Okay, two would be enough, but Iovetra is a woman of scientific testing, thank you very much. She was an alchemist before she was a vampire, this is in fact what got her into this mess. Which is to say:

She's totally going to make like, five. In varying arrangements of silica lattice, with a perfect copy of the original opal as the control, and then the four others in slightly different arrangements from the control. The result is five black opals, but slightly different.

'Making' the opals involves the castle delivering her a heap of sand (from her stores), and Iovetra spritzing it with her watering can, and then her... sitting quietly with it, doing magic at it. There's a little heat and pressure from the floating globules of moistened sand, but mostly it's just politely arranging itself at her castle's command. In cases like this, where they haven't figured out a template for the castle to follow, Iovetra needs to personally help her castle put this thing together, with it providing an interface and following her instructions.

Anyway, here are some opals! "Do you know which one of these is best for magical purposes?" she asks, because she is incorrigible when it comes to this kind of testing.

Numair could do this, of course. That would be the easy and careful way to do it.

But that's no fun.

Chirrup! The opals glow, the perfect copy just as much as the original, the rest in varying shades. ...it's all indistinguishable at this level.

Grumble grumble. Chirr-tweet. Another glow, that same perfect copy, but now the rest are of visibly different brightness. Three of the new ones are distinctly dimmer, but the last is a little bit brighter.

Ooooo~

Okay so that one was with a smaller and more regular lattice, but interestingly enough it did need just the right amount of impurities, or that one on the left would have been just as bright as this one -

She's going to make some more. Four more, specifically. Testing types of, and concentration of, the impurities.

The precise ratio and distribution of impurities does turn out to be quite important. She won't have a perfect sense of what makes for even a local optimum of opal design — everything she tries still has some inconsistency, even as controlled as she can manage it — but a few more iterations will get her opals which consistently glow brighter than Numair's original necklace gem under Kit's whistle.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of sand or traces of iron in the immediate vicinity.

Numair does his best to follow along and explain a little bit of what he feels in the opals to Kit and draw a sense in the dirt on the ground. This isn't exactly the most efficient method of communicating, but it's better than blind iteration.

Eventually he remembers they had an objective, though. He takes a couple test opals and reaches into a pouch with a finger, drawing it out  now coated in a vaguely herb-scented oil. He draws symbols in oil and that black fire over the opals and in a circle around them, gestures, and with a lazy flick of his hands the oil burns away and the fire flows inwards, sucked into the gems. He offers them to Iovetra.

Tap the ground with the drawings. Vampire: oval! Sun overhead, line bounces off. A line ahead of the sun, going down below the ground and then back up, and another beam of light: bounces off, but a much lighter line goes through. Down and up again: more gets through this time. A third cycle, and now the beam of light is mostly getting through. He taps the four sun drawings and shrugs, waves a hand.

He gestures to his necklace, then pulls at the material of his cloak and gestures around Iovetra's neck. He says something in a questioning tone.

Oh, right. An objective. Yes. That.

"I am guessing I am to also turn this into a necklace. Can do, one moment."

She has been collecting the skins of the very many creatures she's been murdering lately! It wasn't for literally this purpose, but they can be used for this purpose! She soon enough has a braided leather cord, upon which goes the opal. Necklace then goes onto neck. "Sufficient for the magic to work? Am I good to test it?"

Nod. (The working will be weaker with only one opal, and this is a somewhat on-the-spot modification to more aggressively cover things and handle the leakage with raw power. Even so, a single opal should do a bit better than his previous spell, and with both of them he expects it will be as good as that with an additional layer overhead.)

Okay! Then she will stick her arm outside. How complete is this sunlight protection?

With one opal: she loses a little bit of her ability to see purple colors, but perhaps half as much UV gets through. With both of them: Purple colors in general are very dull, and ultraviolet light is heavily blocked. Maybe half a percent is getting through, or less if the opals are kept in close proximity.

