[@PandaBrady]

Awesome! Then in that case, I have a couple of questions about magic, Westeria and how Iron Arcana work in general. Brace yourself for a wall of text, because I kept having more and more ideas as I wrote this.

Firstly, the intro says that magic is based on the user's Pneuma, and everybody has some level of Pneuma. However, I was wondering if there are limits on what types of effects people's Pneuma can create - like elemental affinities, or some such. For example, could there be a person who could manipulate flames, but not water? Or, expanding on that, could there be somebody who could only do really weak magic that has no outward effect on the world - like, say, sending information telepathically - and who had no affinity for physical magic? Or does everybody have the same set of abilities they're working with provided that they know how to do it? Also, is there any kind of "ritual" spellcasting system where you can draw on the Pneuma in the world around you rather than your own Pneuma by, say, drawing a magic circle and allowing it to build up power slowly until the effect is complete?

Secondly, magic is heavily regulated in Westeria, and the intro mentions that they've been undergoing an industrial revolution to try to wean themselves off of their society's dependence on magic. Does this mean that magic has somehow become scarce there and they need an alternative, or is it just that they're afraid of the power of magic to subvert governmental authority, so they restrict its usage to only those working with the system? I thought it was the latter at first, but since they're building machines specifically to be used by non-mages and Stern's character was doing research to create artificial Pneuma sources, it seems more like they're running out of people who can actually do magic to me, so I'm a little confused now.

Thirdly, what is Westerian society like? I have my own mental picture of it since it seems to be the designated "antagonist faction," but that might be completely different from what you envisioned. Given the heavy regulation and militarization, and the potential lack of magic to provide the luxuries and comforts of day to day life enjoyed by other countries, my impression is that it's a hyper-nationalist empire kind of in the vein of a crossbreed between Soviet Russia and Imperial Japan - I.E. a cross of "we are more intelligent and advanced, and must spread our glorious civilization to enlighten the barbarous savages around us," further justifying their war by saying stuff to the effect of "other nations are greedy and are hoarding the resources and magical power our people need to prosper, so we have to conquer them because it's them or us" - which is potentially also misrepresenting other kingdoms as being tyrannies of the magic-wielding elite dominating the lower class, who thus need to be "liberated," when in reality it's exactly the other way around, and the aristocrats and officials with magic are just whipping the un-sorcerers into a patriotic fervor with fascist-style propaganda and a policy of "bread and circuses" to grow their own power. So like, the closer you get to the heart of the empire and of its industry, the more luxurious and opulent everything is, but hiding just beneath the surface are slums, starvation, and squalor.

Fourthly, what exactly is their technology like? Is it actually modern-style science with like, electrical reactors and circuits and motors and engines? If so, is it full-on science fiction level, or is it more steampunk-ish? Or does their technology run on them converting physical energy like heat, electricity, and light into magical power to charge the magic cartridges mentioned in the intro and to run the systems of things like Iron Arcana which are specifically stated to use magic-based weapons and systems? If so, how does it work? Are they channeling light/electricity into some kind of magical Lacrima crystal or ritual circle that converts that directly into natural Pneuma?

A brief explanation of why I asked so many questions. Basically, my character concept is a "true believer" in the sort of hyper-nationalist ideology I mentioned above, who's been effectively indoctrinated to overlook the flaws in her own country, and to believe that she's fighting for the people and the well-being of the poor and downtrodden, when really she's just a puppet of the system. Her character arc could be something like slowly realizing the flaws in her patriotic zealotry and coming to appreciate that the enemies she's fighting are human like her, and probably have reasons for fighting that are just as valid, which might ultimately lead to her defecting - or just rejecting this realization and dying in battle for what she still wants to believe is a noble cause.

As for her backstory and powers, she's a result of the Child Soldier Project mentioned in Stern's bio, and the direct product of some of Sartorius' research of Heart Extraction bastardized by other scientists after his disappearance. My idea was that if magic was scarce in Westeria, they might be trying to create artificial mages to bolster their military forces by implanting the Pneuma Hearts of other living beings into them in order to strengthen their magical potential. However, I was hoping that there would be some sort of "affinity" system in place which ended up making this process difficult, since even if they strengthened a subject's Pneuma, they wouldn't gain any new "affinities" for different types of magic from it, just more energy to work with. So, they had to settle for just dramatically boosting the power of people who already had weak magical abilities.

