((spoilers!) Information for the writers )

Story takes inspiration from this sub-story: https://chyoa.com/chapter/%22Magic-exists%2C-urban-fantasy%22.437601 . Stories can take place under the initial "chaos of the magical apocalypse," or in the years beyond when protection items are common and magic is better understood, mastered and integrated into modern society.

The rules of magic are as follows:

You can use computers with the right software to render enchantments into glyphs or other forms of visual code. More advanced users can with these tools create innate abilities to use magic through conscious desires or other various mediums.

Magic is intrinsic to sentient creatures. You can't use electricity or other, conventional forces of the universe to power a spell. Most magical spells/enchantments connect to a sentient creature's subconsciousness and hypnotizes it into using its innate powers to do to itself, or nearby items, what you want it to do. It works a bit like a virus, or a computer virus, in that it takes partial/total control of a entity and makes it do what it wants it to do. Items without consciousness can be enchanted and changed as well, but adding value to materials costs magic.

Math and unit names:

(note, these rules are crude numbers based on initial research that got leaked onto the internet, the unit names are the only things that have remained)

• Thaums: One person's average innate magical production per second = 1 thaum (magical equivalent of a watt, potential energy production), or 3.6 kilothaums/hour (kth) for the more strategic-minded individuals. Since most magical spells are more easily calculated in seconds, that's what most use.
• Primes: Effective cost of spells is calculated in Primes (equivalent of joules, concrete energy expended on a task. A spell costing sixty primes takes about a minute with a one thaum production, or 0.6 seconds with a charged battery capable of outputting 100 thaums.)

Extrinsic magic: Where the most easily applicable magic is done by infecting a sentient creature with an enchantment, a magic wielder can channel their own energy into a target for various results. Channeling blindly into a different person would just increase their thaum output, but if you have already applied a enchantment to them, this might quicken the process. If you have enchantments on yourself, you cannot overrun their need of primes to halt the processes they are applying to you.

Infection/contact methods: Spells and enchantments are most commonly transferred visually. A printed glyph on two sheets of paper or some other medium, taped up and visual contact thereafter avoided by the wielder was one of the first ways to infect victims. Beyond that, all five senses of humans connected to their brain can be vectors for enchantment magic. Once magic was made into a weapon, various ways of safely transferring an enchantment from a weapon to a target were also invented, often inspired by more contemporary or fictional weapons.

Unsupervised attack methods: Protected persons cannot easily be infected with passive enchantments that have no thaums available to overpower any defenses. A method to create more aggressive enchantments is to combine it with a battery, giving it thaums to try and overpower defensive enchantments. as long as the target is in the aura of an aggressive enchantment with thaum power, it can keep using primes in wearing down the targets defensive capabilities.

Speed and strength: A person's innate magic is not a battery that can be emptied quickly or slowly, but a constant source of energy more like that of a generator. There are magical ways to store that energy for more explosive use, and most people don't notice that they are using 100% of their magical powers, working, fighting for their lives, or asleep. The more advanced users will quickly learn how to make items that can store magical energies for this kind of use. Electricity is a good reference to how spells get their power.

Protection magic: Enchanting amulets or other trinkets to protect the wearer from unwanted enchantments taking root in them. These have a maximum amount of Primes* they can suppress equal to the amount primes put into them when created and last recharged. One of the first responses to the magical apocalypse was mass production of these items through mass recruitment of civilians to create new items with state-approved enchantments. This did, however, not happen immediately, and many just made their own in the chaotic times with their own algorithms.

If a offensive enchantment overpowers a defensive item with more thaums than it can handle, the enchantment gets applied and the remaining primes applied.

Sharing magic between users: Like electricity, you can connect multiple thaum sources with various arcane tools. Unlike electricity, it can be done without wires and physical connections through something akin to quantum teleportation. Creating a network of trinkets designed to send a part of the wearers power to a central node is the most common way to share power. A lot of the early magic conflicts involved connecting unsuspecting civilians to specific mages, dramatically increasing their thaum potential.

Thaum safety limitations:

Magic overload and maximum throughput are factors that needs consideration when working with battery units and protection items. Most items have a max thaum limit of output or drainage, and enchantments in a person have a limitation of how much power they can use before the magic becomes harmful. Most humans have an upper limit of 1000 thaums on individual intrinsic enchantments. Multiple enchantments evenly distributing thaums can increase this up to about 5000 thaums.

Protective items in the size of amulets usually start around 3600 prime with a 100 thaum suppression potential. Rings and piercings start around 360 with 10 thaums. more advanced items has interfaces that informs the user about activity, like a geiger counter, and current power A defensive staff or other items of a few kilos can be used

Batteries and prime storage: A person can with the right enchantments store a certain amount of power in their body or on items on their body. As a successfully appplied enchantment can hijack a body's innate power generation and eventual stored power, most experienced wielders prefer to put their eggs in multiple baskets that cause less problem for them.

