The bell over the door jingles. A young man steps in, accompanied by--

--a remarkably similar looking girl, presumably his sister--

--and shortly after that, another girl who probably isn't related to them. This one's midform, with some feathers trailing from her arms and in her hair, with a pair of them sticking out looking a little like a peacock's crest, only orange.

"Are we interrupting something?" he asks, looking between the shopkeeper and the other customer. "I apologize."

"I confess that I myself have only recently come into the awareness of magic at all, and the only verifiable magic I have personally observed--besides the Avalon itself, now--is my sister's friend's medallion. And countless others, I'm sure, since entering this place. What else, precisely, is magic supposed to be able to do?"

"...I don't know that we are anything other than human," he says, as though it hadn't occurred to him, "but then apparently Daphne didn't either before a month ago. I suppose it's worth checking, at any rate." He shrugs. "I can certainly see why someone would be...skeptical...of a luck charm of unknown provenance. To be quite frank, it seems like the sort of thing that would be rather difficult to tell even once you had it, unless it produced some rather dramatic results."

"How much do they cost? It seems a reasonable policy, given what I've been told of their nature, but it would be foolish to commit to paying a completely unknown price."

"Depends," says the shopkeep. "Commoner ones - perytons, nixies, griffins - fifteen hundred. Blank one's priciest at four K; don't try it unless none of the others match you."

"...I am reluctant to ask," he says, "because I begin to suspect the answer is no, but it certainly seems as though her question has more to do with wanting to learn about magic than meeting the people who do it. Is there not some place to send people who want to do that?"

"Fuck."

The similar-looking girl puts a hand on his shoulder. Whether in comfort or warning isn't immediately apparent.

"All it would take would be one competent, interested individual to start a school like that. If none exist I'm not sure whether to worry more about the inclinations of existing magic users or their numbers."

"If I knew where to find magical secrets do you think I'd work retail?" says the shopkeep.

"I think he mentioned something about a bookstore?"

He bites back whatever he was about to say next and says, "...Yes. I think you did."

"Regardless of his disregard for the future of this culture insofar as it relies on the continued existence of magic users, I suspect at this point it would be more useful to chide the bookstore owner for the lack of accessibility."

"Yes, I suppose. I can do the steps if I have to," sighs wheelchair girl. "Although really it's only a matter of time before someone who's genuinely paralyzed from the waist down turns out to be a critter, so it's still irresponsible." She wheels for the door. The shopkeep doesn't bother to tell them to come again another time.

"Perhaps it's for the best, then, that you came along first, since you do have both reason to chide and the ability to access the person to do so."

"I mean, we don't actually know that she showed up before any actual paraplegics, for all we know those stairs thwart someone every other Tuesday," the lone confirmed critter in the group points out.

"That is a point. Although I suspect if it were literally so frequent something would have been done by now."

"You'd be surprised! Although all my information on that is not from inside the Avalon; I'm new here."

"We are, too."

"I found out I was a firebird under kind of awkward circumstances, and then I met Jaromira a while later, and we just kind of--clicked. And she was a sympathetic ear who wasn't close enough to the situation to make it weird, and then of course she told her brother everything--about critters and magic and stuff I mean, not the personal stuff I told her--and it turns out he's kind of a huge fantasy geek, and the idea that magic was real, well."

"It's real but apparently in an absolute institutional shambles," sighs Wheelchair Girl. "I'm May. I'm a wyvern. You'll forgive me if I don't demonstrate." She gestures at the chair.

"Oh, of course. And I'm Daphne and I just said this was Jaromira, and that's Kanimir," she says, waving at the relevant persons as they're named.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, even under the circumstances. Perhaps especially under the circumstances. I think I'd not have inquired after educational possibilities for some time had you not been there." He snorts. "'Institutional shambles' may be too kind. Had there been an institution in the first place for there to be shambles of there would at least be some historical precedent for finding teachers."

"Oh, of course."

"D'you want some help with it? I have no idea how much those things weigh."

"Don't worry, if you'd fallen on either of us we'd blame the bookstore owner for not putting in a ramp."

"Indeed," says Kanimir, surveying the organizational system.

The bookstore has conventional sections, from romance novels to cookbooks. It also has a section entitled Magical Nonfiction. May rolls in its direction.

"I mean, mostly it's Kanimir who's interested in learning magic. Daphne and I aren't totally uninterested--we're sane, after all--but he's the one who really, really wants it."

"...The amount of money I can draw on without Father asking questions I'd rather not answer doesn't cover a medallion but it would cover those books. If I bought them for you would you be willing to do some kind of time-share on the one there's only one copy of? We could meet--somewhere public, of course, I'm all but a stranger--say once a week to exchange it and discuss? Having a teacher doesn't seem to be on the table, but having someone else to learn with seems worthwhile."

