Drawing Magic Effects

[Christain Cobb]

Basicallyin the world I am building, magic-users draw the energy necessary to use their abilities from other Realms - specifically, these other Realms are actually planets in the solar system. This is not something said magic users are aware of, however, due to strange magic that makes planets appear as odd phenomena in the night sky.

Drawing power from another Realm, in this case, entails creating a small fissure in reality that draws power from that other Realm. While the fissure is open, you can draw energy from another planet. Once it closes or is forcibly closed by someone else, you're out of luck until you can open a new one.

However, even though the main Human Planet that said magic users are on has its own energy, the magicians that live there cannot draw on it. In the same way, if someone from the Human Planet was to end up on one of the other planets through whatever magical means, they would not be able to access the magical power of that current planet, but would be able to tap into their own, original planet instead.

Each planet has its own, slightly different magical field. Either it's all one thing that just has different levels, or they actually have different kinds of "mana" or whatever that interact with each when brought into contact. Either way, power doesn't come from the planet's "aura" or "mana" or whatever directly--it comes from the flow of mana through a fissure from one realm to another, or from the interaction when different kinds of mana meet.

So, clearly you can't draw power just from the planet you are currently on. It would be like going to Venus and hoping that you can run a Sterling engine off the atmospheric heat--it doesn't work, 'cause there's nowhere for the heat to go--everywhere is equally hot! But if you can make a portal from Venus to Earth, with a hot side and a cold side, you can absolutely run an engine off of that. Magic works the same way, but instead of extracting power from heat, it's... magic.

The idea here is that everything on a given planet is so acclimated to the magical energies of that planet that they outright ignore anything which said energies try to do to them. You can gather all the local energy you want, but no matter how hard you push it into a spell, it has no effect.

The reality-based equivalent to this would probably be related to how a person can get acclimated to a constant noise or smell, to the point that they don't even notice it any more. Or more like gravity or air pressure - humans are constantly under pressure from several tons of atmosphere, but we don't feel it because we're used to it (and if it suddenly disappeared, we'd notice).

The astral projections of these magic users varies to some degree but is always immense, and centered on their physical form. Their own home world and other objects in the vicinity are within this form and inaccessible. Near objects can be accessed only with painful contortions. There is a set of objects within easy reach of their astral projections. Objects that are too far away are likewise unreachable.

Astral projections of non magic users might be considerably smaller, but even if somehow they learn or develop the skills to make them, these projections are of no practical use to a non magic user. But could a non magic user able to project herself team up with a magic user?

Attempting to draw magical locally creates a negative feedback loop the prevents the magic from working. By drawing the power from a remote source, the feedback effect it out of phase or otherwise diminished allowing you to get a successful power draw.

Creating a fissure in a large nearby source will create a flow of energy that is too strong to manage, and maybe dangerous. A fissure to a far-way place dissipates most of the energy along the way, or to maintain a fissure, so the resulting energy is manageable.

Feedback interference. You know how radios have feedback loops that disable them in close proximity? It's the same type of interference that makes it impossible to draw power from the planet you're on. Of course you could be more technical about it, but as far as a general explanation, this is good enough.

Additional: Mana exists in fields that exist around planets. Trying to siphon off mana from outside the field is easy, but drawing mana from inside its field is very difficult. This is the same sort of system that keeps electrons in fields around atoms. If you hit an electron with a strong force, it will simply bounce away from the nucleus before it comes into contact. However, electrons can be stolen by outside forces with a strong pull.

What immediately comes to mind when considering this question is that the the system is symmetrical - that is, it works exactly the same even if someone from planet 1 is transplanted to planet 2. It is not a subjective exclusion from the current planet. The energy of the current planet is objectively unusable. So what would make that happen? The simplest answer, for me, is that something in the transition from planet X to planet Y is necessary for it to become usable.

To find what that is, I would look at the physical layout of a solar system. What is between you and another planet that isn't between you and your own planet? This could be some object in its own orbit, or maybe the energy must be drawn through multiple planets to amplify. But my thought is that it must be drawn through the sun.

