychoanalysis methodologies provided the foundation of psychody- namics studies), the Id is the primal, undisciplined, libidinous force of human potential unfettered by reason or discipline. The Focus- ing process directs the Ego and Super-Ego to tame and channel that undisciplined force, directing the vast potential of psychic energies toward more stable, rational, and socially-productive purposes.
Certain unorthodox/heretical arcanologists (and the extremely rare people who begin their work with arcanological theories and then break away from the sanctioned arcanology organizations) posit that The Source originates within the Collective Unconscious, as it was theorized by Freud’s student and rival Carl Jung. This explanation, they claim, reveals why the potential power of psychodynamics is far greater than the energies contained within a single human mind—as well as why those energies typically manifest in symbolically-signif- icant, elemental phenomena like winds, water, fire, forests, caverns, strange entities, and so forth. On this view, then, Focusing would be understood as the process by which a person’s link to the Collective Unconscious is completely and permanently severed. Following the procedure, while the person could, at least in theory, still manifest her own strong, but now tightly-restricted and severely-limited, ener- gies, she could never again participate in, or have access to, either the rich diversity of collective, human emotions or the power of com- bined human energies.
Popular fiction and superstitious belief, on the other hand, assert that The Source originates from any number of implausible scenar- ios—like aliens, mad science, or the heart of dying stars—and they have even suggested that it’s a human-generated power drawn vam- pirically from recruits during Focusing, and stored in secret batteries. These stories, while popular in fiction and movies, are rarely given real-world credence. No serious scientist would risk her career by claiming that popular conspiracy theories are true.
WHO HAS MAGIC?
In the Strowlerverse, magic—generally referred to as Talent—is not hereditary. It can’t be bred for; it has no genetic basis; and nobody can claim special access to its powers because of who their parents were. (People have fought wars over every statement in the prior paragraph, but that doesn’t mean that their beliefs were correct, only that people were willing to both kill and die for them.) The truth is that everybody contains some measure of magical Talent. Most ability, however, falls below measurable thresholds. For practical purposes, their Talent isn’t strong enough to matter.
For most of the 19th century, Talent manifested only in ways that were fairly small, and that were easily explained either by “strange quirks of fate” or by cultural beliefs and practices that were dismissed by “rational men of science.” In the early 1900s, however—possibly due to the radical increase in Western occultist practices, or to the psychic upheavals of the Colonial Era and the Industrial Revolution, or to a metaphysical foreshadowing of the coming conflicts, or to the energetic currents caused by centuries of imperial genocide and slavery, or, most likely, to a combination of them all—stronger Talents manifested among a few proto-arcanologists. And every generation since has seen the number of people with Talent increase. However, because they represent only a fraction of the wider population, people with a power rating of 4 or higher remain a tiny minority.
Demographers and census workers note that a slow-but-steady increase in the percentage of children with Talent has trended for the last thirty or forty years. Yet, because no connection has ever been drawn between Talent and specific genetic markers, some people have begun to quietly speculate that being around adults practicing psychodynamics is the primary trigger for a child’s own latent abilities. Nonetheless, during these same years, some of the strongest individual Talents were manifested by children who were raised near misty hills and forgotten forests, rather than closer to population centers. So, no one has an official answer to the ques- tion of whether coincidence or causation is at the core of the relationship between Talent and exposure to psychodynamic power. Even the theory itself, however—that exposure to arcanology increases its emergence in local populations—is politically fraught. Most governments do not want to believe, or to be faced with the accusation, that their troops in the war against unlicensed arcanol- ogy, by their mere presence alone, actually increase both the likelihood and the threat of flare-ups.
Similar to the Richter Scale, the power-rating of an arcanol- ogist is determined from the logarithm of the amplitude of waves of force pulsed by an arcanologist to a one-kilogram steel cylinder that rests on a scale. An arcanologist who can consistent- ly control the amplitude and amount of her force will achieve a higher rating than one who, for example, applies massive force erratically or minimal force with precision. Because of the logarithmic basis of the scale, each whole-num- ber-increase in magnitude represents a tenfold-increase in mea- sured amplitude; in terms of energy, each whole-number-in- crease corresponds to an increase of about 15.3 times the amount of energy released, and each increase of 0.2 corresponds to a dou- bling of the energy released. [Wikipedia: Arcanology] An individual who creates power waves with magnitudes greater than 4 is considered to have a power-rating worthy of arcanolog- ical training. Conversely, because power-ratings below 4 are also below the level of human-detectable effects, individuals with those ratings are not typically considered to have Talent.
The vast majority of arcanologists have ratings between 4.0 and 5.8. Ratings higher than 6.0 are extremely rare. Anyone rated from 7.0 to 8.0 is registered as a valuable national security asset.
1 - No measurable ability (brain damaged)
2 - Minor sensitivity to psychodynamic effects (base- line human)
3 - Tiny ability to affect personal environment (lucky)
4 - Can control and channel tiny amounts of power from The Source
5 - Can achieve basic transformational effects on a human-discernible scale
6 - Can learn and achieve complicated transforma- tional effects on a molecular scale
7 - Can achieve transformational effects on a subato- mic scale; can manifest raw power from The Source 8+ - Not officially recognized; unofficially, appears to break the laws of arcanology. More research needed, preferably in secluded and secret government facili- ties.
Most unregistered “magic-users” disregard the power-rating chart entirely, preferring, instead, to hone their powers by using individually-unique, non-standardized methodologies that may be idiosyncratically their own.