Awesome. What are you thinking of working on once the spreadsheet is done? Healing?

I might spend a while generating more runes first but yeah probably.

Sounds good. I'm going to start working on a diagram to see what runes went into enchanting an object; if it works it will be useful for reverse engineering medallions.

That does sound really useful. Is this your first independently drawn diagram? I can go over it for you when you have a draft if you want.

I have a couple others--durability, making things glow, and a disenchantment one so I can experiment without accumulating random magic garbage--but this will definitely be the most complicated one I've done yet. I would love a second pair of eyes on the draft, thanks.

She starts looking through her recently-expanded dictionary. Are there any runes whose meanings include "runes" or "magic" or "the past"?

Nope!!!

Annoying but not surprising. How about "writing" or "shape" or "line" or "paper" or "ink" or anything in that general area?

"Shape" exists.

She starts a diagram with the main meanings of "control", "sight", and "shape", and lets it eat her work time for the next several days. During the breaks between rounds of checking, she works on translating "Make the diagram used to enchant this rock appear on this piece of paper." She'll probably get the email with the spreadsheet before she feels comfortable with the diagram.

Here's the spreadsheet! It has all the runes named and all their meanings and amounts listed and there's a place where you can plug in the meanings you want at what ratios and get suggested runes and sizes for every layer.

Nifty! She tries it with "control", "sight", and "shape", and compares what it spits out to what she has so far.

Its advice is different from what she made up, but it does pick the same control rune for the top level.

When she does all the math for all the layers, how small does it get the extra meanings and how complicated is the resulting diagram?

It gets them down well under tolerances and she'd still be pretty safe if she left off the last layer. It has more runes than hers on the second layer but fewer on the third.

She very carefully draws it up (leaving the last layer in), waits 24 hours, checks her line work, and emails Bella:

Your spreadsheet is a major time-saver! Here's a scan of what it gave me for a first attempt at a reverse-engineering spell, and its cancellation math looks good. Do you see any problems with the line work?

P.S. Whether or not this works to reveal the runes that went into an object, it might also be able to copy runes off a diagram. Which is either a photocopier I don't have to go to a library for, or an end to inking stamps and tracing printouts.

Your line work looks fine, but I would have expected the knowledge meaning in there? What's your plan for an incantation?

Knowledge is a good one to add, since I guess it's more of an information transfer spell than a straightforward illusion. I'll do another draft with it in there.

Incantation is going to be based on "Make the diagram used to enchant this [object] appear in ink on this piece of paper." I might end up needing to work in illusory light or something instead, but I figure if magic can materialize flesh into a wound it can probably materialize ink onto a paper.

Ink might be above this diagram's pay grade; I don't know if I've heard of a spell doing outright matter creation, actually, have you? Like, did you ever get a healing spell to regenerate an entire arm? Were you testing them with your subjects on a scale?

No to all of the above, and in fact missing chunks explicitly don't grow back. Maybe what looked like growth was actually running the animal's natural healing process really fast. Color changes might be a better bet; question is whether it's worth making separate diagrams to test color changes and matter creation on their own first.

Isn't testing something we have reason to believe the system actually can't do really dangerous??

Healing a cat with a missing leg didn't have any negative effects even though I didn't specifically exempt the leg. Maybe I should come up with a test that will be like that, where it can still do something even if matter creation is impossible. Or I can skip it and do color changes, that seems exceedingly unlikely not to work when I can do arbitrary colored light.

Yeah, I'd leave the fallback if matter creation is a bust. Color changes would also do fine for your original project here if you decide not to get sidetracked.

If magic can create matter, that's really important, but reverse-engineering medallions is also important, and easier to deploy than most of the applications for matter creation. I'll stick to color changes.

She generates a new set of runes off the spreadsheet, this time including the "knowledge" meaning, and "color" if that's available.

As long as we can transmute matter I'm not sure it's that important to generate it. There's lots of matter no one cares about.

It's important to know whether or not magic actually breaks the laws of thermodynamics or just looks like it, but even if matter creation definitely worked that wouldn't prove it wasn't just pulling the matter from outer space somewhere.

Back to carefully copying and arranging runes. The spreadsheet really helps, but there's still plenty that needs doing by hand. Maybe with a nice CAD program she could write a script that does all the rune positioning and line-drawing automatically; then it would just be double-check, print, and trace.