It's a combination of both. I wouldn't know how to give an insect brain damage, or how to tell if I'd succeeded.

There are probably animals missing a sense due to brain damage, if you could get ahold of one and check if they could see afterward.

My mom's a vet, she might be able to find one. I could tell my parents about magic and deal with their freaking out, I guess. The question is whether it's worth delaying my appointment with this person for.

Probably not, if the grandma dies it doesn't matter any more and you can go back if she's hanging on when you have another draft.

Yeah. Better to try and fail and know it doesn't work than for her to die before I can try it.

Agreed. Good luck.

Thanks.

At the time they agreed on, Margaret is waiting outside the hospice facility. She's exchanged pictures with the grandchild, so they should recognize each other alright.

Grandchild shows her to his grandma, who is unconscious as all get out.

If nobody is in the room but the kid and his grandma, she pulls the healing rock out of her pocket and presses it to the back of the grandma's hand where it rests on the bedsheet.

Grandma looks maybe slightly improved. An IV mark on her arm disappears. She doesn't wake up.

Margaret remembers that multiple attempts sometimes help, and picks the rock up and puts it down a couple times. Then she looks sadly at the kid, and murmurs, "I don't know how much that helped. I hope it helped some. I can leave now if you want."

"If you can't just - keep doing it or whatever, I guess I'd rather not explain you to the nurses," he sighs.

"I think I've done all I can for now. If I find a way to do more I'll let you know?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

She heads home and emails Bella.

Whatever it did didn't wake her up, so if it helped with the brain damage any I didn't see it. How's the spreadsheet update coming? If it's almost done I should start pulling diagrams off the Tikbalang medallion.

It's almost done, yeah.

Awesome.

She reviews the version of the wording that ended up working, and pulls the first spell ever cast on the Tikbalang medallion.

There it is!

It's fucking huge! Her desk, part of the adjacent wall, and some floor are covered as the diagram burns life-sized onto the paper and every contiguous surface.

. . . 

. . . 

. . .

"Damn!"

Alright, fine, she's telling her parents, she's not going to secretly recarpet her bedroom, this is just stupid.

She takes a rock and a glow diagram and goes downstairs to where they're working at the dining room table. "Mom, Dad, magic is real. Watch this."

They're shocked at first, then kind of excited, then annoyed about the wall and the carpet, then mollified when she promises to pay for the repairs out of the money she's earned doing magic. Neither of them seems interested in doing any runecasting themselves, so she doesn't go into too much detail about the dangers beyond mentioning that she takes a lot of safety precautions but didn't take enough this time and will definitely be more responsible in the future. She doesn't mention secretly having been a dragon the whole time either; it just doesn't seem on-topic. Bringing up her use for a brain-damaged cat can also wait until they're in a somewhat calmer mood. 

Spreadsheet's in her inbox the next day, but the giant diagram is kind of weirdly unfolded onto the topology of desk, wall, and floor, and it's hard to read like that.

She tries again, with the incantation now including "resized so that the proportions are unchanged and the diagram fits entirely on the paper". The paper in question is a three foot square sheet from the craft store, spread out on the floor of the garage to which she has migrated now that minimizing mess is more of a concern than secrecy. (The car has been safely evacuated to the driveway.)

The diagram fits entirely on the paper now and is much more legible. The main meanings are shape, change, and metal.

Metal is the big surprise there. Is there a second diagram? She has three more of these sheets before she has to go to the art store again.

There is a second diagram. This one's main runes have control, reverse, shape, size, and change as their biggest meanings, once deciphered, but some of the runes are ones she doesn't know and she has to do some tedious backformations with the rune derivation procedure (similar to what one would do to find out secondary meanings of a newly derived rune only one meaning from which is known) to figure that out. Some of the layers of cancellation on this diagram are so tiny they can't be made out at all at this scale. The original diagram must have been room-sized.