"I am glad to have succeeded, if marginally.  ...The core of a lightsaber is the crystal...  Hmm.  Perhaps a flavor of corundum would have better...resonance, instead, especially as the entirely-made-up kyber crystals are produced in geologic forges much as diamonds are produced by the heat and pressure of the earth's core...Or an artificial emulation thereof.  But those, I would rather lack the power to produce by my own hand, I imagine.

"Perhaps my focus is too narrow, though.  Alas that open-ended problems are the ones I find the most difficult to solve and optimize.  Do you have a recommendation?  I am not...well-informed on what makes materials more or less suited for a given purpose, unless you mean that it was literally my focus that requires better allocation.  That, I believe I can do something about, in a repeat attempt.

"Oh, and I did mean to ask; what are the consequences of this instability, in practice?  If you would be so kind.  Perhaps even this flawed product can be useful for some purpose."

She shakes her head. "No, no, no. No. You can't just imitate something and expect it to work. It has to be yours. That's why enchanting is a long process. You take base materials and make them into something slightly less base. Then you do it again, and again. It's not that there aren't any methods you can learn, there are, that's what I'm here for, but... This isn't high school chem lab, you're not making the same canned project as every other student in America. You don't need a crystal, it can work but you don't need it. The crystal doesn't matter. How lightsabers are supposed to work doesn't matter. If you want a lightsaber, you try things that have to do with shaping and holding energy, and put them together, and take them apart and put them together differently, and eventually you have a lightsaber! That's the number one thing that I try and usually fail to express to newbies. Enchanting is slow, incremental, and involves countless failures.

...As for the crystal, it's going to stop being magic in a few hours and crumble into maybe two or three big pieces, it looks like."

"...I see.  I do, unfortunately, believe quite hard in the power of crystal as regards laser swords, but that is interesting and useful advice."

"...Would that instability render it particularly unsuited for further refinement, as was?"

"Nope! And that's fine, crystals can do amazing things, just don't use them because you have to! Further refining it will make good practice and might make it more stable. Or ruin it. I think you should learn some more mystic refinement techniques. Carving runes into the faces, or perhaps a magic circle and crucible... I admit I'm a fossil so I don't much care for lightning and engines, though."

This draws a slight chuckle.  "I'm sure I'll be using bubbling cauldrons in no time, but if you want to see runes from the modern day, look at a circuit diagram sometime.  They're positively arcane."  She smiles slightly, and hums as she thinks about further possible refinement techniques.

It is Luna, however, who comes up with their next idea.

"...Hmm, okay, I'm going to need...symbol for water, like, the alchemical one or maybe trigrams but probably the Greek kind, wire - gold, for the associations with purity and perfection, if we have any - I can probably make copper work, if we don't have any stocked or you don't want to lend me any, but, you know, it's gold - and gold's all mystically significant in ways copper isn't while still performing as copper would in the modern paradigm -"

She rummages in her duffel bag, and curses her past self's not having picked up a jewelry-crafting habit.  It was absolutely in character, she gave that trait to a character she played; why didn't she - oh.  Right.  Misogyny.

"Well, I don't seem to have had the luck to come prepared for jewelry-smithing, but either way the plan's the same - get wire, wrap it into an infinity sign, an infinite loop, a constant flowing current...

"...Hm, should I buff the crystal to a sphere and just wire-wrap it, or cleave it to a prism and think like I'm doing induction...

"...Well, cleaving the crystal makes it more appropriateky lasing-medium shaped, and..."

...She references a circuit-diagram cheat-sheet, to double-check something, as she starts to arrange the tools and materials necessary for realizing her idea, and grins.  "Definitely going with induction and cleaving the crystal so it's neat, given that alternating current has correspondences, diagrammatically speaking.  Plus, there's the associations with induced magnets.  And blue-and-gold is just a good color scheme in general, which really can't hurt anything."

(How much can Sylvia help with this, anyway?  She's bending the wire to shape, but can she conjure it?  Luna isn't sure how much doing this with conjured gold would affect the results, but it's a moot point if Sylvia can't conjure gold at all yet.)

Ooh, and she can use the powdered sulfate (- from cleaving that lumpy, cloudy mess into a neat, shiny prism; she wields her tools just so -) as infill on the symbols of water.  There, that's settled, and the ritual is ready...ish.

"...Hmm, actually, maybe I want this to be rotationally symmetric-ish water and fire, depending upon one's point of view...Plasma's a sort of fire that flows like water, after all."

...Yeah, she'll flip one of the triangles around.  Circles upon circles upon circles, a ceaseless refinement and alignment.

...Now where can she get some red to mix in and make magenta purple?

...First step, make sure she's not going to set anything on fire by adding fire symbolism.  Fire blanket out, goes under the ritual setup preemptively...  Missing that would be bad.

"Damn, figuring out where I can get something appropriately red is going to be much more of a pain in my ass, pardon my language; paint is right out, but I don't think anything else is immediately ringing a bell.  ...copper?  No, but maybe as a backup option given that it sort of works like an RGB schema if you count the rust...

