As Jack began practicing, however, he began to get a sense of how his powers worked.Imagining something provided the general framework for how the spell should in theory play out, but the spell trigger word he used is what determined the actual final result, regardless of what he was imagining. So if he imagined creating fire in the shape of a tornado, but used the variation of the trigger word that stood for "fireball", he would cast a fireball instead. Which explained why he shrank when he intended to get larger when dealing with the goblins. What was less clear to him was why the trigger word determined the type of spell cast, or why the wrong spell trigger word popped in his head in the first place.
Eleanor said that the best she could figure, his spell words probably worked very similar to a wizard"s, where a spell trigger was actually a complex command that described the spell"s magic school or elemental sphere, the manifestation of the spell"s magic, the spell"s target, duration, and so on.
Which meant, she speculated, imagining things would cause the spell trigger word components to appear in his mind, and by saying them aloud in the correct order, he would generate the desired result. But if he said the parts in the wrong order, or used a wrong component piece, he would generate different results from what he intended, such as using a different element, or, in his previous case, shrinking himself instead of growing giant as he had planned.
"But how on earth am I supposed to know which part of a spell trigger counts for each component of the spell?" Jack asked, perplexed.
"I guess you"re just going to have to experiment with slightly different spells and see which component parts change to know what does what" Eleanor said, shrugging.
That sounded incredibly tedious, but Jack was willing to give it a shot if that"s what it took. With Eleanor"s help and occasional moment of "encouragement", he slowly began to map out the terminology of his magic, nailing down piece by tiny piece what each word fragment did, and learning how they affected each other when placed together.
After a few weeks, he had figured out enough parts to create elemental projections of all kinds, change his body shape, size, and appearance, grant himself increased physical attributes, fly, conjure basic objects, and change materials from one kind of thing to another.
As he progressed, he began experimenting further, but found the level of his ability to manipulate the world was limited in some ways. He could not trans.m.u.te or create living matter, only move it from one place to another. He could not affect the flow of time, only slow down or speed up the rate others moved within it. He couldn"t seem to affect the minds or free will of other beings, either, apparently. When he imagined trying to do these kinds of things, he was met with an immovable black wall in his brain that made imagining casting such spells in order to prompt a trigger word impossible, and the few times he tried to combine what component fragments he knew in order to hopefully generate these effects, either nothing happened, or, worse, something would backfire spectacularly.
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On one particular occasion, Eleanor had to rescue him when he managed to unintentionally turn himself into a duck during one of these attempts. He didn"t think any of the girls or Simon were ever going to stop laughing or let him live that one down. He knew for sure Frumpkin wouldn"t, as he began referring to Jack as Duck Boy from that moment onwards.