Quiche, fresh bread with a topping assortment, and lime bars!

Oooh. She'll get the bread with tomatoes and mozzarella and balsamic on it, and a lime bar, and head on home to read . . . actually, she still has the first volume of Natural Magic, she should take a look at that before she has to give it back.

Nixie and nokk "essence" (saliva) can temporarily give other beings gills! Nokks (but not nixies) go crazy at around age fifty. They can switch between legs and tails naturally (but still don't look human in leg form). They are sexually dimorphic, here are illustrations!

Oh no, the poor Nokks! Does it have anything on natural dragon magic?

Not in this volume, at least!

Well, there are four more still in the library. She reads a few more articles and then switches to Aftermath.

Things were tense between griffins (largely partisans of the sphinxes) and other, less partisan species after the war was over. While some griffin families had remained neutral, and a few griffins had even turned spy for the dragons, the effects on the reputation of the griffin species lingered for many years. Dragons had fewer species-wide allies than sphinxes, but still drew on the support of many monsters and sometimes harnessed cryptids (things like Nessie, though not her specifically) in the war. Some cryptids were destroyed afterwards by vengeful remnants of the sphinx side.

A few families and individuals attempted to continue to prosecute the war even after its principals were all dead, to enrich themselves or salvage some glory; they were not appreciated for this in their own time. Most people wanted to leave the dragons and sphinxes both buried and out of everybody's way.

She sort of can't blame them. And nobody has any clue why the war started in the first place, do they?

It is generally believed to be something to do with medallions, although it's unclear exactly what, since dragons possessed and used medallions throughout the war.

Well, that sort of suggests that if dragons return to society having successfully reverse-engineered medallions, it should help. But that's a sufficiently ambitious project that she should probably work on de-aging first. In the shorter term, what happens if she uses the informal "you" when ordering the magic to chill some water, instead of the formal?

It does not care.

How about if she rephrases it to the French version of "I insist that this water be cooled immediately"?

That makes it colder than the one that specifies five degrees.

Not much colder, though, or it would freeze. Still, interesting.

She's running low on experiment ideas; she looks at the healing diagram. What are the main meanings, and what are their proportions?

This one's much more complicated. The main meanings of the first layer of runes are "intact", "reverse", "life", "control", and "protection"; the "life" rune chosen has a secondary of "intact" and the "protection" rune chosen has a tertiary of "reverse", which makes for mildly less disastrous cancellation layers. A footnote helpfully explains that reverse runes are dangerous because they leave a lot up to interpretation, so the incantation has to be very good.

And of course it doesn't say anything new about what makes an incantation good, does it. If she calculates out all the cancellations (and then waits a couple days and does it again), are there nontrivial amounts of anything other than those five present?

Nope, everything else has been whittled down small.

Margaret is not going to try this on herself or anything she cares about the first several dozen times; she's going to catch a worm. With that in mind, she starts on a couple different incantation wordings, hates all of them, starts a couple more, then goes to the library on her way to the next DnD session to see if anything there has anything on incantation design.

Nope, not unless she wants Entre Amis from the foreign language section.

If nothing else it will be good French practice. She returns Natural Magic and Aftermath, checks it out, and heads to game.

They are distracted from cultists by landgoing privateers, intent on taking all their stuff for the benefit of a duchy that they've stumbled into.

Landgoing privateers are not nearly as cool as seafaring privateers, and even if they were they're still not getting any of the party's stuff. Or anybody else in the caravan's stuff, for that matter.

The landgoing privateers do have magical motorcycle equivalents but this may still not be as exciting as maritime combat. They are thwarted.

Magical motorcycles are pretty cool, but they don't give you an excuse to say 'Avast!' or 'Hard a-starboard!' so they are indeed less cool than maritime combat. Back to investigating cultists, unless their thwarting of the privateers left any loose ends that need dealing with first.

Well, the cultists' trail leads into that duchy and now they aren't allowed in! The caravan leader turns them in to secure passage for his trade goods.