"...You are offering to buy the books for me, so that I will have them, in exchange for me showing up somewhere periodically to study buddy with you," says May, blinking. "Is that what you're saying?"

"That's mostly it. I also enjoy spending Father's money on things he would disapprove of. And I would not wish to deprive you of access to information on magic, given how difficult it apparently is to find."

"Our dad's a neglectful prick and you seem cool."

"Well, I'd be very silly to turn down this deal, and I am many things but that's not one of them. You have yourself a study buddy, Kanimir."

"Wonderful. I expect this Avalon would be an appropriate location, depending on how convenient it is for more regular visits."

"It's convenient enough for me weekends and afternoons. But not summers or some holidays; I visit my dad."

"Understood. I'm available...most any day of the week, actually." He smiles wryly. "As my sister is so fond of reminding me, I don't have much of a social life outside of her."

"Are you not in school?"

"I meant afternoons, on weekdays."

"Okay. Well, my social life being similarly impoverished, does 'daily' sound good until we've worked through this thing?" She waves Runecasting.

"I think that sounds excellent."

"Excellent. Four sound good? Earlier on weekends, optionally."

"Four sounds fine. I'm available at arbitrary times on Saturday, but not until after eleven on Sunday."

"Let's just make it four daily unless it turns out to be really tempting to sit in the park for six hours at a time spellcrafting, in which case it can be earlier weekends."

"Suits me."

He also buys the other copy of the dictionary for himself, of course. That's just good sense.

"Thank you," May beams at Kanimir when she receives her books. "It's nice out - well, it's technically indoors, even outdoors - we can study in the park?"

"That sounds pleasant."

"I don't mean to ditch you," May adds to Jaromira and Daphne. "If you want to look over our shoulders I won't object."

The girls exchange glances.

"We're good."

"Have fun poking at magic."

"I admit I'm slightly curious what precisely is wrong with your legs, but I'm also aware that that might be a discourteous question, so I apologize if it's unwelcome."

"Nothing's wrong with my legs in particular. My diagnosis is so vague you could drive a really clumsy monster truck through it, but it's probably neurological, and it'd affect my arms enough too if I decided I wanted to try wheelchair basketball but thankfully doesn't affect my handwriting or ability to brush my hair or anything like that. I could probably get by without the wheelchair if I were really determined and masochistic, except in wintertime - and since I have to have one to get anywhere in wintertime, I bust it out whenever I feel like it."

"That sounds preferable to several of the alternatives."

"Yep." Ah look, one of those park chess tables, unoccupied by chess. May rolls up to the side of it rather than transfer onto the bench, and plunks down the magic books and a notebook produced from the bag on the back of her chair. "All right, let's see what runecasting is all about."

"Oh, yes." He's completely unable to hide the excitement in his voice.

Kanimir is also a fast reader and a firm believer in heavy notetaking! "I suppose having each other to check our work is better than nothing, but yes, safety precautions are rather useless when they don't tell you how to find the blasted safety measure. Perhaps this was written in a more friendly time." He checks the publication date.

"I expect that depends on how old they were when they wrote this. Unfortunately, even if they are, I wouldn't expect them to necessarily be easy to locate."

"Yeah. Especially if they live in an Avalon and don't have some easy White Pages address."

"And if they were writing textbooks in 1965, they probably don't have a significant internet footprint."

"It's worth checking, but yeah. We could try to get ahold of them through the publisher, maybe."

"That would most likely be the most reliable method, although I suppose we should be prepared that they might be as unhelpful as the man in that shop."

"I'm hoping he's an isolated outlier... from an admittedly worrying general trend, but trends have two tails."

"That would certainly be best, although I've found that expecting people to be helpful does not have...consistent results."

It may have to do with all the magical design terms having -scription in them. Later pages refer to "description" (the runes describing the positive effect of the spell), "proscription" (cancellations for unwanted effects of versatile symbols), and "superscription" and "subscription" (effectively, footnotes for the major runes). The author likes to call the words you speak to cast a spell "inscriptions" and the entire process of spell development or copying "scribing", too.

Yes, that would seem to follow.

There are many principles at work when laying out the components of a spell, which the author describes at very great length and May writes down at somewhat lesser length.

Kanimir's notes are periodically annotated, mostly with notes-to-self to look up some connection or other to a similarity between something he noticed in the book and something he recalls from elsewhere.

May peers at his crossreferencing curiously.

One such note suggests he look up other runic alphabets and check for similarities between those and the magic kind of rune. "I wouldn't necessarily bother," he says ruefully when he sees her looking, "but there's little enough information readily available; I'd like to see if I can find anything useful elsewhere."

