"I'm not sure if I'd say that I attached magic to chess. I might prefer to say I attached chess to magic," she says. "Chess is still the same game, it's just that now I can do magic with it, separately from what anyone else does with either thing. And most of the process involved... trying things and then finding out that they worked. I've read enough to know that this is not normally what happens when someone tries to invent a spell, let alone a whole new magical tradition."