"I can make voice-activated rings of invisibility and make objects hard to damage, at least if they don't have many moving parts. And make things glow, which is mostly just good for testing, and take enchantments off things without damaging them." She's not ready to mention the space-warping yet; it's too dangerous and also a messy work in progress.

"What happens with things that have moving parts?"

"I have to specify that they should still be able to move or else it's like I dunked the whole thing in glue and left it overnight. Hinges that won't bend, clasps that won't open, etcetera."

"I guess it might accumulate materials stress if it bent?"

"Potentially that, and also I think some phrasings result in the spell treating any change in arrangement of the parts as damage even if they're all still connected."

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense."

"I have some stuff on what kinds of user input are possible, too . . . I don't seem to have brought my notes on that but a spell for making things emit colored light can match the color of an object or take a hex code but can't do 'the color I'm thinking of'. What I don't get is how it gets the meaning of the hex code if not from my brain."

"Huh! Good question. I'll mull over ways to poke that."

"Maybe one of us can invent a new way to describe some subset of colors and see if the spell starts picking up on it somewhere on the spectrum from 'just in one person's head' to 'written down somewhere' to 'publicly posted'. It'll take specific words like 'purple' versus 'lilac', too, so it doesn't have to be something as complete as RGB." She writes down "new color descriptors" as a reminder for later.

"I wonder if this has any interaction with the native language effect."

"It would make sense if it did but I don't have any predictions beyond 'some type of interaction'. Relatedly, if one of us makes up words for colors we should call those the English words and then make up French or Spanish translations of them, to be on the safe side."

"What makes you think that would help? They're made up either way."

"My intuition is that words made up by an English speaker would count as English, but maybe if I used French spelling and pronunciation rules and etymology and deliberately intended them to be made-up French that would do it?"

"I mean, maybe, but it's not much smaller of a gamble."

"Yeah. Might be better to see if we can figure it out without making up words."

"It makes it so much harder to do science when every experiment could straight up kill you."

"Yeah. And there's so little systematic knowledge-sharing, between the tiny number of people and some of them wanting to hang onto spells as trade secrets, so there are probably experiments getting repeated. Maybe we should publish our notes, if there isn't some secret good reason nobody else does."

"I was thinking of founding a school."

"Someplace where people could work with supervision and actually talk to each other would be pretty great, and I'd want to help, but it sounds like a major time commitment. How are you thinking of handling the logistics?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you look like you're in high school, right? Would this be a one day a week thing, or something you'd do as a full-time job eventually?"

"I was thinking the latter. Charge tuition."

"I haven't given up on eventually having a job I can tell people about, but I guess things could change between now and college."

"I don't particularly see the advantage of having a job I can tell people about. I mean, if it comes up I can say I'm a teacher."

She sighs. "My parents don't know about magic."