"That makes sense. I'll leave that to you and I'll write the publisher, we can divvy it up."

"That sounds efficient."

Fortunately, they have runic dictionaries available. It would have been kind of a problem if they didn't, though.

May doggedly looks up all the runes as they come up. Every one has an array of effects, defined in units that it seems the runic dictionary author made up entirely - ᛗ apparently has a 'human target' effect of 9.7, for example, as one of eight properties it's listed as having. This is when it's one centimeter tall; all of the runes' effect sizes are defined when they are one centimeter tall. Scaling them up or down affects all of their results proportionately, which is how there's any hope of balancing anything - but except for a couple of toy examples in the textbook, it looks like most spells need layers of proscriptions and superscriptions and subscriptions six and seven layers deep to get unwanted effects down to safe levels. (Safety of levels is apparently defined relative to the size of the spell, not the absolute length of the runes - this is because a single chant puts a fairly consistent amount of total power into the spell, and 3% of it going astray will generally not hurt anything even if the design is six feet wide and 3% is at a level of 458 or something.)

Which means that if that would be useful, a given spell could probably be scaled down to arbitrary sizes for discretion as long as you have fine enough handwriting. Good to know.

"Definitely. Actually, I wonder if we could just print a thusly constructed spell--it says here you can't cast out of the book but I don't know if that's because printing doesn't work or because someone pre-used the spells to make it harder for novices to hurt themselves with them or for some other reason."

"Good question. I can swing by my mom's school after mine lets out and swipe her copier, if there turns out to be anything in here we actually want to test." The toy examples they have seen so far would, if cast, explode an inanimate object of more than two tons, set the entire diagram on fire, and turn a rat into a pigeon, respectively; they were chosen for their illustrative runic characteristics and not practicality. May makes a note of this contingent to-do item.

"Setting the diagram on fire shouldn't be too dangerous if we put the paper it's printed on in a metal bowl first, and don't put the metal bowl on anything flammable," he notes.

"We don't know how hot the fire is," May points out. "Paper doesn't burn especially hot, but magical fire might be special. She's not going into a lot of detail here."

"Point. I suppose a rat would be relatively easy to acquire from a pet store, but then you have the question of what to do with it if printing the spell doesn't work."

"And if the spell went wrong in some way, poor rat. I mean, I'd sacrifice a rat to learn about magic, people do worse for biology, but I'd rather find a spell I actually want to try first."

"Agreed. It's certainly preferable to detonating a two-ton rock, but far better to find something less...wasteful." Pause. "If we do ultimately attempt the pigeon spell I suspect it would be best not to tell anyone at the pet store what we're intending to do with the rat."

"I'd probably want to get the sort of rat intended for feeding to snakes," May says.

"Oh, do they have live ones of those? I thought it was just frozen mice."

"I think so? I've never owned a snake, but I think some of them get live food."

"I've never had any sort of pet. Just read books with characters who had," he shrugs. "With any luck it will be immaterial."

"See you tomorrow."

"Awesome. It was great to meet you." May packs up her books and rolls away, disappearing the blue scales across her cheeks.

The next day he is poring over a book on critters when she arrives. He looks vaguely frustrated.

"Hey. What's got your goat? I checked and it definitely wasn't el chupacabra."

"Mm. An unpromising research avenue. This book doesn't have dates in it to compare to likely origin points for various legends--given that new critters can apparently come into existence if you mess up a spell, I've been trying to see whether some of them were inspired by legends rather than vice-versa. But I'm afraid I'm not really getting anywhere with that."

"I was surprised that perytons exist. Their first incursion into human media was in like the fifties."

"...I have no idea what that implies."

"Haven't gotten to that chapter in the book yet, but if I had to guess perytons emerged sometime after most of the legends got established and were better at hiding than other critters, until around then. I'd say it was a complete coincidence - somebody would have thought of mashing up a bird with a deer eventually - if it weren't for the names matching. That could just be the guy who published the book knowing someone who knew about critters and suggesting the term, though."

"That would make the most sense, I think...although most likely not before the art of creating medallions was lost." He stops for a moment to consider. "I should look into seeing what anyone's best guess for when exactly that was, is."

"Fifteenth or sixteenth centuries A.D.," May says. "A little later in Asia. There was a war between two factions of critters and the knowledge was a casualty. It's possible individual makers of medallions survived longer."

"...There could be written instructions left somewhere. In someone's tomb or forgotten library or abandoned workshop or something. I wonder if anyone's thought it a priority to check to find out." He purses his lips. "Even if they don't now they probably have at some point in the past...I wonder if it would be possible to create a spell to reconstruct destroyed nonmagical objects..."

"Maybe. There were some rune meanings that seemed like they could have been gesturing in that direction. What language are you planning to cast in?"

