She can tell that walking the line between not phoning it in and not getting too invested is going to be a bit of a pain, but she had fun anyway. She packs up to go home.

Brenda hugs her again.

Hugs continue to be pretty great.

Her project of figuring out how to durable-ize a jewelry box continues. She glues a bit of cardboard to each side of a hinge, and enchants it with "Make every part of this object strong against damage; let nothing break or separate the parts." (French has too many words for "break", but she's pretty sure she got the right one.)

Rigid, will not hinge.

Disenchant, ponder, rewrite, ponder, "Let nothing damage this object enough to break an enchantment upon it."

Now it hinges.

And is the cardboard rippable, either "in two" or "off the metal part"?

Nope!

And if she can't get scratch the hinge or pull the pin out with a pair of pliers either, then this version is sufficient. . . . And is really what she should have been doing from day 1, wow. Specify what you want, not something approximately related, Margaret.

If she buys that jewelry box now, is it likely to arrive before she leaves for Seattle? It might be better to wait and not risk it ending up sitting on a porch in one or the other location.

It will take four to six weeks.

Ugh, best to wait. She can work on bags in the meantime. Not plastic bags, because that sounds like a great way to make oneself very dizzy, but she digs around in her closet and finds a little felt jewelry bag that should work. It takes few false starts and a bunch of French work to come up with "Make the inside of this bag twice as capacious without affecting the outside or the drawstring or the part that opens and closes." She casts it with the drawstring pulled shut.

This works, but whenever the shape of the bag is perturbed from the outside the inside reshapes itself sickeningly.

That's nauseating, and then cool in a way she kind of wants to show to a theoretical physicist, and then too nauseating to mess with anymore. Disenchant, back to drawing board (but she notes down that wording as potentially interesting for later science).

At the metaphorical drawing board: What's nice about boxes? The inside is a consistent and regular shape, so you can stack things neatly in them and know they won't get smushed around much. What's nice about bags? They can be scrunched up when empty or partially full so as not to take up much space, and can distort to fit lots of different shapes of similar volumes. Maybe she can have her cake and eat it too. She considers a bunch of wordings and ends up with another big monologue: "Replace the space inside this bag with a cubical space six inches on a side, connected at the center of one side to the inside of the part of the bag that opens and closes, without affecting the outside of the bag, the drawstring, or the part that opens and closes except for connecting the latter to the new space."

This spell breaks when she opens the bag.

Probably because the connection between the inside and the outside was too "inflexible" and opening the bag pulled on it. Maybe if she doesn't specify quite as hard? "Replace the space inside this bag with a cubical space six inches on a side, without affecting the outside of the bag, the drawstring, or the part that opens and closes except that it will open onto the new space."

This is, she thinks, potentially going to have problems with where on the new space the opening appears any given time she opens the bag even if it otherwise works. But step one is getting the bag to stay bigger on the inside at all.

This bag stays bigger on the inside but the bag is rigid and inflexible when handled, stuck in exactly the same position apart from being able to open as far as that configuration of the rest of the bag allows.

Poke poke how did she even get that result out of a spell with "without affecting the outside of the bag" in the incantation? She tries changing "cubical space six inches on a side" to "a space with twice the total volume", in case the problem is that she can't actually have her cake and eat it too.

This still has the dizzy warping problem from a couple experiments ago but doesn't rigidify the bag.

Honestly that might be okay if you only ever took things out of the bag by feel and didn't look in there, but she'd still rather not sell them like this. At least she's getting a better sense of what incantation features cause what problems. Maybe rigidifying the outside of the bag didn't count as affecting it in the way the spell cared about.

"Replace the space inside this bag with a cubical space six inches on a side, without affecting the outside of the bag, the fabric of the bag, the drawstring, or the part that opens and closes except that it will open onto the new space."

This gets the same rigidity result.

"Replace the space inside this bag with a cubical space six inches on a side, without affecting the size or flexibility of the bag, and also without affecting the drawstring, or the part that opens and closes except that it will open onto the new space."

Most of her time is going to school, incantation work, and gaming in that order, but she still checks every day for new orders of invisibility jewelry and enchants the items as Brenda finishes them.

That incantation just doesn't work at all.

Brenda produces assorted jewelry at an impressive clip. She continues to get orders.

Those, at least, she can enchant reliably; she can also make sure Brenda knows her new address and (when she has it) her moving date. Bags are proving a lot harder. By the time she shows up to the gaming session everybody knows is going to be her last one, she still hasn't gotten a bag she's happy with.

Her character dies in a confrontation with a necromancer and his army of undead. The group went in together on getting a going-away box of cupcakes.

When the zombies get her she flops on the floor dramatically, clutching her throat and giggling.

"Awwwwww, you guys got cupcakes, you are all the best!" Cupcakes for everyone! Sugar makes everything better.