Editing Magipunk:Magic (section)

=== Divination ===

There is no reliable form of precognition or prescience in Magipunk. Prophecies are usually the provence of divine hermits or other stuff that's on the edge of myth, rather than the reasonably well-understood workings of commonplace magic. However, using magic for the purposes of spying is a long-respected tradition. 

The simplest method of scrying is to look at a particular location from a distance. Many wizards use a mirror or crystal to hold the image of the distant location, though this is not strictly necessary. However, if one does use a crystal or mirror, it becomes trivial to save an image of what is going on in the scryed location. 

More difficult is to scry on a person, whereever that person is, rather than a static location. This is a complexity of magic which demands a certain amount of specialization to master, but it's a useful enough bit of magic that a fairly large number of people study it. It is particularly difficult to scry on individuals who can teleport – their identity is somehow hard to get a fix on. In addition, the more intuitive or sensitive subjects of scrying can sometimes sense that they're being watched – usually a sort of "hair on the back of the neck" thing rather than anything concrete. 

Most difficult of all the scrying methods is actually spying on someone's thoughts. This is a significant level of complexity more difficult than scrying on someone's body, and is much more likely to be noticed. 

There are relatively simple wards that can be used on either a location or a person to prevent scrying, and, at the present state of the art, at least, the wards are essentially impregnable – that is, no spellcaster, no matter how sophisticated, has much of a chance of working through such a ward. The problem with the wards is that few people can afford to constantly ward themselves against scrying. The wealthy, and institutions like Alliances, Church-Mills, or the government, will often have a few small rooms which are continuously warded, but only the most paranoid individuals will habitually ward themselves. However, the option exists for times when clandestine activities are planned.