That doesn't seem to make it be happening any less.

If it suddenly disappeared that would arguably be even weirder. She takes a step into the bar, notes that according to her ring she isn't stopping anything bad from happening, and walks farther in and looks around. The view of exploding stars out the window is extremely cool.

It really is!

When she lets go of the door it swings shut and then pushes open again.

"Hello. Do you know what this place is?"

"No, and it should've been impossible to do this in the Dome -" She reaches for the door handle, which has ceased to exist behind her.

"What's the Dome--?" Oh no, the door is trapping them in here. She tries wanting it to stop doing that for a moment, then worries that she might stop the entire bar with them in it to who knows what effect and tries to not want anything.

"Dome's a big, uh, dome, covers the palace in Sothis, blocks teleportation and suchlike, shouldn't have been a way to - why me I'm not even pregnant - who are you -"

"I'm Margaret, I've never been to any palaces or anywhere called Sothis and I'm as confused as you are."

"Sothis is the capital of Osirion. Uh, on the Inner Sea, do they know about the Inner Sea in - Tian Xia?"

"I'm from the United States and I thought I had a decent geography education but I've never heard of any of those places. Are you from an Avalon?" Presumably this woman is a critter since she thinks teleportation is normal.

"No, I'm from Sothis. Big city." She's feeling around the edge of the door. "And I have been impossibly kidnapped out of my family's palace and I don't care for it at all."

"Yeah, this is pretty creepy." Margaret is debating whether to offer to try to teleport them out, but this bar wouldn't fit in her parents' kitchen and she's still never teleported into or out of an expanded space and she really doesn't want the first time to be with a passenger and a lot of other weird stuff going on. "Hello? Is anyone else here?"

No voices call back.

She walks up to the counter and examines it. There's nothing behind the bar where you would normally expect shelves full of alcohol, and nothing on the bar where you would expect a cash register or something, and overall this whole place gives off an air of "faked up to mess with people without a ton of attention to detail".

When she gets close enough to touch the bar a napkin appears on its surface, suddenly and silently as though added between frames in a movie.

Okay, so someone is watching and capable of teleporting things in here. And the thing they chose to teleport was a napkin. For some reason. She picks up the napkin and examines it.

It says Welcome to Milliways! Can I get you anything? The first drink is free.

"Hey, uh, I never got your name, also there's a magically appearing napkin offering us free drinks and not explaining why we got kidnapped." 

"Ismat. Uh, I don't have anything on me for detecting poison."

I'm sorry, I don't control the behavior of the door, says a new napkin. It seldom declines to open for a given patron for more than a subjective day. I don't dispense poison, though I have nothing but my word to offer on that.

"Yeah, me neither." Margaret hands Ismat both napkins and checks if her phone has signal.

It does not.

"- well, who does control the behavior of the door -"

It's conventional to refer to them as "the Landlords" but I can shed no further light on the matter.

"So you're, what, trapped in here with us too? Where are you, why are you communicating by napkin?"

I'm the bar. I'm stationary by nature and this is how I communicate with most patrons.

"Oh! Sorry, I didn't realize people came in bar. Did you know people could be bars, Ismat? Also, uh, bar, how long has this place existed? Have other people come in here?"

"I don't know of anybody making a habit of turning people into bars but it's not the strangest thing I ever heard."

There's usually someone around, but I'm afraid I have very little idea how old I am, I simply can't remember back that far.

That sounds pretty unnerving for the bar too. "So, uh, I still have no idea where Osirion is."

"North end of Garund."

Ugh, American schools are really living down to the stereotype today. "Where is that relative to North America?"

"What's North America? It's, uh, south of Avistan, west of Casmaron..."

"Okay, if it weren't for how you're speaking English I'd be wondering if you were even from Earth."

"I'm speaking Taldane!"

"Oh, man, translation magic? I wish I had found out that was a thing sooner! And not like this."

"It's a thing, but - I didn't do it, I don't go around wearing something that does that -"

The two of you are not from the same world, says the bar, if anybody's looking.

