[@Omni5876] Hey, thanks for the show of interest. To answer your questions:

Magic mainly manifests by simply [i]doing[/i] magic, but a mage can be identified by simply having another mage nearby. As all mages share a connection with Gaia, they are also by extension connected with each other so a mage can always sense another mage. There are indeed schools for mages and in Belisio, anyone identified as a mage is usually automatically enrolled in a school for mages where they can hone their talents for a variety of occupations such as deep sky mining, mist harvesting, land 'stitching' (connecting floating islands together), landscaping, aetherlink maintenance and of course serving in the military as a battlemage.

As for how mages use their magic, they don't use incantations, but they don't just think and it happens either. What they basically do is use their own link with Gaia, imagine it as a rope, and breaking off individual strands to connect with other objects and control them either on the micro or macro scale. It's like an invisible third hand that can be further split apart to control multiple objects or multiple parts of a single object (or multiple parts of multiple objects if the mage is skilled enough). On the micro scale, the focus is on properties such as temperature and density (say melting steel to make it more malleable or freezing it to make it more brittle) whereas on the macro scale, the focus is on sheer mass and volume (moving something very heavy vs a lot of small things in a very wide area).

Depending on a mage's particular area of focus, they can strengthen their link with Gaia to be able to control bigger and heavier objects (useful for casters) or make it more fine tuned for precision work (useful for battlemages). Either way, casting is a focused effort of skill and control. Where non-mages only see a slight distortion in the air, a mage can see their power at work from the perspective of their 'hand', their link, focusing on the object they want to control. They can either 'zoom in', so to speak, on a molecular or even atomic level to shift things around a bit, or zoom out to control the object itself in its entirety, if that makes sense.

To be sure, a commoner in a school for mages will be looked down upon by their noble peers, but Gaia doesn't discriminate and anyone could be born as a mage. It's very likely however for nobles to receive higher quality education and special treatment from their tutors due to their wealth and status, while everyone else is given the bare minimum and must scrape by on their own efforts, so there's that. Anyways, I hope this all helps with your character.

[@ThunderWatcher] Hi, would you mind sending your cs to me through a pm? Just so we can discuss it without flooding the ooc thread. I'd like to go over a few things if that's alright with you.