"Ah. That would probably help, yes."

"I wasn't totally sure I was awake and in reality until I was able to show Ren after going to sleep and waking up again."

"I think under similar circumstance I probably would have taken the fact that turning into a large mythical creature did not make sense as evidence that I was awake. I might have been startled in a dream, but not likely confused."

"Oh, I'm sometimes confused by things in my dreams," May says. "...Not always by things that don't actually make sense, but confusion is part of the available emotional palette to be mixed and matched."

"For some reason things in dreams always make perfect sense to me. At the time, that is."

"I wonder why that is."

"I have no idea."

"I guess it's sort of like people who only dream in black and white or something."

"Probably. I don't believe I was aware of that particular phenomenon."

"I only remember vaguely hearing of it, it might or might not be really a thing."

"Ah."

"After we have invisibility down what do you want to design next?"

"My first thought is that immortality ought to be considered a higher priority than nearly anything else, since of course if we have forever then we can achieve everything else. But of course if it were within the reach of a pair of novices then someone would surely have let it slip by now. Perhaps some form of healing, to build up to that eventually, or a locating spell, so we can eventually find out if there's any lost information on the medallion creation process still intact."

"Yeah, healing would be my answer. I think it's unlikely that we'll get outright permanent invulnerability to death in general. I've been reading up on the extinction war and there's no inkling that anybody had that, even at the height of magical knowhow, so it'd probably wind up being at most anti-aging unless we're lucky enough to be unprecedented prodigies - and we're a little young to need that urgently. A locating spell's a good idea." Write write.

"I was thinking anti-aging, yes. I do expect it's not currently urgent, but since it's not currently known to be possible, I'd rather not put off getting started until it is. Healing is a good first step."

"And there's a bunch of runes that are good for it directly. Did you wind up trying the rune derivation procedure at any point? I haven't gotten around to it."

"No, not yet. I expect I'll do it with relative frequency once we're properly constructing spells and can't find something that works in a given context."

"Yeah. The dictionary's abridged, even. I wonder if there's a rune for every possible combination of things? If there is then with sufficiently exhaustive derivation you could not only waste your entire life hunched over graph paper but also cast useful single-rune spells."

"Hah. Not my fondest ambition, I'll admit, but that does sound like it could be nice, in the result if not execution."

"It'd let you cast fast if you needed to, but it's probably a better plan to frontload the work on having scrolls ready rather than on the graph paper thing."

"Oh, yes. I have no intention to waste away with a ruler and protractor and sheafs and sheafs of paper."

"Even if we become immortal?"

"If we become immortal I can put in my lifetime of graph labor over the course of several lifetimes interspersed with sufficient other activities to prevent wasting."

"Oh, that sounds like a better idea, I suppose," sighs May, grinning.

"The opportunities potentially afforded by immortality are extremely convenient."