"Bar says . . . parallel universe? Did you know those were a thing too, because I didn't."

"There's other planes. I've been to Axis."

"Wow, there just keep being more things in heaven and earth. What's your world like? We both have humans and magic items, at least."

"Axis, not Heaven or Earth. Axis is the Lawful Neutral Outer Plane. Uh, humans, magic items... deserts? Elves? Falafel?"

"It was a literary reference; is there an actual universe called Heaven? We have deserts and falafel but not elves as far as I know. Uh, pegasi, computers, universities, baseball? And what does it mean for a plane to be Lawful Neutral?"

"There's a Heaven - Lawful Good outer plane - and an Earth, that's one of the Elementals. We have pegasi and universities. Uh, everybody in the plane is - no, that's not true, some people in Axis aren't Lawful Neutral, but that's the way to bet. The natives all are, and the dead people, and most of the gods."

"We don't have gods, at least where anyone can see them. And our dead people don't, uh, do stuff. They're just dead."

"What, are they all getting eaten by daemons straight off - that's awful -"

"Nobody eats them, they just--stop existing. The bodies get buried, usually. It's really good that people in your world can keep living after they die; I wish we had that."

"How do you mean they just stop existing, what's happening to their souls - I could probably make a soul-trapping thing so somebody could take your soul somewhere appropriate to let it out before it dissolved or whatever, I never have and it'd be hard but I'm good at what I do -"

"I have no idea how souls work in my world, or if we even have them. If anyone has a way to detect them I don't know about it. You make magic items?"

"Yeah. Jewelry."

"That's interesting. I do too. How does it work in your world? I draw runes on paper and then say an incantation."

"Oh, I'm not a wizard, I just... make jewelry. Though I've worked with wizards now and again, and clerics."

"What's the difference between a wizard and a cleric and someone who makes magic jewelry? Or did you mean you make the jewelry and a wizard or a cleric does the magic part?"

"I've done it that way but now I can make the jewelry magic on my own as long as it doesn't require anything really spectacular. But I can't cast spells, I can just make jewelry."

"Huh. I can do it both ways, but with items you can make it do the same thing over and over instead of needing a new casting every time, so I pretty much only do items. It sounds like your world works on different rules."

"I think selling spells is much more lucrative than making items but more of a hassle to have to do your own sales and wizards don't typically like to do sales. What items do you do business in?"

"Things that make you invisible, lights, I have a healing item but selling healing has a lot of laws around it; my biggest seller is things that make members of other species look human so they can live in human society."

"- why is healing bogged down in legislation -"

"Because I'm a kid with no medical training and I can't prove my methods are safe because I haven't tested them and I can't test them because I can't prove they're safe."

And because if she wasn't a dragon they might well not be safe, to be fair, but she can't be fair because even if whoever abducted them probably knows about her business they might not know her species, and Ismat almost certainly doesn't.

"Medical training - are they not safe, compared to not being healed -"

"I've never had anyone end up worse off. But, uh, not a lot of people know magic healing, so I've only had a handful of volunteers who were willing to try something new."

"I guess it'd be hard to come by if you don't have gods. If the damn door would open I could get you some missionaries, fix that right up. - well, maybe after my brother in law checks that their souls wouldn't dissolve if something happened to them, that'd be a bit much to ask."

"What are your gods like, other than good at healing magic?"

"Depends on the god. In Osirion we mostly favor Abadar, god of trade, but now and then I'll say a word for Shelyn or Nethys, gods of beauty and magic respectively."

"Are those the only ones? What do they do, how do they interact with people?"

"No, no, there's dozens, but not all of 'em have active churches in the area and not all of those are relevant to me. Uh, they pick clerics, who can do magic, especially healing, and who carry out their will in the material plane. My husband's a cleric of Abadar, and his brother's Abadar's mortal aspect, pharaoh of Osirion; the church handles banking and insurance and regulatory compliance and pilgrimages to Axis and social services and such, so Merenre, my husband, does that, and my brother-in-law rules the country."

"That's really cool. Especially how they all do healing in addition to their specialties. I admit I'm kind of hesitant to invite unfamiliar powerful beings into my universe, but if we get out of here and if my universe isn't a death trap that keeps people out of their afterlife I'll at least think about it and try to learn more."

Ismat goes and tries the door again but it still won't open. "Probably sooner or later I'll be noticed missing and Merenre'll have me fetched home."

"That's good. --Do you think he'll be able to get me home too? Nobody I know knows about other worlds; they won't know where to look for me." Bella has as good a chance as anyone of figuring something out, but she'd have to develop new spells even just to find out that Margaret isn't dead.

"He's got Plane Shift but you need a doodad for it and I don't know that there are any attuned to your plane. Maybe Abadar can work something out. Sending'll get a message to someone, though, doesn't need a doodad."

"That's good. And if it doesn't look like I can get the door back open to my world, I can try teleporting, I'm just worried it will go horribly wrong if I try to teleport from outside the universe."

"Our sort of teleport only works within planes, yeah."

"Yeah. So, what sort of things do you make magic items for?"

"Little hairpins to warn you if you're being lawless or evil or something, necklace that makes you immune to diseases, rings that make you only need two hours of sleep and no food or water..."

"Wow, those are impressive! Except, uh, how did you make a hairpin that knows what's evil? I mean, how did you define that?"

"- I don't, I suppose Pharasma does it? It just reads off you the same as Detect Alignment would except it can tell you about specific things you've got in mind and not just your whole life all together. I broke a law for about a decade and I'd rather like to go to Axis now I've cut that out, I wear one -" She taps it on her head; it's gold and jacinth.

"So, breaking laws affects you in the afterlife? Is that like a divine judgement thing, or more like Axis having a government that doesn't let anyone with a criminal record immigrate? And what's Pharasma, a legislative body?"

"Divine judgment thing. Pharasma handles that and sends you off wherever you sort, she's a god. Axis has governments, lots of 'em, you can move wherever you like the look of it."

"Huh. What are all the places people can get sorted? Can people who get sent to one place communicate with the other places? I assume at least some of them can communicate with Ear--I mean, with where the living people are."

"Axis, Heaven, Hell, Nirvana, Elysium, Maelstrom, Abyss, Boneyard but you can't stay there forever, Abaddon but if you sort neutral evil you're allowed to pick Hell or the Abyss instead I hear. They're all - communicable with in theory, but Axis is the one that lets you go buy lunch and rent a safety deposit box or what have you."

"The translation magic is making some of those sound pretty ominous."

"Some of 'em are evil afterlives!"

"That sounds--not great."

"Well, yes, this is among the reasons it's inadvisable to be evil."

"Is there a big published list of what--Pharasma, was it?--considers evil? Because in my world there's a lot of disagreement on that."

"Uh, I don't think Pharasma publishes a list, but the Osirian government does statistics on who ends up in Hell, and usually it's like they murdered a baby or something."

"Yeah, okay, murdering babies is widely agreed to be evil. Though, uh, not necessarily what counts as a baby, I guess. If you guys can detect souls, do you know exactly when they attach to people?"

"No, but getting rid of one isn't understood to be alignment-safe at any particular moment. I guess that could be a weakness of our statistics but honestly some people can't tell they're pregnant for months, you don't want to count on having a one-week window or anything, just have to keep your clothes on till you're married and bringing in enough coin to feed 'em."

"My world has medicine you can take every day that makes it so you can't get pregnant until you stop taking it. Is that evil too, or has it not been invented?"

"I have never consulted an herbalist about this because I was posing as a man for a while and then I got engaged the same day I stopped, but you'd want to be really sure it wouldn't kill a baby. Women aren't allowed to buy, say, shapeshifting potions, because those'll kill a baby, and you just can't be that sure you aren't pregnant unless the thing you're doing is not having any sex."

"I'm pretty sure the pill we have can't make you miscarry even if you take it wrong, it just works or it doesn't. Also, not letting women buy shapeshifting potions sounds kind of excessive? Presumably the woman knows more than the potion seller about whether she's been having sex. Are women also never allowed to, to drink alcohol or do extreme sports or whatever?" Honestly, with evil-afterlife levels of danger hanging over anyone who loses a pregnancy and has it magically labeled their fault, it's a wonder any of them ever try to have kids on purpose.

"Well, it might be evil for the potion-seller too, see. So if I wanted to shapeshift for some reason I'd go to my husband about it and he'd decide if he trusted me it was a safe time, which a potion-seller who doesn't know me can't very well do, and maybe buy me a potion or maybe only do it if I said some things under a truth spell or something, and that'd be on him if it turns out aiding and abetting lands you in trouble. We're allowed to drink... I think sports aren't illegal but I wouldn't expect to see women at them unless they were adventurer types already."

"What a difficult set of constraints you're all working under. I guess once you get to the afterlife you have forever to take as many potions as you want--unless people get re-sorted between afterlives or something?"

"Not routinely, anyway. And yeah, the dead can't have children, though if I wanted to be shaped like a man I'd have done it long ago and I don't think I'll find it much more appealing afterward."

"Fair enough. What sorts of shapeshifting exist other than changing gender?"

"Oh, some people can turn into animals and monsters and suchlike. They say the high priestess of Nethys can turn into a dragon, though I can't personally confirm it."

Margaret suppresses about eighty percent of a laugh. "That's cool. Some people in my world have two forms too, though it's not public knowledge there."

"Huh, why not? Seems like that'd make it less useful."

"Yeah, it's pretty annoying having to hide it. I don't know how it ended up as a secret originally, but now a lot of people are worried that making critters public knowledge will freak the humans out and they'll, I don't know, start a war or something."

"Start a war over you... existing...? Maybe this is my Abadaran talking but that sounds like a terrible reason for a war."

"No, it's absolutely a terrible reason. I think it should actually be possible to tell people slowly and get them to be reasonable about it. It's just hard to predict how large groups of people will react to anything."

"I guess if you have a lot of people agitating for a war because they want to level or what have you that could me dicey."

"There's nobody who wants a war for its own sake. What does 'want to level' mean, I don't think it translated right."

"Oh, casters get better at stuff kind of - choppily? It's smoother in practice, I think, but people talk about it like you're level two or level nine or what have you and that has implications for what spells you can cast, how hard you are to kill."

"Huh. I learn new spells one at a time because I only get better at the specific thing I'm working on, for the most part. Does being harder to kill just mean that people learn a lot of magic useful for self-defense, or is there more to it?"

"No, also just harder to cast hostile spells on - they have a failure rate - harder to stab usefully, that sort of thing. I think the leading theory is that adventuring, which is how people tend to level, involves getting healing magic cast on you a lot, and that's good for you? I don't know if there's been a study, you'd have to pay someone a lot to adventure without access to healing."

"Couldn't you also try it the other way, find people who have been healed a lot because they got sick or had accidents repeatedly? Also, how does magic skill make you harder to stab?"

"Well, magic's expensive, and rich people're also more likely to have taken lessons in magic or at least fencing or something, it isn't a clean experiment. The really high level casters I know are not getting people trying to stab them in front of me but I am a rich person and once one of my apprentices tripped holding a pliers and ought to have driven it through my foot, and I got a bruise? Didn't bother having that fixed though I did get the shoe mended, that's a cantrip, cheap as a few loads of laundry."

Margaret winces at the thought of pliers going through someone's foot. "That's really interesting. What makes magic expensive, if it's not dangerous or secret? Is it just the limit on how much someone can do per day plus it taking a long time to learn?"

"Some of it has expensive components, too, like diamonds for a Miracle or what have you, but for everything else, yes, mostly those."

"I wonder if I could learn some of your kind or if you have to be from your world to do it."

"Huh, I guess I don't know - I don't think you need to be anybody special to be a wizard, or anything but in good with a god to be a cleric, but it's weird if you don't have them and maybe it's because you can't."

"Could you try to teach me a spell? Or do one yourself, to see if it works in here at all?" It probably will, her medallion is still working.

