The OneThe One is God. Any God, all gods of every people - in the mythology of
Young Wizards, all the mythologies that ever were and ever will be are reflections of the central conflict between the various Powers That Are. The One is the originator of everything; it created the Powers, the first of Its children, and with their help formed the universe itself. It's been said by the Transcendent Pig that the One is actually fairly juvenile - that It loves puns and silly jokes that are the equivalent of ringing someone's doorbell and running away to hide behind the bushes. So far the One Itself hasn't shown up in the books, seeing that It exists outside of physicality and time, but It's certainly on the side of the wizards, and seems to love everyone and everything, even Its wayward child, the Lone Power. Not much has been revealed about the One other than those few things.
The Powers That BeIf the One is the head honcho, the Powers That Be are Its main enforcers. Lesser gods or angels, depending on the mythology being examined, they are immortal beings that exist outside of time and proper space and will sometimes drop in to help certain events along. The Powers are, well,
powerful, taking immense patience, effort, and time to use things such as the rising of the mountains and the course of a glacier advancing to shape the land to the perfect form they envision, and then helping people get settled in the worlds after sentience comes around. All mythologies have a reflection of the Choice at their core, but the variations after that choice are mostly due to the interactions that species/race/culture has with the Powers That Be. The cultures with more defined, concrete stories that last through history (Greek, Roman, Irish) tend to be places where the Powers That Be fell somewhat in love with the place they were helping to shape and either never left or didn't remove themselves for a very long time. Cultures with a more fluid and not as
focused look at spirituality (the Native Americans, for example) tended to not have much interaction with them after that portion of the world was built to their satisfaction.
The Powers exist outside of time, but can only affect time by going into it Themselves. They have a few ways to do this: acquiring an appropriate body to live Their life out with on that world, showing in Their own, natural, very powerful Selves when a job needs doing, or choosing to live within someone, using them as an embodiment, more or less a fully aware avatar. The danger of the first possibility is that essentially quitting the Powers means that the being has to give up most of its power to the One and is anchored forever at the spot of their choosing; reclaiming their abilities pulls the Power back to the One, the body It was inhabiting dies, and They can't reembody for a very long time. For the second, reality isn't really
robust enough to stand up under such a concentrated form of power for very long, so a Power in its natural form can't stay in the world for long. The third, and most common option, means that the Power has more ways to act on reality and more power available to do so, but the host body is often the target for violence from the Lone Power, and subject to messy death (or attempted messy death). While in reality, the Powers are not limited to one species, gender, or sex, and so can be born in or appear as anyone, as long as it's intelligent. Their "true" forms are also fairly androgynous-looking. They tend to collect a lot of names as well.
There are many Powers That Are, each with Its own job and own abilities, some more powerful than others, but there are a few that are heavily involved with the series. A list of them are as follows:
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The Lone Power, the main antagonist of the series, an analogue for Satan, various gods of death and hell, and possibly also the Trickster gods and spirits of various mythologies. Strongest and first born of the Powers, during creation of the Universe It went off on Its own to create entropy and set it running in the fabric of reality. Nita rewrote Its name to offer It the chance at redemption, and later Dairine, backed by Nita and Kit, forced It to a point where It accepted that It was lonely and wanted the light It was born in, and so could accept said redemption. But there are still lots and lots and
lots of splinters of the Lone One left in reality, and all of the ones from before Its rewriting and redemption still range from completely, terrifyingly evil to apathetically evil to everything in between, and wizards still have to fight and defeat those splinters whenever they come across them. Nita always sees It as a young-ish, handsome guy with sandy red hair unless It's presenting a specific aspect to Its audience (like the Tower of Shadows one), having only met one version of It that was female. Most wizards tend to see It as the first aspect of It they see.
