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.
"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.
Yeah. Anything that can help mass-produce medallions is worth a try.
The other weird thing is in the last incantation. It refers to "the healing magic currently being done to the medallion", says that magic should be redone in various circumstances.
Yeah, maybe this will need to be a team effort. I'll look up which species can do healing.
Margaret doesn't go to the library immediately. Nor does she start in on diagram recharging. Before she does any more runecasting, she's going to get a better understanding of her dragon powers. She makes a largeish light+control diagram, puts a rock on it, and incants, "Cause this rock to glow red for three seconds, and then to glow red for three seconds every time the person touching it does any magic other than by saying an incantation and using a diagram."
Maybe using her medallion to pass for human counts as using magic, rather than the medallion doing magic to her. Maybe touching the detection rock counts as using magic. She can test the first one by going fullform in her bedroom and taking her medallion off for a minute.
At least it isn't recursive. Still, dragon fullform is not the most convenient for doing science. She disenchants the rock and tries again: "Cause this rock to glow red for three seconds, and then to glow red for three seconds every time the person touching it does any magic other than by saying an incantation and using a diagram or by using a medallion."
And if she enchants a different rock to glow and then disenchants it, that doesn't set the detector off either, right?