Trill! Chirp chirp trill chirp. Grab a bit of paper out of Numair's pocket and put it on the ground inside a circle. Stand up on hind legs, curl front claw like she's holding a spear, and croak in a low, booming voice. 

The paper bursts into flame.

Another piece of paper! This time she arranges the ground a little bit, making something of a divot for the paper. She reaches for Iovetra's watering can and gives an inquiring quork?

Yeah, go ahead. Actually, maybe it would help to have her castle bring over a spare tinted window, to show what a proper shield against the thing-that-burns-vampires looks like.

In the meantime, she tries to explain to Numair how she is more flammable than the paper. Little square, tiny fire. Vampire stick figure? Big fire. Watering can, pointed to paper-on-fire - fire goes out. Watering can goes on vampire-on-fire - bigger fire. Do not try to put her out with water, it would not go well for anyone involved.

Nod nod. Yes, he got that from before (except the water thing, that's new). What is this about sunlight though?

New bit of paper! This one is near one of the flowers. Up, pose, croak — a scattering of light appears around where a cone from Kit's mouth would touch solid objects. They glow for a moment before fading. Croak — again the paper goes up in flames, but nothing else in the area.

Watering can! A dribble of water on the divot of earth, until it's more like clay than dirt, and then she squishes it down back into shape. A trill and the water fwooshes out, leaving behind a hastily-baked clay bowl-like object. The watering can goes down, partially covering the paper. Croak of light, and the bowl shines but the paper does not. Another croak and the edges of the paper burst into flame, followed quickly by the rest.

Ah. Hmm. And yes of course a little bit of fire will spread, he didn't think of that.

Numair closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them he opens them to the arcane as well as the physical. Can he see anything special about this window?

Well, magically, it's sort of part of the castle, but in the same way the glass panels around the greenhouse are. By how they have been covered by blankets from the inside: that doesn't do it. The property that protects the vampire from the harmful-to-them parts of sunlight (UV radiation, for those following along at home, though vampires know it as 'sunlight-that-burns.' This is, of course, one word in their native language.) is entirely physical, and a marvel of vampiric chemistry instead of vampiric sorcery.

Iovetra will demonstrably show (via asking a blanket to scootch a bit to let one tiny ray of sunlight down) that under the glass she will not catch fire! There is light touching her very pale skin, and everything.

It's not doing anything magical, so there's no convenient structure to try to copy. Definitely some component of the sunlight which can be filtered out, though. ...and if it's anything besides the sunburn spell, which has been useful enough in the desert that he knows it by heart now. he will need to ask Kaddar to fetch him the relevant books, he can't reconstruct anything on the spot. 

Well, it would need testing either way. Vampire stick figure. Person stick figure throws something at vampire. Vampire with an oval outline. Campusy with oval outline with the sun overhead! Two branching paths: in the first, lines from the sun touch the outline and bounce off. In the second, they go through, and the vampire is on fire. 

Numair taps himself and the person figure. He then taps the arrows and shrugs. Tap the fire doodle — sad face.

And he says something to Kit, which Iovetra of course cannot understand.

Does that get a useful response?

"I can recover from being set on fire, and we can test with just me sticking my arm out into the sunlight," she says, motioning to her left arm, and then outside. She thinks she understood what he was getting at? He might have a way to keep her from burning to death in the sunlight, and wants to test it, but obviously does not want this to kill her. Not that killing her would stick, with her coffin still intact, but she is not bringing that up because she has at least one iota of self preservation inside her.

Chirp! Tailpoint to Iovetra, nod nod.

...she is an acceptable test subject? Really? O...kay...

First things first. He flicks a finger at Iovetra and a burst of black flame with white sparkles flies towards her. If it touches her, it expands painlessly into a bubble before fading to a near-invisible glimmer. He gestures to the entrance.

She lets it touch her. She did just consent to being a test subject, so.

Yeah, okay, she can go stick her arm outside, into the sunlight. Does it begin heating up, such that she needs to pull it back inside immediately before it bursts into flames?

About 5% of the normal amount of ultraviolet light touches her skin, mainly in the 370-400nm range. (Drawing a precise line was hard, so the spell kind of fades out after it passes the visible spectrum. It blocks enough light to minimize sunburns, and that's all it's really for anyway.)

... Huh! Surprisingly effective. She can still feel a bit, tingling at her skin, and thoughtfully leaves her arm out to see how quickly it begins heating up. It is, but much, much slower than usual. She might be able to manage with it, but, well. Desert.

"Very effective, but not perfectly so!" she says, removing her arm from the sunlight. That was so straightforward and easy??? That's very surprising, if it had been easy to fix with vampiric magic, well. Her life after death would look much different. "It's missing catching some of the sunlight-that-burns, but it's getting most of it. I could maybe manage if I shifted into a rat and hid in a pocket, but I think I'd prefer to refine it further."

Ooh Mama might be able to talk to a rat! Maybe later.

Whistle whistle. LOUD whistle and then quieter. Chirp! Quiet and then quieter again?

She needs a stronger version? He will need some more time to think about that, or... he says something to Kit.

Kit grabs something off his chest and holds it up — a necklace, holding a stone of some sort. Points to the stone, points to the castle. Interrogative chirp?

"I'm sorry, I don't think I understand? Is the stone... for something...? Do you want me to put on the necklace for some reason? You want... the castle to study it, maybe? Your magic is deeply strange to me, and I have no idea how any of it works."

Tap the stone, draw one on the ground. Vampire! Oval! Lines from the sun! Most bounce off, but some go through. Draw two stones, another vampire with another oval. This time almost all the lines bounce off.

"The stone magnifies the magic? Huh. Then that might help, yeah. But you only have the one of the stone, and want to know if my castle might be able to make another?"

The manufacturing capabilities of her castle are pretty impressive... It might be possible, but she'd need to know what the stone is made of, and try to find the raw materials for it.

Nod nod!

Opals are a hydrated amorphous form of silica composed of 150-300nm spheres forming a hexagonal or cubic close packed lattice. Black opals, as this one is, contain mostly very small silica spheres which rapidly diffract light, causing an interplay of colors filtered by various trace impurities...

The most important discovery Iovetra will make is that this gemstone seems to be composed of much the same basic components as glass, with the difference almost entirely in the form of very fine structural components. She has (almost) all the materials she should need right here. There are some trace impurities, if she can detect them, which are not immediately present in the sand, but the part which is essentially ash is easy to construct and she needs very little of the other, more metallic, traces (mostly iron-based). If she fails to replicate those impurities, the resulting gem will look very different.

This is of course mostly figured out by Iovetra's castle, not by her directly.

Iovetra returns Numair's stone once it's studied, then listens to her castle's diagnosis for if it could make this thing.

"- Okay, so, yes, my castle can make more of them. The way we'll do it right now will be kind of expensive magically, but I have been keeping my castle very well fed lately, so it shouldn't be a problem for just a couple. I do think we should make several test opals to properly figure out the parameters we're aiming for before refining the process to something less magically expensive, neither I nor my castle understand what precisely is assisting with the magic, here. Is there any reason for me to not just start making things now? I have everything on hand already." It helps that she's a packrat. And also literally in a desert. That is composed of silica.

The desert is very much composed of silica! Also a surprisingly large amount of iron, so the impurities aren't that much harder to find the necessary materials for.

Nod nod! Tap the two opals and a mostly protected vampire picture again. Two should really be enough.