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The One's Champion, known on Earth as Athena, Thor, Lugh, and Michael the Archangel, among others, the most powerful Power after the Lone Power, Its main adversary, and Its twin. The Champion is only a smidge behind the Lone Power in pure force, and has spent all Its time combating the works the Lone Power has pulled and helping people defend themselves from Its attacks. More or less second-in-command to the One, It also seems to like embodiment more than a lot of the other Powers; it says at one point that it's like a game of chess, in that sure you can end the game by just flipping the board over, but you don't
win it then. You have to get into the game and play by the rules in order to truly beat your opponent. It also seems to find life and the people that live it fun to be around. The Power the main characters know the most about, the Champion lived for ten or so years in the body of a scarlet macaw named Macchu Pichu, known as Peach, that belonged to Tom and Carl and liked to predict the future - if she felt like it. After Peach was destroyed by the Lone Power, It next manifested in the Irish wizard Ronan Nolan, although It stayed with him for less than a year as he tried to sacrifice himself to let It out. The Champion seems vaguely more female than male, as it says that for sheer protective instincts, getting a mother is your best bet, and once showed up in a completely female angelic form.
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The Hesper, a brand-new power that was created after the formation of the universe and therefore had to undergo a first embodiment within reality in order to be able to have any effect on it. She's more or less a Lone Power that never fell, and is the only power to have a definite sex since so far She's only had one body. Born from within a race that the Lone Power had completely taken over, It didn't realize She was embodying until it was too late, and Kit, Nita, and their friends helped finish the process. She's currently out of the universe again, since first embodiments never last long, and will return to try to heal the hurt her counterpart has wreaked on the worlds. Bears the Spear of Light originally made by the Smith of Fallas to fight Balor.
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Ponch. Ponch started life as Kit's dog, a mutt-mix of lab, border collie, and about eight other breeds, a little smarter than most but still a dog. Wizardry practiced around pets will oftentimes start changing the animals, though, and after awhile Ponch started creating universes out of nothing. His favorite was Squirrel World. Ponch's tracking skills also improved at the same time, though since he was already a good tracker, this was less noticeable. He also had the ability to take others with him into these universes, and out of them again, and Kit started using this ability to get to other worlds and even into mindscapes. Ponch was the one that found Memeki, who would be the Hesper, and losing her hit him hard. He ended up completing the dogs' Choice when the Lone Power was going to destroy Earth and Kit along with it, and he chose to accept his full power and fight the Isolate to save Kit. He advanced to a higher state of being, becoming the canine version of the One, and now every dog (and loyal-friend-type creature) has a bit of Ponch in them.
The History of the UniverseIn the beginning, there was nothing. Because the Powers that Be had to scrap it all and start over after the Lone Power invented entropy, which meant their original building blocks for the universe (and all other universes) wouldn't work properly. The universe as it's known now is a pastiche of things they could pull together that ended up working, but not in the perfect way they were hoping for. Death and entropy were there from the start, thanks to the Lone Power.
See, the Lone Power wanted to invent something that no one had thought of. Something big, something impressive. So during the creation, It went away and thought long and hard, and then made a great working. It came back to show the others Its creation - entropy, the gradual running down and loss of energy from the universe, as well as its lesser tools to accomplish it faster, such as wars, lies, deception, and painful death. The Lone Power had invented misery, and the One as well as the other Powers were disgusted and furious. They cast out the Lone Power, who turned on all of Them and set out to sell Its "gift" to all the worlds and all the people that came into being. The entire point of wizards and wizardry in general is to stop the Lone Power as often as they can, however they can, and slow down that long and eventual death in the hopes that the One and the Powers can find a way to stop it altogether.
The Universe CurrentlyLife found a way, as it so often does, and while Earth as a whole doesn't know about wizards, or aliens, wizards sure do know about aliens, and aliens sure do know about Earth. There are over a hundred thousand homeworlds for even more species, and many more across the different universes that abut against ours. Some planets have humanoids, but far more have types of life that are significantly different from a human, such as over-sized metallic centipedes and three-legged football-shaped beings covered in what looks like colorful carpet samples from a hardware store. Wizardry is available on all worlds, with most knowing about wizards and being open about them, while most also know about lifeforms not native to their own worlds. Its not uncommon for wizards to meet and become friends with at least one member of another species from another world; in fact, it's far more uncommon if that
doesn't happen.
