Just One Mote: The Challenge That Threw Over a Paradigm

The First Founder of the society of Tolkeen magic-users, informally called "The Esoteric Engineers", was a man by the name of Roger M. Ire.  When he and his wife discovered the mote, the Esoteric Engineers got excited.  They had an irreducible minimum--a floor--upon which practical experimentation with magic could begin, and thereby allowed the application of the Scientific Method and other related practice norms of science to the study and practice of magic.  While the Atlanteans emphasized the Art of magic, it was the native Earthers that brought back the Science to the Art and Science of using magic.

Tolkeen's emerging curriculum for training the future generations in the use of magic centered around the concept of the mote, with both the Atlanteans--who had no problem acknowledging the importance that a confirmation of the existence of the mote, and eagerly adopted it for their own use; this made the transfer of magical knowledge much more efficient--and the Earthers agreeing that students would be required to create an original protocol--a new spell--that used Just One Mote.  This became known (informally) as "The Cantrip Challenge", but that underestimates the great influence that this emphasis on efficiency in the use of magical power had upon Tolkeen's magical community.

The One Mote Challenge lead to the creation of a vast array of very efficient magical effects.  These are minor in their scale, their scope, and their power.  What is not minor is their utility; one of the first spells taught in Tolkeen's curriculum is one of the first One Mote Challenge creations: a spell that accurately lets the user know, without fail, exactly how much supernatural power a given thing or effect has in it- but it requires that the user behold the thing or effect.  This is because the One Mote effect requires the use of the user's existing senses; all it does is analyze the user's sensory input and break down the power--if any--in existence within that input.  It is up to the user to make sense of it; it's a reader/analyzer spell, one that works only for the user, but easily combined with other effects to feed the results to others.

This spell is one of the pillars for the Platonic Pattern Printing Protocol.  Anything that the user perceives with this spell can be fed, via another effect, to either a data storage medium--including a user's mind--or sent straight to a device or individual capable of reproducing the observed thing or effect.  The magicians of Tolkeen can even take something from a fictional medium--say, the VF-1 Valkyrie of the classic series Super-Dimensional Fortress Macross--and make it a wholly-and-fully-functional technology by way of this simple One Mote spell.

That, quite frankly, is revolutionary.  This is why Tolkeen is a force to be reckoned with, and not a joke.