Kanimir is also a fast reader and a firm believer in heavy notetaking! "I suppose having each other to check our work is better than nothing, but yes, safety precautions are rather useless when they don't tell you how to find the blasted safety measure. Perhaps this was written in a more friendly time." He checks the publication date.

"I expect that depends on how old they were when they wrote this. Unfortunately, even if they are, I wouldn't expect them to necessarily be easy to locate."

"Yeah. Especially if they live in an Avalon and don't have some easy White Pages address."

"And if they were writing textbooks in 1965, they probably don't have a significant internet footprint."

"It's worth checking, but yeah. We could try to get ahold of them through the publisher, maybe."

"That would most likely be the most reliable method, although I suppose we should be prepared that they might be as unhelpful as the man in that shop."

"I'm hoping he's an isolated outlier... from an admittedly worrying general trend, but trends have two tails."

"That would certainly be best, although I've found that expecting people to be helpful does not have...consistent results."

It may have to do with all the magical design terms having -scription in them. Later pages refer to "description" (the runes describing the positive effect of the spell), "proscription" (cancellations for unwanted effects of versatile symbols), and "superscription" and "subscription" (effectively, footnotes for the major runes). The author likes to call the words you speak to cast a spell "inscriptions" and the entire process of spell development or copying "scribing", too.

Yes, that would seem to follow.

There are many principles at work when laying out the components of a spell, which the author describes at very great length and May writes down at somewhat lesser length.

Kanimir's notes are periodically annotated, mostly with notes-to-self to look up some connection or other to a similarity between something he noticed in the book and something he recalls from elsewhere.

May peers at his crossreferencing curiously.

One such note suggests he look up other runic alphabets and check for similarities between those and the magic kind of rune. "I wouldn't necessarily bother," he says ruefully when he sees her looking, "but there's little enough information readily available; I'd like to see if I can find anything useful elsewhere."

"That makes sense. I'll leave that to you and I'll write the publisher, we can divvy it up."

"That sounds efficient."

Fortunately, they have runic dictionaries available. It would have been kind of a problem if they didn't, though.

May doggedly looks up all the runes as they come up. Every one has an array of effects, defined in units that it seems the runic dictionary author made up entirely - ᛗ apparently has a 'human target' effect of 9.7, for example, as one of eight properties it's listed as having. This is when it's one centimeter tall; all of the runes' effect sizes are defined when they are one centimeter tall. Scaling them up or down affects all of their results proportionately, which is how there's any hope of balancing anything - but except for a couple of toy examples in the textbook, it looks like most spells need layers of proscriptions and superscriptions and subscriptions six and seven layers deep to get unwanted effects down to safe levels. (Safety of levels is apparently defined relative to the size of the spell, not the absolute length of the runes - this is because a single chant puts a fairly consistent amount of total power into the spell, and 3% of it going astray will generally not hurt anything even if the design is six feet wide and 3% is at a level of 458 or something.)

Which means that if that would be useful, a given spell could probably be scaled down to arbitrary sizes for discretion as long as you have fine enough handwriting. Good to know.