"It could be that it's possible but nobody's done it yet, there aren't enough runecasters to have done everything it's possible to do."

"Maybe."

"I've been reading a couple of runecasting books. There's a lot of potential and a lot of risks."

"Don't get yourself killed, okay?"

"Of course not--then the party would be down a tank. . . . Seriously, though, I promise not to die."

"Oh good." Brenda pats her shoulder.

"Anyway, see you!" And Margaret goes home and sleeps. The next day she finally gets an incantation draft that seems worth iterating on; it translates to "Heal this worm's injury, restore it to perfect health as though it was never harmed." She works on wording for that a bit, then reads some of the book of primary sources from the war.

Frustratingly, almost none of them are from either dragons or sphinxes, though there is one from a dragon's lieutenant talking about the insane runecasting - apparently his boss could in extremis draw a single rune on anything handy and, covering it with a paw, chant at it, achieving as much as would be expected from a full blown spell. The lieutenant thinks probably he was doing something secret while the rune was hidden to make this work.

He must've been in an extremely desperate situation to discover that he could do something like that. If only there were other dragons around who remembered the war and how dragons did runecasting. Failing that, she could really use an experienced runecasting teacher. She checks the Avalon website for any mentions that anyone there does runecasting on the regular.

Nope!

Do any other Avalons have any runecasters in them?

Some of them have people who run little curio shops that include magical merchandise.

Thank goodness it isn't a completely dead art. She can't actually *get* to any of those Avalons without explaining everything to her parents, but do any of them have email addresses?

Nope! This one takes mail orders though.

Margaret contemplates actually mail-ordering something, but decides against it. She doesn't actually have a set of experiments to do on an enchanted object designed yet; she'll hold off on the expense and the extra thing to hide for now. She does send a letter to their mail order address, saying she's aware of the dangers of runecasting but would like to study it anyway, and asking if the enchanter is interested in taking an apprentice or knows anyone else who might be.

Then, knowing a response is unlikely and a response in the next couple days is practically impossible, she puts it out of her mind. Over the next two days she finishes her incantation, and goes out and captures a worm.

The worm objects! Squirmily!

Now she has a worm in a water glass! She crushed a bit of it with the edge of the glass in the process of getting it in there, but the next step was going to be to injure it so that's actually a bonus. She puts the water glass down on the carefully-copied diagram and recites her carefully-rehearsed French.

And lo, the worm was healed.

She takes back every unpleasant thing she ever said about this magic system; anything that can do that much information processing and cellular-level manipulation starting from five runes and a long sentence is awesome. (Her criticisms of runecasting as a field of study still stand.)

She already made a stamp for this diagram; she crushes the middle of the worm more thoroughly than before and tries it again.

The worm is improved, but still doesn't seem as lively as before.

Could be a limitation of the spell; could be she just has a traumatized worm now. She peers into the glass. Is there still a visible wound, or is it just not thrashing around like it used to?

The visible surface is intact.

She might need to capture a cricket or something; they're probably easier to diagnose than worms. Does the crushed-and-healed section feel any different if she pokes at it? 

No. The worm flails.

She kind of feels sorry for the worm. But not so sorry that she won't injure and heal it several more times to check for accumulating lingering damage. (She's pretty sure this counts as mad science.)