The high school's robotics club has a supply budget, but it's not the biggest, and anyway she can't use that stuff for personal projects. Her dad is willing to donate scrapped car parts from his auto shop, but his customers have been having a run of good luck lately and he hasn't had to throw much out. All of this explains why Margaret is detouring through this junkyard on her way home from school, looking to score some free parts.
She hasn't lost a library book before and isn't about to start. She reads over Teddy's shoulder.
The book has plenty to say about how to make Sitrling engines! Margaret notes down facts and figures. "It looks like the hardest part will be getting the measuring devices we need to make sure everything has the right tolerances. We might need to visit a radio shack if we can't find all of this in the junkyard."
And Teddy wields a computer, doing supplemental googling.
"Yeah, or as close as we can get with random junkyard parts. I know a machinist if we need anything - relatively small and custom. Met him on the internet, helped debug a CNC machine. It was fun."
"Ooh, that sounds like it must have been fun! And really useful; one or two custom parts can make pieces interface with each other that wouldn't otherwise work."
"Mixture of fun and frustrating. If it was a job it would've been frustrating, but it was fun as it stands. And now I know a guy with a CNC machine."
"Yup!" More notes! Pressures and temperatures and inner and outer diameters. Eventually, "I think we've got a pretty solid grasp of what will and won't work for the piston, the displacer, and the cylinder."
"Part of me says we should plan the whole thing out and calculate a bunch of this stuff before we actually start building anything. But since available parts are dictated by the junkyard..."
"Yeah. I'm thinking see what we can get, wrote a detailed plan based on that, and just not do anything that permanently alters any of the parts we get until we have the plan done to our satisfaction."
"Yeah. It has occurred to me somewhere along the line that this probably isn't the best way to get a portable phone charger... But it's fun, doing this kind of thing, so who cares."
"Well really, what's the point of having powers that break the laws of thermodynamics if you don't use them to spit in the face of entropy?"
"The existence of Spirit Bearers is a pretty strong black mark on the idea of entropy. Why not glory in it, yeah."
Also, the charger doesn't need to be all that portable; I was thinking of getting a couple of those spare battery packs that you charge up and then use to charge your phone, and just charging them off the engine at home. That way if it ever surges my phone won't get fried."
"Yeah, you're capable of putting out kilowatts of heat. This thing won't have to be like a dinky little solar charger."
They work on the calculations.
"I wonder what that genie is up to now."
"Yeah, so do I. We were practically housemates for a few months, and then they left and I haven't heard a thing from or about them since. Which isn't all that unexpected, it's just an odd feeling."
"Yeah, I wonder if anyone's ever gotten a spirit to sit still for a psychological evaluation."
"Not that I've found so far but it doesn't sound impossible. I'll look for something like that later."
"I should head home, but someday soon we should plan to go to the junkyard and hunt for parts."
"See you!"
A couple days pass, and eventually it's time for Margaret's first self-defense class. She shows up on time, in raiment but not scaly.
The room contains four other newbie-looking magical girls, one new-looking magical boy. The instructor whose picture was on the bulletin board isn't here yet, she's a couple minutes early.
"Hello!" She says to the five. "My name's Margaret. Are you all here for self-defense too?"
"Hi. Yeah."
Nods all around.
"You from around here? Five of us, all new, seems like kind of a lot. Aren't we pretty rare?"
"Oh, I live an hour away. This is the closest place that had a 'bearer self defence class."
"Even so, this is more new people than I was expecting. Did any of us get our powers from the same spirit, I wonder? I got mine from a genie."
"Genie, eh? Nice. Congrats. I had to talk to this forest spirit up in the Appalachians for months and do, like, weird tests - and of course now I've got to work for it. Worth it."
"River spirit. My grandma recommended me. It's a little weird having a magic grandma, she looks younger than my mom."
"...Got mine from a ghost. Don't like to talk about it."
"No comment."
"Also no comment. Not everyone has a fun enmagicking, girls."
"Oh, sorry. What's a more fun topic . . . Um, magic is awesome?"
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