"Ooh, maybe. And if I can't then that's interesting information about spellsilver. Does the intelligence headband come in fabric?"

"Not that I've seen but I've heard of charisma cloaks as a variant on charisma headbands."

"Would the official term be a Cloak of Vast Intelligence, if it existed? I could try that first and then fall back on the charisma one if it doesn't work, or I can just do the charisma one first so we know."

"These aren't as standardized as all that but it's what I'd call it, yes. You can also stack up all three kinds in the same item, that's what my brother-in-law's crown does."

"Ooooh. That would probably take a diagram three times as big, though, so I'll try a cloak with the intelligence-only version first." Can Bar sell her a nonfunctional version of a magic item so it has the lead bits in the right places and everything?

Bar can sell her a cloak and all the lead she could want but the combination is not doable.

"The lead isn't itself functional or woven in or anything, the magical property of spellsilver is sucked out of it into the material. I just don't know how it's done."

"In that case, I guess the thing to do is to try with a regular cloak and call it conclusive if it succeeds but not if it fails. Which is kind of how it is with me doing magic in general; there are a bunch of ways things can go wrong and it's rarely obvious which one."

"You don't have... diagnostic spells or anything? - you should make spectacles of detect magic, that's what you should do."

"I have this ring that shows when I'm suppressing a bad result but it doesn't say what the result would have been. Magic-detecting spectacles sound excellent; what kind of detail do you get from them?"

"I don't myself have any - detect magic is a cantrip, they wouldn't sell, the people who want to see magic can do it all day long."

"Nifty. What sort of stuff about a spell does it pick up on?"

"Don't know much. I don't need it to do what I do, I come from the jewelry end, not the spellcraft end, and people can only cast it on themselves. I know it can tell if something's magic or not, and what kind, and how strong?"

"That might be good for distinguishing between 'bad spell design' and 'not enough power' but I think I'll work on intelligence enhancement first."

"Makes sense."

So Margaret goes back to spell design. This one is going to be a lot more complicated and also bigger, which means it needs to be even more complicated to compensate for the size.

Ismat orders dinner from the bar and watches her.

Eventually Margaret finishes the algebra part (she misses Bella and her spreadsheet). "When you're done eating, would you like to learn to draw diagrams? I could set you up with a simpler one, or you could do the one I'm doing in parallel and we'd have two tries if the first incantation I test doesn't work."

"I hadn't better actually do anything while my family doesn't know where I am and I'm in a strange time-dilated pocket dimension, suppose I didn't make it to Axis? But I can receive a lesson without any practicals."

"That makes a lot of sense. I've never heard of anyone getting hurt from drawing a diagram someone else used, but this place is weird and it's very reasonable not to want to. I'll just explain what I'm doing so you'll know for later. So, it doesn't matter what order you draw in as long as you don't smudge anything; personally I like to start at the top edge and go down for something this big and center-outwards for the smaller ones . . ." 

Ismat watches her very intently.

The hardest part of doing a big diagram is always keeping her mind from wandering, so having someone to narrate her diagram-related stream of consciousness to is pretty nice, and a lot of it is stuff she already has prepped from teaching classes on it, so it won't slow her down much. Eventually she runs out of relevant stuff to say before she runs out of diagram, and keeps drawing quietly.

Ismat has been taking notes! When she thinks she recognizes something she asks about it.

Margaret is happy to confirm and elaborate on things, and occasionally thinks of tips that don't usually come up when she's lecturing on simpler diagrams.