Entropy is still running, on some worlds more than others, and the condition of the world is more or less a reflection of the way a species' Choice went. There are very few places where the Lone Power completely lost, and those worlds tend to be quiet, peaceful, with a very long life and a very peaceful death for the beings that live there. Alaalu, the world Nita and Kit went to on their exchange program, was one such world, while Rashah was on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. On Rashah, everything was pain, everything was death; the trees were ripped limb from limb, there was a constant war going for thousands of years between the two city-states of the Yaldiv, and motherhood involved the eggs exploding from their mother's body and literally eating her corpse for their first meal. Most worlds fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, like on a bell curve. It's never been outright said, though it has been implied through what happened in the Song of the Twelve, that Earth is likely right in the middle of the two extremes, given that the ten whale wizards who made the first Choice had a more or less completely even split between rejecting the Lone Power, accepting it, or refusing to decide.
The ChoiceEvery species, as they begin to gain sentience, is faced with the Choice which will determine the basic "course" their lives are going to take after that point. Occasionally one species will Choose for the whole world, especially if only one species gains sentience; other times, every individual species will choose as their moment of awareness. The wizards of the group will be approached by the Lone Power, and sometimes a being working for or with the other Powers, and It will present Its case. The Lone Power won't outright lie, but It's an expect (
the expert) of the misleading answer, of telling you something that sounds true without telling you the catch. Every Choice that's ever shown in the series, the Lone Power offered something the person making the choice wanted, or It thought they wanted; a temptation like the fruit of knowledge. To the whales it offered to make their personal abilities stronger and thus their knowledge greater; to the Demisev it promised protection from the fires that swept their world frequently, a freedom from that sudden painful death if only they would each keep a small coal of pain burning inside their souls for forever. If there's a representative for the other Powers there, they also present their case for rejecting this "gift," but usually the representative is a wizard itself who is trying to guide its friends without really knowing what it's doing (such as Dairine was). The Lone Power only gets one chance at a Choice for any particular species, and so will put all Its effort into making sure it goes the way It wants. While It has very few total victories, It also has very few total failures.
TimeheartThe "heart" of everything, the center of all the worlds, Timeheart is what the universe
would have been like if the Lone Power hadn't invented entropy and stuck it into the equation. Analogous to Heaven, everything in Timeheart burns with an inner fire, the sheer state of being
alive (even though most things there are dead). The worlds and universes expand around it like the layers of an onion, everything getting more
real the closer to the center you go. Wizards often say "What's loved, lives," and Timeheart is definitely a part of that, as whatever's been loved in its lifetime goes to Timeheart after it dies. Kit's Lotus Espirit, Fred, and Ed all went there and seem to be just happy with it. Wizards can choose to visit there, mostly in dreams they know are real; regular people can, too, though they see them as just dreams.
Wizardry and SpellsWizardry is the not entirely explainable force that allows wizards, the Powers That Be, and the One to affect the world and natural laws in it to achieve an affect. Wizardry was used to build and is still used to repair the universe, and it more or less works by wizards convincing a specific
thing to do something slightly (or very) out of its normal nature. No one's entirely sure where the power comes from, aside from the One, and how wizards are able to use it, they just know they are, the power is good, and the system works, so any metaphysical conversations are usually left to the theorists. Wizardry isn't something one can touch or see, it's more a natural law, like gravity, that controls all other natural laws and can help override them at times as its users want. The users just have to know how to talk it into helping.
Wizardry can do
anything, although not everything it can do is permanent. Wizardry won't let a wizard rewrite the speed of light, for instance, but it will let them bend it for awhile so the wizard can sort of slip around it. Nita once uses wizardry to convince gravity to leave her alone for awhile so she can skywalk. For something that's not going to break physics by doing it, wizardry can make anything happen, from transporting someone to another location, to creating duplicates of items (and people, though the person is a very imperfect copy), powering vehicles, changing shapes, healing wounds, even such mundane things as opening doors, drawers, and locks. The only limits wizardry has, aside from not permanently changing the building blocks of the universe, are the limits that wizards themselves bring with them to the table: if the spell is not constructed correctly, the spell will fail, and if the wizard can't power the spell, it will peter out.
