OP: My MC has to fulfill a prophecy by discovering a powerful magic. The problem is, I have no idea how ze would find/discover it. Can anyone help me out?
Me: After receiving your undergraduate Masters in Evocation,you work for and get your PhD in Inadvisedly Applied Thaumatology. Then apply for an internship at the Central Experimental Research Necromantic Ring to collate data from the Large Hexing Construct, and then you sift through numbers until your eyes bleed.
After that, you try to get your results published before someone else does.
Me: Er.
It occurs to me that I might have simply had too much fun suggesting the scenario and not enough time explaining what I mean. So:
"Discover"has connotations that are different from "find".
If the choice of words is deliberate, then the "discover" implies effort and sacrifice, and in order to discover it, the character has to make himself into the kind of person that discovers things.
People like to tell stories about discoveries that are pure accident or flashes of insight; for example the discovery of Teflon and the realisation by Kekule that benzene is a ring, and they fail to realise that yes, Teflon was a lab accident, but it was a lab accident, by people who were actively working to discover something else, and that Kekule had his flash of insight specifically because the problem "what is benzene's structure?" was always on his mind.
To discover, therefore, implies a search. Whether that search involves trekking through dangerous terrain to find out what the natives of a particular deserted part of the world have been doing with their magic, or high-energy research splitting the fundamental particles of magic is entirely your call.
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