Hey guys, hope you all have been doing okay! I finished that explanation of how the magic stuff in this chapter works, so here’s a list of the abilities used an how they work:

Before we begin, I feel I should clarify magic in the comic doesn’t* consist of some force or other form of “stuff” that is unexplainable by science, or some ability to rewrite the laws of reality and physics. Magic in the comic is much more akin to something like a power to add and remove energy remotely. May not sound that impressive, until you realize that light, heat, movement, your thoughts and even matter itself is all energy, which results in the ability to control… well, literally everything. That said, the “control” is the only* non-scientific part, and stuff follows the laws of physics (or at least I try to make it follow them, anyway.) It’s why the lady in white lives where she does – all that hot sand baking in the suns is packed with energy, so she can do more or less anything, given practice.

First off, the weird “cloaking device” the castle has is less making something invisible and more just making the viewers see something else instead (so in this case, sand.) It’s just another form of the lady in white’s mind control that is more akin to hijacking your brain’s inputs and outputs via the nervous system – which is why it didn’t work on Trak-R, as he doesn’t have one. It’s also how the lady in white did her “invisibility” a few pages ago – she was there, she just made you not see her.

Secondly, Andromeda saying how she didn’t notice any “presences” upon entering is basically a far lesser variant of the mind control, being just *detecting* there’s a cluster of tiny electrical charges nearby that mean there’s probably something alive there. You could definitely get false positives, but I dont think there are many things equivalent to a brain outside of nature. It’s far less intrusive and far easier to do than mind control, but as we’ve seen, someone who does possess mind control can use it against you – and it being “far easier” still means that Andromeda had to practice it since she was very young.

And lastly, the lady in white basically conjuring a glass of water out of thin air – well, there are two ways you could approach this. The first is that she used energy to make matter from nothing but the air, but I dont think even she has the skill to do that without potentially setting off a nuclear bomb sized blast (matter has a LOT of energy stored in it.) The second, and more “plausible” is that she already owned the glass, and just moved it to her, be it via teleportation or just doing it really fast. Teleportation is canonically something that is possible in universe, and there’s a gazillion different hard-scifi ways of approaching how it’s done, but all of them require a near-atomic level of precision that it is basically the single hardest thing you could do with magic. Screw up, and you’ll be missing a leg, or explode in a mushroom cloud.

…Although, as with most laws, there are ways to cheat at it – but I’ll leave that for another time. See you next week.

 

 

 

*With exceptions to the lost and magical inheritance, which coincidentally have stumped in-universe magic scientists, such as samuel, for decades.