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.
"True. But hey, now you can teleport. Which reminds me, I didn't explain the safety features. It brings your clothes and things you're holding, and if your destination is occupied by something other than air it just doesn't go. It doesn't stop you from appearing in midair, since we both have wings and appearing well off the ground is a good way to avoid obstacles."
"If you're fully supporting it instead of part of it touching the ground or a table or something. Shoes work fine though, they count as clothes."
"Basically, yeah. If you expect to need to move a lot of cargo I can work on a version two that will bring any container your hand is touching and its contents, or something."
Nod. "I don't think I'm leaving anything out . . . Oh, do you want the latitude and longitude of the empty side of my garage, as a convenient out-of-the-way location in Seattle? You can overwrite it if you end up needing twenty non-Seattle locations."
So Margaret walks Bella through adding the coordinates as one of the keywords on her necklace. "Alright, I think that's everything before I head home and get back to work on the medallions?"
"Thanks. I'll text you my cell number when I have one." And with a muttered "teleport home", off she goes.
The promised text arrives a couple days later.
I am now living in the 21st century, if you ignore the ancient Arabic. How's the necklace working out?
I haven't yet structured my life to require much teleportation but it does save on commute time.
That's good. Now, what happens if she tries that scan-alter-print thing? She draws a glow diagram with an extra rune in the bottom layer, scans it, shreds the original since it's improperly cancelled, and prints a new one with the extra rune cropped out. Is it usable?
What if she painstakingly assembles the runes one line at a time in MS Paint, and prints that?
Her next text to Bella reads:
Hi. Turns out printing diagrams, edited or drawn in MS Paint, doesn't work. Also there are weird things going on in the medallion incants.
First one I've known about for a while: I got four diagrams off the medallion and seven incantations. I think I know which diagrams go with more than one, but things enchanted with photocopies of the same one show up as two.
If a smaller or simpler diagram can be used to recharge a bigger or more complicated one, it would save me so much effort. Maybe I'll try that next.
It would also be cool if a big complicated diagram could recharge itself at the same time as another diagram though.