Suppose we should worry about teaching licenses and all that jazz?

We should make sure not to do anything illegal since we want to come clean to the humans eventually, but I'm pretty sure you don't need a license to teach people things if you aren't tied into an official diploma program. Maybe if people refuse to learn from us without them?

I think that might depend on how old the people you teach are.

I wish I could ask my mom, she was a kindergarten teacher.

It can't be illegal to teach your friends to knit, right, and magic is presumably less regulated than that, but maybe it's illegal to take money for it or something.

While she's waiting for Bella to text back, Margaret flips through her rune dictionary, looking idly for meanings that might be relevant to aging and death beyond what she used in the healing spell.

It might be illegal to teach a bunch of kids to knit in a formal setting. We could almost certainly avoid this if we just took college students but it's probably not worth as much thought as I'm giving it anyway.

She'll probably just use the healing diagram with a different incantation, then. 

I suppose it depends on how likely anyone is to respond to "magic exists" with "I want to find some way to seriously inconvenience you".

rich person on the phone ttyl

That's the coolest end to a text conversation she's ever experienced, and anyway, she has magic science to do. She starts in on a tiny version of the glowing diagram, realizes it got really late while she was texting, and puts her pencil and magnifying glass aside until the next day.

When she finishes it, she takes an unenchanted rock and a deep breath, holds her dragon magic detector where she can see it, and says in plain English, "Make this rock glow blue; make it emit light without heat."

Pleasantly blue glowing rock. Dragon magic detector goes YIKES.

Well, if she's ever in an emergency with a shortage of both paper and vocabulary words she can still do magic without either harming herself or suppressing it completely, but yikes all the same.

Now it's time to start in on de-aging for real. She orders a batch of tadpoles from a science class supply catalog and checks her web store for any more orders or questions.

She has plenty of orders for medallions and her other offerings accumulated.

Medallions and other things go in the mail, with little cards asking people to leave reviews about anything they liked or didn't like. More medallions get prepped, replacements for the sold ones and a couple more monster species she's had requested.

She sends Bella:

Medallion orders have been picking up a bit. When would be a good time for you to come over and make the next batch?

Also, I tried an English incantation with a tiny diagram; it worked like a full-sized diagram and a French incantation but required dragon magic to come out that way.

Wow. Is there anything we need to just crazily overcast?

I can come over Saturday morning.

Now that you mention it I am tempted to crazily overcast a heal on myself but I think it would be a better idea not to do that. Saturday morning works great!

And then it's just a matter of making healing diagrams and waiting to see which of the tadpoles or Saturday morning arrives first.

A crazily overcast heal seems like the kind of thing that leaves you with six kinds of cancer or a tail or two heads or something.

Yeah, hence the not doing it. And even if I did I would try it on a bug or something first.

Once the tadpoles arrive (twenty of them, and a little plastic setup with fake rocks) the first thing she needs to do is make it possible to tell them apart. Each one gets separately enchanted to glow a different color when poked, and she assembles a file with the hex color codes, a picture of each one glowing, and a space to write each incantation she tries and whether she ended up suppressing it.

Now she has lots of tadpoles who start glowing when she taps them.

Tadpole number one gets put in a little cup of water on a healing diagram, and chanted at in French. "Stop this organism from aging, physically and mentally, without interfering with learning or memory." It's going to be tricky to test the functionality of that last clause, tadpoles not being very bright at the best of times, but once she has something that goes through at all and prevents turning into a frog she can escalate to a mouse or something.

The tadpole does not react to this.

Well that's good, but what about her ring? Generally speaking her magic suppression is usually all-or-nothing when she doesn't have a specific thing for it to do in mind.

It doesn't suppress anything!

Awesome. The other nineteen get different versions of the incantation. Some of them get phrasing about preventing age-related degeneration specifically, rather than aging in general; some get phrasings about it being impossible for them to die of old age; some of them get more or less detailed specifications of how it shouldn't interfere with their minds. Two are left alone (except for the glowing) as a control group. Each one gets a line in her notebook with the phrasing and whether she suppressed anything. She starts a protocol of shining a bright light on whatever part of their enclosure she's about to put their food in a couple seconds before she does it; if the controls learn to anticipate the food and go there she'll have preliminary evidence of which if any incantations mess up the ability for the brain to change over time in non-aging ways.

They do not learn this very quickly, at any rate.

Come on, little guys, wherever the light is there's about to be food there, it's not hard. She takes pictures of each tadpole each day to track which ones are growing and how fast. Since she uses the camera she already has, she ends up with a big grid of tadpole Polaroids.

The tadpoles do not learn anything in the next week.