What was a spell? What was it really? I knew how to make them, to some degree at least. But it wasn't exactly a science. I wanted something, my magic begins to work in that direction without my input, I follow through on what it was trying to do with my intent behind it. Then I apply the proper emotion, a catalyst or binding somehow, and it completes the spell. That was a whole lot of intangible things all playing towards any number of possibilities.

But there was another aspect to it, something that while I acknowledge sometimes I didn't always pay attention to it. Lenses.

When I make a spell, it's the only time I ever have to make it. When I teleport all I have to do is want to be someplace, unlike when I had first created the spell. Same thing with my magic wings capable of sucking the air out of the room, I just needed to move my magic to my wings and give them a flap with some intent in mind. I didn't need to remake the spell every single time I needed to use it. The reason I didn't have to do this was because of the lenses.

I called them lenses anyway, and I wasn't perfectly sure what they were. If I thought of my magic like a beam of light, then each spell was just a way of focusing it in a particular manner. Like moving a lens in front of the beam.

The only reason I thought this was simply because of how I didn't need to perform the exact same process performing a spell as I needed to create the spell. It was like once I knew it, I had the lens stored away to draw on the next time I needed to cast it.

So that became my question, what does a lens look like and can I draw it?

I started simple. I got a piece of quartz and started throwing everything I could think of at it.

It wasn't like the flowers. It didn't draw on my energy, just absorbed it when the magic happened across it. I tried cycling through emotions and memories with it, but nothing seemed to stick or attract. I did notice the gem getting shinier, more smooth around the edges and generally more cartoonish. But that wasn't what I wanted, and it wasn't playing on any of the lenses.

I moved to the very first spell I had ever learned. My shield spell. At first, I just prepared the idea of the spell, moving my mental lense in hopes it would make a physical lense. No such luck. My next attempt was to try casting the spell, but directing it towards the gem. After some fine tuning, I manage to get a separate shield around the rock but no lense.

My successful, and therefore final, attempt was probably the most obvious. I closed my eyes and focused on the idea of protection rather than the spell itself. For the first time, I felt my magic respond, twitching in one particular direction. I followed it and continued to work towards it. I pushed raw magic out of my horn and poured it right into the gem, keeping the concept of protection in my mind. I was on the right track, but I needed more.

I attempted to combine thinking about protection and going back to the shield spell itself. This time, with both parts working in tandem, I felt my magic to continue to flow in one direction in a metaphysical sense that was hard to describe. It was something I felt before when making spells, but it had always been based on a sense of instinct. Here I was wandering in the dark and it gave me a better sense of exactly how my magic was reacting to my actions.

Trying to think of a metaphor for the feeling, I found there wasn't quite anything for it. I could have combined to unrelated ones, but it would have just made it confusing. It was like… my magic knew what I wanted, or when I wanted something I shoved my magic in a direction. And then when I toyed with ideas, emotions, spells, and anything else I was opening doors that might lead somewhere. But some doors only had brick walls behind them, so my magic didn't go through. Other times they didn't.

The gem itself and the idea of infusing it with a shield spell was just a direction, a way of pushing my magic that I have no idea to see if it would work. Thinking of a concept of protection was one door, combine it with my knowledge of the shield spell was yet another. But I had hit the end of the path that I get too much quicker with spells. A point of catalyst that binds the effect.

It took a long time of cycling through my thoughts and feelings to find what I needed. Unlike with all my spells, my magic didn't seem interested in giving me any instinct or hints towards what it was I needed. Which made finding it increasingly difficult as I learned it was a rather complex emotion.

The emotion was… odd. It wasn't just one thing. It took my hopes for the future, feelings for my friends, my relationship with my dad, and a certain… attachment to this place. 'This place' being relative. As it seemed like it was going to work with my feeling of the house but got much stronger with thoughts of Brockton Bay as a whole.

It was like the light and love of my soul had to get dragged out of the depths of me to fuel this gem.

My eyes flew open as I felt the gem in my hand get extremely hot. I had no idea how long I had spent holding this little rock, but long enough that my foreleg had gotten tired and my… Elbow? Knee? Something had gotten stiff.

I dropped the rock on to the floor of my room as I saw something getting burned into the side of it. It was a circle, only the size of a pea on the largest facet of the gem. I only got a few seconds to see it before it began to fade, but it was long enough for me to pick up the detail of it.

Immediately, I grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen with my telekinesis and began sketching it before it could fade from my memory. The circle was a simple design, tiny little circles lining the diameter of it and slightly curved lines connecting them.

So that was it, the Lens of protection. I couldn't help but smile at it.

Suddenly, there was a knock on my door. Shaking myself out of my thoughts, I grabbed the knob and opened it to reveal Lisa on the other side. The moment we made eye contact she raised an eyebrow and I knew her power had told her something.

Unable to resist, I picked the gem off the floor with my magic and tossed it to Lisa with a smile. She caught it and instantly looked even more confused.