"Probably English. My native language is actually Polish and I'm not as fluent in any other languages as I am in those two."

"Oh, lucky you, I'm going to have to make do with high school French. If my grandma had lived longer she might have taught me Japanese, but no dice."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Yeah. It should be okay, though, my impression hasn't been that fluency per se is terribly important and if we're doing it right we won't need to invent incantations on the spot, just say them without stuttering. Oh, for the spreadsheet, I couldn't type ninety eight percent of the runes I got through so they're all page number in the dictionary and letter - first one is 6-A since there's the front matter in pages one through five, and on from there."

"Fixing that seems like a worthwhile project at some point. Even if it turns out printed runes don't work, if you printed a sheet with runes printed on it in grey, tracing over them would probably be easier than drawing them from scratch."

"Or a stencil," May agrees. "But if copies do work I'm just even more disappointed in the pathetic existing magical community."

"Agreed."

"Even if we have to write every one out by hand we can still eventually make custom objects and carry around cases of scrolls. I'm excited."

"My sister and her...friend...weren't interested in learning a dictionary full of runes and an extremely complicated percentile system, but I imagine they'd be willing to scribe scrolls for a commission."

"Should be easy enough for people to do without knowing all the underlying principles. I'd want to check them over, of course."

"Of course. Stencils or greysheets or what have you should render mistakes rare, but given the warnings..." he grimaces at the book.

"Yeah, I'm too young to die."

"Color me intrigued."

"There's so much to do."

"God, yes, it's the best feeling, I will never be bored again, you know?"

"Exactly. I mean, I wasn't exactly bored before, there's all kinds of things in the world to occupy one's time with if you know what you're doing, but this--" He breaks off, grinning. "Reading about magic can't compare to having it at your fingertips."

"I think it's still arm's length. We haven't done any. Yet."

"But we will."

"I for one intend to start a magic school and use its students as cheap scribing labor."

"...That's a great idea. I mean, starting a magic school is obvious, it needs to be done, but that's also a good solution to the labor bottleneck."

"I'm very smart."

"I noticed."

"I'm going to cultivate extremely precise handwriting. Extremely small scrolls would be very useful." Hmm. "I wonder if you could get something reusable by making grooves in an object and filling them with new ink or what have you for every casting."

"Oooooh," exclaims May, and she flips to the index. "...Well, if you can, this book doesn't know it or doesn't have it under an obvious index term."

"It seems worth the experiment, in any case. There's only so much book; one can hardly blame them for focusing more on how magic works than how to practice it efficiently."

Well, Kanimir speaks a little French. This is Canada, after all.

"Sadly, flight is not an option for me," he sighs dramatically.

"Well, not even all critters have wings. But I do, and I want to use them. There's not enough room here."

"I suppose it's still possible that I am something and just don't know it. I'm not sure I want to, if I am--yet, anyway. I don't currently feel the lack of wings, but if it turns out I have them I'd rather wait to find out until we've worked out invisibility."

"I get that."

"I wonder why fire is coming up disproportionately often. It doesn't seem like it would be very important..."

"I think it's easy to do. I found a lot of fire runes doing my data entry project. Oh, and the letter to the publisher will go out Monday."

"I think I've found some stylistic similarities between some of the runes and Norse runic alphabets, but nothing sufficiently concrete that I can be sure it's not confirmation bias."

"Do you want to tell me or should I check myself in case I can corroborate something?"

"I think it would be showing, not telling--if I had any similarities solid enough to firmly define, besides the fact that both tend to be fairly angular, I'd be more confident it wasn't confirmation bias."

"Okay, but the gist of the question stands."

"If you check yourself and don't see anything, I can point out my observations later; I'm less confident that the reverse is true. So the latter option is probably preferable."

Well, they'll certainly want to cast gargantuan and high-precision spells eventually. Notetaking notetaking.

Well, this sounds important for not blowing oneself up.

"Well, people who didn't use spreadsheets at all managed. Although not well enough, it seems like."

"Not well enough. And I'm hoping to get some real mileage out of it, so I want it to be the best tool possible."

"Of course. If there's anything I can do to help, let me know."

"I'll get you a copy when it's filled in with the whole dictionary. I don't want to wind up with a mess where two copies of it are being edited differently, though, you know?"

"Yes, that sounds untidy. And potentially problematic in more concrete ways."

"Very. But you can check it for errors and reorganize it in ways that make it more useful to you and then I can replace my copy with your edited version, and so on."

"Indeed."

May's notes are no longer wholly in standard English. She's inventing shorthand as she goes.

Sensible. Kanimir would follow suit, except if he were going to do that he would want a well-indexed glossary, and that would probably take more time than the shorthand would save right now.

