"How'd you find out you could do that, anyway?" 

"Honestly I was just coming up with a bunch of things it would be cool if I could do and seeing if I could do them. I figured sphinxes probably had anything making them a superpower of the known world going on besides falling unconscious in enemy territory all the time."

"That still beats my method of 'keep doing bigger and bigger runecasting experiments, get suspicious about the complete lack of negative consequences'."

"That was what you did? Well, I'm glad you turned out to be a dragon, then!"

"I would have stopped escalating if I'd ever had a coughing fit instead of just nothing happening; I got suspicious that it was a dragon thing pretty early. But yeah, there was a reason I never asked why you weren't doing more direct runecasting work." 

"I would have been if I hadn't had this other, safer magic to play with."

"Makes sense. It's good that we found each other, and really awful how sphinxes and dragons ended up fighting when they have such great synergy. . . . Do you know how the war started? None of the books I found had anything."

"No, I don't know what kicked it off, but it seems like dragons and sphinxes both had a sort of client race thing going on with a lot of other critter species, so it got really big instead of a little spat when they started."

"Like World War I but with species instead of tiny countries in the Balkans."

"Kind of, maybe? I don't know a lot about the Balkans. Or World War I for that matter."

Margaret shrugs. "Anyway, thanks for coming over. I'll let you know how the test goes."

"Bye."

Bella teleports out.

Time for some more research! Is there anything in the laws of the Seattle or Framingham Avalons that would forbid giving or selling people homemade medallions?

The legal code is not nearly that comprehensive.

No, obviously not, but there could have been a law against selling magic items without a license, or an overbroad law against fake medallions whose wording also covered functional ones, or something.

She finishes the one she's got, complete with re-using the diagram Bella recharged.

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.