"I'm not a wizard, I don't know any to teach you."

"Oh, the theory doesn't overlap with the artifact-making? I assume that requires materials to get anywhere with."

"Most people who make magic items are also spellcasters, I just found out how to do it anyway. And yeah, there's a kind of metal you can anchor an effect to and it'll power it."

"My magic doesn't seem to need a power source. It does use something, because effects that aren't attached to an object wear off eventually, but whatever resource it needs I can't see where it's coming from. I wonder if it runs off something completely different from yours or if it's the same kind of power but my world has more of it."

"Huh! S'pose you could attach an effect to something to power our sort of magic?"

"Maybe! I'd need to be able to describe what I wanted in very unambiguous terms--not the internal mechanism of how your magic works, just the external effects I'm going for. Or possibly I could do it by reference to an existing object."

"I have some on me. Do they need to be any particular sort?"

"I don't think so. If this works at all it will be because I can use my magic to produce your kind of power the way I can produce electricity, so if it's the same thing across multiple kinds of item it should work the same."

Ismat pulls off a necklace with a stylized hand-shape of lapis lazuli, and hands it over.

"Do you want me to duplicate all of this necklace's magical properties onto a different object, or just a subset? I need to know exactly what effect I'm going for."

"The chain's the power source, the hand does the spell. If you can dupe the whole thing that'd be very cool."

"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."

"Would that account for the spellsilver? I'm not sure if 'being spellsilver' counts as a magical property."

"Good question. If you tried to make this with a different metal, would it work badly, or not at all?"

"It's not all made of spellsilver, just this bit here. It's not actually good for most of the structural features of... anything. There are different kinds of spellsilver but I mostly work in this sort because it's the densest, holds the most without having to make somebody an entire gorget."

Margaret thinks for a moment, then snaps her fingers. "Bar can't make magical objects! So I can try to sell back this necklace and buy one with an appropriate bit of spellsilver and if she can't sell it then it's a magical property and if she can then I'll have some."

"...Does this result in me maybe not getting my necklace back? It's worth nearly a thousand gold."

"No, no, I meant sell back the nonmagical necklace I was originally planning to do the test on! I have no plans to do anything with your necklace except referring to it as an example in an incantation and I've never had that damage anything."

"Okay, good."

"Also, I don't think you ever said what it does? Theoretically I don't need to know for this incantation but it might help and also I'm curious."

"Hand of the Mage - gives me an extra hand, useful when I'm working. But since Mage Hand is a cantrip it's not too hard to make."

"Ooh, neat! Is controlling three hands any harder than controlling two?"

"You have to concentrate on it," she shrugs. "It's not that hard."

"Neat. Anyway, back in a minute." So, can Bar make spellsilver?

She sure can, every kind of it!

That's great but it's going to require some back and forth with Ismat about what the kinds are and which kind she should get. Which is the opposite of a hardship because magical metallurgy is so cool.

Sure, Ismat can give her an introductory spellsilver overview.

Margaret is having so much fun. She takes some notes about potentially stacking effects from both magic systems on the same artifact, then goes back to Bar and gets set up with a necklace containing the same kind of spellsilver as Ismat's original, in the same shape and attached similarly to the rest of it.

Anything else before she tries the test? If she gets it wrong she'll need to retrace the whole diagram before she can try again.

Ismat inspects the necklace. "I wouldn't bet it'd work as-is," she says, "though I could probably get it there in an hour or two, but your enchantment's faster."

"It's faster if I get it right on the first try. Doing something new often takes multiple attempts, but then once I've got it I can make them as fast as I can draw the diagrams. It's pretty neat how we have such different sets of constraints."

"Hour or two is a lot faster than starting from scratch, usually it takes me at least four hours for even the simplest pieces."

"Huh. I guess theoretically I could parallelize by paying someone to do tracing while I do design and incantations, if not for the secrecy. Anyway, might as well find out if I need to go back to the drawing board for this one." She lays the diagram out on the floor and gets the correct necklace in each hand and starts speaking in what Ismat won't be able to notice is French.

