Benedict Jacka

Life magic grants power over the biological systems of living beings, affecting their health, growth, and physiology.  Life mages can both sense and affect other living creatures, and do so extremely effectively.  They tend to be treated with respect or with fear, and often both.  Unusually for mages, the active effects of life magic are limited to touch range.

Sensing and Changing

Life mages typically get their start by learning to sense the presence of other living things.  At lower levels of skill a life mage can simply tell whether there are other people around or not, but as they grow more proficient they can pick up an incredible amount of biological information simply by looking at someone – everything from a person’s general health and physical condition to their fitness level, number of existing injuries, blood pressure, presence or absence of disease, and what sort of food they’ve been eating lately.  A skilled life mage can learn as much with one minute’s study as a team of doctors can learn with a twenty-four-hour medical checkup.

Once they’ve learned to analyse biological systems life mages learn to control them, usually starting with their own bodies.  They can’t completely redesign or transform living systems – that’s the domain of shapeshifting – but they can monitor and adjust their own biological processes, and to a lesser degree those of others.  A life mage falls asleep or wakes up whenever she wants to, and can accelerate or decelerate her internal systems, direct the buildup and breakdown of muscle and fat, alter the growth rate of skin and hair, and perform a variety of other useful tricks.

Medic!

Healing is one of the two iconic abilities of life mages, and they’re very, very good at it.  By strengthening and accelerating the natural regenerative processes of living systems life mages can repair almost any injury – they don’t really do anything that a living body can’t do on its own, but they give it an enormous boost.  It’s very rare for a patient being treated by a life mage to die from their wounds.

The main drawback to healing is that it consumes significant amounts of biological energy.  The more severe the wound, the greater the energy needed – a life mage can heal papercuts all day, but treating serious injuries is draining.  The energy can come from either the life mage or the patient, but the more injured the patient the less they’re likely to have to spare, and life mages who specialise in healing quickly learn to pace themselves to avoid burning themselves out.

All of this probably makes life mages sound quite selfless, but there’s a catch.  While life magic is very good at healing, it’s just as good at doing the opposite.

Don’t Touch Me

When wielded as a weapon against other living beings, life is probably the single most deadly type of magic in existence.  A life mage able to touch a subject can do almost anything she wants to them – everything from putting them to sleep to paralysing them to shutting down their internal organs.  The most feared ability of life mages is their death touch:  a life mage can drain the life essence of another living creature, literally pulling the life energy out of the target’s body and into their own.  Doing so inflicts horrific amounts of damage and is extremely difficult to stop:  while another life mage can counter the spell, for most people the only real defence is to stay out of reach.

The lethality of life magic makes other mages understandably wary of getting close to them.  Life mages are the best healers in the world, but anyone else allowing a life mage to heal them is also placed in an extremely vulnerable position.  Most mages exist in a position of power:  they live privileged lifestyles, and having that power suddenly taken away is not something they enjoy.  Life mages also have a (slightly unfair) reputation for being prone to turn psychopathic, and there are several extremely well-publicised stories about life mages who turned out to be serial killers.

As a result, while life mages are appreciated, it’s rare for them to be entirely welcome anywhere, and their presence tends to make other mages uncomfortable.

Gating is a particular magical technique that revolves around transporting objects or people from place to place.  It’s a general spell, used primarily by elemental mages, though a few other magic types (such as death and space) have access to it as well.

How It Works

Although there are several methods of opening a gate, by far the most common technique does so by creating a similarity between points in space.  The spell creates a two-dimensional portal linking the points, enabling the caster to step through them, as if space had been folded to bring the two locations adjacent to each other.  Upon completing the spell the gate collapses and vanishes.

The distance between the two points of a gate spell is irrelevant:  creating a gate is to travel ten feet is just as difficult as creating a gate to travel a thousand miles.  What is relevant is how familiar the caster is with the locations.  Typically, gating between locations requires that the caster know both places very well.  Getting familiar with a location isn’t difficult but does take time, and gate spells are also relatively slow to cast, taking upwards of a minute.

Taking Risks

It’s possible to accelerate the casting of gate spells, or to use them to travel to or from unfamiliar locations, and it’s even possible to cast them across dimensions or to go to locations the caster hasn’t seen at all.  However, doing so is dangerous.  Gating is one of the more difficult magical techniques, and using it under anything but ideal conditions is a lot like drunk driving:  you probably won’t kill yourself, but it’s still a really bad idea.  The more complicating factors involved in a gate spell then the higher the probability that the spell will go wrong, and gate spells that go wrong can be very, very messy.  There are a variety of possible consequences for a botched gate spell, but the most common is for the gate to suddenly and unexpectedly collapse.  If someone happens to be stepping through the gate at the time, they’re unlikely to survive the experience.

