Healing a cat with a missing leg didn't have any negative effects even though I didn't specifically exempt the leg. Maybe I should come up with a test that will be like that, where it can still do something even if matter creation is impossible. Or I can skip it and do color changes, that seems exceedingly unlikely not to work when I can do arbitrary colored light.

Yeah, I'd leave the fallback if matter creation is a bust. Color changes would also do fine for your original project here if you decide not to get sidetracked.

If magic can create matter, that's really important, but reverse-engineering medallions is also important, and easier to deploy than most of the applications for matter creation. I'll stick to color changes.

She generates a new set of runes off the spreadsheet, this time including the "knowledge" meaning, and "color" if that's available.

As long as we can transmute matter I'm not sure it's that important to generate it. There's lots of matter no one cares about.

It's important to know whether or not magic actually breaks the laws of thermodynamics or just looks like it, but even if matter creation definitely worked that wouldn't prove it wasn't just pulling the matter from outer space somewhere.

Back to carefully copying and arranging runes. The spreadsheet really helps, but there's still plenty that needs doing by hand. Maybe with a nice CAD program she could write a script that does all the rune positioning and line-drawing automatically; then it would just be double-check, print, and trace.

I can see why that would be interesting, but why is it practically important beyond knowing what specific things it can and can't do? Are you worried we're siphoning energy from the sun or something?

It probably won't matter from a practical standpoint for millions of years, but "does the universe have an expiration date" is the sort of thing I'd like to know for sure. And transmutation vs. creation could turn out to be relevant sooner, e.g. for space travel stuff. Probably not the most important thing to be working on now, though, you have a point there.

Oh, I guess it would be relevant for fueling spaceships, yeah. Unless you can just bypass fuel by applying motive force directly.

It wouldn't surprise me if you could! Magic is pretty awesome. 

Eventually she has finished and waited on and scrutinized another diagram draft, this time including the "knowledge" meaning, and she sends it over.

This one checks out. The runes are such a blunt instrument, it's kind of frustrating.

Very. The clumsiness of runes and the sophistication of natural language incanting is such a weird contrast.

I wonder if there are other ways magic could work and this one is just the one people stumbled on? Critter natural magic isn't like this.

Yeah. For that matter, maybe there are loads of rune meanings neither of us know about, and some way to specify more of what we're doing in the diagrams. As-is it kind of seems like someone set out to invent a rune-based magic system, then gave up and switched to an incantation-based one halfway through.

I don't think there can be more rune meanings in this system, because when you derive new runes you only select one meaning and the others are independent.

Yeah, it's pretty unlikely that there'd be a meaning that none of the runes in our dictionaries had any of. Somebody would've stumbled on it. It's probably just the blunt instrument it looks like.

She has her French incantation (the version that just asks for runes to appear on the paper without specifying ink) done by this point. She enchants a glowing rock, puts it and a fresh sheet of paper on the new diagram, and incants.

A column of runes appears.

She pulls up the glowing rock diagram and starts comparing.

They are the correct runes! Only once per, even though two appear twice, and all at the same size (so that they exactly fit into one column on her paper), but the same ones.

Well, she did ask for "the runes", not "the diagram". She'll work on it. In the meantime, did the spell in fact put ink on the paper or did it change the color of the paper directly? She might need to go find a magnifying glass to be sure.

It looks like it may have gently singed the words into the paper.

. . . that is, somehow, hilarious. It's so complicated from a human standpoint and so simple from a physics standpoint!

I tried the reverse-engineering draft; it got all the runes but didn't output their size or positioning, just a list. I need to lengthen my incantation; it must be a day ending in Y.

Also, when I don't specify how it should put the runes on the paper it appears to go with "faint burning" as opposed to either conjuration or more complicated transmutation. Which sort of makes sense from a chemical efficiency perspective, but it's still funny.

Huh. Did you have leftover fire?

She finds her notes from when she was checking the spreadsheet's math and rereads the leftover meanings.

Fire's one of the leftover things but there really isn't much.

There is a tiny bit of leftover fire, yes. I'm going to work on revising my incantation to get the whole diagram instead of just a rune list, but if you want to try redoing this one without any fire I'd be interested in whether you get a different result.