Magic

As John was leaving the house where his tutoring took place, he was now getting mentally ready for his work shift. He worked as a bartender in a local pub in order to help pay for his living expenses. And as this was a Friday evening, this shift was the busiest of the week. He also did some tutoring on the side as that would earn him some money, though less than bartending, but was less tiring for him to do. However, the real highlight of his day would be his meeting after his shift with his small group of friends. He was now walking back to the pub he came from earlier but his mind was expectant about tonight's, maybe more accurately tomorrow morning's, gathering since it meant it was time to practice magic which was very much frowned upon, if not illegal in the city.

Generations ago, the usage of magic had become more or less of a taboo. It had come to the point where most people did not even think magic could actually be performed by humans and that those that would were most likely going to turn into monsters very quickly. The official stance was that magic was something that fed off your intelligence which was said to be the defining difference between humans and monsters. As such, officially at least, magic wasn't so much forbidden as it was only allowed under strict supervision. In actuality, it was completely forbidden since upon learning people were practising magic, the authorities would take you to a specialized facility under the guise of medical examination and surveillance during practice. The only thing that was known about what really happened there was that you were most likely either destroyed mentally, brainwashed, or simply killed. This very polarized view on magic was nearly as old as the city itself. Everyone was aware that the founders of the city had to have set up the dome protections using magic to some extent, but they neither knew how much magic was used nor whether it was needed to sustain the protections.

Thus there was currently an extremely limited number of people that were practising any magic at all. They all operated in extremely small circles that barely ever communicated with each other. In this city of 70 thousand souls, the best estimate one could make of how many would wield magic regularly was around two to three hundred. Most circles were made up of five to ten people and starting a circle was a rather simple yet very risky affair. Due to how restricted those circles were, their level of understanding of magic was incredibly shallow. The basic information to get started was publicly available since the official stance was not that magic was forbidden altogether, but that information was not that easy to access. The "correct" information was hidden as one theory amongst many others and a neophyte would have no way of distinguishing which theory had actual applications. If one were to know the right people or simply stumble across the right documents, one would learn some of the basic principles behind the magic of this world.

From what was understood by its current underground practitioners, there was not any real condition or restriction for anyone to learn magic. The only restriction would be that you had to be aware and believe in the existence of magic to start actively practising it. Magic seemed very akin to any scientific discipline, maths or physics for instance. Anyone could start learning some basic concepts and even use them daily provided they spent some time upfront. However, the effect of magic would be extremely limited in such a case. Unfortunately, how far magic could scale was basically completely unknown to the current practitioners. There was simply far too much research to do, far too few people to do it, and virtually no way to share your discoveries with other circles. The starting point for learning magic was based on breathing exercises leading to meditation as well as trying to feel your surroundings through your heart. You could then slowly refine your feeling of the magic until you were able to sense it at all times like you would a limb. From then on you could start to make use of this energy in a nearly limitless number of ways. The only constraint was that the effect was going to be very minute. For instance, if you held a cup of coffee, you could heat it a little provided you had learnt the proper magic. A cold cup of coffee would stay cold, but you could increase its temperature by a couple of degrees in an instant, at the cost of quite a significant amount of energy. And in such a case only other people that were magical practitioners would be able to notice you had just used magic.

But the first drawback was that you did not have much energy stored and that the energy was not able to be recovered very quickly. This could be improved through both practice as well as more meditation exercises but it took a long time. The second drawback was that producing new effects was rather hard. People would need to experiment a lot with infusing magic into objects alongside thinking about specific things and even having some ritual-like set of movements to find a way to use their magical energy in a brand new way. Once the usage was found, they could spend time practising until they were able to produce the same effect through shortcuts, usually without requiring the special movements or needing less concentration. It was only after you had managed some mastery over your special application of magic that you could start sharing your technique with the other members of your circle. Sharing both your spells as well as ways to make news spells was the core focus of magic circles and it was especially important to share since you were basically isolated from any other circle due to fear of being uncovered and taken away. There also seemed to be some sort of affinity between people and certain types or certain specific applications of magic, but no clear rule had been found by any circle as of yet. Some practitioners had tried to categorize magic by their element, but those efforts very quickly led to dead ends.

As his work time finally ended, John walked out of the pub once more today, though this time there was no passerby that called out to him. His shift had gone smoothly but he was quite tired from all the work and it was already close to 2 am. Luckily tomorrow he had a day off for his excursion with the clid and since the meeting time was at 2 pm he would have some time to sleep beforehand. But first, he had to get to his meeting place with his circle. The scheduled time was 2 am and everyone would usually head back home at around 4 am.