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.
Cool, that gives her enough time to send all the remaining holdouts another round or two of email and also knock on those two house calls' doors again.
"Hi! Remember when you tried that healing magic a few weeks ago? The Council wants some information on how well it worked. Can I ask you a few questions?"
"I didn't realize the Council was going to want one. It isn't mandatory, you can skip any questions you don't want to answer, I just have to ask."
Ah, the magic words. "I definitely don't send you any ads, and if you don't want to answer any questions you don't have to do that either. I'm just trying to find out if the healing had any side effects."
"Alright, goodbye!" Off she goes. Has Bella gotten around to looking over her diagram yet?
Great. Now, can she use it to enchant a rock to, when poked, recite the first incantation used on a different rock?
Fortunately she can afford to experiment, but the first version she tries is "Cause the rock that isn't glowing to produce the sound of the first incantation used to enchant the glowing rock, at sixty decibels, whenever a person touches it."
One could argue that the responsible thing to do would be to immediately swap the glowing rock for the Tikbalang medallion and not do anything weird. One could also argue that the responsible thing to do would be to find out the limitations of her recording. She taps the rock, then taps it again before it's done reciting.
Huh, she had kind of expected it to interrupt itself computer-style, but that's actually nicer. She gets a new glow diagram and checks that the rock isn't any more capable than her mundanely recorded voice of actually enchanting anything itself.
Next test: repeatability. Can she get the same incantation from the same rock recorded identically on multiple other rocks?
She only does it for three total before disenchanting all of them; even duplicating and tracing gets exhausting pretty fast. Once she's established that one enchanted artifact can have its incantations read repeatedly, she swaps in the Tikbalang medallion and gets the first incantation used on it instead. Time for the moment of truth: how utterly alien and unrecognizable is it?
Okay, that's definitely a human language with sounds her mouth is capable of making, which was not guaranteed and deserves appreciation. She also appreciates the precise pronunciation, though that's entirely expected--if she can't get this translated, one possible (terrifying) last resort is to memorize the recording and reproduce it sound-for-sound without knowing what it means. But that's a worry for later. For now, she puts that rock away in a carefully labeled bag and attempts to put the second incantation ever used on the medallion onto a different rock by the same process. There were four diagrams used on it, but she's prepared to find three, or five, or twenty-seven incantations.
Her email to Bella reads:
I got the incantations from the Tikbalang medallion. I can't send you sound files because I still haven't figured out how to get magic sound to cooperate with computers, but I'm going to try to make phonetic transcriptions next and you'll be welcome to look if you're curious. The weird thing is that it had seven incantations and only four diagrams, so either there's some ambiguity in the definition of a spell diagram such that I didn't get all of them, or there's some way to do runecasting other than "one diagram and one incantation at a time". Or something else weird is going on.