The chapters on what all the rune meanings... mean... are all they have time for today, and then May has to leave. "Got homework - the dull kind," she apologizes, bundling up her belongings.

Kanimir looks at his phone and grins wryly. "Same, actually."

"I'd be working out how to graduate early and get into college if I thought that would help, but I don't think they'd let me major in magic!"

"Unfortunately, the state of magical education has not advanced to that point." Beat. "Yet."

"Well, that was more fiddly than I was fantasizing but not as bad as it could have been," May says, shutting the book. "I think the best example spell to try is probably the one that boils water. I mean, it could kill us, but any spell could and boiling water unlike fire has a fixed temperature. Monday I can bring a run-off copy."

Kanimir does not comment on how pleased he was by its fiddlyness. "Sure. I'll bring some materials to experiment with re-using a grooved template."

"And I'll make some of the copies with lighter marks so we can trace over them if the Xerox doesn't cut it."

"Excellent."

"Then: spellcraft."

"Yes."

"High five."

He high fives her. He looks at her grin. It is a really nice smile. He opens his mouth. He closes his mouth. He says. "Would you maybe be interested in...meeting up for something other than magic sometime? Or not just magic? Or--I'm really terrible at this, sorry."

"Terrible at, uh, what, exactly?"

"I--um--" He takes a deep breath. "You're intelligent and creative and interesting and you have a really pretty smile, and obviously if you're not interested that's fine, or anyway it should be obvious and I'm not one of those jackasses who thinks they somehow deserve any kind of attention from someone else that they're not interested in giving, but--if you were interested--I--"

"...If outdated gender roles and your poor relationship with your father can by their powers combined get me really nice food I find myself rather void of objections."

"Brilliant. How do you feel about curry?"

"I love curry! However, I mysteriously become a white person in its presence. So they have to have a mild option, or a medium that really means medium and not chemical warfare."

"Awesome. Although you only really have to worry about ramps for me when it's icy. Ren actually encourages me to walk some when I can so I don't atrophy or something."

"Duly noted. I still prefer places in principle that don't choose to cut themselves off from a morally arbitrary segment of the population."

"I sort of get it? Restaurants in particular have brutal margins and it's hard to get investors. If they can't put together enough capital to be picky about buildings or refit them," shrug, "I mean, it's not like they're hedging me out for being Asian, if they were doing that a pox on the lot of them because it's strictly more effort. What's really enraging is when the elevators in train stations are broken. And stay that way for weeks. And the one thing that sets me off every time is when a total stranger sees me stand up and wants to know everything about my medical history, as though I didn't increase aggregate demand for wheelchairs and thus improve the market. It's like they think I stole it from a paraplegic."

"That's...most of the reason I was worried about being discourteous when I asked why you had it, to be honest."

"You were fine. The average case is someone I wasn't even talking to in the first place, who jumps straight to chiding me. Or yanking my chair away while I'm standing up. I don't even park in handicapped spots," snorts May, "which would almost earn a little suspicion over a scarce resource, if the people who take it on themselves to be the wheelchair police weren't such jerks."

He shrugs. "In my experience, when someone has to deal with something unpleasant frequently, even experiences that would otherwise be innocuous can become grating, if they're similar. It didn't turn out to be necessary, but I would prefer to be more curious rather than less. To the extent my curiosity allows, I suppose, or I would have refrained from bringing it up altogether."

"Believe me, I understand being curious. This is also the reason why I find a reason to mention that I'm Japanese early in an acquaintance if I can. Because it's not clear when people are supposed to ask, but it would be weird if someone knew me for four years and thought maybe I was Mongolian or something."

"Kind of you."

"You'd think my name would help, but it's short for Mabel."

"Pfff. So anyone who doesn't know that is doomed to come to the right conclusion for completely the wrong reasons."

"Unless they know my middle name, yeah. Charlie - that's my dad - is completely assimilated, my last name is Swan, no help at all."

"What's your middle name?"

"Mariko. What's your full name?"

"Kanimir Czcibor Kozlow."

"Do you get people asking you to spell that all the time?"

"Mostly I avoid giving out my middle name."

"Makes sense. So when should we meet for dinner, and should it be there or here?"

"The curry place doesn't close until late, so...sixish? Sevenish? And I don't think my car is equipped to hold a wheelchair, if that's relevant."

"Okay, call it seven, and what's the address?"

He gives her the address.

Which, characteristically, she writes down. "I guess if we spend long enough being total nerds that day I can just drive us there."

"That...would probably be useful for making sure my sister doesn't shove me in a tuxedo or something similarly ridiculous."

"Would that be something she'd do?"

"I don't know if she would do that specifically, but, well--I've never been on a date before, and she's been known to get...enthusiastic about things."