Ismat supervises thoughtfully without interrupting her.

And momentarily there is no visible result whatsoever, which Margaret is very happy about!

"That probably worked! I can't be sure until you try it, but I didn't have to suppress any explosions and that usually means at least a partial success. She hands over both necklaces.

Ismat's been keeping track of which one is her original; she pockets that one and puts on the new one. She concentrates a bit and the pendant itself lifts up from her chest. "Looks to me like it worked!"

"Awesome! So my magic can interact with your magic at least if it has something to copy. I bet we can get all sorts of cool applications out of that if we ever get out of this bar."

"It doesn't save on materials but on the high end there's a lot of labor cost, even for me and other nonwizards. Can you teach me?"

Margaret bites her lip. "Theoretically, yes, but once you know the risks you might not want it. I can't teach the thing that lets me block the side effects when something doesn't work on the first try, so if you got a line wrong in a diagram or made one mistake in the initial math or didn't specify something precisely enough in an incantation or stumbled over a word you'd get anything from a cloud of ash to a big explosion to being turned into a different species."

"Well, can you make an item that does that for me instead?"

"That sounds extremely hard to specify and might not even be possible without turning you into my world's form of shapeshifter, but on the other hand it would be world-changing if it worked. So far working on immortality and resurrection first has seemed like a better bet, but maybe multiple worlds changes the calculus in favor of metamagic."

"We have resurrection! It wants diamonds, which we understood to be finite in supply, but maybe Bar can sell us as many as we can pay for! Immortality sometimes somebody pulls it off but they don't tell everybody else how."

"Oh, wow--that changes so much. I have money but not 'huge pile of diamonds' money but if we could resurrect people that would make spell development a lot less dangerous. And maybe we could resurrect dead experts who could do the suppression thing and learn their lost knowledge! But that's got weird political risks because there was a war and enough knowledge got lost that I don't know the names of any experts who definitely wouldn't start it up again." Also she wants Bella's mom back first of everything, which risks making the politics worse, but she's going to hold out hope that she can figure out how to have it both ways.

"You need a body. And it's harder - needs a higher-circle caster, higher-circle spell - if they've been dead longer."

"Ah. I don't know where anyone is buried, but when we get out of here I might be able to find out." Also she doesn't know if Bella's mom even is buried as opposed to cremated and the best-case scenario still sounds gross. "Maybe the best thing to do here and now is for me to teach you the spells I know work, if you're okay with the risk of doing the copying wrong or mispronouncing a word. It's safer than trying to design new ones."

"I think with a ninth circle spell you can skip the body. Uh, pronouncing a word wrong in what language?"

"Any language that isn't your native language, which is going to make teaching you in here very tricky. Casting in your native language puts too much power into the spell with generally horrible consequences. No, I don't know why; if it was designed the designers did a bad job."

"I speak Osirian and Taldane. Learned Taldane as a kid though, can I still use it?"

"Did you learn it the same way learned Osirian, or in school? But I should be standing by the first time you cast something anyway."

"I learned Osirian at home and Taldane by stealing my brother's homework and talking to neighbor kids."

"You'll probably be fine, then. So the first thing to go over is runes and their meanings, I think. Bar, can I borrow a copy of--" she names the rune dictionary she learned from and wishes she could even get to just the garage she was came in here from.

Bar produces a copy.

Explanations time! Here are the possible meanings runes can have; each rune has a bunch of meanings in different ratios, scaled by the size of the rune. You want your diagram to contain a bunch of the meanings you want and as little as possible of the ones you don't. By arranging them like so you can get the second set to cancel out the side effects of the first set, then the third set to cancel out the side effects of the second set, and so on. She uses the spent water-boiling diagram as an example because it's fairly small.

"Well, that's nastily mathematical - you don't have to go adventuring to make the big diagrams work, or anything, though?"

"Nope. If you get the runes and the incantation right, it works. And if it's a fresh diagram; it gets used up even if you make a mistake and then you have to draw it again."

