Things in her late great-grandmother's attic:

- the good china
- an ancient banjo
- a birdcage, which was not thoroughly cleaned before it was stashed
- some paintings, several framed
- a box of vintage dresses
- quilting supplies
- National Geographics
- a bassinet
- a broken printer
- a jewelry box
- lamps
- 48 jigsaw puzzles
- books
- books of banjo music
- a broken rocking chair
- a music box with a spinning ballerina

Keep, donate, garbage, keep except for this hideous abstract one that gets donated unless her mother's really attached, keep unless the historical society wants them, donate, donate, donate, set aside to see if she can fix it, look through further, keep these two lamps and donate the rest, keep, prune for duplicates with existing library, donate alongside the banjo, garbage, donate.

Sorting the books should wait until there's a bit more clear floor space; she'll go through the jewelry box while she waits for her mother to get back from the previous donation run.

It's a jumble. Bracelets and rings and necklaces tangled with brooches and earrings and scarves.

Untangling piles of tangled things is the best fidget. She starts picking items out of the morass one at a time and laying them out, matching up pairs of earrings and folding the scarves.

This one must have a sticking-out wire; it stings briefly when she touches it.

Also now she's a dragon.

!!!!

?????

Yup she's a dragon alright! She's scaly and green and doesn't really fit in this teeny attic very well! This is kind of distressing but also kind of the coolest thing to happen in the history of forever. She has wings. She has scales. She has absolutely no room to turn around and really hopes this is a back-and-forth sort of deal rather than a permanent one-off because there are a lot of fragile things in here and she can't even look at the far end of herself.

If it's a back-and-forth sort of deal it's not instantly obvious.

She is not looking forward to explaining this to her mother. Can she even talk with these mouthparts? She tries to say "what is going on" to the otherwise-unoccupied room.

That works fine!

Okay, that's one worry out of the way. She should really get back to trying to turn human again, though. Can she sort of squash herself down into humanness? Can she do it by focusing really hard on what being human-shaped felt like? Where did that thing that poked her right when it happened end up, maybe she needs to poke it again?

There it is, tangled up with a string of pearls and a broken turquoise earring.

It doesn't zap her a second time, but on inspection she can see it's a bronze medallion with a dragon image stamped on one side.

That's certainly suggestive. She gets it onto a clawed forelimb and holds onto it and concentrates again.

With some effort she can get humaner, bit by bit.

Occasionally she loses it and some chunk of her goes dragony again, but she manages to get herself fully human in time for her parents to get back. She doesn't say anything to them yet; she wants to have a bit more clue what's going on before she tries to explain it to anyone else. She ends up with the medallion under her shirt.

If she can manage to stay human for the rest of the day, she tries to find any internet discussion of this sort of phenomenon that night.

She can, if she pays attention.

Casually searching for "I turned into a dragon???" turns up light novels and transformation fetish porn.

She knew she was going to have to dig deep to find any truth under all the fiction. She tries "dragon medallion turned me into a dragon" and "dragon medallion shapeshifting powers" and similar.

This gets more of the same, and on the second page a site called "Medallion" which won't show anything without a password and only shows up because of hidden metadata SEOing for "medallion" among other phrases.

She tries "dragon", "drake", and "wyrm" as the password and examines the medallion for hidden text, both without much hope.

None of those work. If any of these marks are text it's not an alphabet she's seen.

She'll have to try offline. Maybe the school library or the public library will have something suspiciously accurate under "fiction" or "occult". 

When she goes to bed that night, she absent-mindedly pulls the medallion off along with her wristwatch and hair tie, and once she's grabbed it back it takes her another fifteen minutes to get human again so she can sleep. 

The school library does not have anything suspiciously accurate under "fiction" or "occult".

Well, how about the public library? She even looks under "religion and spirituality".

Nope and nope.

This is not a one-off natural phenomenon. One-off natural phenomena don't come with clearly person-made artifacts and secret websites. That means there's a deliberate masquerade. She writes a decidedly mediocre YA short story about a kid with heavily altered demographic details who finds a medallion and turns into a dragon and learns who her real friends are. This gets uploaded to a couple of original fiction sites, from a computer at a public library that isn't the one she normally goes to but which also doesn't have anything suspiciously accurate, just in case. At the bottom is a line saying that if you liked this story, send feedback to this email address (created the previous day for the occasion).

Decidedly mediocre short stories don't get passed around very quickly; no results are forthcoming in the first 24 hours.

She doesn't expect results quickly. If she doesn't make any progress in a month, she'll ask her mom if her grandmother might've had anything weird going on. In the meantime, she practices shapeshifting in her bedroom at night and checks out everyone she sees at school for similar medallions despite the fact that hers is still under her shirt.

Well, plenty of people wear necklaces they keep hidden under their shirts.

Only one of her classmates keeps it on during gym class, though.

Next step: befriend this person until she can tell her weird things without immediately being thought crazy. And also until knows whether she can be trusted not to report her to the secret dragon police or whatever. She sits with that classmate at lunch the next day.

"...hi?" he says. "You're... Margaret, right?"

"Yep! That's me. And you're Kevin?"

"That's me."

"I like meeting new people. I know we're in the same gym class; do we have anything else together?"

"Uh, maybe English?"

"Yeah, that's right, second period with Mrs. Stevens. I'm really enjoying Pride and Prejudice."

"It's better than Gatsby, I guess."

"A lot of things are better than Gatsby."

"Gatsby sucked."

"None of the characters had any clue what they were doing. At least Elizabeth Bennet seems like a functional human most of the time."

"It's still not as good as any book that came out after we were born though."

"Well, I like the old stuff. But what's good and recent? I can always use recommendations."

"I don't really read girl books," he says.

"So recommend me boy books, I read whatever."

Thinking books have genders is weird. But hey, you look for weirdness, you get weirdness. He can have odd taste in books and still be a secret dragon.

He lists a couple mass market thrillers.

"I'll have to check those out. So what-all do you do when you're not stuck in school?"

"I play video games mostly, and sometimes I go rollerblading and stuff."

"Rollerblading sounds fun, but I admit I've never actually tried it and I'm not sure where to start."

"It's not that hard. If you ice skate it's a little like that, I think."

"I've been ice skating once, it was nice except for the cold. And I guess rollerblading doesn't have that problem."

"Yeah, you do it outside. Or in like a rink, which doesn't have to be cold."

"Are they like skateboarding rinks, with obstacles and stuff?"

"No, it's more like ice rinks only not ice. You can rollerblade in a skate park if you want to though."

"Huh. Neat."

"It's hard on your ankles when you're starting out though, you have to get skates that fit to make that less bad."

"Ooh, good to know. Huh, I bet there's all sorts of stuff I don't know like that, and what protective gear I would need and stuff."

"Helmet at least, knee and elbow pads if you're scared," says Kevin.

"I'd be kinda scared, yeah. Sometimes I think everything is like that, with loads of stuff you don't know you don't know going in. Are video games like that?"

"Yeah, but nothing you have to wear knee pads for."

"Yes, I imagine video games are pretty unlikely to get you injured in real life."

"One time a guy I know yanked his controller too hard and hit himself in the face."

Margaret sporfles a bit and puts her hands over her face. "Oh no! Is it bad that I think that must have looked really funny? Was he hurt much?"

"Just a bruise," he says, "but it looked really dumb."

"Well, hopefully he can laugh about it now. What game was he playing that inspired such a movement, anyway?"

"Super Smash Brothers."

"Ah, one I've heard of despite kind of living under a rock when it comes to games. My parents don't hate video games, exactly, but they won't pay for a console and I never saved up for one."

"None of your friends have any?"

"One or two do, but only getting to play when you're visiting someone else's house makes it hard to get into any of the ones with a plot. I've tried Smash Brothers and Dance Dance Revolution, though, those are fun."

"I've only played DDR in arcades, my parents don't want to buy any peripherals that only work for one game."

"Yeah, I can see that. They're pretty expemsive, and finding space for them could get hard even if they weren't."

"Yeah. It's good fun at arcades though."

"It really is. Especially if you get multiple people."

"Yeah." Lunchtime is drawing to a close. He finishes his pudding cup and picks up his tray. "See you around, Margaret."

"See you!"

If the rest of classes go by without incident, she'll head home and try the internet again, because she had a thought. With the medallion on, she can shapeshift; with it off, she's stuck as a dragon. So what if she looks for "medallion that turned me human"?

That same website that wants the password turns up again under some fanfiction and webcomics.

Grr. The next day she keeps an eye out for any more persistent necklace-wearers and sits with Kevin at lunch again.

One of the teachers has a necklace. A girl in her math class. A boy in her art class.

"Hi," says Kevin.

"Who's that?" asks one of Kevin's friends.

"This is Margaret from gym."

"Sure am. I don't think we've met; tell me about yourself?"

"I'm Tom," says Kevin's friend. "I'm Kevin's friend." Tom is not wearing a necklace.

"Good to meet you, Tom." She looks at both of them. "How're your days going?"

"Going okay," says Kevin. Tom nods.

"Cool, cool. I'm thinking of going to the arcade after school today, get some ice cream, play some games. Want to come?"

"Are you asking me out?" says Kevin.

"Nah, not like a date, just hanging out." 

"I guess I could go for like a little while," says Kevin.

"Cool. Got any guesses what we're doing in gym today?" She'll make small talk and eat her lunch for a while.

"I heard it was gonna be running," says Kevin. He too makes small talk and doesn't say even one thing about dragons.

She arranges a meeting spot with Kevin after school. Gym is in fact running; she makes sure her medallion is thoroughly wedged down her gym shirt and wonders if exercising in one of her shapes makes the other one tired. They don't seem to need to eat separately, so there's clearly some sort of interaction.

At the arcade Kevin continues to be pretty dull company. They play DDR. He shows her some other games. He doesn't mention his necklace or anything about dragons.

That's alright; the goal was to get him relatively alone. She lets her medallion fall out of her shirt during DDR.

"Huh," he says when he spots it. "Where'd you get that?"

"I found it in a relative's attic", she says, tucking it back away. "I really like it; I never take it off."

"Can I see?"

"Yeah, okay." She fishes the medallion out again and holds it out, keeping a tight grip on it in case he makes a grab for it for some reason.

He doesn't grab it, but he squints at it, and then some visible but unclear change in his opinion comes over him. "You wanna sell me that? I know a place that'll pay weirdly lots of money for things like that."

And right back into the shirt it goes. "No way. It was my great-grandmother's, it's important to me. I'd actually like to learn more about it, though, none of us know where she got it. So if you know a guy who has more like it, I wouldn't mind talking to him."

"Nah, I don't think so."

"Have you ever seen one like it anywhere? For that matter, can I see your necklace? I noticed it in gym class, I bet it looks pretty neat."

"Mine's a medical alert necklace, it's not interesting."

She sighs. "Listen, we both know more than we're letting on. What if I told you this wasn't just a normal necklace? Because I also have medical reasons for keeping mine on all the time." If he doesn't know what she's talking about he'll conclude that she's nuts, but in that case she doesn't lose more than an already pretty fake acquaintanceship.

He squints at her.

She looks right back at him, trying to project "I know you know". They've been standing motionless on this DDR pad for a couple minutes now.

"Hey, get out of the way," says someone who wants to use the DDR pad. Kevin hops off.

Margaret hops off too and heads for a dark corner near the skee-ball consoles, beckoning Kevin to follow.

Kevin follows her. "Look," he says, "I'm not sure what you're - uh -"

"Show me your necklace. If it's really a medical alert necklace, I'll drop the whole thing and we can forget we ever had this conversation."

"If you really can't take yours off, prove it."

"Watch." She faces the wall so nobody except Kevin can see her left hand, then turns it into a clawed foot and back for a moment, just long enough to know you didn't imagine it if you were already expecting it. Then she stares at his face again.

He splutters for a bit.

Then he says, "Dragons are extinct."

"Stop playing dumb and show me your necklace--wait, 'extinct'?"

"Extinct!" he says, nodding rapidly.

"Extinct but not fake, huh. What on Earth is your deal, then, I had you pegged as another one and you're clearly in on whatever's going on."

"I'm a pegasus, we're not extinct."

"Pegasi exist too? I guess that's not actually much weirder than dragons, but can you prove it the same way I did?"

He looks around suspiciously, then produces a hoof for a second.

"Wow, okay. So there are more than one of us. Do you know any others?"

"Yeah. But not dragons, they're supposed to be extinct."

"Alright. Can you introduce me to some of them? I want to learn more about how . . . all of this . . . works, and there's only so much I can figure out experimenting on myself."

"...but you're supposed to be extinct, people'll freak out."

"Can we tell them I'm a normal person who figured you out somehow, or will that freak them out too?"

"I don't want to get in trouble for telling humans."

"Can I pretend to be something that isn't extinct? And what kind of trouble would you get in, is there a secret Pegasus government or do you just mean your friends would be mad at you?"

"I don't know what else would look enough like a dragon. - there's like a secret nonhuman government, it's not just pegasi. I think the lions or some of the lions have their own thing too."

"Lions . . . are people wearing medallions? I thought they were normal animals? Or do you mean some people turn into dragons and pegasi and stuff and other people turn into animals there are real ones of?"

"They're not like regular lions, there's... bohemian and nemean and.... heraldic? And I dunno if griffins count and there's a lot of kinds of those... and there might be lion totems but they probably would live in Africa..."

"See, there's all this stuff I don't know. Can you just tell me where to find more secret magic people and I won't tell anybody you're the one who told me and you won't tell anybody I'm a dragon? Maybe there are secret magic people websites I could lurk on and then nobody would be able to tell."

"There's websites, yeah. And Avalons."

"Can you give me a website address? And what's an Avalon?"

"An Avalon is like a critter neighborhood, for people who don't have medallions mostly. I forget what it's called exactly, like where the hyphens go, but I think it comes up if you search for it with enough close-enough words?"

"I got one that looked like it might be it earlier but it needed a password to see anything, do you remember a password?"

"Oh, yeah, it's Avalon but the O is a zero and then there's numbers... I think it's eight eight six two six."

She runs over to where she left her backpack next to the DDR machine and grabs a notebook and pen to write this down. "Great, thank you. And where's the nearest Avalon to here?"

"You know the abandoned movie theater? If you go through the alley next to it there's a door that says 'Danger, Electrical Equipment, Authorized Personnel Only', and you knock and prove you know what's actually behind there to the doorman and they let you in."

"That'd be the abandoned movie theater on Washington? Got it." She writes this down too. "Thanks so much. I'll leave your name out of everything until you say it's okay."

"Thanks. Uh, good luck with... not being extinct?"

"I guess so, yeah. Good luck with everything."

"Thanks."

That was stressful enough that she wants that ice cream she'd been talking about, so she picks up her bag and wanders over that way.

The ice cream place is happy to serve her ice cream.

Then home and try to get on that secretive website again as soon as nobody else needs the computer. She really hopes Kevin remembered the password right.

He didn't specify a case, but if she capitalizes "Aval0n" then it works!

This appears to be a hub site pointing to even better-hidden other websites for various species and specific local Avalons.

Oh wow. Oh wow. Notebook time: what do they have for general overview stuff? Is there a page with a comprehensive list of species? Is there a page on what secret magic people scientists have figured out about how it all works?

The website doesn't seem intended as, or have any obvious links to, comprehensive references. If she finds her nearest Avalon on the map, its individual site looks almost like a university website, with event listings and a map and some local news. The species pages mostly want more passwords.

Figures that they'd have a culture of not making lots of information available. Can she at least see what species pages there are to put passwords into? And do any of the events have clues in them, like "flying race: pegasi and phoenixes welcome" or whatever?

There is a long list of species ranging from pegasi and perytons to bugbears and bugganes! The events are not like "flying race", they're more like "council meeting" and "temporary library closure" and "concert" with a list of bands Margaret has never heard of.

Perytons? Bugganes? Maybe her taste running to lit fic over fantasy really is a problem. She pulls up a dictionary of mythological creatures in another tab and starts looking up the species she hasn't heard of. Is anything mentioned sufficiently reptilian that she can show a scaly claw and claim to be that? Because it looks like she's going to have to go to an Avalon in person to get any kind of science books.

There are wyverns. Other than that, pure reptiles are thin on the ground.

And are wyverns the kind with front legs and wings, or the kind with back legs and wings; it wouldn't do to get called out on transforming the wrong appendage.

Back legs, no arms, wings.

She hides in her room and practices turning one foot into a dragon foot and back. She practices saying "I'm a wyvern" and "I like this form a lot better, it's what I'm used to." (The second is a bigger lie than the first; the only thing about her dragon form that isn't awesome is the need to keep it a secret. And the inability to hold a pencil.)

She deletes her mediocre young adult short story; it's more risk than use at this point.

And the following Saturday, she tells her parents she's going to spend the day in the park and goes to the alley next to the abandoned movie theater.

There is indeed a sign that reads:

DANGER
ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

and is locked.

Deep breath. Adjust backpack. Check that nobody's looking. Knock knock?

There is a two minute delay.

Then a guy opens the door a crack and grunts, "Nearest bathroom's in the Walgreens."

"I'm not looking for a bathroom, I'm looking for the Avalon."

"The what?"

"The Avalon. Where the people without medallions live and the people with them go to visit."

"You don't look like an authorized personnel."

"Neither do you, right this minute. Doesn't mean we aren't."

He starts to shut the door again.

She sticks a hand in it. "I know about pegasi and perytons and bugbears and stuff. What more do you want?"

"You don't look like authorized personnel," he says again.

"Ugh, I hate doing this. Look down." Once he's looking: Shoe. Claws. Shoe again.

He opens the door a little farther and lets her in.

She smiles at him as she goes by, but makes sure to get a ways past before she starts gawking like a normal person.

There is some legitimate-looking electrical equipment, and a long narrow stairway lit by flickering fluorescent lights that goes down at least three or four stories, and another door at the bottom.

Past that door, there is a whole little village in a vast open cavern lit with faux sunlight, bright enough to feel warm and real. To her left and right, little rowhouses, duplexes, and small apartment buildings with cramped gardens line narrow cobbled streets clearly intended for pedestrians first and foremost. The stairway lets out onto a main street leading straight ahead; it's a bit broader but not by much, and lined with shops and restaurants and such.

Some of the people walking around look human and wear necklaces. Some of the people walking around are entirely shaped like whatever they really are under that - deer with wings, griffins, multiple variants on "weird creepy horse", satyrs, centaurs. Some people are going around with partial transformations - wings, tails, faces, fur, all changed but leaving them the convenience of hands and bipedalism.

It's good that some of the people look human; means she doesn't look weird for doing the same. She gawks a little bit, then starts walking down the main street looking for the library. As she goes, she tries to observe everything at once. Do the restaurants serve the same kind of food as human restaurants, or are there other kinds of food too? Are there any shops you wouldn't see ones of outside? What does the age distribution look like, are there kids around? 

The restaurants look pretty conventional - diner, pizza, tacos, burgers, buffet, fried chicken, barbecue, French bistro, pancakes place, sub shop, Chinese food, coffeehouse, pub, bakery, sushi, steakhouse, a little mom&pop that seems to serve only specials and have no regular menu. Conventional except the buffet serves bugs and the French one has a weird amount of tartare variations on its menu, and the specials at the place with the chalkboard include "Grass Salad" in between "Turkey Breast with Rice Pilaf" and "Lentil Soup". The proportion of restaurants to houses is weird; one could get the impression that most people who live here eat out for every meal.

The shops mostly look pretty normal, though she can spot some oddities - the hardware store advertises a farrier, the haircut place is having a sale on full fur coat grooming.

There are kids - almost all miniature creatures up until about sixth grade age; at that age some of them look human.

The restaurants look tasty; she'll probably get lunch here today. The tiny critter kids are adorable, even though growing up without the ability to turn human has to kind of suck.

They don't seem to mind.

There's enough clearance in the Avalon for flying creatures, especially kids, to take off, but not to do much; there's enough space to get over the typical building, but the place is indoors, and there's not much wind, updraft, or headroom. Being a flying creature in here is a little like being a bird stuck in a grocery store.

That's sad, but try being a flying creature stuck in a human body because even the myths think you're a myth. Maybe she should tell her parents everything in the hopes of a road trip to the middle of nowhere next summer. But that can wait; right now she's looking for the library.

There it is, between the buffet and the movie theater. It's not a very big library.

If it's small then reading every single book in it before graduation is totally feasible. Or at least all the ones that mention magic at all. What sections have they got?

They have pretty usual sections plus little ones on each of Nonhumans and Magic.

Magic section first, it's more likely to have theory stuff and the possibility of magic other than critters and medallions is awesome. She will read every title and grab whatever looks introductory or theory-ish.

The titles currently on the shelf the tiny little library under Magic are:

Natural Magic (an encyclopedia with five volumes)
On The Concealment of Avalons
Artifacts
Medallions: Nature and Uses
Rune Dictionary
Inscription
Cautionary Tales
Rune Derivation: Complete Guide

...and that's it.

She can't decide if this is feast or famine. Checking all of them out at once would probably be rude, so she'll start by sitting in a corner and reading Artifacts. And taking copious notes.

Artifacts is aimed at people who already make artifacts for a living and it has a lot of incomprehensible inside baseball about the best ways to make luck charms, nixie essence dispensers, ward bracelets, and surefooted shoes.

Just the fact that these things are possible is important information! But what's in the two books on runes?

Lots of symbols, numbered and carefully drawn out with ratios of their lines and descriptions of their curves. Each is accompanied by a chart of numbers and words, with the numbers in descending order and the words things like "protection" and "fire".

Theory! This is theory! Score! She's definitely checking these out. But if there's no explanation of what to do with the symbols, she should also read Cautionary Tales before trying any of the several ideas that have appeared in her head.

Apparently it's really REALLY easy to get yourself Killed In Real Life or permanently disfigured or disappeared or maimed or something doing magic! Here are LURID PICTURES.

Yikes. And what are the things that people did to end up like that? And what should they have done instead?

They made small drawing errors, forgot or swapped runes, incanted in their native languages, did not finish an incantation they had started, or made unknown errors!

Okay, so she has to draw runes and then incant at them, and which runes and what incantation should probably be searched for in other books rather than derived empirically. Also she's already getting an A in French but it just got more important. Also, how long has she spent reading so far, she kinda lost track of time there.

It's been about three hours. Might be lunchtime.

She'll attempt to check out the two rune books, and also Inscriptions.

She can do this. "You must be new," says the librarian. "Where you from?"

She names her neighborhood.

"That's still nearest this Avalon though, where are you from?" The librarian has big fuzzy deer ears and no other obvious nonhuman traits at this time.

"I grew up around here, I just didn't go to Avalons until recently."

"Oh, did you just turn?"

"Mmhm."

"Does whoever gave you their medallion live here now? Or did you buy it? - Oh, or they might have died, I'm sorry, that was insensitive of me." The library card is now issued and the books are technically checked out now; only social pressure keeps her there.

She stares at the floor and says, "Yeah, I inherited it--I have to go--see you." and skedaddles.

The librarian doesn't chase her.

Of course not. That would be weird, and Margaret's the one being weird today. Next stop: that place with the lentil soup, that looked good.

They happily serve her a bowl of lentil soup for cheaper than she could get a bowl of soup outside the Avalon.

That's pretty great! She had been all prepared for things to be more expensive here, because of the people who would pay more not to have to go outside. Maybe magic is sufficiently available that it makes things cheaper? Has she seen any other stuff that looked conspicuously magic aside from the people and their medallions?

Nope, unless the cavernous ceiling without any columns holding it up counts.

It totally might count, but she can't really go take a closer look at it. Instead she's going to sit on a public bench somewhere and read Inscriptions.

This has lots of tips for making runes fit neatly into subsections of diagrams, keeping them all on the appropriate scale relative to each other, drawing accurately, and deciding what to proscribe and what to let go (it doesn't specify what that is, just recommends going one layer deeper into proscriptions for every eight inches longer the diagram is in its greatest dimension). It has some complete diagram examples, though it doesn't include their incantations and just briefly mentions what they're for (A space warping diagram or An invisibility spell.)

Progress! If she looks through the rune dictionary for each of the runes in the invisibility spell (potentially a very useful spell, incidentally), what do they mean? 

They mean lots of random things. Actually, more of them mean random things ("fire") than relevant things ("sight").

Hmm. Each of the runes has multiple words next to it, right? If she traces the diagram very carefully onto a notebook page, and writes in the list of meanings next to each rune, do any patterns jump out? Repeated meanings, more relevant meanings belonging to larger or conversely smaller runes, meanings that seem related for runes that are near each other . . . ?

Lots of repetitions. Most of the irrelevant meanings in the largest batch of runes are repeated in the smaller batch.

She marks up the diagram some more to indicate how the repetitions are arranged spatially. And where are the most relevant meanings found, in terms of rune size and placement?

The single biggest runes are one with a top meaning of "sight" and another with a top meaning of "forbiddance".

That's nice and straightforward, unless it's dangerously misleading. She notetakes about this diagram until there's scarcely a square inch of white paper left on the sheet, then starts in on the next one.

She's still at it five hours in, when she realizes that one, she can barely make her eyes focus on the paper anymore, and two, it's dinnertime. Given her previous success with the lentil soup, she goes to the Avalon's Chinese place for dinner.

It, too, is cheap.

At home, her parents ask her how the park was. She says, "It was nice, I walked around and sat on a bench and read." She goes to bed pretty early for a Saturday, for the luxury of lying in bed in her dragon shape for a while before she has to turn human to sleep.

Sunday is sacrificed to all the homework she didn't do the day before. Monday morning she wakes up early, gets to school right when their doors open, and photocopies as much of the rune dictionary as she can get through before first period.

The runes do not react magically in any way to being photocopied, fortunately.

She's pretty sure you have to chant at them at some point to get anything to happen, and has been careful not to say anything while touching or looking at runes. Still, it's a relief. A few mornings like this should be sufficient to copy the whole dictionary, unless it's a brick.

It has brickish aspirations.

Well, she has these books for a couple of weeks; she can do it with a combination of coming in early and staying after everyone else leaves.

She takes to doing her homework in her bedroom instead of at her kitchen table; that way nobody can tell that it's a mix of hurrying through actual homework and staring at rune diagrams. She knows it should be possible to get where she's going from where she is; from an information-theoretic standpoint all the bits are there. And it's a textbook, it's trying to convey information, it's not like she's trying to access something deliberately encrypted. But she's not a theoretical perfect information-extractor, or even Alan Turing, and she's impaired by her unwillingness to test any of her hypotheses in ways more concrete than "see if they're consistent with all of the diagrams in this book".

The books have no comment on how much information it is theoretically possible to derive from them.

Well, they don't call themselves "A Comprehensive Introduction" or have exercises they expect her to be able to do after reading a certain amount; that's sort of a comment, or at least a very pointed silence. After two weeks she goes back to the Avalon.

It is much as she left it. Different door guard; she has to display her foot again.

Behold: a foot. How's the library doing this fine morning?

It's still there! The librarian recognizes her. "Hello again!"

"Hello! I've got books to return." She hands over the rune dictionary (now redundant with the copy hidden in her desk) and the derivation guide (on which she took detailed notes but which she did not actually copy.) "And I'd like to renew Inscriptions, if nobody else wants it right now."

"Nobody else has it on hold. You're not getting into magic, are you? Nasty dangerous stuff."

"Yes, it does look very dangerous. I've just been reading about the theory; I'd like to learn but I'd rather not try anything until I've got a good solid understanding of what's safe to do and what isn't."

"All right. Just you watch out, don't want to burn your pretty eyebrows off or worse."

"Yes, I'm rather attached to having everything attached. Do you have any books with safety advice, maybe some sort of primer for people who are new to magic?"

"There is one textbook but it's checked out right now, it has been for a while."

"Can I put a hold on it for when it gets back, please?"

