This post has the following content warnings:
Margaret in Medallion
+ Show First Post
Total: 3412
Posts Per Page:
Permalink

"And I think I'm about out of excuses to keep talking. Do you want to pick a date for our next meeting or should I just tell you when I have another dozen or two medallions prepped?"

Permalink

"Just let me know, I don't have a day planner on me."

Permalink

"Sounds good. I'll see you in probably a week or two, then!"

Permalink

"Seeya! Have a good one!"

And she waves and goes.

Permalink

And Margaret pushes the new website version with its new listings and its big banner saying "NEW: medallions!" with a link to an explanation, and then goes and coils on her bed in dragon shape and thinks. About Bella and forming a company and Bella and running a magic school (with Bella) and how to go about revealing various species to various other species, and Bella. She comes to a few conclusions, one of them being that she's much too nervous to do anything about the others right now, so instead she goes back online and starts looking at human advice for starting a company in the hope some of it transfers.

Permalink

It's surprisingly difficult to find really actionable advice for starting a company online beyond that there might be reasons to incorporate in Delaware.

Permalink

That's really annoying. Clearly she shouldn't have dropped out of Girl Scouts at age seven. Maybe either the public library or the Avalon library will have something; she'll look into that tomorrow. For now, she can do her homework and trace another set of medallion diagrams and then check her email and see if anyone has noticed her announcement. She's hoping for an order, but braced for either nothing or accusations of fraudulent-ness.

Permalink

She gets an email about whether she means like, medallion medallions, or... something else?

Permalink

Definitely medallion medallions! The listing for a pegasus medallion is a medallion a pegasus can use to turn human. The listing for a naga medallion is a medallion a naga could use to turn human. They look different from the existing ones because she doesn't want to confuse people into thinking she found them instead of making them, but they are otherwise identical as far as she can tell (except for including some previously-neglected species).

Permalink

Questions keep coming in: can she do custom designs? Can she do one for centaurs? How do her medallions determine what people will look like in human form?

Permalink

She can laser your favorite image on one of the blanks she's already got for a small surcharge, or you can wait until she sets up a PO box and then mail in a small object with no moveable parts and get it back medallionified. Centaur ones will very likely be available in the next week or two! Her medallions work the same as the old kind, and in particular if your natural form already has human parts those parts keep looking the same. 

Permalink

How did she do this? Have they been tested? How strict is 'no moving parts', normal medallions have chains. Can she insure against the wrong person touching a medallion in transit?

Permalink

She was able to duplicate the process by which earlier medallions were made (don't try this at home). Chains are fine, but only the thing on the chain will be the actual medallion. Medallions will be shipped very thoroughly packaged with tracking and insurance against loss, but she doesn't have a way of detecting fraud, so she can't insure against the wrong person opening it. 

She adds "lie detector" to her long-term project list, draws a couple more diagrams, and checks her inbox again.

Permalink

Why shouldn't they try this at home? How did she duplicate it? Who were they tested on?

Permalink

They shouldn't try it at home because runecasting is very dangerous, she's not going into detail on her process because it's a trade secret and also if she explains someone might try it at home, she's not giving out information on her test subjects. She compiles a FAQ with the questions she's had so far, in case anyone else has the same ones.

Permalink

They slow down when the FAQ goes up.

Permalink

That is generally the point of FAQs, so, good. And it frees her up to do some more tracing and eventually also her homework. She makes sure to take a break from tracing every thirty minutes to walk around a bit and make sure her brain isn't getting foggy.

Permalink

Some people order medallions.

Permalink

This is both a relief, because it means anybody actually believed her enough to spend money, and scary, because what if something goes wrong and they end up being worse off because of it. She double-checks that the payments went through, puts the medallions in very heavily padded envelopes, triple-checks the shipping addresses, and entrusts them to the critter shipping company with heavy loads of tracking and insurance.

She tells Bella,

Got my first medallion orders! A naga and a griffin, and somebody asked about centaurs so I'm putting a couple of those in the next batch.

 

Permalink
Centaurs are a good use case, they know what they'll look like and stuff.
Permalink

Yeah, somebody asked about that. I should go through my incantation notes and see if I can assemble a sensible account of how the magic generates human appearances. And look up whether relatives who get medallions as adults look related; it might be going by genes somehow.

Permalink
That'd be interesting, though it can't be doing that explicitly.
Permalink

Yeah, this magic does a lot of detail work where we can't see it. Which is better than having to do it all ourselves or incantations would be book-sized, but still. Also now I really want to someone to do the Human Genome Project for critters.

Permalink
Maybe wait for the human project to get the price down, you'd need a lot of samples done.
Permalink

It sounds like the sort of thing that will happen eventually once critters are common knowledge. I've been thinking more about what needs to happen for that, now that medallions are rolling out. We'll want to reveal that neither of us are extinct first.

Total: 3412
Posts Per Page: