"Why haven't you tried the shield?"

"Too much else going on--I'm getting some commercial applications out of invisibility and doing a bunch of research on the space-warping--plus I don't know as much as I'd like about what's meant by shield. What things have you tried?"

"I've got an invisibility diagram but I made it myself, I'll be interested to compare against yours."

"Ooh, definitely! Do you have yours on you? I've got a copy of mine in my bag." (She left the house this morning with a lot of paper and a heart full of hope.)

"I can give you a used one if you like." Rummage rummage.

Rummage rummage here's a used one of her own.

Swap. Bella's is a three hole punched paper - looks like a photocopy with blue pen over it.

"Oh, you've been tracing photocopies? That's clever. I've been doing clay stamps and paint."

"Your way's probably faster but I'd be worried about missing an inkblot or something."

Nod. "Yeah. It gets easier to do them cleanly with practice, but checking for inkblots is definitely the slowest step in the process. I guess if the photocopier gives you stray marks you can just not trace them."

"Yeah. And it usually doesn't, I always copy from the original."

"Maybe I'll try a few your way once I find out which of the libraries I can get to has a copier."

She starts looking over Bella's invisibility diagram. Are the top runes the same "sight" and "forbiddance" as hers? Even if they are, it would be a surprise if they didn't start diverging immediately after that, there are so many ways to cancel a given meaning.

She's using a different forbiddance rune but the same sight rune.

Huh. "What duration do you get out of this one? I use mine for invisibility artifacts, and I'm worried they'll wear out after some number of months or years of use."

"It'll do 23 minutes on a straight cast but I haven't gotten into enchanting objects, can you teach me to do that?"

"I get 27 minutes, but I don't know how that affects the artifact version, those definitely work longer than that. On the teaching . . . tentative yes? Like, I've managed not to get hurt so far, and I can go through my notes and tell you that certain things worked, but I can't say I'm not only alive by luck, you know?"

"And I'll want to retranslate it into Spanish and everything, yeah, but, dignity of risk."

"Yeah. Working together is unlikely to be worse than working separately. If nothing else, having a healing spell and a second person around to cast it is better than not that."

"And we can double check each other, fresh eyes."

"Yeah, definitely. We should swap emails and pick a time to meet up somewhere if we're going to try anything, but in the meantime we can compare notes some more." Margaret's burger and fries are getting cold.

Bella writes her email address down and passes it over.

Margaret does likewise. "What have you been working on besides invisibility?"

"I've been frontloading a lot of time into a spreadsheet that can pick runes and rune sizes for me."

"That sounds useful! I've made a couple diagrams myself, but I've mostly been working with the same few and focusing on incantation design."

"How far has that gotten you?"