Before one can speak of mages, one must first speak of magic. Disavowed as a whole by society and science, this rogue force came with a vengeance with the coming of the otherworldans. The otherworldans say that they brought some of their home with them. Most people would rather be without it. I mean, the idea that some terrorist could BE the bomb instead of carrying one? That's not a comforting thought.

    It has been discovered that magic can be used in three primary ways. The first and 'easiest' is through an otherworldan artifact. Anyone can pick up a wand, and provided they know the activation phrase or gesture, make it do some magic for them. While this is deceptively easy, artifacts are not easy to come by. The steadiest source of artifacts is dungeons, and not many people are willing to go in after them. Of those recovered, most end up in MEC vaults and labs. There they are studied endlessly by scientists and MEC hired magi in the hopes of understanding and possibly duplicating the items.

    The second method of employing magic is through training. Like a combination of Science and Physical discipline, magic can be taught to those who are willing to put in the effort of learning it. The MEC offers an intensive six month training regime for agents who apply and are accepted into the magus division. During this time, they are taught how to read several otherworldan dialects, how to access and measure local power flow, and proper intoning and physical gesturing. Many graduates point out ruefully, "I spent six months, and I still can't do anything!".

    Dan Enderson, the founder of the training program, insists that this seemingly 'wasted time' is vital to the long term success of MEC magi. "Magic, more than any other field I've had the pleasure of studying, requires an intense understanding of the basics before you can even begin to get into the applications. I would be doing a grave injustice if I allowed people to experiment with these kinds of forces without knowing what they were working with."

    The third method of employing magic is natural talent. Otherworldans use magic. Why can't we? Apparently, some of us can. Approximately a tenth of a percent of the population has latent magical talent. Though most of the time, if ever discovered at all, this is a simple and small ability, some cases are starting to crop up of people being born with a single powerful talent. Such 'one trick horses' can range from being able to summon motes of light at will, to more impressive fire ball hurlers or storm summoners. Naturally talented people seem to pop up more often outside of major cities.

    A particularly famous natural magician is Lisa Winson of North Carolina, USA. With her natural talent for plant tending, every garden that she visited for a day would bloom overnight to a state never seen before. She sells her services, depending on the size of the garden or forest she is to visit. For a mere fifty dollars plus air fare and hotel, she'll come to your own back yard garden and rouse it to wondrous fruitfulness.

    Learned or naturally talented folk can both expand their spell casting abilities through the same methods. You can either study and divine your own spells through months of effort, or you can gain possession of some mystical instructions. Like scrolls from popular role-playing games, these texts contain the full instructions for how to employ a particular spell. One must know how to read them, however. Natural talents understand the flow of magic, but rarely know how to actually read the text. Those who are trained usually have no problem picking up what's on the scroll, but take longer to get the form and flow of the spell down. The MEC has had some success creating their own texts, using special papers and inks that seem to properly echo the magic flows.

    It has been noted that spells come in increasingly complex forms. Like most sciences, the bigger the project, the more complicated things can get. A magi who has not reached sufficient understanding of magical principles cannot learn a spell from a text beyond him. Until he or she practices and becomes more fluid in their spell casting, the text might as well just be a bunch of scribbles. Added to this is the fact that the texts themselves seem to speak to the reader on a level deeper than conscious language, and one might see how it can be a daunting task for the uninitiated and unprepared to properly absorb.

    The laws concerning magic are simple. Magic used to break any law is punishable by the government of the country the perpetrator is in, in addition to possible action by the MEC. The MEC is working on techniques to possible neutralize magical abilities in a being, to 'declaw' outlaws who would use the power to skirt around mundane government. In the mean time, such criminals are kept inside MEC facilities as opposed to standard jails. There, they can be properly monitored and insulated without danger to themselves or other inmates that they could present with their talents.

    There have been a rare few incidents of criminals being reformed and being released directly to the MEC magus division. However, since they break the usual clean record requirement, All such cases were assigned to Dungeon Delving squads, and thusly were removed as possible problems before long.