"Certainly." He goes away and comes back a minute later with separate checks. Apparently there are enough bills in the wallet to cover the fajitas.

Now that her parents can know she has money she has managed to acquire a debit card, and pays with that.

"This was nice," he says cheerfully. "I'll - see you around?"

"If you get sick again, you've got my email." And head towards the door before the awkwardness she just created can catch up with her.

He does not pursue her. She is free.

She heads home, pursued only by her own sense of awkwardness and the worry that possibly all boys are that boring.

When she gets there, she has a spell to test! Her incantation is "Reproduce at the original volume the last six seconds of sound in this room before now." She only has two copies of the diagram in the room; on the off chance that magically played-back incantations work when mechanically recorded ones don't, she wants to find that out and doesn't want to chain-reaction her way through a pile of wasted copying effort.

This spell does not work and expends the diagram.

Argh. Is the problem with "this room" or with the timing? She falls back to "Produce the sound of a ringing bell, at a volume of 60 decibels".

This works flawlessly.

"People touching objects" is a conditional the magic seems to reliably get; she puts a rock (not enchanted) on top of the next diagram, leaves a hand on it, and says "banana pancakes". Then she tries the incantation "Reproduce at the same volume the last words spoken by a person touching this rock." If this doesn't work because the magic doesn't know what speech is, there's still a chance it will know what an incantation is, but she has a reasonable amount of hope this way will work too.

Doesn't work, does expend the diagram.

That's annoying. Also, she's going to have to find a way to present her eventual results to Bella in a way that will make her uninterested in trying other things with illusion sound, without explaining that she knows what things are dangerous.

"Produce an illusory voice saying "banana pancakes", at sixty decibels."

This works. It copies her voice.

She's not at all surprised by the fact that it copies her voice, but is a little bit surprised by how her voice sounds from outside her head.

Possibly the limitations of this spell in making any indirectly specified sound is because she didn't put "knowledge" in there. But since she's been getting such polite failures, before she goes and does a whole second diagram, she's going to do one more test. She puts a glowing rock (a blue one, as it happens) on the diagram, reviews her wording notes a few more times, and says "Produce an illusory voice saying the most recent incantation used to enchant this rock, at sixty decibels."

It recites the incantation in her voice.

Yessss, payoff! Possibly payoff that a non-dragon researcher would have died without getting, but instead the researcher is her and she's fine.

Margaret's going to need an audio recording setup before it'll be worth it to start in on the Tikbalang medallion, since the odds they were speaking anything she can memorize on one playback are very slim. Furthermore, all that translating, plus the occasional hours she spends doing things that aren't magic, have taken her all the way to pretty late Sunday evening. Margaret sets some music-mixing software to downloading on her laptop and watches the progress bar from her bed in her dragon fullform for a while, then turns into a human and goes to sleep.

The next morning is her meeting at the doctor's office! She brings her healing rock, her notes on it and its predecessor, and a couple copies of the latest version of the diagram, on the off chance the doctor wants to look at it.

The doctor glances at it but clearly doesn't understand any of it. "What's the procedure for using this?"

"Just have the person touch it and it does its thing. It should work on all types of critters and also regular humans, and touching it and letting go a few times might do more than just touching it once but I haven't done enough tests to be sure."

"Anything it's contraindicated for?"

"I've never seen it make anything worse and I'd be very surprised if it did, but it's unlikely to help much if at all with mental problems and it can't regrow missing parts, like if someone's lost a leg it just won't affect that."

"Mm-hm. But it doesn't care about viral versus bacterial, anything like that?"

"Nope. Viral, bacterial, cuts and sprains, haven't tried allergies but it should at least do some symptom relief even if it can't fix the underlying problem."

"What's the exact nature of the deal you're offering with this rock?"

"I'm thinking a monthly fee and also you tell me whatever you find out about what it does and doesn't work on, so I can make ones that work more broadly or handle things this one can't."

"Are you offering this to anyone else?"