Fair enough. Just wanted to make sure we weren't about to duplicate work.

She tries the reverse-engineering spell again, this time with "the diagram" instead of "the runes". She's pretty amused that she's been working with runes and diagrams and French all this time and only today learned the French word for "diagram".

This spell singes the diagram into the paper she's working on, actual size.

Awesome! Now, she doesn't think magic is going to make the same sort of mistakes a person might, but it still pays to he careful in this business. She goes over the singed diagram like it's one of her own, double-checking positioning and sizes with a ruler. She also puts the original and the singed one on top of each other and holds them up to the light, wondering if they're even more identical than two of the same diagram usually are.

They are!

Then it's time to find out if what she has is a fresh diagram, or the equivalent of a photocopy. Can she enchant a new rock with it?

Nope.

Then it's only a free photocopier that fits in a desk drawer and never adds phantom lines, rather than the secret to mass-producing diagrams, but that's still very cool. 

I've got the spell copying diagrams now! As a bonus, I can trace the copies instead of needing to go find a photocopier. 

I really want to put my medallion on it, but I'm scared it will mess up the medallion somehow even though the rock I tested it on is fine.

If you have a few grand you can buy one and then you can sell it back if you want.

I'll see if the magic shop guy takes PayPal. Also he might still be too annoyed at me to sell me something and then buy it back, but the possibility of a step towards reinventing medallions is worth risking a few grand. 

He's probably not enough of a jerk not to buy back a medallion at all but he might not give you full price for it.

That would be pretty fair, I think, since he can't prove what I did with it. I suppose I could bring the diagram, offer to do it there and sell it back without it ever leaving his sight.

He won't be able to tell if it still works without getting it to attune to someone.

Yeah, thus the not expecting full price. I'll pick one of the kinds there are relatively many of, of course. And maybe test it on something more complicated than a glowing rock first.

There aren't many myrmidon medallions but I think there are even fewer myrmidons, check if he has one of those.

Thanks for the tip. What's a Myrmidon? I haven't heard of those.

That's because there aren't many of them. They're ant people and they lost most of their queens to disease a couple hundred years back.

I'm sorry to hear it. There are so many kinds of people, though, wow. I wonder how critters evolved. Or even if we did, maybe we started out as shapeshifted humans and it ended up hereditary somehow.

A guess I've heard is that turning into a critter is one of the more survivable kinds of magical accidents you can have.

That sounds like an overly complex thing to have happen on accident, especially if you were trying for something unrelated.

I don't know that I buy it, but you could have some things happen if you were trying to curse other people with animal transformation?

Yeah, I guess that would be a plausible way for it to go. But if it is, the sheer number of critter species means people used to incompetently curse each other with animal transformation a lot. Maybe they did, for all I know.

Some of the changes since then could have other causes, like all the varieties of griffins and stuff.

True. All the varieties of griffins almost seem like they could have evolved normally, except it would have had to be weirdly fast.

And some things could have been deliberate. Like a lion critter going "I want to be Superlion".

Yeah. I can definitely see why people would want to become a critter, or a different kind of critter, on purpose.