Max has opened his laptop, and has begun taking notes in a Word document. Various headings and disorganized lines read:

• 'sense' universal - chk sense description, what information sense prov.s


• source unspec. - skills (mem.? musc. mem? talents?), personality (what mapping? what evaluation? mbti analogue | single-factor temperament?), heredity (genetic? how ubiq. is ATCG dna?


• NVM, source specified- power acq. from other mages, bestowed somehow (vector?)


• all magic uses 'mana' resource, mana source + costs + transaction procedure unspec.. +mana has purity levels?? characteristics of 'impure' mana unspec.


• magic recent development in home world, possible non-native (milliways as vector?)


• heritable + transferable, heritability -> genetic expression, does transfer alter ATCG/equiv.?)

Max jots down several questions, but the most pressing, he decides, is...

"Spells. That's what I... this is all answering 'what', but no how or why... powers, you can... control plants, change minds, see through time... those are all, they're, completely different sorts of things! Why would they- how can they all run on the same 'mana', and follow these same rules?"