"...Synchrony problems with that though..."

"This is what I mean about prototypes. Or at least parts drawings and process flow diagrams."

"...I imagine I get where you're going with that, just on the basis of words meaning things, but you should know that I did not understand it natively."

"Words, how do they even work."

Instead she pulls out her slate and chalk and starts sketching. "What if the wheel that spins the paper has... Contact points? That trigger the searer? But then we might as well just make a precise stamp..."

"No, it's..."

She's already at work on her tablet.

"You need to be spinning the searer.  Because then you can calibrate it reliably and just feed it rotation and on-off and all the other instructions."

"Hmm... I see what you mean. It's going to need a rune library. Or like. Twenty of the most common ones."

"Yeah.  I figure we see if we can do, like.  Hooking together commands, where each command pulls the next one in the chain into the calibration matrix.  And then we pack the common runes down into a single matrix themselves."

"So... Sear engine here, with runes in different rotations. It can accept three instructions. Rotate left, rotate right, and sear a rune. Hmm... If we have twenty different runes... Either we need to activate a particular one or also have a shield that blocks all of them except the one we want and rotate that too..."

Lo: A sketch

"See, this way we don't have to have eleventy bajillion different control channels for the different runes on the melter. We just have to make the device read off some sort of instruction and do... Three very simple things. Rotate one disk precisely. Rotate another disk precisely. And make heat. Makes it much easier to design, magically speaking."

"...I was not thinking of that.

"Though maybe if runes are composeable...

"...but there's still the problem of...

"...Fuck!  Drippage on the one hand, human error in encoding in the other...!

"...Inverted record needle?  Polar coordinates...

"So.  There's open problems whatever we do to start.

"Namely, that as far as I can figure, the tools we could use to eliminate imprecision are themselves imprecise in their construction unless I'm missing a trick, on the one hand, and 'if you melt wax it will drip downwards only semi-predictably' on the other."

An extremely ordinary arctic fox interrupts them, striding smugly into the cave.

It's aggressively ordinary and forgettable. Absolutely nothing noteworthy here. Your eyes might slide right over her.

"Hey you two. So. Your diamonds thing has a lot of promise. This humble fox would politely request that you continue such pursuits."

She does what is oddly recognizable as a perfectly polite and formal fox bow.

"In other words: Get on with the main plot, please! That is all."

And she is gone between eyeblinks.

"...I'm not going to just forget about the diamonds, I've spent years thinking about scenarios like this, but I don't have the tools I'd need to prototype that here and now and --"

"Oh what the heck.  Let's entertain her.  And probably blow something up because I'm going to need to overvolt it.

"...Why did I say specifically overvolt it?

"Is my breastmilk magically conductive enough to be an ink?

"I dunno!  Let's find out!  Quick, get pencil and paper, it's not science if we don't write it down!"

And, hopefully, off they go.

Tamamo fucking showing up and telling them what to do is kind of unnerving. The fake leaning on the fourth wall bit makes her want to roll her eyes in an attempt to dismiss the implications.

...Well. She can write things down. And provide what she knows about spell control mechanisms- They mostly rely on creating a stable structure that can be perturbed in specific ways to unfold, and with lots of work on making timers and such- This style of synchronous trigger might work here-

(It turns out that magically charged kitsune breastmilk makes for poor quality but technically workable magic ink. It works better for drizzling big circles on rock than writing on paper, the watery content is too blotchy.)

"I wonder if we could do, uh, whatever you do to make powdered milk, to this stuff.  And if it would still hold the magic.  Then, I dunno, I guess you could make crayons with it?"

Anyway!  There's still science to be done!

(If she knew that Nicole was thinking that Tamamo was only faking leaning on the fourth wall she would laugh.  She would laugh madly.  But she does not!  So she will not!)

Nicole gets increasingly antsy with the design bits and eventually declares that she wants to actually draw and cast the latest version. Out on the windslab, probably, for relative safety.

That is how we entertain the masses, Nicole!

Sure, why the heck not!

Nervous!!

Well. They can find or make a sufficiently flat bit of ground a bit away from the campsite and... Well Alicia's milk is the most convenient but they're going to have to try the same thing in different media... So, chalk, and both types of 'ink'. But for now: Flat rock, carefully measured to be as level and smooth as reasonable for a random bit of rock, and then she draws their best so far prototype diamond press diagram very carefully with narrow chalk, and puts a handful-sized chunk of black anthracite coal right in the middle.

"I can see magic if I focus on it. So maybe you should cast and I should take notes. Unless you also can? Little nervous here."

"I can see magic, yeah.  Uh.  Let's...

"We should both be paying attention?"

And with that settled...

"...I feel like we should be guarding more against an explosion that magic considers working-as-intended."

"...Not wrong. I can do a spherical shield spell, and you can do the actual experiment? I don't have an artifact to hook it off of though."

"Don't make it spherical, make a wedge.  Or like, half a cone?  Half a cone.  Or.  A teardrop?  Deflect it away from us rather than trying to contain.  ...Or actually do make as many shields as we can but the point is that the less you're actually trying to deflect the less likely it is that your shielding breaks and we get blown up.  Unless that's not how whatever you're doing works.  I wonder if there's a spell where you can, like, sap heat and motion to produce some other better directed effect.

"...Oh wait did you mean to put the shield around us.  Yeah that wouldn't be a bad idea."

"...I really don't want to try two untested spells at once. My sphere shield definitely works. And I would put it around us, not the coal and circle. There are ice spells that just. Directly reduce molecular motion as far as I can tell."

"...Yeah don't do something novel if you have a thing you know works even if it's maybe not technically optimal for all I know.

"...We should work on making a shield that does that to stuff."

"There's prior art on it actually! I took some library notes. But let's get this done."

She starts on the shield.

"Right.  We stand on the shoulders of giants."

"...Can we do magic in our fox forms, you having to divert less of the explosion seems like it would be better."

"I find it pretty doable. The actual casting is the same, plus or minus psychosomatic help from gestures. Drawing is, I hear, more difficult for some kitsunes than me."

Drawing drawing drawing a magic circle~ Executing on a well practiced task is soothing.

When the shield's ready, she's going to cast the spells.  This needs to be done, she has like no patience left.