The campaign is pretty standard fare, although they meet because they are all picked up by a band of mixed human and orc slavers rather than happening across each other in a tavern. Brenda is closest to Margaret's age and is helpful, if sometimes in a munchkiny way, with the game; Joseph cracks a lot of jokes; Sanjay keeps being tempted to metagame.

This is pretty fun! If it's like what she remembers it will probably eat the whole evening, but she made sure to have her homework done first.

It does take three and a half hours before the DM calls a halt and says they can pick up same time next week.

Margaret goes home and falls asleep immediately, without even spending some time in fullform first.

The next morning she realizes that all this history-books-and-gaming has been, while useful to her long-term goals, also working as a distraction from something she hadn't fully admitted: she has a pretty good understanding of how incantations work. The next thing she needs to do in her self-study of runecasting is try creating her own diagram.

She decides to start with a spell to cool water, since testing it will be similar to her tests of heating water and there shouldn't be any new risks on top of the existing ones. If the heating-water spell starts with "heat" and "water", this one should start with "cold" and "water". She spends well over ten hours over the course of several days on constructing a first draft of a diagram, cancelling the side effects of side effects of side effects, being careful not to do anything near it that might count as "incanting".

It completely fails to indicate in any way whether or not it is plotting her doom.

If it did, that would be extremely worrying, given that it would be a departure from what she's used to. The next step, according to the textbook, is to leave it alone for a week, so she does that. During that time she goes to DnD again. She gets to the avalon early, though, to swing by the library and renew her textbook and see if there's anything new in the magic section.

Nope!

Then she'll grab the first volume of that Natural Magic encyclopedia, if it's in, and head to DnD.

It's all hers. D&D starts on time! They have escaped the slavers and now must earn money to pay for their passage across the desert.

Her character will help kill the oversized wolf that has been killing the villagers' sheep and collect the bounty on its head.

Then they can negotiate with the caravan boss (Xavier shapeshifts to match different NPCs - he usually has at least one or two animal parts, but he can do different human faces, and different exact animal parts, though his voice stays the same) for passage, and are assigned caravan duties, and that's the end of the session.

What fun! "I liked the different faces for different NPCs," she says to Xavier on the way out.

"Thanks!" he says. "I'm not good at voices, I figure it balances out."

"I never had trouble telling who was who, at any rate. See you next week!"

"You know it!" Xavier grins.

And when it has been a week since she last looked at her water-cooling spell, she pulls it out again. The textbook said to check how it would kill you; does it give any details on how to do that? The obvious first thing is to redo the calculations and see how much of what meanings remain after all the cancellations are done, but there might be some other way to find flaws in a diagram and she should do all of them before starting the second draft.

It suggests checking for flaws in your lines, your rune placement, your math, whether you've placed the runes you meant to place and didn't absentmindedly put in a different one somewhere, your math again, and whether the size of the diagram is right for what you want to do.

The runes are all the ones she wanted. These lines are imperfect and this rune should be a bit to the left. Her math comes out the same as the last time she did it but she's not satisfied with how much light and stone she has left over; she redoes the last three sections and gets it down to something closer to the size of the residuals from the boiling diagram. The size matches the water-boiling diagram, so that's fine--or is it? The effect size goes as the size of the largest rune, and similar effects like two different temperature changes should need similar sizes, right?

The textbook doesn't say how to make your own cooling spell!

Well of course not, but it could stand to say anything about sizing at all. She'll leave it sized like the heating one and leave it alone for a while and rework the cancellations again and again until her largest residual meaning is smaller than the largest residual meaning on the heating one or it's been six weeks, whichever comes first. 

She can get it that way if she tries hard enough and does enough magical stoichiometery.

Magical stoichiometry is fun! She does as much of it as necessary and then some. Checking the precision of her lines and the placement of her runes is less fun, but she does it just as diligently. On the days when she's not looking at it to let it fade from her head so she can catch any mistakes, she comes up with French for "Remove heat from this water; cool it to five degrees Celsius."

She revises her letter to her parents to include information about the war that they ought to know before either of them tries touching her medallion, though she doubts either of them would go for it even without that.

She gets a pot of warm water, and a thermometer, and the diagram, and the letter, all set up neatly on her desk.

She casts a spell of her own design.

The water chills; condensation appears on the cup.

Seeing condensation on a cup does not usually make her feel like the coolest person ever, but this time it does. She starts in on turning the new diagram into a clay stamp like the previous one.

She has the textbook practically memorized by now, and photocopies of all the diagrams in it; she returns it to the library, complete with the slip of paper bearing her name and phone number, before the next DnD night.