Margaret Peregrine is a high school sophomore. Most of the time, she's either at school, at the school robotics club, at the school chess club, or doing schoolwork. Today, she's cleaning out her late great-grandmother's attic.
She has sometimes had success in the past with just asking really directly for what she wants. She looks up a bunch of French words and eventually settles on "Produce sound vibrations in the air in the form of the sound of a ringing bell, at a volume of 60 decibels", which is long enough that she practices it a bunch of times before casting it for real.
That sort of suggests that runecasting just can't produce actual sound. Which is odd, because it can produce actual . . . Wait a minute. Do the glowing rocks show up in pictures taken with her laptop's camera?
And if she turns off the lights, she can use one to read, including words that she didn't previously know what they were?
So the light is real and the sound is fake. Is that a limitation of the magic, or is it to do with the fact that she's using the control meaning in the sound diagram and not the light diagram? Or maybe it's that she's attaching the light to an object but trying to get the sound without a vibrating object.
That last one is the easiest to test; she puts an unenchanted rock on the sound diagram and works up an incantation that translates to "Cause this rock to produce the sound of a ringing bell at sixty decibels when a person touches it."
What if she replaces "when a person touches it" with "every fifteen seconds"? (It's a good thing her parents aren't home right now, the unpredictable ringing noises would be so annoying.)
Getting it to record is no longer the goal. She disenchants it after three rings, wonders for a second why her disenchant didn't work, then realizes it's a different noise from a different room and goes to answer the phone.
"Perry household, Margaret speaking."
"Okay, I'll be there. Are you going to be there too? Do I need to bring the rock or my notes or my driver's license or anything like that?"
Okay, back to research! She can make a rock make a sound she describes, and she can make a sound out of nowhere that she refers to, like prior incantations. Can she do both at once?
Her next experiment involves two rocks on the diagram, and the incantation "Cause the rock that isn't glowing to produce the sound of the first incantation used to enchant the glowing rock, at sixty decibels, when a person touches it."
She goes over her diagram, her incantation, and her setup again several times before concluding that she definitely wasn't doing anything new. The only change was that she was combining effects. Possibly anything that counts as multiple effects is impossible, but given that she can make one spell do all of "detect if someone is touching an object", "detect if the person touching the object says a specific word", and "make the object and the person touching it and everything they pick up turn invisible", that doesn't seem too likely.
Eventually, she concludes that it seems worth the risk of throwing more power at it. She starts producing, carefully and laboriously, a double-sized version of the diagram with an additional layer of cancellations; it's an open question whether she gets it done and safety-checked by Wednesday.
Well, now she's curious about what happened to the paper product supply chain. She heads on into the council building, looking around for either Dr. James or the room the meeting is going to be in. She's never actually been in here before and has been looking forward to checking it out.
She can catch the tail end of the paper product supply chain failure analysis ("- in the future you may allow mundane drivers expressing suspicion to examine the shipment to verify that it is not drugs, Mr. Pratt, dismissed") and then she and Dr. James, who has been sitting on a bench with a book by the water fountain, are called in.