"Hmmmm... do you think teleportation is too ambitious?"

"Maybe...I expect it would take longer than some other things, right now, but even if it turns out to be too advanced to complete right now we could probably make a little progress before setting it aside for later."

"Yeah. It'd make getting to the other Avalons easier and you wouldn't have to explain why you wanted so many plane tickets."

"That is true. And plane tickets are expensive enough individually that enough of them to visit all the Avalons I would like to visit would definitely require explaining."

"Okay. So we will both come up with healing meanings and teleportation meanings and then you spell out - pun intended - the one and I'll do the other."

"Alright." He grins. "Healing scrolls: now part of this complete first-aid kit."

Giggle. "We'll probably want a few different kinds, for different injuries - I wonder if the same diagram would work with different incantations to handle, say, the common cold and a cut and a snakebite?"

"That's a good question...I think there might be some difference on a runic level between a cold and a cut at least, since the one is about repairing something and the other is about removing something."

"Yeah. But cold and snakebite, maybe. ...And cancer. Cut and bruise and broken bone."

"Hmm. Cold and snakebite, yes, but I think the whole thing had better be more comprehensive overall if cancer is going to be covered as well--snakebite isn't as pervasive and it doesn't matter if you don't get every single pathogen for the common cold as long as you get enough that contagiousness and symptoms cease to be an issue."

"I think cancer is actually similar. The immune system can handle little bits of it; the point of surgery or chemo is to kill enough of it that the body can mop up the rest. But I'm not an oncologist, so I'm not sure."

"I'm fairly sure you're right, but if I'm going to create a cancer spell I'd rather have one with less of a chance of remission later on than the standard techniques, because if your immune system misses any of the leftover cancer cells they can go somewhere else and start the whole thing over again." He considers. "I suppose it isn't as important as it looks on the surface, though, if the spell will reliably work again if the patient does go into remission; chemo is dangerous in its own right and doesn't always work multiple times, is part of the problem."

"Right. If we can just spend ten minutes copying out a healing spell every time someone's cancer is acting up again, cancer remission is officially less annoying than, like, diabetes. Especially since there's no reason to expect that some things are magically inoperable the way that certain brain cancer might be."

"I suppose my brain hasn't fully shifted towards calculating things based on magical logistics rather than mundane ones. Bad brain, no biscuit."

"I am now imagining you stuffing a biscuit in your ear to reward your brain when it does well on standardized tests or something."

"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."