She relays this to Kitten. Clearly there are some diminishing returns with this opal system, but: yeah okay, she can go with two opals. For safety, though, she's also going to wear her hooded cloak and gloves, which she already had on hand for when her castle was not in a desert. Warding off sunlight is literally what these are designed for, and a mix of the magical solution and a mechanical one seems the best for keeping her from being on fire.

Of course, she tests this, by going outside in the burning sun. ... Yeah, this'll work. She beams, delighted.

"Thank you!!" she says cheerfully, twirling in the sunlight for the first time in centuries.

Throwing more power at a spell is not usually a good solution to problems! Catching everything there with a spell is not easy, and the second opal is as much to support the spell's duration as it is to empower the actual effect. Numair is unsurprised by this outcome.

He bows, smiling, at her evident delight.

Some chirping to pass along the message, and then Kit would like to pull Iovetra towards the tents. She can turn into a rat! She can talk to Daine! She can meet Kaddar and he can be very confused about whether or not she is the Graveyard Hag, especially if she turns into a rat in front of him! It will be great! Come ooooooon!

Oh? She - will consent to being tugged towards the tents, though she's a little nervous and doesn't keep it off her face. "I can keep this necklace, right, it's mine now? Are there care instructions I need to worry about, is this going to last forever, or only a limited duration...?"

Limited duration? Yes, didn't Numair explain this. Nod nod! Point to the sun. Very quiet whistle. Claw goes around! Up, down, up, down, up, down. Her whistle grows with each cycle, staying mostly quiet but growing in volume. Up, down. Louder still, and Iovetra might notice a patch of sand in front of them starting to shimmer with head. Up, down. Loud! And with this whistle, the sand is giving off a clear heat shimmer and starting to change color, becoming faintly reddish amidst the typical yellow sand.

Warning croak. Don't be that sand.

"Ah, okay, so it does need to be renewed. I should be able to tell when it's starting to lose power. I make a point of trying to avoid being on fire, don't worry."

Agreeable chirp! And back to over there over there over there.

The camp consists of a collection of tents on a dune, raised above a platform covered in beautifully woven carpets and decorated with pillows of all shapes and sizes. Globes are set around the platform, glowing for no clear reason. There are stone circles set atop it, scorch marks in the middle indicating them as locations for fires to stave off the night chill.

Humans bustle about on the platform, preparing food, setting out wood for the fires, tending to the animals, and so on. One sits in the middle. Iovetra may note when he starts to get up and do something a few times, before glancing at someone nearby and instead sitting back. He holds a bouquet of dried flowers.

Kit is not tugging her towards them. Kit is tugging her towards a perhaps twenty-year-old woman standing atop a dune. looking worriedly back at the castle until she recognizes Kit and Numair walking out towards her.

Social anxiiiiiety, please do not all descend upon her with torches and pitchforks, that would go poorly and also hurt a bunch. Also it's so bright out here, it's extremely hard to see anything when she's directly in the sunlight, she might need to make some kind of tinted eye protection to protect her eyes. She can see a little, though, with the help of hiding under the hood.

She doesn't know what the dried flowers are about? They're not for her, are they? That seems strange and weird??? Unless they've figured out she's an alchemist, which, the giant garden and castle covered in blood roses probably gave her away, but, still. She's. Just going to keep being tugged along by a tiny dragon.

If a rat squeaked at her with intent to communicate for some reason, would Iovetra understand what it was saying?

Ssssssort of? She could make some guesses from context and her understanding of rat body language and communication styles, but it would be very fuzzy guess, not definitive understanding.

When the woman speaks, it feels... a bit like that. Iovetra has oddly strong guesses about what she's saying, guesses which don't seem obvious from context if she thinks about them

She says something, and Iovetra would guess this is noting something slightly surprising about her. Not an unpleasant surprise, just something unexpected. Then she turns to Kit and starts talking.

Kit gleefully chirps and whistles and acts out her responses.

Numair follows behind, but he stayed back to gather some of the opals for inspection by other mages. He will be a few minutes catching up.