"Maybe I should be glad I'm an only child."

"Oh, if I really don't want her to she won't. She'd only do that kind of thing if she thought we'd find it funny that she had. And I love her dearly. She can be trying at times, I do admit, but I wouldn't trade her for anything in the world."

"Awww."

"We're not very much alike, but we are close. I was...a little jealous, I admit, when she met Daphne; she's as extroverted as I'm not, but she usually doesn't get as close to people as she has to Daphne. But she makes her happy, so."

"...Are they dating or just friends?"

"I am genuinely unsure whether they're significant others or friends with benefits."

"Jaromira won't tell you?"

"I don't think she's sure. Or Daphne. They...I did talk to Jaromira about it. The short version is that they had a moderately confusing conversation about their feelings the only productive conclusion of which was that they 'weren't using labels,' for whatever that's worth."

"Huh. That would drive me nuts."

"Part of the circumstances are that Daphne was spending most of her emotional energy dealing with the aftermath of her first transformation. She..." he trails off. "It isn't my place to tell the whole story, but when she acquired her medallion, it led to some other things becoming known that were harder to deal with."

"Oh... I can see how that would be awkward. I'm not sure which of my parents it is. And it's a little expensive to try to find out."

"Yes. ...Which one do you think it would be better if it was?"

"Ren, definitely. She'd like it. Charlie would as soon not bother."

"It does sound fun. Wyverns seem like the best thing to be, to be honest. Various kinds of avians as well, but I prefer scales to feathers. I'd say dragons if they weren't extinct, probably." He pauses, going over what he just said and winces. "...In terms of, you know, fun--please don't tell anyone I just said that, it must sound terribly speciesist or something."

"I don't think I'd mind having fur or feathers," says May. "And I don't have enough immersion in critter culture to even say if that's speciesist or not."

"Under the circumstances, I think it would be unwise to assume it wasn't. Knowing less about the culture means I ought to be more careful, not less." After a moment he adds, "I don't think I'd mind fur or feathers either. I find scales more aesthetic, but I wouldn't be displeased with feathered wings."

"Maybe when I make friends who've been in critter culture longer I can ask."

"That seems likely. How did you find out what you were, if it's not too personal?"

"Literally found my medallion outside on the ground. I'm just lucky nobody saw me except an old bugbear lady. She calmed me down and got me back into shape."

"That must have been frightening."

"Well, I thought I was probably dreaming for much of it, but yes, I was sure startled."

"Ah. That would probably help, yes."

"I wasn't totally sure I was awake and in reality until I was able to show Ren after going to sleep and waking up again."

"I think under similar circumstance I probably would have taken the fact that turning into a large mythical creature did not make sense as evidence that I was awake. I might have been startled in a dream, but not likely confused."

"Oh, I'm sometimes confused by things in my dreams," May says. "...Not always by things that don't actually make sense, but confusion is part of the available emotional palette to be mixed and matched."

"For some reason things in dreams always make perfect sense to me. At the time, that is."

"I wonder why that is."

"I have no idea."

"I guess it's sort of like people who only dream in black and white or something."

"Probably. I don't believe I was aware of that particular phenomenon."

"I only remember vaguely hearing of it, it might or might not be really a thing."

"Ah."

"After we have invisibility down what do you want to design next?"

"My first thought is that immortality ought to be considered a higher priority than nearly anything else, since of course if we have forever then we can achieve everything else. But of course if it were within the reach of a pair of novices then someone would surely have let it slip by now. Perhaps some form of healing, to build up to that eventually, or a locating spell, so we can eventually find out if there's any lost information on the medallion creation process still intact."

"Yeah, healing would be my answer. I think it's unlikely that we'll get outright permanent invulnerability to death in general. I've been reading up on the extinction war and there's no inkling that anybody had that, even at the height of magical knowhow, so it'd probably wind up being at most anti-aging unless we're lucky enough to be unprecedented prodigies - and we're a little young to need that urgently. A locating spell's a good idea." Write write.

"I was thinking anti-aging, yes. I do expect it's not currently urgent, but since it's not currently known to be possible, I'd rather not put off getting started until it is. Healing is a good first step."

"And there's a bunch of runes that are good for it directly. Did you wind up trying the rune derivation procedure at any point? I haven't gotten around to it."

"No, not yet. I expect I'll do it with relative frequency once we're properly constructing spells and can't find something that works in a given context."

"Yeah. The dictionary's abridged, even. I wonder if there's a rune for every possible combination of things? If there is then with sufficiently exhaustive derivation you could not only waste your entire life hunched over graph paper but also cast useful single-rune spells."

"Hah. Not my fondest ambition, I'll admit, but that does sound like it could be nice, in the result if not execution."