It's not precisely "magic" in that nothing is done without work and a payment, usually in the form of a wizard's current store of physical energy, but occasionally in a more ... esoteric form of a similar nature. Nita and Kit's "blank check" wizardry to seal the fire drake and the evil Book away from time and space forever ended up costing lifeprice, the highest price there is, and Nita once combated the Lone Power using entire years of her life (which still required a current energy payment to perform). They don't just wave a wand and pull rabbits out of a hat, which a lot of them would like; instead they have to set up the spell, which means pulling it together in the manual, then possibly laying it out in a big diagram that everyone can see, and then reading it, which can take awhile if it's a really big one. Smaller spells take less effort in every department, and convincing something to do what it normally does (asking a drawer to open for a second, for example), takes an effort so miniscule it can't even be felt. Asking a kettle of water to boil takes about as much effort as running up a flight of stairs. The larger and more complicated the spell itself is, the more mass or area is has to affect, and the more unusual the affecting
is, the longer the spell will take to begin working, although when the spell is finished the wizardry will work right away if it's done right. Delicate, intricate spells also take awhile to do, even if the energy output isn't quite as big, much like doing intricate handmade lace is complicated but not physically exhausting. Outside influences can act on a wizard during the initial set up of a spell; if someone took a wizard by surprise and trained a gun on them, and immediately shot it, it's almost certain the wizard wouldn't have time to stop it and would die. But a hesitation of any sort and they could either throw up a personal force field or talk the gun into "breaking" for awhile. It's hard to take a wizard by surprise, but not completely impossible, and the younger and less experienced a wizard is, the more possible it is. Once the spell is underway and is gathering momentum, though, there's a sensation that the universe is leaning in to listen to the spell and hear what's being asked of it, and a sense that the world is "pausing" around the wizard as well. Other wizardries can hit them at that time, but purely physical things seem to be put either in slow-mo or held off entirely until the spell is let loose.
There's a constant saying that "Wizardry cannot live in an unwilling heart," and it's shown in action. What it means is that there
is a way to lose wizardry and stop being a wizard, return to being just a normal person, though one that always has a small core of loneliness at the center of them that's like a constant, small pain. A wizard can either renounce wizardry consciously and reject it almost physically, or they can lose their belief in magic and have it fade away. Nita almost does the first version when her mother is sick, only being stopped through intervention by Kit and her mom, and Tom and Carl (and all adult wizards) show the second type during the Pullulus disaster when reality itself was stretched out of proportion. The older, more mature wizards lost contact with the "strings" of their wizardry, and it turned into just a memory of a fun make-believe game to them. At the resolution of that conflict, they went back to normal, but it was a hard blow to everyone when it happened.
WizardsWizards are, as Tom and Carl once put it, more or less the tech support of the universe. It's their job to go after problems and try to "patch" them, suppressing or hopefully eliminating the problem all together, and doing it day in and day out in a hope to slow down the death of the universe and make the worlds a little better. They're bound to serve life and the preservation of life, to not change or harm something unless another life is immediately threatened, and combat the Lone Power as it tries to wreck the universe. Wizards' policy says if you find an emergency, it's up to you to fix it or at least hold it back until more wizards can be called in, although most wizardries are more planned than emergency interventions.
