Illusion sound being unrecordable seems to me like it might be a more fundamental limit unless you build recording into the spell somehow.

It's not technically recording the sound--it's enchanting an object to produce a specific sound when tapped. I can already do that with simple sounds, and I can also make it produce an incantation from an enchanted object, so if I can combine them the result should be almost as good as a recording in terms of ability to replay it over and over. Less flexibility than a computer would offer, unfortunately.

Do you think you'll be able to get around the problem enough to get it onto a computer eventually?

I don't know. I think if the sound is only in my head then it might not be possible, but I could potentially find a way to make it make real sound waves. I've checked that the light I make shows up on cameras and illuminates things in the dark, so I'm pretty sure that's real, but sound might be fundamentally different. I could try enchanting a speaker in case the problem is that other objects won't vibrate the right way to make real sound, but right now that feels like too much of a tangent from medallion work.

I wonder if it's linguistic. I don't know about French, but English doesn't distinguish 'sound' as in 'thing heard' from 'sound' as in 'waves in that wavelength through an appropriate medium'. Of course, the runes also contain a light meaning and a sound meaning and I have no idea what those labels are translated from.

That could be the case. If whoever or whatever created the runes decided that sound is a perception and light is a physical phenomenon, it might just be a dead end.

This email is accompanied by a set of close-up photos that add up to her double-sized sound control diagram.

You want this spellchecked?

If you have time in the next couple days, yeah, I don't know what else you're busy with.

Nothing I can't shuffle around to advance the cause of science, though I admit sound recording is less exciting than healing rocks.

Well remember, the point is to record the incantations used to make medallions. After which, I admit, there's going to be a lot of boring finicky translation work and you probably won't hear from me for weeks unless something moves on the healing rocks.

Speaking of the healing rocks, it's about time she let her parents in on the rest of the secret. They haven't run their mouths about runecasting; they aren't going to run their mouths about critters in general and dragons in particular.

When she tells them, they display an appropriate amount of nervousness about the possibility of getting discovered. They ask if it might be better for her not to go to the Avalon at all, but eventually agree that her disappearance would itself attract attention and that the medical research she's doing is important enough to keep doing something that's worked so far.

How are you even going to figure out what language it's in? A lot of ancient ones we don't know very much for sure about what they sounded like.

I'm hoping I can find a critter linguist. If I can't, or if whoever I find says it's a non-starter, I can try magic transcription or even translation, but that's a pretty intimidating prospect.

My bet would be that the original makers spoke Greek or a Middle Eastern language, but that's as a first language, and I don't know what they'd have picked up for their incantation language.

Yeah. Here's hoping it's not something totally lost to history.

I should check some more libraries and see if there's any prior art on magic translation. It's useful enough for other purposes that someone might have already invented it.

You've been running into issues with information handling, right? It'd be the mother of all information handling problems.

It really would. I guess the alternative is trying to develop my own incantations to do the same things directly, which is also hugely complicated but which I at least know somebody accomplished at some point.

When it's been a few days since her first survey, she emails everyone who hasn't responded yet, asking them to please fill out the survey to help science and future sick people, and reminding them that of course they can skip any particular questions they'd rather not answer.

This prodding gets one more not very thorough reply.

Ugh, if the rest had just replied with "I don't want to", she could have gone to the Council and said she couldn't compel anyone to talk. But no, they had to ignore her completely. Do all the non-responders live in the Avalon, and does it publish a phone book?

Not all of them and it does not.

The ones who don't, are they perhaps in the regular phone book? Not that this is going to help if somebody gave her a fake name, but who would do that?

Some of them have duplicate names and some are not listed, but she can get a couple numbers that way.

She calls the first one on the list, fully expecting "go away" but wanting to put in a level of effort the Council will accept. If anybody picks up: "Hello, this is Margaret Peregrine, can I speak to [name]?"

"I don't think he's home. What's this about?"

"Followup questionnaire for a research study he participated in, I need everyone to either answer a few questions or tell me they refuse. Can you ask him to call me back?" She gives her number.

"Yeah sure."