"Sure thing." The librarian does this. "I'm sorry about your grandparent or whoever - who was it -"

"My great-grandmother. And thanks."

"You're welcome. Did she ever come around the Avalon?"

"I don't think so. She didn't tell me much."

"How about your parents or your cousins?"

"I'm afraid it's kind of complicated. Sorry."

"On a lighter note, I think I'm going to check out some history books. Only so much staring at diagrams you can do before it starts to get tiresome, you know?"

"Sounds good to me," says the librarian, winking.

For what feels like the first time in way too long, Margaret's last statement contained zero subterfuge. She wants to know about critter history; what do these shelves have for her?

The Nonhumans section has The Nemean Council and Notable Nixies 'n Nokks and Bugbears Then and Now and Griffins Through History and Perytons: The Myth, The Stereotype and Avalon Timeline and The "Boston" Avalon and Who In History Was A Winged Horse? and things in that vein.

She'll take The Nemean Council because knowing about governments in her vicinity is important, and Griffins Through History and Avalon Timeline because those will probably go in chronological order and hit major events in critter history that she should know about. Like how dragons went allegedly extinct, plus the sort of general knowledge that will prevent her from having to let on that none of her living relatives know anything.

The librarian is happy to check them out for her.

Time to go read on a bench some more! She starts with Avalon Timeline, and people-watches while she's at it.

People of all shapes and sizes go by on zero or more legs while she reads about the founding of the first Avalon in Liverpool, UK hundreds of years ago, when "monsters" (this apparently means creatures who can't disguise themselves by medallion or with natural shapeshifting either) decided it was getting too crowded for them to live in the open and a wizard among their number made them a hidden place. The idea was popular and copied; most major cities now have an Avalon.

Natural Magic (look in library encyclopedia)

gets added to her notes. If Avalon Timeline is decently long, it will last her until lunch and she can pick up the griffins book afterward (she's not about to read library books while eating).

It is long enough to last till lunch.

The griffins book spends a lot of attention on family trees and a thriving griffin-only city-state in ancient Persia. There are several kinds of griffins and the book thinks this is very important.

And did these griffins ever get involved in anything of broader importance? Did any famous griffin scientists invent or discover anything? Did any famous griffin generals lead the secret extra front of the Revolutionary War? Does a griffin lead Critter Wal-Mart?

Griffins are a number of minor historical figures, mostly Middle Eastern ones she wouldn't be likely to have heard of; is she impressed that they think ibn al-Ghazali was an opinicus?

Seriously, does critterkind live in some sort of eternal stasis? Or are there just not enough critters to support an ecosystem of historical events? She'll look al-Ghazali up on the internet this evening. Now, what's the Nemean Council?

The Nemean Council exists to keep Nemean lions, who are indestructible and super-strong, in check. They require all Nemeans to take certain serious vows about the use of violence before allowing them medallions (if they're born human shaped, which the Code also requires of would-be Nemean parents) and they're also responsible for restraining any Nemeans who do not take, or who violate, those vows.

"Other species governments" goes in the to-research list. Then it's time to stare at rune diagrams until her eyes feel about to fall out or she needs dinner, one or the other.

Dinner is available whenever she's ready.

What's that little mom-and-pop place doing tonight?

"Haystacks" and "Glorified Rice" and "Chicken Fried Steak".

Glorified Rice sounds interesting! She'll order it without knowing what it is.

It's a dessert made of rice and pineapple and whipped cream.

Yeah, alright, dessert for dinner. She'll eat plenty of vegetables tomorrow or something. She makes a bit of small talk with the restaurant owners, then it's time to go home and stare at runes a while longer and go to sleep.

Come Monday, she thinks to check if Kevin is still in the same place at lunchtime, i.e. hasn't been hauled off for questioning by the secret dragon double secret police.

Kevin has not been hauled off; there he is hanging out with his friends.

She waves at him but sits with a different random person. No nefarious scheme this time, she just wants innocent chitchat where she won't have to tell any lies.

Random other people are pleased to have her company.

She keeps on spending evenings staring at runes. The meanings of the runes have associated numbers; if she writes in the numbers for a single repeated meaning everywhere a rune with that meaning appears in a diagram, is there any pattern to it? Do uses of a single meaning tend to cluster within the diagram, or be evenly spread around it?

Even spread - one in each section is common, usually a secondary or lesser meaning in the largest section and then a primary meaning in the next section. The numbers vary, but so do the sizes of the runes.

Secondary meanings in section n repeated as primary meanings in section n+1 suggests a sort of cascading effect. Does a rune tend to be bigger when the meaning it's repeating from the previous section has a big number?

Yep.

Looks like there's some idea of balance between successive sections, then: the secondary meanings in the first section are balanced out by the primary meanings in the second section, and drawing a rune bigger means "getting more of" all of its meanings. And the successive sections tend to get smaller because they're balancing their large-numbered primary meanings against the secondary meanings in the previous section. Does that same principle seem to hold for the other diagrams? 

Yes!

By the time she's done verifying this, she's torn the paper and her hair is a mess. But she's finally getting somewhere! 

. . . Not quite far enough to actually try drawing a diagram of her own, mind you. But somewhere. Is that textbook back in at the library when she goes to return the history books?

Yes, there it is.

Excellent! What's it called? What's in it?

It's called Runecasting and it's a really old book apparently published in the sixties. It confirms her guess that the successive sections are cancellations.

She punches the air and hisses "yes!" right there at the library checkout desk, then laughs at herself.

"Yes?" asks the librarian.

"I had a theory about how some stuff worked that the last book didn't explain, and the book says I was right. This stuff is the most interesting puzzle I've ever seen! And I should probably be reading somewhere other than standing right at your desk, I guess."

The librarian smiles. "As long as you don't try to cast anything, I don't mind if you read in the library, dear."

Margaret giggles. "Okay then." She moves out of the way a bit in case someone else wants to check books in or out, but goes on leaning on the desk and reading.

The librarian doesn't object and processes other checkouts every now and then.

In between checkouts, Margaret remarks, "It would be cool to meet the last person who checked this book out. I don't really know a lot of other critters, and nobody who's into magic."

"I can't give out patron information, but if you want to leave a slip of paper with your number in the book for the next person I won't mind a bit."

"That's a good idea, thanks!" She puts a slip of notebook paper with "Hi fellow magic nerd! Let's meet up!" and then her phone number between two pages and goes back to reading. What else does the book have to say, besides that successive sections are cancellations?

You should never incant in your native language, but ideally you should be fluent and not stumble over the words in the language because stopping incanting, or incanting incorrectly, is a very, very bad idea and can kill you. Diagrams work once. Here's how to circumscribe layers of cancellation; here's how small an effect has to be before it doesn't matter (different between effects; you don't want any extra fire). If you wind up overshooting a cancellation and winding up with a negative amount of a thing, that can have effects that differ per kind of effect - some are fine like that, others you have to get neater.

This . . . this could be enough to actually try a spell. At least if there's anything in here about what the incantations should actually say. She can't actually hold a conversation in French in real time, but individually composed and rehearsed sentences with precise meaning and correct grammar should be doable with a dictionary and patience.