A new wizard is offered the power at a point that seems to be when they start growing into physical maturity; on Earth, it roughly corresponds to the general ages of puberty, except more compact. (Please note a wizard usually doesn't get offered the power and start puberty at the same time in most cases, but it's an easy way to remember the timeframe.) Wizardry onset for humans is typically between the ages of twelve and fourteen, though there have been wizards younger (Darryl was eleven, Dairine was a couple months shy of being eleven) and older (Angelica Pelligrino, a wizard from the 19th century Nita looks up to in a vague historical way), but at least two-thirds of human wizards gain the power during that middle range. The Powers will only "wake up" a wizard when a problem comes along that that exact person is the right answer for, since every wizard is the answer to a problem somewhere. It's speculated that the Powers That Be want to give a wizard as much time as they can to enjoy a normal childhood, gain some knowledge about how the world works, and be as well-adjusted and (hopefully) mature as possible so that when the staggering weight of the work they've signed up to do hits them, they're able to handle it. The younger a wizard is, the greater the power they have: Dairine's numbers were ridiculous when she got started, though Darryl's weren't out of the ordinary for being activated at his age. This is compensated for, though, because every wizard has a drop in power after their initial debut, and the higher the start, the farther the fall. Dairine does not take hers well at all. A "ranking" wizard like a Senior or a Planetary will have a higher power level (Irina's is in triple digits, while Mamvish's is in quadruple), but that power is only offered to them as they begin climbing the ladder of "wizardly management" and they
need all that power to keep track of the part of the universe and the other wizards under their care.
There's no one "type" that tends to be a wizard, but in general they do tend to share a few qualities. Most wizards love to read, and almost all have a general thirst for knowing what's happening and a love of knowledge in general. Most tend to be able to think quickly on their feet, otherwise they end up dead pretty quickly. There's also a tendency towards being a kind of anti-bully, the type of person that does just want to do good, help improve the world, and not gain any reward from it other than the satisfaction of knowing you're improving things for others. That doesn't mean wizards aren't or can't be selfish - there's no such thing as a "personal gain" clause in wizardry, which means that as long as a wizard believes a spell is the right thing to do and is willing to pay the price for it, that spell can be performed. Nita corrects her astigmatism this way, for example. But it does mean that when a job needs doing, a wizard won't sit back and kick his, her, or its heels and wait for someone else to do it, they're going to get it done. And most wizards seek out projects to do even when there's not an emergency, keeping a number of them going at a time until a solution can be found for any of them. Wizards love to just do
wizardry, and will often find any excuse they can to do so.
The OathWhen offered wizardry, every potential wizard has to take something called the Oath, which is exactly what it sounds like: the Hippocratic Oath for wizards, their rules and manifesto all rolled up into one easily understandable package. The Oath can change wording slightly from world to world, even from person to person, but the tenants always remain the same. Reciting it out loud gives the new wizard access to wizardry.
In Life's name and for Life's sake, I say that I will use the Art for nothing but the service of that Life. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so -- till Universe's end.
The OrdealAfter a new wizard accepts the Oath, at some near point in the future they will be sent on their Ordeal, and mostly without any warning. The Ordeal is the test that shows whether a person can actually
be a wizard or not, with all the peril they go through. No wizard is ever offered the power without them being the solution to some problem the Powers see; Nita and Kit's ordeal was to recover the Book of Night With Moon, while Dairine's was to complete the Lone Power's redemption. Ordeals are never light, they're never fake, and they're sometimes deadly - usually a new wizard comes away battered, if not outright hurt. They are
always life-changing experiences, if only for the fact that it's usually the first time a wizard does some really big wizardry and discounting any other complications that arise during them. Ordeals can and have killed new wizards; it's estimated that three to five percent of the disappearances in America are new wizards out on Ordeals who don't come back. Senior wizards keep track of Ordeals in progress, and if one fails, they send in other wizards to get the job done.
The Lone Power (almost) always appears in some form or other for an Ordeal. Its equally likely he'll actually turn up himself as not; new wizards might not actually fight him face-to-face in their first big problem, but they always fight his agents and inventions. Joint Ordeals like Nita and Kit's are uncommon but not unheard of; most wizards don't find a partner for work for awhile. There is a type of wizard called an Abstainee where they have their Ordeal and the Lone Power
never comes in
any form; these wizards usually have power ratings that are off the charts and remain so for as long as they live. These wizards are, however, exceedingly rare: in the Milky Way, there have only been nine in the last handful of centuries.
