"So go ahead!"

She raises her hands, to an accompaniment of trumpet-blasts from somewhere overhead.

She laughs, and starts making up rules.

...Nothing feels real enough, however, to feel like she could feel out whether she could make her favorite flavor of paradoxically extant non-existence.  And she doesn't actually want to fall flat on her face, here.  She'll...  Hold on to that λ-'λ', and what it could λ-represent, for later - for waking.

"...I don't think I want to be quite so dramatic as this," she waves a hand at the slowly-rotating sigil floating over the countertop, "and then fail equally dramatically to stick the landing in the waking world because I didn't have a feeling for what I was actually trying to do - but believe you me, I have things to try."

"Ooh, what things?"

She squints at the 'λ', trying to figure out what it might symbolize.  "I've never been to Greece... is this something about physics?"

"Ha, no.  Nothing to do with...  I mean, I suppose it could eventually extremely tangentially touch on the subject of wavelengths, but that's so many degrees of association before you get there that it just doesn't count.  It's a reference to something that I dearly hope is still only a work of fiction.  ...I wish I could explain it properly, but I absolutely cannot do that even though I know exactly what I'm looking for, sort of."

"If it works, though..."

"...Well.  I suppose you've already said that you can make magic just up and fill in the blanks of a spell.  I intend to see if that is extensible."

"Oh - inventing new spells?  It's... not impossible, but it usually fails to do much of anything, or sometimes only does half of what you want it to.  And doing it in here doesn't tell you anything about whether it'll work in the waking world."

"Though if you want to try... there's a lot of tradition about what knots are related to which parts of the spell.  But if you want to try doing it without knowing any of that tradition, go ahead!  It'll at least be an interesting experiment!"

"...Extensible to the products of spells.  Not...  I mean, yes, this would be a new spell, for it to work, but the spell-invention isn't the point, really."

"Products of spells, as in... what?  If you mean creating material out of nothing, you can't do that?  Or something else?"

"No, no, creating -"

"Creating a thing that isn't, creating a not-thing, but a not-thing that - fails to exist so hard that it wraps around to effectively existing when appropriately perceived?"

"That... sounds a little like what that one Fay said..." (- what was the Fay's unique pronoun again -) "zxe was doing... but I've never heard it from anyone else, and I thought zxe was spinning lies.  But if not... it sounds dangerous; zxe also said it could destroy the world."

"...Well, yes, of course it could if you made the wrong sort of λ-thing.  The whole thing is that they're concepts.  They're - the platonic ideal of things, existing only within their roles, and it's all too easy to think of a thing that could destroy the world, though one hopes the world would successfully reject being asked to create such a thing, and one therefore wouldn't risk accidentallying existence...

"...Of course, you could also get out in front of hypothetical XK events if you make the right pState...  Uh, rules for how a λ-thing exists, I mean.

"...I have a sudden, burning desire to send - um, how do you conjugate that pronoun, do you conjugate that pronoun? - a copy of Glitch, and also simultaneously desire to keep - insert pronoun here - very far away from the collected works of the inimitable Dr. Jenna Katerin Moran."

Shiver.

"Yeah, I wouldn't send... zxo? If I remember correctly?... any ideas about interesting dangerous things either.  Even though I'm not sure they'd work; I'd think that the collected magic of the Earth would defend itself, and maybe defend humanity too."

Shiver again.

"... But I'm very curious to see if it'd work!  And if it does, then I'll shove out at least half my other projects to try to figure out how to defend against it."

"I think, if it works remotely like I think it might, that it would be relatively simple to frame a spoiler against world-destroying λ-creations.  Maybe it'd be hard, but - simple.

"...Would it, in fact, be as Utterly Stupid of an idea as I think it might be, to bribe zxo with the books that gave me this idea, to help out with safety precautions?"

Aeslin cringes.

"Please don't.  Zxe would help a bit if zxe promised... you can trust the Fey's promises to the letter of their word... but nothing more.  Don't give zxo any books with nasty ideas.  If this is real; we haven't proved it yet."

"...I'm not just going to give them the books on spec, Aeslin.  I know enough faerie lore to want to run away screaming at the thought of even meeting one.  But if zxe's already researching this sort of thing, and we find out that this works.  It would be better to have them inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in, if you'll forgive the crudity of the idiom."

"I've never trusted Fay in my tent, but... maybe if it's big and urgent enough."

She breaths deeply.  "So what're you thinking now?  Any other things before" (gulp) "testing this in the waking world?"

"I.  Am very much a bit consumed by dread.  But, um, hm.  Knots.  You mentioned knots in a casting context.  There's math about knots.  Did you know that."

"Oh yes!  Muggle knot-invariant proofs have explained several longstanding questions.  I haven't figured out yet how to use four-dimensional untying, but I'm sure there's something there."

"Okay good because I know almost nothing about it."

"It's not that hard to learn, if you can visualize things well.  And learning magic helps you practice that."

Aeslin twists the upright-stroke of the λ into an overhand knot, and then stares outside.  The rain starts focusing itself into something more like a shower-spray, or maybe a waterfall.

...She tries to twist the λ, but it has been grabbed and relocated by Mira before she gets very far.  "Don't...Mess with that.  We don't know what it does.  But...  Where was I.  ...I'm honestly a horrible visualizer, when I'm awake, but I'm not bad at patterns?  Like.  I can at least do some basic conducting and stuff so hopefully that scales well."

What it does here in Mira's dream?...

... well, it's Mira's dream, so it could at least turn things into a nightmare and eject Aeslin with a real-world headache.  Or maybe just possibly something more.

"Hopefully... Hmm, conducting.  I haven't though about that, but there're some similarities..."

A staglamite juts up from somewhere beneath the window, turning the shower-spray of rain into a fountain.  Aeslin starts sculpting it a bit.