"Honestly, I want it to be gems of some sort.  But...

"Oh, hmm, thermite.

"Which I am not going to make, but I believe it's made with rust as in iron oxide.

"Which is at least red-ish.

"Though I didn't think to bring any, so that's probably right out."

"I'm... Not sure what exactly you're planning. Don't try to do too many things at once, it'll just get muddled if the symbolism or intents clash."

"Right.  Dropping that part, then, just water it is even if it's also fire from another perspective..."

And it is Luna's turn to be the vessel of their focus, as she tries...

Well, 'refining' the cut-down crystal, by creating a sort of 'circuit' of magical water, dehydrating and rehydrating it ad infinitum; she's drawing upon the symbolism of water and electromagnetic induction to (attempt to) add to the crystal the ability to make energy flow.

The end result of all this activity focused on the poor little crystal is: It crumblemelts into a weird sort of goo? Bright blue goo.

"Hmm."

"Do you have particular advice on developing the necessary sensorium to understand just what the hell it is I'm doing?"

"Mostly just keep trying things and seeing what happens. If you get something good, see if you can get it again. If you can get it again, see if you can get it consistently. Enchanting is the opposite of science. Girls who try to do science to this rarely make any progress."

"I see."  If this conversation had been had over the Internet, Luna would at this point promptly declaim 'Thanks I hate it'.  However, it is an in-person conversation, so she does no such thing.

...Anyway, now that there's a puddle of bright blue goo to work with, she's pretty sure this is out of her field.

Ophelia, on the other hand, has some ideas.

Hm.  She'll dig out an old, dead flashlight, first, a heavy metal thing, and hand that portion of construction over to Diana and Sylvia - they're going to need a casing and a generator.  And it will likely help, she thinks, if both Luna and Diana can push for their flavors of temperature control.

The blue goop can go in a beaker for now; they'll come back to it later.  Well, actually...they do need to test its properties, if Old Wardess doesn't inform her.

"I do need to have some sort of idea of the properties of my crafts, though, and you seem to have some sense for it that I have not yet found within myself."

"This stuff is basically a rechargable explosive at this point, for what it's worth. Could make it into a decent grenade." She says of the goo. "I have a spell for detecting the properties of enchanted things. Or rather, I have invested a lot of power into magical sensing and seen a lot of enchanted things. It's almost always related to the intent and emotion you put into it... You usually have to guess and check when you're new, unfortunately. Try to feel the energy it's giving off, maybe, if you have any kind of magic sense at all yet."

"I see.  I shall certainly make sure to invest in such."

She would like to peel back the shadow of magical ignorance from her eyes, but now is likely not the time to test novel spellwork.

"Have any of the other components of this ritual acquired thaumaturgic significance?  It would be a help to be able to reuse the wire."

"No, they're still tools. Tools tend not to change if you don't want them to."

"I see."

She continues to be on an alchemy kick, and as she disassembles the flashlight...she has some ideas.

It's mostly going to be on Sylvia to implement them.

...How good is her detail work, at this point?  Layering hundreds of alchemical symbols, whether etched into a frame, made of magically reshaped gold, or otherwise, is not something to do sloppily.

Her teacher stops her before she gets too far along. "Stop, stop- Trying to throw everything you can behind individual attempts! You're only making it harder to figure out the basics."

She blinks, slowly.

"...Hm.  Perhaps this is a project for a different time; it would be rather disrespectful of the time you've been booked here to simply hyperfocus on carving, anyway."

"What would you recommend, as the one item a magical girl should but does not usually have?"

She pinches her temple just below the fancy circlet thing.

"I feel like we are having a fundamental communication disconnect. I'm not trying to get you a completed project, or even start on one. I'm trying to help you get a feel for the very basics of magical craft. On the level of 'this is a hammer, you hit nails with it'. That is what I start with, because it causes trouble if you do not. I asked what you wanted to make, yes, for inspiration, but perhaps I failed to emphasize enough that you'll get there in time?"

Luna blinks, closes her eyes, and pinches the bridge of her nose, where glasses normally sit.

"Okay, this is middle school shop class, not the inexplicably horribly-translated car that goes backwards when it hears something loud that I soldered together at summer camp.  My apologies, I didn't get the syllabus."

"So.  What do you want to introduce me to?"

"Well. Let's both take a moment and breathe, first."

...

...

...

"Welcome, I'm glad you decided to try out enchanting! The fundamental unit of enchanting is craftsmanship, with intent. Working on something, as simple as crocheting or sanding a piece of wood or as complex as soldering a circuit board or carving runes in beast bone under the full moon, helps make it more magical little by little. Today I would like to guide you through a number of very basic handicraft steps to help you learn to notice when you're doing magic to an object, and to try to make that feeling expected and normal. Does that make sense?"

Yeah, breathing is a good idea, she'll do that too.

"It does!"