"It'd let you cast fast if you needed to, but it's probably a better plan to frontload the work on having scrolls ready rather than on the graph paper thing."

"Oh, yes. I have no intention to waste away with a ruler and protractor and sheafs and sheafs of paper."

"Even if we become immortal?"

"If we become immortal I can put in my lifetime of graph labor over the course of several lifetimes interspersed with sufficient other activities to prevent wasting."

"Oh, that sounds like a better idea, I suppose," sighs May, grinning.

"The opportunities potentially afforded by immortality are extremely convenient."

"I know, right? We were born a little too late to have any realistic hope of spending any amount of time having read all the books ever written even if we keep going till the heat death of the universe, and some people still don't seem to want to live forever, it's crazy."

"I could understand turning down immortality if literally only one person could become immortal, on the grounds that outliving one's loved ones would be too painful, especially if by deferring immortality someone more inclined could take it up instead, but there are an alarmingly large number of books where the immortality itself is considered a negative in its own right."

"There are! It's very frustrating. I'd probably take it even if I did have to do it alone, although I'd probably make different use of my social life. Anyway, there doesn't seem to be a single principle of runecasting implying such a thing."

"Oh, yes. This is far preferable."

"Immortality for all, and we'll outlive those frustrating people who write those frustrating books."

"At least the ones for whom it isn't simply sour grapes."

"Those people we will try not to call hypocrites."

"Of course. If we call them on it, they might conceivably change their minds, and it would be a terrible shame to lose J.K. Rowling, for example, to her own philosophy."

"Yes. Oh, I love those books, but then they go and do that. I mean, they do have ghosts, but it doesn't even treat the ghosts as a respectable option!"

"I usually choose to interpret the moral as 'sacrificing others and damaging your own mind because you were too paralyzed by your fear of death to refrain from going with the first option presented rather than doing research into more palatable options is a really terrible plan.'"

"Yes. This is a world with the philosopher's stone in it and supposedly Voldemort's really academically talented and the last guy who pulled it off is still alive to be asked nicely for tutoring, and he doesn't, say, research alchemy and make his own, he runs off and uses some strictly inferior option and kills a bunch of people."

"So the moral is to not let fear of something prevent you from taking the correct rather than immediate solution. It even fits with Harry's dementor experiences in the third book." Pause. "I remain firmly convinced, for the record, that the Flamels faked breaking the stone, got plastic surgery or some wizarding equivalent, and moved abroad rather than actually allowing themselves to die. Really, there's no reason not to."

"I don't even know why they were friends with Dumbledore. I suppose he must have other good qualities or something. It doesn't say that they die, it says that they will, so there's that."

"Well, he was remarkably intelligent and very powerful, and he defeated the last Dark Lord before Voldemort. He's probably a useful person to know if, say, you have something extremely valuable that you periodically need to hide." beat "And then of course instead of storing it somewhere no one but the Hogwarts Headmaster could get to he put it behind an easily-bypassed series of traps with 'MacGuffin within' written on it in metaphorical neon signage, they got fed up with his bullshit and faked their eventual deaths."

"Well, it's not clear if Voldemort could have gotten it out of the mirror if Harry didn't go and do it for him," May says. "The traps leading up to it were not particularly well-thought-out, but the object wasn't 'have difficult traps', it was 'conceal stone'. ...Though it seems like a jerk move to store an object for your friends which they regularly use in a way that prevents them from going and getting it; what if Dumbledore had died? And I'm not about to defend Dumbledore in general, he's complicit in child abuse and educational sabotage."

"The problem with the way the Stone was stored is that 'to keep it away from the villain' is not the only reason to want it besides using it. If Voldemort had sent a loyal minion with whom he was not physically attached, they wouldn't have wanted it to use it, they would have wanted it to deliver it to their dread master."

"It's been a while since I read the first book; did Quirrell try that before or only after Harry got it?"

"Quirrel tried it before Harry got there, but since Voldemort was co-occupying his body Quirrel would have had to use the stone for Voldemort to benefit. If he had sent a different minion--which he didn't have contact with at the time, I will admit, but I'm dubious that Dumbledore was sufficiently sure of that to justify the loophole. More to the point, I'm dubious whether the Flamels would be satisfied with the setup, which is an entirely different question."

"Probably if they knew any details about how Dumbledore proposed to hide their most important rock they would have said 'no, we would rather just rely on Voldemort's inability to remember that there is a world outside of Europe and usually just Britain, we will be in Chile if you need us'."

"I suspect that they found out several details afterwards. And then faked their deaths and moved to Chile."

"Of course, I am sort of disappointed in them for not - having safely stashed the stone somewhere - doing more with their six centuries and change of experience and knowhow to help with all the appalling things going on. Maybe they got up to similar shenanigans in Chile and Harry and Dumbledore and so on share Voldemort's myopia about the rest of the globe and we just never heard about it."

