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This week: Here There Be Magic? Edited by: Satuawany  
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"You can always say it's magic if you don't understand it; and, who knows, you might be right."
~From Issola by Steven Brust
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"I don't know," someone says, "but there's gotta be a scientific explanation for it."
A few years back, I stopped wearing watches. I remember talking to a friend and she showed me her shiny, expensive watch. I grumbled something like, "Why bother buying something so fancy when it's just going to break in a year?"
She looked at me like I was nuts, which prompted me to ask more questions of her and others. It appears there are a lot of people out there who wear watches for years, occasionally needing to change their batteries. This baffled me.
You see, I've never had a watch that lasted more than a year. In about a year, they all---cheap watches, expensive watches, watches that glow in the dark and are water resistant and show me the date at the push of a tiny little button---die. It's almost like, well, clockwork.
I stopped buying "nice" watches soon after high school, after about the third one died. Figuring it had to be the battery, I'd take it to an authorized watch-battery changer, who would give the watch new life and hand the ticking thing back to me. In less than a week, sometimes in less than a day, it would be dead again.
For the next ten years or so, I would buy five-dollar watches at the friendly neighborhood supercenter every year. I figured, you expected those to die in a year. I could blame it on the battery and talk about how it seemed tedious to get the battery changed on a five-dollar watch, so might as well buy a new one.
Another friend dashed that all away when I noticed she'd been wearing the same cheap watch for five or six years. With the same battery and everything.
I did a halfway mediocre search on it, and discovered that there is "allegedly" this whole group of people who have problems doing things like wearing watches that keep working, using credit cards without spazzing out the magnetic strips, and walking under streetlights that don't wink out.
My debtors will tell you my credit cards have always worked just fine---until they got cut up, anyway. The amount of streetlights that go out near me is no greater than what can be attributed to chance, especially with the dying, cycling streetlights around here. I figured all those people who claimed to have an effect on streetlights didn't know much about streetlights.
One friend I questioned about these phenomena said, educationally, "Oh, the streetlight thing happens to everyone."
"Well, yeah," I said, "Every once in a while, a streetlight's just faulty."
"No, no," he said. "It happens all the time. To everyone."
This conversation happened over the phone, so he didn't get to see me blink a lot before I asked, "What do you mean?"
"Well, everyone I'm ever with."
I paused, sniffed significantly. "Are you saying that every time you're out with anyone, streetlights go off and come back on as you and whoever go past? No matter who you're with? Dude, do you ever go anywhere alone at night?"
Possibly for the first time in his life, a light went on above his head. "Oh!"
As soon as I think I've got something figured out, and it correlates with what skeptical people "in the know" say, someone I trust comes along and knocks me back a few steps. This would frustrate some people. I love it. Makes me feel like there's still some magic out there, at least until science comes along and gives people a way to quietly strangle it.
The problem is, all the evidence for this kind of thing is anecdotal (just like what I've told you in this newsletter). It's also almost impossible to recreate it in any kind of scientific environment. For most, it comes and goes, and definitely goes when someone's waiting for it to happen. Suspicious, says science. If you want to look it up, it's labeled "Street Light (or Lamp) Interference."
Science doesn't always have to kill the magic, though. Science can be magic, and that's when I love it. Usually, it's people's perception that makes it seem mundane. That same friend once told me a story about the time he saw a sea serpent.
He was in the Navy, and they had him out in the middle of the ocean on a surfaced submarine. My friend was on the deck when he looked out across the waves and saw something huge, long and sinewy. It moved above and under the water, giving the hilly image of sea serpents on old maps that have the caption, "Here there be monsters."
The sun glinted along it, shimmering on the edges of every individual scale, as it undulated across the surface. He watched a few moments, thinking he couldn't be seeing what he was seeing. Being the down-to-earth being he is, he grabbed---and forgive me my lack of technological knowledge here---some kind of far-seeing device that was several times better than the telescopes of olde.
"You know what I saw?" he asked me, as I leaned forward, mouth agape.
I shook my head, barely, my eyes staying wide.
"Fish," he said. It was a school of fish, tightly packed and moving in such perfect unison as its members dove in and out of the water, that from a distance it looked just like a sea serpent.
Some people who hear this story have such a let-down reaction. Aw, not a sea serpent. Just fish.
"But dude," I whine, "Fish moving like they're all the same creature! That's cooler than a sea serpent!"
The evolutionary implications alone are spectacular. If you were a large marine creature that would love to go through a school of fish with open jaws, would you want to tackle a sea serpent?
These are the magical components of our world. When you're looking for a way to develop the magic system in your world, or tweak this world for your urban fantasy, don't forget the everyday magics that we overlook. See the world in a grain of sand, William Blake. Or watch the center fail to hold, Yeats.
Tell yourself, "I don't know, but there's gotta be a way for magic to explain it!"
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Fantasy: March 07, 2012 Issue [#4916]
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