"Does it need to be a necklace with a chain, or can it be any pair of connected objects? I'll also need pencil and paper and a potentially annoying amount of time staring at diagrams, but I can see if the bar takes PayPal and it's not like either of us has much else to do right now."

"It could be a bracelet, but then the band needs to be pretty chunky or the metal a more expensive kind to hold more charge per unit mass. And I could do a bracelet all as one piece, the necklace is just easier this way."

"Okay. And does the chain need to be fancy metal to provide the charge such that I might be able to do it in a different material, or to hold it such that I need the second one to be the same substance?"

"I think it does both but I'm not a wizard. Some stuff might only hold and not generate, there are items with charges that don't renew."

"Well, I'll see what the bar charges for a nonmagical but otherwise exact copy; that's more likely to work."

She goes back to the bar and asks, after a quick check that she can temporarily suppress her own invisibility ring and is therefore still cheating awesomely.

She can still suppress her ring. I can't actually make exact copies of things that were never offered for sale in an approximately mass-reproduced form, although I should be able to find a similar-looking item somewhere.

"Okay. The important thing is that it be the same materials."

Bar can find a lapis pendant on a different style of pendant for her.

"The lapis isn't important, just pretty," Ismat says.

"Good to know. Now I need to sit here doing math for several hours; it'd be easier if I had the spreadsheet but unfortunately it doesn't count as published enough for Bar. And then . . . say, Bar, could you copy a piece of paper exactly if I handed it to you, or is there something I could do from in here that would count as publishing it?"

I can copy a piece of paper as an extension of the napkin function.

"That's potentially amazing. --It doesn't need to be on a napkin, right, it can be regular flat paper?" She's already designated one sheet as scratch paper and is doing math on it while she talks.

Yes, napkins per se are a cosmetic feature, my "voice".

"That's really cool." Math math math she's going to be at this for a while.

Ismat tries the door again, gives up, orders lunch on credit.

Margaret also gets lunch (a plate of fruit and nuts she can eat while working) and checks that she can still suppress her own invisibility ring, because this is even more than usual not a project she wants to do without being able to cheat. She borrows a ruler and a protractor from Bar and spends a while drawing, spinning the paper around to reach every section. If the door keeps being obstinate, she eventually stands up, blinking and holding a complicated diagram.

"Huh, I'm not a wizard but I think that looks different from their notes."

"Different like our worlds developed a different notation to do the same thing, or different like they're completely unrelated? Ooh, do wizards publish their notes? I could get some from Bar to look at."

"Scrolls might count? There are probably schoolbooks but I don't know what's in those, if it's got magic notation or not. I know that all the wizards come up with their own styles."

"Well, it seems worth trying." She asks Bar how many wizard spell scrolls, and for that matter how many runecasting diagrams, she has access to.

Bar can get her some common low level scrolls - some of the available options aren't specifically wizard scrolls, other spellcasters can write them too - and highly trafficked mid-level ones like Sending and Teleport. Runecasting diagrams have apparently never been "published" per se in Margaret's world.

Can she at least get that book she got from the library when she was just starting out, with a diagram for boiling water in it? It has just occurred to her that the translation effect in here might cause all spells to go off as if she's saying them in English, and she wants to check that on a tiny version of the water-boiling diagram and not on something unfamiliar where the result is likely to be an uninformative "whatever that was it needed suppressing" at best.

Yes, she can get the book.

Cool. Trying to cast it straight out of the book does nothing, not even "something bad that gets suppressed, so she hasn't found a Get Out of Tracing Free card, but it's not like she has anywhere to be right now; she can copy it onto a new page. Does the water-boiling spell behave normally or does it produce a massive steam cloud? (She determines this out in the yard, standing well back.)

The water-boiling spell behaves normally!

Good to know! She goes back inside, scrutinizes her sheet for flaws again with slightly fresher eyes, and turns to Ismat.

"Next step is coming up with a detailed verbal description of what exactly I want to do. The easiest way might be to hold both necklaces and say 'give the necklace in my left hand the same magical properties as the necklace in my right hand', since it means I don't need a solid grasp of how your magic works."