"Don't move a moment," I told her, "I want to test something." I levitated the pen I had been holding higher and then launched it as hard as I could at Lisa, aiming for her chest so I didn't stab her face in case this didn't work. But about a foot away from her a purple bubble of light formed and stopped the pen in its tracks. Suddenly, both Lisa and I were grinning wildly.

"One more thing before we really get into this," I said, cutting her off before she even started. "What do you get when you look at this?" I lifted the paper with the Lens on it and showed it to her.

"No clue what so ever," she answered with a shake of her head.

"Then we're probably going to need more paper," I stated.

"Paper? No, we're going to need much more than paper. We need gems and a lot of them. Different shapes, different kinds, different sizes. We need to test everything, every aspect possible. I can already feel the Thinker headache and I don't even care."

"That's going to take a lot of money," I pointed out to her. In response, she held up an envelope for me to see.

"Not a problem."

---

For perspective, I had gone to sleep at about six in the morning and slept till noon before I even got to my little experiment that led to the tiny gemstone becoming a personal shield. When Lisa had come in it had only been one or two in the afternoon, but we didn't stop until my father had come home from work near eight. Which was apparently still a thing he did.

I hadn't even realized the build up around us until Dad came into the room. Lenses covered the wall, each one modified and experimented with several dozen times over and organized by complexity. Gemstones were scattered across a desk I had put in my room, with Lisa bent over them as she examined them critically. She had long since burnt her power out, but that didn't make her useless in organizing it all. My own magic reserves had taken some hits. Aisha had become something of a guinea pig and tester, mostly getting to throw things at Lisa to see if something worked.

And at some point, Will had started lounging on my bed with a book titled 'Magic for dummies'. Not completely sure what that was about.

"So," my dad stated awkwardly, looking at the hurricane of pure magic innovations that had attacked my room. "I take it things are going well?"

"Well," Aisha began. "We've only set Lisa on fire once, so I would say so."

"That's good," my dad said with a nod. "I guess this means we're getting dinner delivered?"

"Sounds good to me," I answered, offering him a smile. He matched it with his own as he said,

"Well you kids, and Will, don't stay up too late then. I'll give you a called when dinner is here."

"Wait," Will suddenly said, snapping his book shut and standing up. "Any chance getting drunk would increase the chance that I might think of something clever in regards to magic?"

"Probably not," Lisa answered nonchalantly, not even looking up from the table. Will, undeterred, simply said,

"Probably isn't a no! I must follow this hypothesis to its logical conclusion. Combining magic babble with alcohol, nothing could possibly go wrong. Danny, will you assist me in this endeavor?"

"Uh, sure," Dad responded with an expression that made it hard to tell if he was pleased or confused. Maybe he was both.

The two of them left, leaving the three of us with a massive amount of testing and experimenting left to do. I turned back towards the Lens I had been working on, a spell for fire ironically. I had also discovered a number of spells while doing this, which only increased the number of directions when might take this.

So much work to do and only so much of the night to do it in.

---

At least my father had the decency to fall asleep in his chair. Drunk Will, though, seemed to find the kitchen table a suitable enough location to pass out for the night. And he seemed to have left behind a mound of papers.

"Drunk Will takes notes?" I asked as Lisa started poking around the mess he had left.

"Apparently," she answered. "And they're surprisingly legible, just completely disorganized."

"So if he was on to anything it would be impossible to find until he woke up?" I asked.

"Don't be so sure." Lisa slowly pulled a piece of paper out from underneath Will's head and held it up for me to see. It was titled as 'How I Think Magic Works Monologue' underlined three times.

I face-hoofed.

Lisa turned the paper over and began scanning through it. Her eyebrow raised critically after a few seconds and her mouth quirked.

"Well?" I asked.

"He included stage directions," Lisa stated. "And they only serve to make him look drunk."

"Odd, but fitting. Anything else?"

"It's really… weird," Lisa said honestly. "He seemed to come to the conclusion that magic works in a lot of confusing abstracts and symbolism. He wanted to increase his imagination and ability to think outside the box by getting drunk. Half of this is drunken suggestions as to what might symbolically mean what."

"So… nothing?"

"Well, no," Lisa amended. "We've done a great job exploring the rules of your magic, the more logical side of things. Will might have been onto something here, somewhere. Like this one," she turned the paper around to show me, pointing at a little picture drawn in the margins.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Will saw the gems you've enchanted give us minor forms of spells you can cast and started to think a larger gem, fitted inside jewelry that is also enchanted, could hold something more complex. Or rather, give us the ability to cast spells."

"Jewelry?" I asked.

"Yes, like a necklace or a ring. His design is kind of lame, but he might be on to something when it comes to jewelry. You've already created potions and you've found a way to enchant gems. The next logical step would be enchanted weapons and armour. Or at least that's what Will said. He keeps talking about video games and how they represent magic. Clearly, Drunk Will was thinking on a different level."

"So what is the next step?" I asked, grabbing the paper out of her hand and examining it closer. While the writing itself seemed very Will, there were dozens of drunken notes and drawings scrawled along the sides.

"Well, if you really wanted to check the jewelry option," Lisa began, "then we're going to need to get an amulet."