ManualsWizards get access to wizardry through a variety of different ways, even on the same planet, but Nita, Kit, and Dairine get theirs through
manuals - Nita and Kit through books, Dairine through a special computer named Spot. "Manual" is, at least for most of them, the default way to refer to the access paths, even when referring to another way of accessing the knowledge. Ronan and other Irish wizards receives theirs through the Knowledge, more or less a memory-based thing patterned after the old bards, Filif hears the whisperings of the winds, Sker'ret uses what's more or less a high-tech metal-not-crystal ball, and Roshaun has a very small, intense point of light he calls the Aethyrs. Darryl's probably got the most unusual right now, in that he has a
freaking WizPod. As more and more technology is introduced on a planet, especially technology for communication, more and more versions of the manual pop up and are available for use to the general wizarding community. Whatever form of the manual they're given to begin with, though, they generally stick with - Darryl's the only one known to have switched, since he was first whispered to by the Silence when he was locked away inside himself, and then received the WizPod after he emerged. Nita once told Dairine that she'd stick with "something that didn't crash."
The manuals are full of wizardry themselves, as their contents alter over time based on the needs of their wizard, and sometimes even their outside appearance as well. Spot has gone through several upgrades to keep up with the latest computers, and Nita's book has expanded or reduced in size depending on where she needs to keep it. The "insides" of the manual are tailored to each wizard, depending on ongoing projects and specialties; Nita looked for a spell Kit wanted to do on the page he said on their first adventure, and found a spell for grass care. At various points Nita's manual gets thicker or otherwise alters its contents based on the work she's currently doing: when learning to work with kernels, it gained an extra inch of new stuff all about kernel management and the practice worlds, and when she began studying the Speech in depth during the Darryl's Ordeal adventure, she never reached the end of the section, or even seemed to be making
any headway in it, no matter how many pages she turned or how much she read.
Aside from just providing information, the manuals can also be used as high-tech communication systems, with areas that resemble a phone book (with listings of local wizards and ones you work frequently with, along with access to lists of wizards in any other location and, presumably, with many more possible groupings based on how the wizard asks for sorting) and others that are like the best smartphone on the market (with email, voice, and text message capability). The manual will also do various things like make its pages glow slightly in the dark for it to be able to be read, create and update graphs in real time if they're needed, allow wizards to highlight and bookmark various places and have the pages actually
stay there, stores spells a wizard is working on in incomplete forms, and even turns the pages itself if you ask very nicely. Nita's manual seemed to get affronted when she asked if she could get it to do that and kick up a little breeze all summer and immediately flattened its pages down.
The SpeechThe Speech is, more or less, Life's programming language - it's what was used to build the universe, there's an insane amount of power invested in just the language itself, and
everything speaks it. Everything in the universe is alive in some way, and while sentient life tends to make its own languages (and have wizards), everything from grass to rocks to stars can understand and respond to the Speech. Wizards communicate with other wizards from different cultures or even different planets or universes with the Speech and everyone understand it perfectly.
The Speech is used as a
lingua franca for several species across the known worlds even by non-wizards, and it's entirely possible for non-wizards to learn to speak it as well, as long as they can hear it to begin with (Carmela is one such person). Most people on
sevarfrith worlds, though, can't recognize the Speech being spoken, just like they won't recognize magic being performed in front of them, and tend to hear it as whatever their own language is (or the one they're expecting to hear) being spoken with an accent native to wherever the speaker came from.
Most wizards and fluent speakers have a down-in-the-bone knowledge of anywhere between five hundred to about a thousand words in the Speech, and with a manual, access to a few hundred million more to help them with spells or even just in regular conversation. Wizards that study the Speech heavily obviously know more, and there's a few dozen different tenses and modes of speaking that also grow in power the "older" you get. The Speech is the language of life, and therefore it updates, grows, and changes as life itself does, with the life around it. Its one limit is that it needs a source, ie a native speaker, to be able to do its job; the Speech, and therefore the manuals and wizardry itself, can't understand a language or a culture that's completely dead and that it can't find a knowledgeable person to skim context from. This turned out to be a problem on Mars, when knowledge of the language, culture, and history of the Shamaska could have - possibly - saved Kit from getting in so much trouble.