Why? Well, it's big, bright, and your planet's energy can never ever go through it on its way to you. The sun could act as a focus or an activator of another planet's energy, and that energy must be (inadvertently) drawn through the sun to be useful to a magician. Or perhaps the journey of the magical energy through the sun's radiation between planets activates it and it doesn't physically have to go through the sun, but the idea is the same. Something between the planets (the sun or some other arcane object) acts as a catalyst for magical reactions. The energy around planets is the fuel, but it needs a spark somewhere out in space that just isn't available on the planet you stand on.

The other simple observation is the sheer distance involved. I liked it Renan's inverse square law idea, but I like it better the other way. The further the planet is from you, the greater distance the energy has to build momentum. If you draw it from a paltry 4000 miles from the center of your planet (or less if it's from the atmosphere), it is equivalent to a musket-ball rolling out of the barrel. But, drawing from a Pluto analog 5 billion miles away, your magical bolt comes screaming like an abused particle doing loops somewhere in a Swiss lab.

Think of it as potential energy in a gravitational field - except the gravity is the magician pulling on the magic. The further it has to fall (be pulled), the more time the force acts upon it, applying an acceleration the whole time. Even a small (whatever small is in magical terms) acceleration over 5 billion miles produces an inordinately larger velocity than an acceleration across 4000 miles. And translating "velocity" into magical power, that's the ballgame. The furthest source of magical energy on your planet just isn't far enough for any significant, noticeable power to be built up.

Each planet has a different kind of mana (mana1, mana2, mana3...) that could be interpreted like different "kinds of heat" (heat1, heat2, heat3...).

Each planet only has its own kind of mana (they are warm in that sense) but they lack of other kinds of mana (they are colder in that manas). So mages are able to draw mana from others planets to their owns due to the principle hot -> cold.

A mage can't draw mana from its planet because he is already inside of it, he already has that kind of mana in its body so both objects have "equal temperature" or "equal mana type and amount", and you can't transfer from hot -> hot. Also, he can't spend its mana to cast spells on the world because the same principle, both things (he and Earth) share the same amount of mana.

So if by tapping a planet that is a few light minutes away you get enough energy to create a basketball sized fireball, how fast will thermodynamics turn you into plasma if you try to tap a planet that is zero inches away from you?

You could have it that magic works from a "second level" physical factor. By second level, I mean something like the way you have the really obvious physical factor "speed" - easy to see in place everywhere about you, and to remember your own experiences - and it would be a first level factor, and then you have a second factor, well-known and experienced by many, etc., called "acceleration." Without speed, there is no factor called acceleration, so speed is the first level factor, then acceleration is a change in speed and so a second level factor.

Building on that, consider two magnets. Put North vs. South and they stick together through their magnetic force. And never do anything else. Move them separately so that their forces can interact and you generate electrical force if you have a suitable "vessel" for it (a circuit in this case). Whumped together so they are locked, there is no changing interaction and no useful electrical force. Kept separated and changing place relative to each other and it is possible for their interaction to generate a seemingly wholly different force that has interesting capabilities of its own.

So... consider the idea that your magical power factor depends on a second level factor that requires first level factors moving relative to each other. In that case, you could observe three basic outcomes:

1) Things very close, like the whumped together magnets, haven't enough relative motion to generate enough of the second level factor (magic). So the magic user would, technically, get some power from his own planet, but soooo little of it, no one ever noticed or measured that teensy bit.

2) Farther away things would obviously move relatively to their planet. Look at what even the moon does with tides. Since YOU get to decide the background, it could be OK that the magical power is significant at solar system distances. So everyone would notice the magical power, and they would realize - lol, wrongly, but hey, it's magic, not science, right... or maybe it's the scientific revolution period for magic on your world and they WILL come to realize it's not the planets and so on themselves, rising and falling in contributed strength based soley on distance, or weird properties that don't seem to exist on the populated planet, but rather the change, the relative movement - but anyway, they realize the magical power they use "comes from" the other solar bodies.

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