The Far Side of Utopia

Hmmm, well, the split narrative make sense to Mium. Not my fault if humans find it confusing… 😐

Nathan’s use of an incantation for magic is more of a formality than necessary. Classic natural mages often did it to help them build them structure their calculation, but realistically most mages that would need the help just use an autocaster now.

That said, calculations built more methodically (properly written to form) can in some cases have more potent effects in their ability rewrite hyle (refers to matter or “basic substance of everything” in some irrelevant old models of philosophy. I think it literally means “wood” or something in ancient Greek, but I’m a Latin-studies sort, my ancient Greek is not great, I mean, I barely make it through modern English, so…). Etymologically, you don’t really need to know anything besides that it will typically refer to not-eidos insofar as the comic is concerned. That said, most people would just call not eidos “matter” or “reality” or other less arcane words.

They are not, necessarily, however, more powerful – for example, mages we’ve seen like Kally, Ila, and Rovak all write their calculation directly (resulting it being incredibly fast) and we’ve seen them use very powerful magic that way. I’ve historically played a little fast and loose with the colors of calculation manifestations (though made them almost always blue), because their really just my attempt at something I can draw better than how I originally envisioned the magic calculations being depicted.

I could go into far greater depth, but we’d go down the rabbit hole again 😛 The rabbit hole on the different ways to cast magic goes really deep.

Anyway… I’ve babbled enough when I should be hard at work drawing the next page, fixing the character pages, writing the bonus comic, or something.