"My sister is going to write so much fanfiction when I tell her about this conversation."

Giggle. "I've been tempted. I always wind up finding other things to do, though."

"My sister often has other things to do than writing, but not, in her opinion, better."

"Then she can fill this void in the world of fanfiction. Well, I'm assuming it's a void, I haven't checked."

"I haven't either. I sincerely doubt she'll care."

"Has she written a lot of it?"

"She's written some. Mostly she writes poetry, actually, but when she gets a really good idea or hears one she'll branch out into prose."

"...No. No we did not."

"Did you have one in mind?"

"Well, Fridays are traditional, or it might be a good way to celebrate tomorrow if the experiments go well."

"Ooh, celebratory curry. That sounds good to me."

"Tomorrow it is."

"I was also going to bring tea to brew with our magically boiled water."

"...That's a great idea."

"I thought so too! What kind of tea do you like?"

"I enjoy most kinds of tea, but I like green the best."

"Ren has some of that. I'll bring it."

"Wonderful. Should I bring something to go with it?"

"I also considered instant cocoa, and couscous. I don't take my tea with anything, if that's what you mean; do you?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of teacakes or something."

"Ooh, cakes. Sure."

"I'm so excited. We're going to do magic."

"We are! We are going to... boil water... with magic. And once that works there will be no stopping us."

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, after all."

"But with magic, the first step is into a racecar. ...I was hoping that would come out better."

"In your case perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the first steps are a running takeoff into the air."

"Ha. Even if I'd already had a lot of flying practice I would be hard pressed to get aloft before I fell if I tried to run."

"Oh, right. Maybe magic can fix that, too."

"Maybe... I'm not immediately thinking of what rune meanings I'd put together for it but I'm not intimately familiar with all of them yet. More practice, I guess."

"At the very least there might be something that would catch you when you began to fall, even if correcting the core issue would be significantly more advanced."

"Or something that'd give me a softer landing. But just not hitting the ground wouldn't get me all the way to skating around on ice - I'd just fall repeatedly on the same patch - so it wouldn't get me out of the chair so it doesn't seem like a research priority unless a complete fix presents itself."

Kanimir makes a mental note to go over the dictionary again with this in mind just in case some inspiration does present itself. "True enough. Similar principles might be useful for physical defense, though...but we're not any likelier than average to get hit by cars or suffer other forms of accident. That's not none, though. I think I had better put that on the list."

"Sure, just be prepared to rearrange your priorities if we have an idea about how to make medallions or something."

"Absolutely."

May flips to her priority list. Clumsiness cure, she writes, under invisibility and medallions and healing and immortality - and, apparently, at some point she added automated rune derivation? and teleportation and Avalon hider? and divination in general and wards.

Kanimir's list is divided into descriptive priorities--clumsiness cure goes under non-critical repairs along with a handful of healing sub-categories (immortality, medallions and resurrection go under critical non-urgent).

"See you tomorrow."

"I haven't opened it yet," she says. "I thought you'd want to see. Wax is a good idea, I had been thinking of linoleum - the wax might deform if you toted it around but it's an easier carving job and you could stamp a few tablets with a mold if it turns out to work. Smart. Boiling first or correspondence?"

"Let's start with the correspondence."

"Oh well," he sighs. "...It would probably be a good idea to get another copy of the book, at least. And the unabridged version of the dictionary could save us a lot of work."

"Yeah, I agree. I told Ren what some of those magic objects sell for and she agreed that learning magic is a reasonable investment of more than my usual spending money, but you probably still have more of it to throw around than I do if you're not being too scrutinized?"

"If my father asks what I'm spending money on I can honestly say books; he won't inquire further. Spending amounts of money similar to this on more mundane books is something I've been known to do. I was concerned about the medallions because it was so much at once that I would have no plausible excuse for."

Kanimir copies down the information, sets the wax tablet on the flattest part of a park table he can find, and begins carefully filling the grooves with ink.

May rolls back with the kettle on her lap. "I think the Xeroxes are the least likely to work of our three things. Xerox then wax then trace the gray printout?"

"Possibly Xerox then gray printout then wax, depending on how long it takes me to finish this."

"Okay, but that means I get to try the next one."

The ink in the wax is done shortly.

"...Amazing. Alright, my turn again," he says, and begins industriously tracing the grey printout.

"Eeeeeeeee," says May, squirming in her chair. She sets out teacups and pours the simmering water into one, then the other, and goes to refill it.

"Eeeeeeeeeeee," repeats May, and she leans out of her chair to hug him.

"We did we can it is! We are runecaster wizards who do magic!"