Who Regulates the Wizards?

Megumin is a useful place to begin. She has devoted her considerable intelligence to a single spell, Explosion, which renders her unconscious or immobile immediately after use. This is a remarkable technical achievement with a somewhat incomplete deployment strategy. Kazuma usually provides the remaining infrastructure by carrying her home.

I watched her cast from a ridge outside Axel. The valley went white; for an instant the castle appeared to hang inside its own shadow. Then the sound reached us. I have spent my working life trying to understand how intelligence can act upon the world, and here a thought, expressed in a few words, had rearranged a hillside. I wanted to know everything about it. Megumin wanted a score out of ten.

Her adventurer card could tell me her level. It could not tell the stable keeper how far away his horses needed to be. Nor could it tell us whether a larger explosion was simply a larger version of the previous one, or whether some new behaviour would emerge. These are empirical questions. We could investigate them before discovering the answers through somebody’s roof.

At present, experience accumulates mostly inside individual casters. A spell goes wrong, a party survives, and the lesson becomes a story told over drinks. The next party has to survive it independently. Belzerg is paying repeatedly for knowledge it has already acquired.

FINRA offers a useful starting point. It is a private, non-profit self-regulatory organisation, funded by its members and overseen by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It examines firms, sets qualification requirements and can discipline misconduct. Its relevance here is the combination of professional knowledge and enforceable obligations. A regulator must understand what a wizard is doing well enough to recognise when the wizard is offering an explanation that is mostly an incantation.

A Magic Industry Regulatory Authority, or MIRA, should set a threshold for the power and reach of spells that require a licence. Lighting a cooking fire would remain an ordinary activity. Transporting passengers or destroying a fortification would require demonstrated competence under conditions the examiner controls. A claim to be the foremost genius of the Crimson Demons would be recorded under ‘other information’.

The tests would need to describe particular capabilities. An Explosion assessment should measure the blast radius, how far debris travels and what happens when the caster loses consciousness. A teleportation assessment should establish whether the destination is occupied. A successful demonstration in an empty field tells us very little about a crowded street. I would want independent examiners to vary the conditions and publish the limits of what they had tested.

Casters would report serious incidents and near misses, including successful spells with disastrous consequences. Reports should be available across guilds, with victims able to add their accounts. An honest report should help a practitioner improve; concealing a failure should threaten their licence. We should revise the tests as we learn. Eventually, a new wizard ought to inherit something more useful than the surviving wizards’ confidence.

There is an obvious difficulty. Megumin has very little money. Requiring her to deposit the replacement value of a castle before practising would amount to reserving Explosion for people who already own castles. I would prefer to discover how much talent Belzerg has before making wealth a condition of exercising it.

Guilds and towns should therefore maintain supervised practice grounds, including time for unpaid experimentation. Practitioners would contribute to a compensation fund as they earned fees, with those commissioning dangerous work contributing too. Different activities would need separate risk accounts; a healer should be able to see whether her contributions were subsidising artillery. Claims would have published limits, and the authority would have to restrict work it could not afford to cover. A beginner could still learn without first acquiring a patron.

Someone has to pay after the spectacular part is over. Luna showed me a claim from a man whose house had lost its back wall. The caster had left town. The man had drawn the missing rooms, carefully, as though sufficient precision might cause them to be restored. A useful authority would get an investigator to his house and arrange payment for repairs. We could count the days this took. We could ask him whether the process worked.

I would start with a limited trial in Axel, with the rules and results published before extending it. If injuries fell but entry into the profession collapsed, we would have learned that part of the design was wrong. If the forms multiplied while the claims went unpaid, we would have learned something rather more familiar. The ability to correct the institution must be built into it from the beginning.

Of course, a body financed by powerful magicians could become a powerful magician with an office. Independent public members would need real votes, and residents near practice grounds a route to challenge decisions. The crown should oversee MIRA, with appeals heard outside the guilds. Court magicians would have to accept the same examinations. I would be particularly interested in the king’s commitment to this last point.

Aqua raises a harder question. If a person dies and she brings them back, has the incident been resolved? From the perspective of the party’s headcount, perhaps. From the perspective of the person who died, there may be more to discuss. A system that records only whether the quest succeeded will miss much of what we care about. The testimony of the resurrected should remain on file even when it inconveniences the goddess responsible.

My research on memory and imagination taught me to be cautious about how readily the mind supplies a coherent world. We picture the future using what experience has made available to us. A caster sees an empty field; its owner sees next year’s harvest. Good institutions can bring those futures into the same room. The point of the hearing is to discover what our otherwise excellent model has left out.

I remain deeply optimistic about magic. We have barely begun to ask what a society could become if healing, shelter and travel ceased to consume so much of a human life. There would be new questions about how to spend that life. Some people would study the stars. Some would open shops. Megumin would almost certainly use the additional time to make a larger explosion. A worthwhile civilisation should have room for that ambition, and for the person who would prefer an afternoon’s sleep.

On our last visit to the ridge, we waited while the stable keeper moved his horses. He raised a hand from the gate. Megumin began, and the light passed over the town’s windows, briefly making each one a small white square. Afterwards she asked whether I had heard the echo. It had returned from somewhere far beyond the visible hills. She had been waiting weeks for it. I was glad I had been there.

I would like her to keep listening for that echo. I would like the stable keeper to know when it is coming, and the man with the broken house to sleep through the rain. That is the future I have in mind when I propose a magical FINRA. Somewhere in Axel, a clerk should be able to close a file because the roof has been repaired. Outside, there will still be wonders. ◆