"Thanks, likewise."

And that would seem to be it for their call. What does the Internet have in the realm of old tape recorders?

She can get variously ridiculously priced ones on eBay.

She gets the cheapest one available. She doesn't need it to actually function, as long as the bit that turns the tape works.

She will have to allow two to four weeks for shipping.

She can get some matching cassette tapes from a flea market in the meantime; it might end up taking her that long to get them enchanted to her satisfaction. She also goes through the websites of universities in the area, looking for professors who put their papers or their course syllabi on the internet and who mention ancient languages, or anything about deriving pronunciations from writing.

There's syllabi for one Latin professor at the University of Washington!

Well, the worst they're likely to do is ignore her and if she's lucky they might recommend a colleague. Does the syllabus include an email address, or alternately a set of office hours?

Both, in fact.

She doesn't want to risk getting an offer of an appointment before she has the tape deck and the enchanted tapes, so she'll start in on that first. She starts with the first incantation and the same spell she used to put iron the rock, except with "casette" for "rock" and "whenever the tape wheels start turning" instead of "when a person touches it". She turns the wheels with her fingers to test it.

The incantation begins and continues even when she stops turning it.

So far so good; that's what she was going for. She disenchants it and tries again, expanding the incantation to "Cause the cassette to produce the sound of the first incantation used to enchant the medallion, at sixty decibels, whenever the tape starts turning, and to fall silent whenever the tape stops turning."

Now it stops when she stops, but it starts over again at the beginning when she resumes.

Hmm. She has a different idea whether it's a better idea remains to be seen. Disenchant and back to the French dictionary for a bit.

Before that's done, Wednesday rolls around and she has her meeting to go over her report on the lack of side effects of the healing spell.

The council isn't impressed with her statement that some of the subjects declined to provide information. "If," says one of them, "the subjects didn't want to participate in an experiment, it was staggeringly irresponsible to experiment on them anyway."

"They were happy to participate in the experiment. They just didn't want to answer the unexpected extra questions afterward. If someone wants treatment and I give it to them, and then a month later they refuse to take the survey, I haven't done anything to them they weren't okay with."

"You don't seem familiar with what are conventionally termed human research protocols."

"I'm not. I've never done any kind of research before; I was just helping anybody who wanted it and only turned it into a research study when people expressed interest in that. Any future studies I do are going to be designed as research from the start, and I'd be happy to take advice on protocols from anyone interested in addition to what I can find in the library."

"But it was a new, untried procedure," says the councilmember. "It was by nature experimental."

"I guess that's a reasonable way to think about it. I certainly agree I'd have gotten better data if I had set it up as a formal study from the start and made people promise to fill out the whole survey before letting them try the spell."

"It's not solely a question of the quality of data, it's a question of whether there was informed consent to a high enough standard."

"They knew it was a new procedure and that I didn't know everything about how it would work, and they consented to trying it at the time. My taking a survey weeks later doesn't change that retroactively."

"No one can verify that, since some of them don't have responses recorded in your data."

"I have the waivers they all signed. Also, just to clarify--what are you asking for, going forward?"

"We're not sure if you're competent to handle your own research arm."

"Can you recommend someone who is competent, either to run the research or to review my study designs? Maybe I should get an internship in a human scientist's lab, I could learn how to run a study and it would probably generalize to magic research pretty well."