"Huh! You could teach people to copy diagrams in - days - and to use them in hours - this'll be amazing."

"It's still extremely dangerous. It sounds like you have people who are used to dangerous magic and ways to mitigate the risk, but it's important that everyone know what they're getting into."

"They can make enough to cover the insurance, I reckon. But do give me all the safety warnings, I don't want to make the actuaries annoyed with me."

"Don't cast in your native language. Double-check your meaning math and if possible have someone else double-check it. Use a straightedge and a protractor to draw your runes and then double-check that. Incantations should leave as little ambiguity as possible. Cast in a quiet place with no interruptions so you're less likely to trip over a word . . . I should get you a book on it, I want to make sure I don't miss anything and a book will have examples of the consequences of mistakes so you can get set up to mitigate them." She returns the books she doesn't need anymore to Bar and gets the book of runecasting accident case studies she has such unnerving memories of.

"What does count as a native language, some people are brought up speaking Osirian and Taldane both at home," Ismat says, jotting down notes.

"They'll need to cast in a third one, then; it has to be one you learn formally instead of picking it up as a baby. Also, I need to emphasize: all of those rules are for casting something that's already been tested. I don't know how to develop new spells safely. I still have to do a bunch of trial and error most times that would probably kill anyone else. I should test the translations of the spells I know into a couple different languages on your world; translating can introduce meaning changes."

"That happens with people developing wizard spells too, sometimes they explode. How're you going to translate them?"

"Well, the translation effect in here has been good enough not to trip us up in ordinary conversation, so it's at least a first pass. If I say the incantation out loud and then you write it down in Taldane then it'll be in Taldane and I can look at it written down and see if translating it back has introduced any changes."

Ismat nods and prepares to transcribe.

She recites most of the incantations she knows, skipping the medallion ones because they don't need those and also can't use them. None of them do anything without a diagram nearby. Her enunciation is perfect, but she has to fight her instincts every time she needs to pause in the middle of one.

Ismat offers back the notes to see if anything has changed in translation. It all looks just the same as what she said aloud to Margaret.

"Looks exactly unchanged. Either the translation is really good, or it's imperfect in reversible ways. Do you want to try copying a diagram and casting with it? I can check your work and spot you while you cast."

"And you spotting me means it's quite safe?" Given confirmation she will attempt to enchant a nonmagical ring she has.

"If I'm standing right next to you, yes." It's a good thing she tested whether she can interfere with other people's magic before now. She checks that Ismat's diagram is a perfect copy of hers, then hovers while she incants.

And is this ring now a ring of mage hand?

Yes it is! "Awesome! People from your world can do it and the translation is good enough for at least that one."

"Marvelous! I want to see if this works on more advanced magic items, stuff you have to be a really high circle wizard to make -"

"So do I! The spell I've got now only works for duplicating things we already have one of, but I could try doing something more general. Do magic items have well-defined names such that I could try 'turn this Thing into a Thing of Stuff-Doing'?" It's a reach, but apparently runecasting understands hexadecimal color codes, and if it works it could work really broadly.

"There are oddball items but there are also things that get made about the same lots of times. Ring of Three Wishes. Headband of Mental Superiority!"

"Oooooh. Might need a diagram the size of this room but it's worth trying!"

"I might - if my door comes back or I get rescued - be able to get my hands on a headband of mental superiority long enough to copy it, if that helps."

"If it does anything like what it sounds like it would make me faster at coming up with diagrams and incantations," she says, already writing down some equations for the rune-meanings that seem most relevant to intelligence enhancement, "and for that and other reasons I really want one whether it turns out I can make them without an example or not. Can you tell me more about what it does? Having a clearer mental image might help."

"The pharaoh's crown does three standard deviations of all three mental features that our magic treats as enhanceable. I've got earrings that do the same for one of the three, but they get much more expensive if you're doing more enchantment on a single item, they interfere unless you're very very good at it."

"What features does your magic treat as enhanceable? Working memory, long-term memory, visualizing 3D objects, ability to come up with plans that work?"