The incantations need to be longish, a sentence or two, not just a word. They should fill in all the gaps about what your spell should do that aren't covered by the fairly simplistic rune meanings. If possible, poetic language seems to help a little where it doesn't sacrifice precision or fluency.

Excellent. Her first actual spell, which is going to be tomorrow at the earliest, is going to be the invisibility diagram from the textbook and an incantation of her own devising. Unless this textbook has exercises in it, or a recommendation for what to do first, anyway.

It does not recommend doing spells just to do spells, since spells are so dangerous.

If this textbook does not understand concepts like "doing simple things for careful practice before attempting the thing you actually want to do" or "doing things for the sake of knowledge", that's, well, it's the sort of mistake you wouldn't expect from a good textbook. But it's what she's got, and she'll probably spend the whole day minus meal breaks taking careful notes on it.

It does recommend drawing out diagrams, leaving them alone for a week, and then checking them over to find out how they would have killed you!

See, that's excellent, that's the sort of exercise a textbook should have in it. There are other things she wants to try before that, like analyses of all the presumably professional-quality diagrams she has access to in this book and the other one, and getting incantations down, but that's definitely a good idea.

She has a total of 7 complete diagrams. They are for:

- invisibility
- water control
- a shield spell
- a space warping spell
- healing
- sleep
- boiling water

and none of them have incantations.

Boiling water is probably the safest of those, if she starts with a small quantity of water in a safe container and is careful to specify that only the water in the container should be affected. Invisibility is potentially safer, except potentially getting stuck invisible with no way to get visible again sounds worse than getting scalded and more likely than boiling her own eyeballs. What does the book have to say about spell sizes--duration, amount of material affected, area of effect, etc--and how to make them larger or more importantly smaller?

The ratios between the runes are the important thing if you want to resize a spell; a straight shrinkage or enlargement works fine as long as everything's the same relative size. For some applications you want the diagram actually on something that you're planning to affect, and then the size has to account for that, but for affecting a thing that is not your inscription's surface a standard two inch maximum rune line size is recommended.

Resizing diagrams introduces some complications relative to simply tracing, but eventually she'll be drawing her own and then she won't be able to trace anyway. She's going to get perfect at copying existing diagrams at various (small) sizes first, though, so she's not learning design and drafting skills at the same time. That said, she should also try photocopying a diagram and using it at some point; if it works, it can turn one perfect diagram into hundreds of equally perfect diagrams at different sizes with no room for error.

If she doesn't incant one she'll never know.

She'll get to everything in her queue eventually. Tomorrow was probably a bit ambitious for her first incantation, though; she wants to do a thorough analysis of the boiling water diagram to find out exactly how much of what meanings are present in the final result. And she may not even have time for that today, depending on how long this textbook is.

It's not very long for a textbook.

It's still rather a lot of intellectual effort; she'll go to dinner when it's done. At home, she does the calculations for the boiling water diagram. What intentional and unintentional meanings remain when all the cancellations are canceled?

There's plenty of "heat" and "water" and little shreds of a dozen other things.

She writes down the numbers she gets and puts them away; tomorrow she'll do it again and compare results. In the meantime, she starts on a French translation for "heat the water in the cup in front of me, until it begins to boil", but doesn't get a first draft done before bed.

The next day she gets the same numbers again, which is heartening, and works a bit more on her incantation. Does the book have any example incantations, even ones for diagrams she doesn't have?

Nope! It does have one of those pullout text boxes that says, "Remember, never, ever incant in your native language! Choose a language you started to learn later in life. It's okay if you're fluent as long as you didn't start speaking it often before you were about school aged. Since this textbook is in English, I assume throughout that your native language is English."

She started French in seventh grade and still isn't fluent; she'll be fine at least on that front. Maybe they don't give examples because if they did most readers wouldn't know any of whatever language they put the examples in and it wouldn't help them.

By the following Saturday, she has a French incantation she's happy with. She has copied the boiling water diagram exactly, waited 48 hours, and checked it over to confirm that she really did copy it exactly.

Instead of going to the Avalon, she puts the diagram and a cooking pot with half an inch of water in it on her desk. She writes a letter to her parents explaining everything and apologizing, and leaves it where they'll see it if she dies. And she says her incantation, straight through without pausing or stumbling.

The water boils abruptly!

Margaret whispers, "Holy cow". Seeing magic is one thing, being herself a magical creature is another thing, but making magic happen with her own work and intellect is yet a third thing. She goes back to her notebook and looks at the list of applications she wants to try someday, an ambitious list with things like "healing" and "de-aging" and "sell artifacts" and "recreate medallions" and "combine with computers???". She hides the letter to her parents where they aren't going to stumble on it. And she promises herself not to do any more magic for the rest of the day, because she's much too excited to do it carefully enough. 

Her next experiment, carried out between homework assignments, is to make another copy of the boiling water diagram, wait 48 hours, check it for perfection, then make photocopies of both the used and unused ones. This takes multiple tries, because the first go had stray marks on the paper from where the photocopier got confused.  Then she sets up the same water-and-death-letter setup as previously and tries the photocopy of the unused diagram with the same incantation as last time.

This does not work.

Bother. And the photocopy of the used-up one, just for completeness?

Doesn't work either.

Well, of all the ways for something in runecasting to fail to work, "nothing happens" is better than a lot of things that could have happened. How about the unused one she hand-drew and then made a photocopy of, can she get anything out of that or did putting it in the photocopier ruin it somehow? Same pot of water, same incantation. 

The photocopier did not ruin it.

Eeee magic!

The next step is to vary an incantation and see if that varies the effect. The diagram says nothing in particular about boiling, just water and heat. Over the course of a few days she assembles and practices a French version of "Heat the water in the cup in front of me; bring it to sixty Celsius" and repeats her diagram copy/wait/check procedure. Then she tries the new incantation, this time with a thermometer in the water.

It reaches... eighty-five Celsius.

Weird. Does that happen every time? She spends the entire next week's worth of free time just doing that experiment over and over, recording the temperature each time.

It varies slightly depending on how much water there is.

Yeah, she's not trying to draw her own diagrams until she understands what's going on here. Does more water produce a lower final temperature? Does water that starts out hotter produce a higher final temperature? 

More water with an incantation specifying sixty degrees gets a lower final temperature. Water that starts out hotter produces a higher final temperature.

And is the final temperature always higher than sixty C, or is it sometimes lower?

Always higher.

What if she starts with ice in the pot but the incantation still says "water"? (She debates with herself for a while before doing this one, and has the "if you're reading this I died doing magic" letter out on the table again.)

Absolutely nothing happens.

Phew. If she swaps out the ice for water and tries again, is the diagram still good or did the failure use it up?

The failure used it up.

How bothersome.

She's going through a lot of diagrams and diagramming time with all this science, and even with the "wait 48 hours and double-check your copying" rule she's going to mess one up eventually. It's worth investing some more time in finding a way to mass-produce them.

