While we’ve seen that Naomi can be shot, it’s pretty hard to shoot her if she knows where you are. This is has less to do with that she moves far more quickly than a human should, and more to do with something that’s been hit on a few times – her ability to see – and her more complicated senses like spatial awareness – are boosted as well as her strength. This is less normal among boosters than things like speed and strength, as those are easier to quantify difference in. This matters quite a bit when you are avoiding being shot, as being missed by a few inches is something that doesn’t really phase her, given her confidence in if it will hit or not before it does; to her, a handgun is more like a long poking stick – you just don’t stand in the line the bullet will hit, and you’ll be fine.

Much what makes Naomi’s power slightly unique is exactly how little talent she has in quantifying these differences consciously, thus boosting a sense like spatial awareness, a normal person might have a great deal of trouble defining what exactly a vastly superior sense of spatial awareness means; or how to really apply the ability once they have it if something directly manipulated their data to have it, that doesn’t really effect Naomi, as she just skips, well, almost all the steps in magic activation, thus tends to leave her “Key” to resolve almost all of the change, which builds far more interlocked edits. This is, of course, why more complicated calculations she tries usually fail; it’s like if when you’re programming it automatically includes all the classes you try to use without you manually importing them; if you don’t really know what they are, that’s great, but very quickly you’d run into trouble as it starts including way too many systems to viably handle – her ability to process cause from effect with her Key is higher than normal by a substantial amount, but can’t really replace calculations.

She can, technically, calculate magic. She’s just pretty bad at it. Of course, most people can be trained to do it with enough effort. The hard part is doing them quickly – not just quickly in the sense that “before you get hit by a bullet” but also quickly in the sense that magic needs to process in what amounts to a very small amount of time, and most people can’t store the entire sequence in their memory effectively – it’s been mentioned a few times but Eidos data is really quite hard to understand for a human brain.

This isn’t really inherently part of being an innate mage, as Tyler there proves. For him, calculating the innate magic we see him use is far easier than it has any right to be, and writes to Eidos far more effectively the magic normally does, but he can still run other calculations like a normal natural mage. Not all of his his abilities are based off his innate magic, but since there are certain properties that easier for him to edit than others, he tends to use them as a crutch in his calculations wherever possible. Ultimately this ends up being fairly similar to a mage like Kally whose not an innate mage, but tends to rely on a few spells she has used a lot more than others – for her, summoning a dragon Eidos Form is probably faster than than summoning a crude cylinder shape would be, because it’s the equivalent of always on the tip of her tongue, even though her Key doesn’t process that data any more or less efficiently (presumably…) than any other spell. I guess that’s to say it’s different parts of the process that being expedited or made more efficient.

…anyway… been awhile since I rambled in one of these about magic, so… figured this box could use some rambling.

Speaking of which… I think we’ll do another Q&A to celebrate new Patreons, new Year, and general upness of goodness… so! Got a question you want answered in the next Q&A? Ask away!

As usual, if it’s about the comic world/mechanics/etc, I will almost certainly answer it, if it’s about the comic plot, I will only answer it if it’s not really a spoiler, and if it’s about me the author or random shit, I’ll just maybe answer it 🙂