"Intelligence, wisdom, charisma. Or cunning, wisdom, splendor, respectively. I'll let you try on my earrings if you like."

"That would be awesome! Which of the three do the earrings do?"

"Intelligence, it's the most relevant to what I do. I bet it's the best one for you too."

"It definitely is." 

"If your ears aren't pierced you can just sort of tuck them into the shells of your ears to try it out, but then you'd better not shake your head -" Are Margaret's ears pierced.

They are not, because she was never particularly enthused about putting holes in herself, because she was never expecting there to be this good of a reason. But she will totally stick them in like headphones and--

"Oh wow. Oh wow." High-speed runemath while carefully not moving her head.

Ismat giggles.

More runes and also shorthand notes about aging and Life extension! Eventually she gets to a stopping point and remembers that they are not her earrings and she should give them back. She winces as she takes them out and says, "I am absolutely going to make myself a pair of those."

"I wear 'em all the time. Except to sleep, and sometimes when I'm holding a baby."

"I'll probably do the same. You said they also come in headband form, right?"

"Yes. It does want to be something on or around your head. The physical version's usually a belt."

"I'll probably end up needing to design a different diagram for every magic item that we can't copy. Maybe I should try copying the earrings first so I know it's something runecasting can do at all; I've never designeded something with mental effects before. Though medallions do something to let the same mind move differently shaped bodies, so it seems likely." But on the other hand she wants a pair of intelligence earrings sooner rather than later.

"I wish my husband were here to get me Church-backed financing for all this..."

"Yeah. Bar, I don't suppose you want to buy any magic I can sell you?"

I can pay people for working shifts in the infirmary or as Security personnel.

"I guess I could make another healing rock? I don't know how good I'd be at security."

:Security shifts are timed such that whoever is present in that capacity will be categorically accurate for the purpose relative to the other patrons.

"Can you explain how that works? Do you or someone know in advance who's going to come in? If I sign up for security and it turns out I wouldn't be good at it will I just never get shifts?"

:I don't know in advance, nor do I control the door. I can assess you for being competent enough to get shifts at all, and you do qualify, but I can't guarantee that you would immediately get as many shifts as you might want.

"Huh. Well, uh, feel free to sign me up for shifts if it's a good time for one while I'm in here. Or do I need to do something to formally get on the list?"

There is PAPERWORK.

At least it doesn't need to be filled out one letter at a time with perfect line lengths and angles!

It does not! Now she has a Security job. She is not called upon to immediately start a shift, though.

"Well, now I have at least a possible source of income while I'm in here. I would try designing a spell to get the door to open, but I kind of get the sense that the biggest diagram I could fit in here wouldn't do it."

"I'm a little surprised I haven't been noticed missing yet. It's been a while."

"I would expect I've been noticed missing too, but I don't think my parents could do anything." Maybe Bella could, but her parents won't know to tell her so she won't know until Saturday, and anyway it might be that none of the magic in Margaret's world can find this place if it doesn't want to be found.

She wonders whether her parents think it's more likely that she ran away from home for some reason, or that she's dead.

"If my lot find me perhaps we can Sending yours."

"That's a spell you think might work through the door? Worth a try. And I might be able to do something similar; I don't think we've come up with anything either of our magic systems can do that the other one definitely can't."

"Well, I don't know about through the door, it doesn't work through the Dome, but it works plane to plane and if you were neither in here nor in the Dome at the time I'd imagine it'd get where it was meant to."

"Huh. That would definitely help, if you can find my home plane with me as a reference. Also, Bar, do you know if magic that works across planes can usually reach people in here?"

It varies, with the most common explanation for failure being the time-pause effect.

"- damn, that'll be why they haven't found me."

"I guess we're on our own for getting out of here, then. At least nobody will think I'm dead. I should start on an intelligence headband and a ring of three wishes."

"- with fabric items, I don't know how to make them personally, but you can make magic cloaks and suchlike, and those consume spellsilver but don't have them in the item at the end, the spellsilver's just turned to lead, I think. You might be able to make things that way."

"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.