Photocopying didn't work, but something more manual might. What if she gets some air-dry modeling clay and an exacto knife and makes some really careful models of all the runes in reverse, arranged mirror-style on a sheet, then paints it with ink and stamps it onto a page? This might take a lot of tries to get first a stencil, and then a painting-and-stamping attempt, perfect enough that she deems it worthy of incanting at.

Once she tries a stamped diagram, that works fine.

Sure, but can she then paint and stamp again with the same stamp until she gets another good one and use that?

Yes, subsequent stamps also work!

Woohoo! No more copying that one anymore, not that it isn't already burned into her brain. More to the point, any future diagrams only need to be done perfectly once. 

Next step: swap out the number in the incantation from "sixty" to "eighty". Holding all else constant, does this produce consistently or intermittently hotter water?

It never goes below eighty and the variance is less, but it varies a bit along the same dimensions.

This magic system demands a lot of precision going in for a relatively noisy result coming out. Maybe controlling for environmental circumstances really carefully will be instructive. Does playing back a recording of an incantation work like reciting it?

Nope. Does nothing and doesn't use up the inscription.

How about reciting the incantation loudly vs quietly? (This was such a good pick for first spell; it has a really easily measurable effect size!)

Volume makes no difference alone, but if she actually whispers, unvoicing all the voiced sounds, then it doesn't work (whether this uses up the inscription depends on whether she started any properly pronounced words before switching to whispering: if she whispers it all, the inscription is still usable, and if she whispers only some, the inscription is used up but nothing happens).

She never tries whispering only some; too much risk that it counts as "stumbling over the incantation". Whispering the whole thing is kind of scary, even.

Too many nights in her room doing science is going to drive her crazy; she goes to the Avalon again for longer than it takes to renew her books and looks through the history section again. Is anyone else browsing today?

There's an older centaur fellow looking at the art history selection and a fullformed nixie lady talking to the librarian about getting an interlibrary loan.

Interlibrary loan, huh? That's an idea. But she hasn't gone through the whole nonhumans section here yet. What's in there today? She vaguely recalls a book on Perytons . . .

The book on perytons is still there. There are books on totem animals, a book of speculation about unicorns, books about the sphinx/dragon war, a book about jackalopes, one book about the Loch Ness Monster, books about angels, books about centaurs...

She definitely wants one on the sphinx/dragon war, but not more than one because she doesn't want to associate herself with the concept of dragons in anybody's mind. She'll get whichever of those looks most comprehensive, plus the most comprehensive one on angels and the one about the Loch Ness monster.

Then she can check out The Extinction War and Angelarium; What We Know And What We Don't and Nessie.

Time to go read Nessie on a bench somewhere and get some, if not fresh outside air, at least fresher air than she's been getting. What do actual secret nonhumans have to say about the possibility of one chilling in a lake in Scotland?

There is a Nessie! She's not a species - one-off creatures just exist sometimes. She's an animal, not a person. One-off animals tend to be magical and to have ways of preventing casual observation by humans, but to turned critters Nessie is sometimes friendly. She likes popcorn.

That makes more sense than a person doing it, except for how "one-off species" is almost a weirder concept than magic. What about angels, that sounds potentially pretty weird too. Do they in fact have six wings and enough eyes for the whole class?

Angels are pretty mysterious but do have a lot of wings, "six" being a possible number. They do not generally appear with extra eyes. They don't talk about where they came from, but they are understood not to have "free will" and to instead be bound to carry out tasks, mostly keeping demons in check. They are supposedly incapable of hurting people who don't "deserve it" so a safe way to get un-possessed is to have an angel stab you: you'll be fine and the demon won't. They are genderless, they can glow, bugbears can't sense them, they live a very very long time though they might not be outright immortal, they're eccentric and rare and asocial and sexless and imperceptible by bugbear senses.

That's definitely at least as weird as extra eyes. Margaret has a lot of questions about what exactly decides whether a victim of angelic stabbing "deserved it", but answering those questions empirically sounds 1) infeasible and 2) distinctly not fun. She brings the book on the war back home and reads it there for easier notetaking.

The dragons and sphinxes, the most magically powerful creatures ever unless unicorns (who've been extinct longer) had something cool, had a war. They had allies of other species, but no fully overwhelming dominion over any - most griffins worked for sphinxes, most wyverns worked for dragons, but there were exceptions and the alliances were on the individual or family level, nothing that left the remaining combatants feuding after the sphinxes and dragons had driven each other to extinction. They carefully guarded the secrets of their magical prowess - dragons seemed to mostly use runecasting, but did insane things with it such that it's widely believed to have been a smokescreen for some natural magic in addition to whatever the details were of their incredible defensive prowess; sphinxes relied much less heavily on runes in the moment and tended to have amazingly well-enchanted artifacts in play instead. Some of these artifacts survive and are held by private owners or on display in museums in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa (where the war spanned). Sphinxes are credited with the invention of medallions and some sort of dispute about dragon medallions is believed to have sparked the conflict, though the historian writing this book believes there must be more to it, as it was so all-encompassing.

So runecasting is kind of sort of part of her heritage, but it's a heritage that nearly wiped out dragons and may have wiped out sphinxes. That's . . . a sobering thought. She'll just have to do better than her ancestors, and not even think about having kids until she finds some way to live openly as a dragon.

Step 1 on that is making some critter friends. Kevin went badly, but that was because they had nothing in common and also she was using him for information. Does the Avalon library, or the Avalon in general, have any events where she can meet other critters her own age? Maybe a book club or something?

If she looks at fliers posted on Avalon lampposts, she can find:

- a book club planning to next read some book called "Nora Finn"
- a video game club inviting all challengers to defeat them at Madden
- a club called Barn Raisers planning on getting together to repair the nondenominational church's roof and clear out some old hippogriff's gutters and refit a house for a harpy family
- two poker nights, a bridge club, a Magic: the Gathering club, a D&D campaign looking for players, and a general board game night
- karaoke Thursdays
- a "Sunshine Day" holiday party for aquatic types and anyone who likes to swim in the Avalon pond
- an after-school club that seems to be aimed at kids who attend school within the Avalon, called "Extra Credit"
- anime club
- street hockey
- knitting circle

"DnD as played by actual magical creatures" is hilarious on a conceptual level even though it's probably very similar to the baseline human kind in practice, and she probably won't have to lie to her parents about anything except the location. She'll sign up for that, provided they don't require nontrivial prior gaming experience--she did a session or two with some robotics club people once, but their group was too large already and she didn't stick around.

It says they're playing 3.5 and the DM can make a character for you if you don't know how, which is probably promising!

She will show up to the next session and meet everyone there and ask for help rolling up a wizard!

"We've got a wizard, do you have a second choice or should I just try to make a real different wizard?" says the DM, who has lop rabbit ears and a rabbit tail on an otherwise human form at the moment but doesn't wear a medallion. Most of the people in this group are older than her, early twenties, but they don't make an issue of it.

"I can be something else, what does the group not have one of?"

"Could use a cleric," comments a person in human form.

"Or a paladin, we've got a monk but not a full on fighter," says a midformed griffin. "And we have a druid."

"Big party," remarks a lamia.

"Paladin sounds like fun. They're the ones who use both weapons and magic and have a bunch of extra rules about being heroic to follow, right?"

"That's right," says the DM. "Lemme whip up a first level paladin for you real quick. If anybody else shows up I can run this campaign for two groups but I think with six people it's not worth the schedule headache." He rolls up a first level paladin for her. "You got decent stats, lucky you."

"Thank you! Can I maybe get a quick introduction to everybody?" She introduced herself when she showed up but hasn't gotten the rundown of everyone else's names yet.

"I'm Xavier," says the DM. "Your competitor wizard over there is Cole, Sanjay," he indicates the griffin, "is playing a monk, Brenda," a medallionless woman with a snake lower half and sharp teeth, "is playing a psion, Alec," he's in a midform with a horse tail and nothing else, "is our druid, and Joseph," no medallion, looks human, "is a rogue."

"Nice to meet you all!" And now she's ready to start gaming. She will work to remember the rules she's half-forgotten, help the rest of the party in their endeavors, and scout out who in the group seems nice and friendly and like they might be fun to spend time with.

The campaign is pretty standard fare, although they meet because they are all picked up by a band of mixed human and orc slavers rather than happening across each other in a tavern. Brenda is closest to Margaret's age and is helpful, if sometimes in a munchkiny way, with the game; Joseph cracks a lot of jokes; Sanjay keeps being tempted to metagame.

This is pretty fun! If it's like what she remembers it will probably eat the whole evening, but she made sure to have her homework done first.

It does take three and a half hours before the DM calls a halt and says they can pick up same time next week.

Margaret goes home and falls asleep immediately, without even spending some time in fullform first.

The next morning she realizes that all this history-books-and-gaming has been, while useful to her long-term goals, also working as a distraction from something she hadn't fully admitted: she has a pretty good understanding of how incantations work. The next thing she needs to do in her self-study of runecasting is try creating her own diagram.

She decides to start with a spell to cool water, since testing it will be similar to her tests of heating water and there shouldn't be any new risks on top of the existing ones. If the heating-water spell starts with "heat" and "water", this one should start with "cold" and "water". She spends well over ten hours over the course of several days on constructing a first draft of a diagram, cancelling the side effects of side effects of side effects, being careful not to do anything near it that might count as "incanting".

It completely fails to indicate in any way whether or not it is plotting her doom.

If it did, that would be extremely worrying, given that it would be a departure from what she's used to. The next step, according to the textbook, is to leave it alone for a week, so she does that. During that time she goes to DnD again. She gets to the avalon early, though, to swing by the library and renew her textbook and see if there's anything new in the magic section.

Nope!

Then she'll grab the first volume of that Natural Magic encyclopedia, if it's in, and head to DnD.

It's all hers. D&D starts on time! They have escaped the slavers and now must earn money to pay for their passage across the desert.

Her character will help kill the oversized wolf that has been killing the villagers' sheep and collect the bounty on its head.

Then they can negotiate with the caravan boss (Xavier shapeshifts to match different NPCs - he usually has at least one or two animal parts, but he can do different human faces, and different exact animal parts, though his voice stays the same) for passage, and are assigned caravan duties, and that's the end of the session.

What fun! "I liked the different faces for different NPCs," she says to Xavier on the way out.

"Thanks!" he says. "I'm not good at voices, I figure it balances out."

"I never had trouble telling who was who, at any rate. See you next week!"

"You know it!" Xavier grins.

And when it has been a week since she last looked at her water-cooling spell, she pulls it out again. The textbook said to check how it would kill you; does it give any details on how to do that? The obvious first thing is to redo the calculations and see how much of what meanings remain after all the cancellations are done, but there might be some other way to find flaws in a diagram and she should do all of them before starting the second draft.

It suggests checking for flaws in your lines, your rune placement, your math, whether you've placed the runes you meant to place and didn't absentmindedly put in a different one somewhere, your math again, and whether the size of the diagram is right for what you want to do.

The runes are all the ones she wanted. These lines are imperfect and this rune should be a bit to the left. Her math comes out the same as the last time she did it but she's not satisfied with how much light and stone she has left over; she redoes the last three sections and gets it down to something closer to the size of the residuals from the boiling diagram. The size matches the water-boiling diagram, so that's fine--or is it? The effect size goes as the size of the largest rune, and similar effects like two different temperature changes should need similar sizes, right?

The textbook doesn't say how to make your own cooling spell!

Well of course not, but it could stand to say anything about sizing at all. She'll leave it sized like the heating one and leave it alone for a while and rework the cancellations again and again until her largest residual meaning is smaller than the largest residual meaning on the heating one or it's been six weeks, whichever comes first. 

She can get it that way if she tries hard enough and does enough magical stoichiometery.

Magical stoichiometry is fun! She does as much of it as necessary and then some. Checking the precision of her lines and the placement of her runes is less fun, but she does it just as diligently. On the days when she's not looking at it to let it fade from her head so she can catch any mistakes, she comes up with French for "Remove heat from this water; cool it to five degrees Celsius."

She revises her letter to her parents to include information about the war that they ought to know before either of them tries touching her medallion, though she doubts either of them would go for it even without that.

She gets a pot of warm water, and a thermometer, and the diagram, and the letter, all set up neatly on her desk.

She casts a spell of her own design.

The water chills; condensation appears on the cup.

Seeing condensation on a cup does not usually make her feel like the coolest person ever, but this time it does. She starts in on turning the new diagram into a clay stamp like the previous one.

She has the textbook practically memorized by now, and photocopies of all the diagrams in it; she returns it to the library, complete with the slip of paper bearing her name and phone number, before the next DnD night.

D&D proceeds; they get to the edge of the desert, where some cultists decide they're at risk of fulfilling a prophecy they don't want fulfilled and start harrying them.

That's a really interesting situation, because they get to investigate all of: how plausible the prophecy seems, how well they actually fit it, and whether it's the sort of prophecy they want fulfilled regardless of what the cultists think. Margaret gets into a lively debate/speculation session with Brenda about it.

"I think if the cultists are trying to avert it, it can't be the kind of prophecy that's really worth much, and except for fighting cultists who started it anyway we can just ignore it, Xavier isn't railroading us," says Brenda.

"Why would people trying to avert it make it less likely to be true? Or do you just mean that it's probably a prophecy that something bad will happen?"

"I mean if they're trying to avert it they think they can."

"Oh, I see. And if it was important enough to matter then it would happen whatever they or we did about it. I'm trying not to think about it in terms of whether Xavier finds this plot interesting or just wanted to give these guys an excuse to attack us . . ."

"I've played with him before, if we're not out to troll him he'll roll with anything we do."

"It's nice that he's willing to improvise like that. I think we should try to find out what the prophecy says instead of just chasing the cultists off."

"I guess that makes sense, then we'll know what they might try besides just trying to kill us."

"Yeah, definitely." They try to convince the rest of the party to track the cultists back to their hideout and investigate.

Xavier ends the session before they get there.

Then they'll have to wait a week to find out.

"I'm pretty excited to find out what it is," she says to Brenda on the way out. "I bet it has something to do with those emblems they were wearing."

"You don't think those are just their culty holy symbols?"