Introducing my micro-series: Magen

Preamble: I’ve often found the portrayal of magic in media frustratingly vague. Who can wield it? What determines their power? Why is one spell harder to cast than another? These questions frequently go unanswered. With Magen, I wanted to explore a system with clear, practical rules that the audience can understand, follow, and gradually discover alongside the characters.

Series description: Ruby Rails is a mechanical engineering student fascinated by magic, but skeptical of the methods she has encountered in books and films. Why should reality respond to a particular language, a prayer, or a pattern drawn on the floor? If magic exists, she believes there must be a logic behind it.

Her breakthrough comes when she compares ancient magical diagrams to mechanical blueprints. The circles, symbols, and intersecting lines describe three-dimensional structures. By building them, she discovers that these devices can focus intent, turning a person’s will into a force capable of influencing reality. The elaborate rituals passed down through generations may have preserved fragments of a system people no longer understood.

The pilot follows Ruby from that first realization to the construction and testing of her first device. Her friend Riven watches closely, asking questions as she begins to understand what she has made. What starts as an unconventional engineering experiment opens the door to a much larger discovery: magic can be studied, reconstructed, and perhaps even improved.

Characters: Ruby Rails: A curious mechanical engineering student decoding magic through experimentation. Her name is a nod to Ruby on Rails. Ruby is a programming language, and Ruby on Rails is a popular framework for that language. For the character, magic is akin to a programming language she can control.

Riven Vale: A sharp, brooding observer whose fascination with magic gradually becomes a desire for power, leading him toward increasingly dangerous experiments.

Where would I take the series next: Each micro-episode explores a specific magical practice through an experiment. Ruby and Riven examine familiar ideas such as amulets, incantations, protective wards, and summoning, trying to uncover the mechanism beneath the tradition. Each discovery answers one question while introducing a new possibility or an unexpected consequence.

The next episode would focus on amulets. If a device can focus intent, can an object retain it? Could an amulet continue carrying out an instruction after its creator has left? This introduces the possibility of persistent magic, along with questions about how precisely an intention must be defined and what happens when circumstances change. The friendship between the two characters becomes the emotional thread connecting the experiments. As their understanding grows, so does the distance between what each of them wants from magic. Ruby must eventually confront the possibility that the person who best understands her discovery is also the one most willing to misuse it.