60

Your grandma hesitates. For a moment, you see her tensing her jaw.

"It's a little—it's not something I can easily explain," she says slowly. "The computer is…imbued with magic, in a sense. I suppose you could say I enchanted it. That way, it can become a magical tool as much as a mechanical one."

Before you can say anything else, your grandma starts clicking away again, eventually ending up back on the same window she had open originally.

"What I just showed you was an extremely simple spell," she says, not looking at you as she examines her code. "But the principle is the same no matter how complex the spell you want to cast. Of course, it does become a lot more difficult to get it just right."

You follow her gaze back towards the row of monitors. Compared to the tiny window of code your grandma used for her conjuring spell, the code in front of you now is absolutely vast, spanning multiple monitors and who-knows-how-many lines.

"There are far more variables to take into account, for one thing," your grandma goes on, scrolling a little to check something further up in one of the files. "And the more complex the spell—the more abstract—the more difficult it becomes to translate it into words. You have to find a way of turning abstract thought into concrete instructions, and you can't leave anything out or there could be glitches you never anticipated. That's bad enough when you're just running normal code—but when there's magic involved, which could impact the real world, it gets a lot more dangerous."

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