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Bella inventories the staff. She uses power from her marble, not because she's drained or needs a lot but because she's hoping to coax the staff into being helpful.
She finds two minimally useful divinations in the hour she's allotted to this project, and she takes an extra hour to wheedle them into knitting together, infusing a spare lens, and accepting power from the marble and only when looked through instead of from the staff and continuously. She puts the new lens - now a dark amber color - on the arm of her spectacles, and tests it out. Yes, she can see the staff calling for magic and her protections and the forest denying it with enough gentleness that it doesn't simply die. She feeds the staff a little personal witchery - she doesn't want it to die before she can really get to work on taking it apart - and then wraps it up and puts it away.
She goes looking for Tony.
thaumobabble
thaumobabble
...Bella decides she doesn't need Tony's attention immediately. She can just watch for a few minutes, right? Just a few.
thaumobabble
"Hey," Bella says eventually, at what looks like a reasonable interruption point.
thaumobabble
"If you have time, I'd like it if you'd work with me on a new lens for my spectacles. I've been fighting with a dwarf spell intermittently for weeks, but I'd like to have it ready in time to go along with the delegation who's going to check out that wizard colony and get a better look at what's going on there, and I think your help would speed things up."
thaumobabble
"Do you want to work on it here or someplace else? I don't know if the forge is particularly attuned to your dwarf magic or anything."
allthebrightest
"Well, let's see what you've got so far. Might as well be here."
thaumobabble
"All right." Bella pulls out her notes on the spell - she's got a primary source on the original spell she's adapting, lots of material on putting seeing-spells into lenses in general, and then a lot of incoherent ranting at her notebook about the stupid uncooperative dwarf magic. "I recently had the idea of trying to enchant the frame of the lens - the iron bit that wraps around the glass - instead of the glass itself, but I don't even know where to start," she says, pulling a blank lens from one sleeve and putting it on top of the notes.
thaumobabble
Bella nods. "The trouble is, iron's not see-through. So the spell would have to be on the frame, but go through the space that the lens occupies. I could pop out the glass part, maybe, if that would help."
allthebrightest
"Or you'd have to make the glass and the iron talk to each other," she muses.
thaumobabble
"Ooh. There's that," says Bella, grinning suddenly. "That could - ooh."
thaumobabble
"Okay, what kind of outputs can you give this little twist of iron here?" Bella asks, picking up the lens and its frame that will hook onto the spectacle-arms when it's done. "I think I can get the glass to listen to most anything, I'm good with glass."
allthebrightest
Tony checks Bella's primary source again, and then she picks up the frame and holds it in her hands, humming thoughtfully.
thaumobabble
Bella produces her spectacles. "Feel free to have a look at any of these lenses," she says. "Or ask me about them. This one," she taps the wizard lens, "is new, I stole some divinations out of the staff I got."
thaumobabble
That doesn't get quite the desired result, and neither do the next fifteen variations, but by the end of a highly fun afternoon spent messing around with the lens, Bella clips it onto her spectacles, gets all the other lenses out of the way, and declares it, "Satisfactory!"
thaumobabble
Pleasedness pleasedness pleasedness!
"So I'll be going off with the delegation sometime in the next week," Bella eventually murmurs against Tony's neck. "I'm not sure how long we'll be gone. It is supposed to be part of learning politics, though."
"So I'll be going off with the delegation sometime in the next week," Bella eventually murmurs against Tony's neck. "I'm not sure how long we'll be gone. It is supposed to be part of learning politics, though."