My character, to begin with, only had an extremely low-level and commonplace magical affinity of "Sending and Receiving," allowing her to transmit information back and forth via Pneuma - effectively, just a psychic short-range communication/clairvoyance ability. By having her Pneuma dramatically amplified, however, not only was the distance she could send/receive info over increased, but the [i]amount[/i] of information she could send/receive was boosted dramatically. This increased capacity lets her not only send messages and scan things remotely, but also create illusions, mess with enemy scanning abilities, and potentially hack into magic-based systems.

The reason I wanted to use this kind of limited affinity was because I was going to make The Moon's weapons systems based on using specially constructed "Receivers," which are basically magically charged stakes that it fires which she can activate using "Sending." Their basic use as a weapon is to allow her to Send and Receive information to and from a target. So, by laying out stakes in an area, she can scan it to determine the locations, designs, and armaments of enemy units in that area, while also flooding them with false information so any scrying magic they're attempting to use to see the area around them or communicate is heavily disrupted. The form taken by this disruption is determined by the kind of information she sends, which is in turn limited by what she actually knows. For example, she couldn't perfectly copy someone's voice saying something they never said to give false orders over communications networks. However, she could just cut those communications entirely by flooding them with white noise, or just use audio editing to swap around words to change the meaning of an order - like turning "Don't retreat!" into "Retreat!" Visually, she can only make illusions of things she can see, since there's too much information required for her to be able to make a convincing illusion of just anything she might want to. So, usually, she scrambles visual inputs by leaving afterimages of The Moon and its allied units to make their numbers appear greater, or to use as decoys, since enemy sensor magic can't tell which is the real one. Finally, if she hits a target with several Receivers, she can also scramble its control inputs to shut down systems, or even hack the unit to take control herself by replacing its pilot's control inputs with her own.

The reasons I asked about ritual magic is that, outside of her own affinity, she's basically powerless to do traditional magic-y stuff like attacking or defending. As such, to create barriers or field effects, she has to rely on improvised magic circles imprinted into the terrain with her Receivers to draw on the energy of the terrain area and resonate with one another to amplify it. By charging these stakes with elemental cartridges, she could cause large-scale field effects, like using Recievers attuned with fire to create improvised landmines, or using a water and earth attuned circle to turn the terrain into a mire of mud that Magecha can't easily move through. Since these take a lot of time to complete the ritual, she obviously couldn't lay these down in the middle of combat and expect them to work, but they could be used for tactical purposes to lay traps and make things difficult for an advancing enemy force.

Why I asked about Iron Arcana functionality is just because I'm not really sure what kind of systems would actually be acceptable. Since it's very lightly armored and doesn't have much in the way of weaponry, I was thinking of giving it a flight pack to increase its mobility, fitting with its role as a scout and skirmishing focused unit meant to disrupt enemy formations with the magical equivalent of Electronic Warfare. However, I don't know if Westerian technology would allow for such a thing as a flying Iron Arcana, given the necessary amount of thrust and power consumption involved. I'm also not really certain how well IAs perform relative to Pneuma-powered Magecha, so would a mobility-type IA even be a match for a Magecha in performance - responsiveness, maneuverability, speed, etc.? Or is their only advantage just thanks to longer operating times and superior numbers?

Another system I was wondering about was some kind of high-yield energy barrier to compensate for lack of armor and serve a squadron-protective role against heavy arms fire. But since IAs run on technology rather than magic, unless there's some kind of conversion system between electrical power and magical output, obviously that wouldn't be possible. The justification I had in mind was, as mentioned above, some kind of ritual circle based around a special crystal that converts electricity or light into magical power, where these crystals would then be the output vector for the unit's shield system, but I'm not sure if that's anything like what you had in mind.

Sorry for the wall of text, and doubly sorry if none of this even makes any sense. I'm just kind of throwing ideas out and seeing what sticks and what needs editing for now.