The limitations of gate spells make them effective in situations where the caster has a little breathing room, but unreliable in emergencies.  The problem with using a gate in an emergency is that they work best if you’re in a familiar area and have a minute or two to cast the spell.  If you’re in serious danger, however, odds are you’re not in a familiar area, and in that kind of situation a one minute casting time is probably fifty-nine seconds longer than you can afford.

Gates, Gates Everywhere

Despite its drawbacks gate magic is incredibly widespread.  Being able to transport yourself anywhere on the planet is a handy ability to have, and for many elemental apprentices learning to gate is similar to passing their driving test, opening up a whole new world of options.  There are a common set of safety procedures for gating which all elemental apprentices are taught, and as long as they’re followed gating is relatively safe.  Of course there’s always the one guy who doesn’t follow the safety procedures – gate accidents amongst mages are almost as common as transport accidents amongst normals, and happen for exactly the same reasons.

Given the popularity of gate magic it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a thriving industry in counter-gate magic.  Mages have (understandable) issues with unannounced visitors teleporting into their bedrooms at night, and it’s a rare mage who doesn’t take the effort to have his home and workplace warded against gates.  Gate wards can take various forms:  the more benign ones redirect gate spells to a designated arrival platform or simply block them, while nastier versions change the gate’s destination to somewhere hazardous or cause the gate to fail spectacularly as soon as something goes through it.  For these reasons it’s generally considered advisable to check an area for wards before attempting to gate into it, particularly if said area is used by other mages.

Charm magic, otherwise known as emotion magic, is the domain of feeling, giving its users the power to sense and control the emotions of others.  Depending on whether they’re male or female, a charm mage is usually called an enchanter or an enchantress.  It’s traditionally considered one of the more feminine types of magic, but this is a little inaccurate – there’s no shortage of male enchanters, they just get less attention.

Swaying the Crowd

An enchantress usually gets her start learning to read emotions.  They can sense someone’s general emotional state just by being near them – whether they’re happy, sad, angry, afraid, or anything else.  With practice they learn to read emotions more precisely, deciphering the different layers and combinations of feelings in a persons mind.  They can’t actually read someone’s thoughts or tell why they have the feelings they do, but feelings and thoughts are closely connected and a skilled enchantress can figure out what someone is thinking with a high degree of accuracy.

Once they’ve mastered reading emotions, charm mages learn to affect them, and the most common (and the most iconic) spell they learn is the ability to charm.  An enchantress can shift the attitude of a person, making them act towards her as they would a dear friend or a lover.  Unless given a reason to suspect otherwise, the target usually doesn’t realise they’ve been charmed – they know they like the mage, but they don’t know why.  An enchantress can also play on a target’s emotions in other ways, giving them empathic suggestions to do or refrain from something and generally manipulating them to her wishes.

For obvious reasons, other mages have a problem with this (at least when it’s targeted at them).

Paranoia Fuel

The major advantage charm mages have over more direct magic-users is subtlety.  Charm magic is incredibly difficult to detect, to the point of being practically invisible – there’s almost no way to know if an enchantress is using her magic or not.  Targets can figure out if they’re being charmed by looking to see if their emotions have changed, but the problem is that emotions change all the time anyway.  It’s very, very hard to figure out whether your feelings toward a charm mage are natural or artificial.

The result of this is that mages tend to be really paranoid when dealing with enchantresses.  They’re afraid that they’ll be charmed or manipulated without knowing it, and so limit their dealings with them as far as possible.  Ironically, this means an enchantress usually gets suspected of manipulating emotions even when she isn’t doing it at all – since there’s no way to know if an enchantress is using her abilities, there’s also no way to know if she isn’t.

Light and Dark

Charm mages are one of the two types of mages that dominate Light Council politics.  The abilities of a charm mage give them an enormous advantage in negotiations and political dealings, and their ability to read emotions lets them pick up on the subtleties of an interaction faster than any normal person could.  It also helps that charm mages tend to be extroverted and social – even without their magic, they’re good at making others like them.

Charm mages in Dark society do less well.  While a Dark enchantress has even less limits on her freedom of action than a Light one, the major weakness of charm magic is that it’s not much good when it comes to brute force.  Dark mages don’t like being enchanted any more than Light ones do, but unlike Light mages their solution to the problem tends to be to apply immediate violence to the enchantress in question.  Charm mages who try to bring a Dark mage under their control often pay for it with their lives.

As a result of this charm mages have a definite bias towards the Light faction rather than the Dark, and those who aren’t Light are usually independent.  It’s less about ethics and more about convenience – the Light style of solving problems is much more appealing to most charm mages than the Dark one, and the social circuit of Light politics is a perfect home for an enchantress to dwell in.