Welcome to Magic 101! If you don't want to read and you'd rather just look at pretty pictures, fine. I brand you a heathen and may you never darken the doorstep of this temple again, even when it gets an upgrade that will make it extremely gorgeous with more buttons on it than the front page. I curse you, heathens! I curse you with all of my considerable imaginary might!

Actually, that leads rather nicely into the thing I wanted to talk about first: Magic. There are many misconceptions about magic, which is exactly the way most sorcerers, magicians, witches, sentient fantastical creatures, (etc. ect.) want it. They'd rather not have every peasant, knight, and housewife able to cast one or two powerful spells to ward them off. It would be more difficult to prey on them, you see. That's one of the largest misconceptions; that regular people can't do magic. This is, of course, completely untrue. Magic is not an innate talent. You don't have to be “born into it.” Magic is the product of effort and sacrifice, and the more effort you put into it, or the more that's sacrificed, the more powerful the spell. Many philosophers have attempted to apply mathematics to this, but there are some difficulties one encounters when trying to gauge the value of something. Take, for example, something relatively worthless like a pile of ashes. If you “sacrificed” a regular pile of ashes by scattering them to the winds in an effort to create a “Sailor's Charm” to control the direction or strength of aforementioned wind, you'd get a “wussy” charm. Look, I used slang. Isn't that cool? Doesn't it draw your attention away from the fact that this is actually a boring lecture? Moving on, sheep. If, however, the ashes you scattered were the remnants of your great great grandfather and they had been in your family for all the generations usually associated with great great grandfathers (five, at last count) you could possibly have an extremely powerful spell on your hands. I say possibly because if you didn't really care about the ashes of a long dead ancestor, the sacrifice wouldn't be very much now, would it? This is why exceptionally emotional people make rather better magicians than apathetic ones. It's also why women tend to create more intense curses, charms, spells, and the like. No, that wasn't a misogynistic stereotype! That was actually a compliment if you look at it carefully, you top-heavy freaks! Ahem.

The effort comes into it while creating the medium to entrap the sacrifice. The medium could be anything really, but traditionally one uses items like an amulet, a ring or a doll. There are more, of course, and these are by no means the only three traditional ones. They are just more examples. If you don't have an item, your sacrifice will be used immediately, and you will have very little control over it. So if we stay with our previous example of a Sailor's Charm, to keep the wind from blowing wildly around you in a dramatic but rather useless manner, you'd need, let's say, an amulet, carved carefully and aesthetically (prettily, you dimwits) into a beautiful piece of wood or stone. The carvings should reflect exactly what you want done, just as the manner of sacrifice should reflect how you want it done. If you wanted fire magic, burn your sacrifice. If you want wind magic, let your sacrifice blow away. If you want water magic, cast it into the sea. If you'd like earth magic, bury it forever. These are the four elemental magics, and they are not your only weapons. However, as beginners, you should focus on these, as other magics (space, time, ice, light, dark, and many other rather cliché categories) are far more advanced and take quite a bit of imagination and experience to figure out just how to get the (shall I start capitalizing them? Yes, I believe I shall) Sacrifice and Effort to attain the result you'd like. Incidentally, this is why paper money has become so popular. Paper is easy to bury, blow away, drown, and burn! And the spell's power is easily calculated, although how much the sacrificer him or herself actually values money does play a part. On a side note, this is why the treasury is constantly printing out new bills. It also makes it difficult to judge the economy's status, but that is something that will be discussed in Economy class, and I have no doubt that I would put you all to sleep if I attempted to relate to you the subtle fluxes of a bustling economy, fascinating though it is. Look! He's already asleep! Jerk. Class dismissed!