"I mean, people heal on their own eventually. Kind of hard to tell whether any of the stuff you're doing is helping unless it's very dramatic. Also people tend to get better a little faster if they think they're doing something about their problems, even if the thing itself isn't doing anything."

"Huh. Well, I think it's a great idea."

"Cool! Then we should stop by the magic shop before we head to work, probably, that seems like a better foundation than completely making stuff up." 

And they can check out the magic shop's Halloween sale.

The magic shop has a bunch of candles and crystals and boxes of tarot cards and little wooden altars and pressed flowers and animal body parts suspended in liquid and vials labeled in Latin and a bunch of mysterious contraptions that they are definitely not going to recognize. There's some jewelry with a lot of weird symbols, some recognizably new age and some much more arcane. Also some toy spiders and bats and eyeballs in bowls near the front. There are also some bookshelves full of books, mostly about chakras and crystal healing and the history of witchcraft and traditional herbal remedies and other related topics. There's a girl behind the counter playing with a pencil.

Hmmm. This place is... sort of terrifying. Just because there isn't one God doesn't really mean that there aren't, like, demons, so this stuff could be really dangerous, but it could also be really powerful, and it's not like there's anybody up there judging her for looking.

She looks at the bookshelves for a while and takes something that claims to be about actually casting spells. 

"Hi. I'd like this, and, uh, if you have anything about healing? Or that's useful for casting healing spells?"

"...is this, like, a Halloween thing?"

"Just, uh, inconvenient timing. I don't know anything about this but I wanna learn. So if you have anything for, like, physically healing people from sicknesses and injuries, that's what I'm mostly interested in right now. Although any other stuff that claims to be able to have actual effects on the physical world would be cool, too."

"Very skeptical wording choice for someone jumping right into practicing the mystical arts."

" - aren't you supposed to be trying to sell me things?"

"I don't get commissions. And I don't give phenomenal cosmic power out to newbies, or junk out to people who are looking for the good stuff. But I do have stuff for aspiring white witches. You just want, what, some stuff to get your feet wet, with some focus on healing?"

"...yeah, I guess so."

She heads back to the bookshelves and gets some more books. "Crystal grids, affirmations, easy potions to make for healing various ailments, some basic spells, introductions to some basic divination, guidance to keep you from making horrible mistakes. You'll want some basic materials, too. You up for eighty dollars worth of experimentation, or should I be scaling this back for budget constraints?"

"I can do eighty dollars."

"Cool. And you get a free scented candle of your choice. They have effects in some spells, but by themselves they mostly just smell nice. Read well before you try anything, okay?"

"Yeah. I will. Thanks."

She takes a candle that's supposed to smell like the ocean. 

"It's my job." She puts everything in a bag and pushes the bag across the the bag across the counter. "Happy Halloween."

So Karen can take her stuff. 

"Well. I have no idea whether any of this is going to do anything, on either of the levels it's supposed to, but it's worth a shot."

"That's a bunch of stuff, what's it all for?"

"I think the board has something to do with crystal grids? I don't actually know what crystal grids are. I did tell the person at the counter that I wanted to focus on healing, and she seemed to think she had stuff for that. I am supposed to read the books before I try anything."

"Aww, why can't there be magic that doesn't involve any reading?"

"She probably just didn't want to give me a free crash course while I stood there. Or wanted me to also buy the books. But I dunno, it's kind of nice, having it all written down. Means I can remember it this way."

"I can't believe there's widely known magic and my father doesn't know about it. Or maybe he does and couldn't get it to work or something."

"I am not claiming that any of this stuff works! It is widely believed to be nonsense. It just - happens that nonsense works almost as well, when you have a spellbook that pays attention to whatever you're doing in practice. Maybe. If this works."

"I guess we'll find out!"

"Yeah."

So she reads a bunch of stuff about elements of spirits and crystal energies and healing potions.

It happens that, if she goes to the trouble of actually identifying the gems that Connnor got her months ago while exploring the catacombs, she actually already has a lot of the elements she needs to cast a lot of the healing spells in the books. On one occasion she bikes to the hospital and heads to the bathroom and sits on the toilet with her board of crystals, flinging spells at other parts of the building, in case having a valid target in range matters. Also in case it's actually doing anything.