"You probably won't get in trouble," Dr. James says.

"You mean for what I already did, or if I keep doing it?"

"For what you already did. Nobody's going to prosecute you for not going through a review board before you tried your healing spell you were excited about on people who signed up for that just because you wrote down what happened, but you do need to bear it in mind going forward."

"Okay, that makes sense. I'm glad I probably won't get in trouble. Anything else we should figure out before you talk to the council?"

"Don't think so. Do you want to hang on to this until then?"

"I might as well, yeah." Rock and diagrams go back in her bag. "See you next week, I hope!"

"See you! Thanks for getting in touch."

At home, Margaret updates Bella on her meeting with the doctor.

I talked to Dr. James in the Avalon; she needs to get Council permission to try anything experimental, but if they say yes she seemed open to treating patients and sending me data. I'll probably end up giving her a de facto monopoly for a while in exchange for handling the bureaucracy, but I haven't promised anything and won't.

I'm hoping I can get at least one incantation recording off the Tikbalang medallion today or tomorrow.

Before she gets any response to that, she tests her audio recording setup, and assembles a bunch of copies of the sound control diagram and a test rock that's been lit up and disenchanted a few times.

Bella hasn't replied in that time.

Then she sets out the rock, starts the recorder going, and says, "Produce an illusory voice saying the first incantation used to enchant this rock, at sixty decibels."

And it repeats back the first incantation.

Nice! Did the recorder catch it alright?

Nope, illusion sound apparently doesn't record naively.

That suggests that the sound is potentially only in her mind instead of also being vibrations in the air, which, yikes. She writes down "test illusion sound vs resonator--glass of water? tuning fork?" and then turns back to her main experiment.

What happens if she drops the word "illusory" and just requests "a voice", leaving everything else the same?

That works but still doesn't record.

Weird weird weird. Unfortunately both of her parents are at work and there's nobody in the house, so she can't check if other people hear the same thing she does. If she goes back to the old incantation version that calls for a ringing bell, does that record?

Nope!

She has sometimes had success in the past with just asking really directly for what she wants. She looks up a bunch of French words and eventually settles on "Produce sound vibrations in the air in the form of the sound of a ringing bell, at a volume of 60 decibels", which is long enough that she practices it a bunch of times before casting it for real.

Doesn't work. Doesn't expend the diagram.

That sort of suggests that runecasting just can't produce actual sound. Which is odd, because it can produce actual . . . Wait a minute. Do the glowing rocks show up in pictures taken with her laptop's camera?

Yes.

And if she turns off the lights, she can use one to read, including words that she didn't previously know what they were? 

Yes.

So the light is real and the sound is fake. Is that a limitation of the magic, or is it to do with the fact that she's using the control meaning in the sound diagram and not the light diagram? Or maybe it's that she's attaching the light to an object but trying to get the sound without a vibrating object.

That last one is the easiest to test; she puts an unenchanted rock on the sound diagram and works up an incantation that translates to "Cause this rock to produce the sound of a ringing bell at sixty decibels when a person touches it."

This works but the sound doesn't record.