There's one Golden Rule in the Speech -
don't lie. Just like wizards make very, very sure of something's name before they speak it, lying runs a very real risk of changing whatever you're speaking about to what you're saying, and the consequences of that could be too disastrous to really be imagined. Wizards will never lie in the Speech and usually get out of the habit of lying in their own native languages as well, since they're so in tune with the truths behind words and bending them even when not using power just feels
wrong. For example, Dairine stops just running her mouth off, mostly, after she becomes a wizard, and when asked a direct question will usually just not say anything and look kind of belligerent. Wizards also tend to not like people lying
for them, as shown when Kit needs to take a day off from school to go look for Darryl and his mama says she'll tell them he's sick. He tells her not to lie to them and just say he needs a personal day.
However, there is a way to say something that's not true in the Speech and have nothing happen, and that's by using mild and/or friendly exaggeration or hyperbole. This works because the Speech reads
intent in the words, so wizards are fully able to say things like "I'm gonna get you for that!" and the Speech will know they really mean "You scared me so much and I'm freaked out!" As the main group is made up of friends and occasionally relatives, this pops up a lot both in and out of the Speech just like it does in normal teenage conversations. Nicknames also seem to count under this category.
NamingNaming is a
huge thing in wizardry, as literally every spell in the book involves naming something
in its entirety in order to have an affect on it. And the entirety means everything: Nita's name includes the fact that she loved to read books on horses for a long time and she once had an enthusiastic sword fight with a tree, while Kit's states his love of chocolate ice cream and poetry, especially Shakespeare. A wizard becomes adept very quickly at reducing all of that data down to a "shorthand" version, one they can pull out and use as a moment's notice, but it's not just people that have to be named accurately for a spell to work, it's everything that's going to be affected by it. A wizard's manual will help them compensate for things like the changing position of a body in space (since the planet, solar system, and galaxy are all moving) and will often plug in the minutiae of a specific item's details without the wizard having to do anything, but the information all needs to be
there because the spell needs to be accurate down to the atomic level. If something doesn't already have a name, then a wizard will need to coin one for it, but it has to be
right.
Misnaming things leads to a whole host of problems, beginning and more or less ending with the fact that wizardry is mostly about persuading objects or people to be what (or where) the wizard wants them to be, so quoting someone's name wrong comes with a very high chance of changing the person themselves. A wizard doesn't just casually erase a name written in the Speech, either, as is shown when Nita drops out of the clean-the-water spell she, Kit, and S'ree were doing, because there's a chance that the person themselves could be erased, or at least part of them. The Lone Power changed when Nita rewrote Its' name in the Speech, and Kit used the same trick during the working Nita tried to cure her mother's cancer, because Nita had been blinded by desperation into not seeing the way out of the situation she'd gotten into. Combining the pre-desperation version of her name (that Kit had saved from their spell) with her name that was current at the time opened her eyes to Its trickery and helped save herself, her wizardry, and her mother's happiness, if not her mother's life.
SpecialtiesJust as with any group of living beings, some people are better at some things than others, and as a wizard settles in to the power they eventually come to settle more or less on one "section" to focus on in wizardry. Every wizard starts out with a general specialty from the beginning: Nita's was plant life and growing things, Kit's was mechanics and to a lesser extent inanimate objects in general, Dairine's was simply very BIG works due to the power she had. Specialties can change as the wizard grows older, or not; there seems to be no set way a wizard will develop, besides the power drop they all suffer after their Ordeal. People's own inclinations in everyday life seem to follow them to some extent into wizardry, as Nita suspects she got her talent with plants from her father the florist, and Kit's papa is somewhat mechanically minded. However, it's not a one-to-one ratio, as Nita also grew up really loving astronomy, and hasn't shown any out-of-the-ordinary proficiency in that department.
