"Standardized tests," he says, mock-reprovingly. "I reward my brain when it does things I care about, not when it successfully panders to a flawed system."

"Of course, my mistake. But you did not put biscuits in your ear when your invisibility spell worked so you must not really do this at all."

"I do not do this thing. If I actually shoved biscuits in my ear hard enough to reach my brain I would be dead." Pause. "That sounds like some kind of poetic irony revenge killing method from a ridiculous murder mystery."

Jaromira jots this down.

May snorts. "I wonder if the cancer spell would work on misplaced biscuit fragments."

"Hopefully we never have to find out. Although I have heard of people being raced to the emergency room for some pretty ridiculous things..."

"Yeah. ...We should also think about how we're going to unveil magic to people in general or those people in the ER are not going to have the benefit of scrolls."

A brief but intensely horrified look crosses his face. "Yes," he says firmly. "Yes, we should absolutely do that."

"It will be controversial as all fuck so it's got to be done delicately, and the demand is going to be enormous and our mass production is sharply bottlenecked. It might have to wait until we have students or apprentices or collaborators in greater quantity."

"...Yes," he says. "But it might be worth doing to let some ER workers in on it sooner than that. A few miraculous recoveries probably aren't going to upset things irrevocably. Although it might be worth doing to make a spell that didn't heal someone all the way but could still be used to make sure someone in critical condition didn't die in the next hour."

"Mm - yes. Definitely worth including some paramedics and nurses and doctors in on a first pass of disclosure if we possibly can. And maybe we can do healing items - not scrolls or wands, but proper healing items - eventually?"

"Yes. Scrolls and wands will do to start with, especially if projector-wands that can do a new inscription whenever you flick on the light turn out to work, but we'll definitely want to do something more--stable, eventually."

"Yeah. And we'll either need to charge for the things or subsidize ourselves with some other revenue stream."

"I don't mind volunteering some of my time to make scrolls and so on for emergency medical use, and of course there's all the other thing we're planning on selling...I think a permanent invisibility item might be lower on the priority list than things that are safer to mass produce and sell."

"I'm not averse to volunteering either, but we'll need materials and I don't want to live with my mom forever and, frankly, we deserve hazard pay. And there's a question as to whether our time is better spent on R&D versus copying things out - and if it's the former, we will probably need to pay people to copy things out."

"True enough. Well, I suppose it's relatively immaterial until we have working healing spells and medical contacts. Do you think we should work on repair or removal first? I suppose injury is more likely to harm us than serious disease in the near future."

"Yeah, and most disease doesn't work all that fast and empirically we can go from zero to spell in under twenty-four hours; if one of us gets sick the other working around the clock can maybe fix it before it gets too bad. So, repair first, removal second."

"I wouldn't want to bet our lives on being able to do any given spell as fast as we did invisibility, but. Yes, most disease doesn't work that quickly."

"And while we're working on it we can think of ways to convince medical professionals that we are not high or brain-damaged."

"Starting with a nurse or an intern--I have every respect for nurses, but the fact of the matter is that they aren't as highly paid or high-status--and having an actual demonstration that couldn't be easily faked would probably help."

"Or a paramedic. It might go more or less unnoticed if someone started getting called to a lot of things that 'turned out not to be serious'."

"Oh, that's true." He considers. "Maybe on that note we should try to make a spell that detects the early stages of diseases that kill you but take a long time to do it. Like cancer, but not just cancer. Then we could fix those without the medical profession ever coming into it in such a way that leaves a paper trail."

"It'd be nice, but we don't have a way to filter for at-risk populations and most people don't have cancer. We'd cast it hundreds of times before we found anyone to surreptitiously cure."

"True. Perhaps we can make a wandlight for it and find someone with nothing better to do than flick it on and incant for a while, but, yes, not a high priority."

"I'm wary of plans that involve somebody incanting over and over. If they get sloppy..."