A normal mortal human can, with the right enchantment, store about 1000 primes in their body. Their battery thaum output however, can only output 1/60th of their maximum prime in thaum limit, rounded up to 17 thaums. Most untouched by magic merely leaves their thaum potential untapped and doesn't store up primes.

The personal prime storage potential, however, have to be distributed between offensive battery capacity and defensive protection magic. Most sane wielders use almost all of their innate power to power protection magic.

Most mortals after the "chaos of the apocalypse" have one interactive enchantment applied to themselves to charge themselves and their protective items.

Priority of Prime distribution to enchantments:

1. Intrinsic enchantments, enchantments put on your person doing things to your person, be they good or bad. Enchantments gets executed in a first-in-last-out order, a stack. Certain enchantments can cancel previous applied enchantments below in the stack. Some enchantments can allow percentages of the Primes given to them to pass by down to enchantments deeper in the stack, but most aggressive and external enchantments wants to avoid this.
   
   If a person wants defensive enchantments while having thaums available for powering offensive enchantments, they must only apply enchantments that doesn't consume all their thaums, enchantments that they themselves adjust the thaum levels of, or have enchantments that have been programmed to turn on and off depending on other various conditions.
   .
2. Extrinsic enchantments, enchantments put on items or other persons gets thaums distributed by the will of the thaum provider, limited only by his intrinsic enchantments and total thaum capacity. The creator knows which enchantments are active and accepting thaums or "offline," and not accepting them, but cannot tell anything more than that without more advanced conditions added to the enchantments.

Example cost and modifiers:

Cost examples, personal:

• Hair color change, 20 primes
• Increase/decrease mass for height, size or cosmetic changes, 30 primes per 1% in body mass/per kilo if 1% > 1 kilo. *
• Alter looks, change ethnicity, 30-100 primes
• Alter mental attributes, personality, political opinions, sexual orientation, fetishes, memories, 50-200 primes
• Total gender change flip, 300 primes.
• Fundamental anatomy change (turn a person into a pile of slime while maintaining sentience and dexterity) 500-1000 primes.*
• Prodigy talents (world-record running, strength, etc. human talents within normal reach) 5000-25 000 primes.*
• localized overrides of laws of nature (super-strength, supernatural flight, super-toughness, functional diminutive/colossal sizes, etc.) >25 000 primes.*
• other costs unaccounted for.

Cost examples, material:

Material changes are harder to estimate, but it is surprisingly easy to convert base materials to more valuable materials, lead to gold, producing material from nothing, changing one material to another. The few industries that felt the magical apocalypse close to a biblical apocalypse were mining-, material processing- and energy companies.

• Modifying material texture and color: 20 primes/m2.
• Altering design and material of object, 5 primes multiplied by rarity of material/100g.
• Nonprecious materials: 1x
• Basic metals like copper: 2x
• Semi-precious metals: 4x
• Precious metals and rare earth metals (gold, platinum): 8x

• Radically unnatural materials: >16x

• Transmuting material with rarer material 100 primes/100g times times magical value of materials.
• other costs still unaccounted for.

* (certain exceptions for safety are usually subconsciously integrated, square cube law a factor in size changes.)

Modifier examples:

Modifiers are added before multiplied with the initial cost.

• Hiding the visual effects of magic working on a body/item, 2 x prime cost.
• Making the target ignore and rationalize changes done to their body or mind with altered memories and opinions:
• 2x cost = flawed coverage, heavy suspicions, might realize something is happening and begin actively investigate the nature of their reality.
• 4x cost = good coverage, but might sometimes cause slight suspicion and unforeseen actions, especially with changes.
• 6x cost = perfect coverage, virtually impossible to disbelieve unless changes are ridiculously deviant from normal reality.
• custom = varied cost with custom drawbacks/advantages, costs, minimum 1.5x.
• Making people who knows the target/item ignore and rationalize changes done to them with altered memories and opinions,
• 1.5x cost = very bad, people that know a target are instantly doubtful of what they are seeing and strangers will quickly begin to suspect foul play from obvious corruption of a person. But if they don't know enough about what they are looking for (knowledge about magic), they'll question their own sanity and probably not go out of their way to intervene, especially for people they don't have a close relationship to.
• 2x cost = flawed, people that know a person or object being changed gets heavy suspicions, strangers doesn't take as much note unless changes are significant.
• 4x cost = good coverage, might be less effective with changes.
• 6x costs = perfect coverage, virtually impossible to disbelieve unless changes are ridiculously deviant from normal reality.
• custom = varied cost with custom drawbacks/advantages, costs, minimum 1.5x.
• Retroactive effects, i.e. being on birth control for a while, 2x cost per month.
• Other effects still uncounted for.