The recharged diagram works fine.

She ought to make second ones of the ones that get used twice, so she can go through the whole process and only get them recharged at one point when Bella's already around.

She can't quite bring herself to email Brenda just yet; she wants more assurances. She tries recording the diagrams and incantations off her own medallion, making it very clear in her mind that she does not want anything to happen that alters her medallion in any way.

Her medallion actually has the same person's voice!

The words are almost the same. The diagrams are the same too, maybe identical.

That's pretty cool, that it's the same person. Sort of suggests it wasn't a widespread thing, though, just a couple specialists. She didn't print the diagrams big enough to tell if they're actually identical, but they and the incantations are close enough to be reassuring. She emails Brenda, says she has the finished product and can come by Framingham and watch her try it on if she's still interested. Her schedule is pretty open, because she can teleport now, so any time not during west coast school hours is fine.

You can teleport? That's insanely cool.

Is Tuesday at 4 my time good?

I'll have to sneak out of school on my lunch break, but yeah, I can make it work.

It's not skipping school if you don't actually miss any classes.

I can come up with another time if you don't want to sneak.

I'd rather not, yeah. How about 7 your time, 4 mine?

That works if dinner isn't running late but if it is there'll be a bunch of people around, is that okay? 8 they'll all be gone.

If it works it doesn't matter who's around, but if her bracelet lights up and she has to talk Brenda into giving the medallion back it's better not to have extra people.

Better to wait for 8, I think; I can get my homework out of the way beforehand and not interrupt your dinner.

OK, see you then!

See you!

And on Tuesday at 7:30 she teleports, invisible and winged, to the air above Framingham, lands in an alley near the Avalon entrace, and walks out human. By 8 she should be knocking on Brenda's door.

Brenda answers. "Hi! Wow, I forgot you're so much younger than me that you look noticeably older after being gone for months. How are you?"

"I've been good! Really busy with research and school, but totally worth it. How about you, how have you been? And how's the rest of the group doing?"

"We're on a sci-fi campaign now, picked up a new system. I'm a robot made from parts from a bunch of different civilizations and it makes me glitchy, it's fun. Can I get you something to drink or anything?"

"Ooh, that does sound fun. Water would be nice, thank you."

Brenda slithers into the kitchen and gets her water. "Sanjay's doing this kind of annoying thing where he didn't take the common language so he mostly speaks in gibberish unless his translation software is working and Xavier's having way more fun with that than the rest of us are - he gets notes about what Sanjay means, see - so I'm hoping he has some payoff planned because in the meantime it's a waste of time." Water.

"Heh. Yeah, that's the sort of thing that sounds on paper like an interesting way to handicap your character, and then you go to actually do it and realize it's kind of terrible."

She takes a sip of her water, and pulls the medallion and its chain out of her pocket. "Thanks. So, where do you want to do this?"

"Is there a reason here's not good?"

"Nope, here's fine. One quick warning: if my bracelet lights up, that means there's something magic going on that doesn't match what my medallion is doing, so if that happens you should probably take it off in case it turns out to be something bad. With that said, go ahead and put it on." She's twisting one of her rings around and around, but her face is calm.

"...Okay." She puts it on.

Margaret smiles when her bracelet doesn't light up. "Okay, now try to think yourself human-shaped. Sort of visualize what you want to look like and try to--mentally squash your shape into a human shape? It took me a bit to figure out, it might take you longer since you don't have a point of reference."

"It goes off what I want?"

"I think so? I haven't actually researched what this is like for people born in critter shape, maybe we should get on your computer and look for tips if it isn't obvious." Margaret is fidgeting with her teleport ring even more now, worrying that maybe her first test should have been on a species that already had medallions.

"That's a good idea, I think there's a site about that somewhere." Brenda slithers to her computer.