Any wizard can get any spell to work, as long as they constructed and spoke it correctly and barring any direct interference from the Lone Power, but wizards with a specialty get much better results with spells that fall within their realm. During their Ordeal, it was Kit who woke the statues, while Nita called the trees to battle. Kit was able to heal a bee sting Ponch picked up digging in the backyard, but couldn't do the healing wizardry required to fix S'reee nearly as well as Nita. During the Hesper incident, Nita wasn't able to heal Ronan after he got himself heroically shish-kebabed because the injury was too severe for her talents, but an Australian wizard named Matt, an injury/surgery specialist, was able to patch him up fine and even told them to send him in for a check over like he was an actual doctor. There are several wizards that spend most of their time writing new spells, several that spend most of their time controlling and maintaining gateways to other worlds and dimensions, and many, many more in many, many more fields that require expertise. While wizards have a policy of "if there's an emergency and you're the one that finds it, you handle it," if there's time to prepare, they'll always try to get an expert in the field.
Spell ComponentsSpell components are a... spotty thing. Of course all spells need the energy of the wizard performing it, that's their "fuel," but some spells need more things as well. It seems to mostly be the very unusual wizardries or the very big ones that need extra components, especially for new wizards that don't yet have the fluidity and fluency in the Speech needed to convey complicated concepts. The more familiar a wizard is with a spell, the less likely they are to need components, as seen when Nita and Kit first try to open one of the worldgates and need a few materials but are able to do it with little to no problem and no materials later (this might be helped by the fact that their normal destination when worldgating is the Crossings, which does have its own technology set up to support gates, as opposed to going to a different universe which is what they had to do when they used their supplies. Other transits in the same universe haven't been shown to need supplies). Permanent spells that aren't going to be taken apart are also good candidates for needing more than just energy, such as the wizardly leash Kit made for Ponch when he started universe-walking and Kit didn't want to get separated from him.
There are some objects, though, that aren't traditional spell components as such (though they probably can be used as components in a spell if one looked hard enough for a spell to do so in), but bend the strings of space and time around them in ways that give them a lot of power or can let them be the focal/anchor point for spells. Spell components act this way for the specific spell they're linked to, but these objects do it anyway, without any provocation and not much prep needed. Nita had a television gimbal that worked in this manner, but she anchored too many major spells to it and it ended up crumbling into powder. Most wizards keep a small "stash" of potentially useful objects with them, but they also tend to use their own brains and basic work in the Speech far more often on the road than spells that need extra items.
Spell StorageOver time, wizards have invented a variety of ways to carry around spells for quick use rather than having to recite all of them right on the spot since some of them can be very long. Oftentimes there's just not enough time to get all of a spell off before you need it, so compacted wizardries are in pretty high fashion.
The easiest way to avoid the prep work when you need the spell in a hurry is to set it up ahead of time and just have it "ready" in your mind, with everything but the last word said; when you need it, you say or even just
think hard the last word, and the spell executes. This is a good method for quick spells, like self-defense bubble shields, but the more complicated ones are simply too...
complicated, and powerful, to let them sit in a mind like that, and most wizards' minds can't handle storing more than a few familiar ones like that. Oftentimes a wizard will collapse a spell down into a small (or occasionally not-so-small) physical item with either a limiter set or left in an inactive state until needed, usually stored in a claudication; this is often used for weapons, such as the ones Ronan and Kit used on Mars when dealing with the superegg. The limiter is removed or the item is activated and boom, you're ready to go. During her mother's illness Nita made herself a wizardly charm bracelet to carry useful spells into the practice universes since manual access there was sketchy at best, and she's continued to use it since then in the same manner. The bracelet itself is made of tightly wound strands in the Speech that are specifically designed to hold and
contain a lot of power, separately, with the seeming and feel of a bracelet over the Speech-links. Each spell is said and then anchored in inactive mode to a small metal charm that represents what the spell is used for, such as the small glass bubble for walking underwater or the empty ring that's the transit spell for her bedroom. This is a handy way to handle the energy-output component of any spell, too, as the energy is taken when a wizard initially builds the spell, rather than when it's activated, meaning a big spell can be activated with no real affect to the wizard in question. Very useful for emergency situations where being exhausted can get one killed.
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