"But with magic, the first step is into a racecar. ...I was hoping that would come out better."

"In your case perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the first steps are a running takeoff into the air."

"Ha. Even if I'd already had a lot of flying practice I would be hard pressed to get aloft before I fell if I tried to run."

"Oh, right. Maybe magic can fix that, too."

"Maybe... I'm not immediately thinking of what rune meanings I'd put together for it but I'm not intimately familiar with all of them yet. More practice, I guess."

"At the very least there might be something that would catch you when you began to fall, even if correcting the core issue would be significantly more advanced."

"Or something that'd give me a softer landing. But just not hitting the ground wouldn't get me all the way to skating around on ice - I'd just fall repeatedly on the same patch - so it wouldn't get me out of the chair so it doesn't seem like a research priority unless a complete fix presents itself."

Kanimir makes a mental note to go over the dictionary again with this in mind just in case some inspiration does present itself. "True enough. Similar principles might be useful for physical defense, though...but we're not any likelier than average to get hit by cars or suffer other forms of accident. That's not none, though. I think I had better put that on the list."

"Sure, just be prepared to rearrange your priorities if we have an idea about how to make medallions or something."

"Absolutely."

May flips to her priority list. Clumsiness cure, she writes, under invisibility and medallions and healing and immortality - and, apparently, at some point she added automated rune derivation? and teleportation and Avalon hider? and divination in general and wards.

Kanimir's list is divided into descriptive priorities--clumsiness cure goes under non-critical repairs along with a handful of healing sub-categories (immortality, medallions and resurrection go under critical non-urgent).

"See you tomorrow."

"I haven't opened it yet," she says. "I thought you'd want to see. Wax is a good idea, I had been thinking of linoleum - the wax might deform if you toted it around but it's an easier carving job and you could stamp a few tablets with a mold if it turns out to work. Smart. Boiling first or correspondence?"

"Let's start with the correspondence."

"Oh well," he sighs. "...It would probably be a good idea to get another copy of the book, at least. And the unabridged version of the dictionary could save us a lot of work."

"Yeah, I agree. I told Ren what some of those magic objects sell for and she agreed that learning magic is a reasonable investment of more than my usual spending money, but you probably still have more of it to throw around than I do if you're not being too scrutinized?"

"If my father asks what I'm spending money on I can honestly say books; he won't inquire further. Spending amounts of money similar to this on more mundane books is something I've been known to do. I was concerned about the medallions because it was so much at once that I would have no plausible excuse for."

Kanimir copies down the information, sets the wax tablet on the flattest part of a park table he can find, and begins carefully filling the grooves with ink.

May rolls back with the kettle on her lap. "I think the Xeroxes are the least likely to work of our three things. Xerox then wax then trace the gray printout?"