"Often missing before you did Dragon Fairy Elf Witch to Father Christmas?"

"Magic back home was complicated."

"Storytime complicated or alas that this will never come up again complicated?"

Uh, Backchannel? Please help.

Nia is asking if Kareen would like to say more on this topic or not!

"Not never come up again but storytime is not right now."

"Understood." She takes a copy of the little infosheet Bella wrote up about Being A Library 101 and traipses off.

And after lunch Kareen will go meet up with Aadhya to do science! 

Relatively-safe materials that Kareen can produce include:

-A jar of dead silvery worms.

-A jar of ashes labelled "skin book." 

-A pile of old, dry human bones, just slightly cooler than room temperature. 

-A block of wax. 

Without touching any of it, Aadhya can start casting some spells to help her orient to what properties these things have. "...I don't think I can do anything worthwhile with those," she says, pointing at the jar. "Lots of not-worthwhile things but the intent is pushing hard and I have no ideas for circumventing it... the ashes are maybe good, I think. For certain values of good. I think maybe if I turned them into a diamond it'd be good for some kinds of scrying. Like if you wanted to get more than a... noise... out of somebody in a maw-mouth. The bones want to be... some kind of autonomous monitoring thing? Like if I were trying to build something like the Scholomance gates, I'd want them in the apparatus determining whether or not something should be allowed through or not. I could possibly even turn it into something like a golem that patrolled a place for mals, though I think you're probably going to want to go down to the graduation hall before I could get very far on that. The wax is more like... it'd go on a weapon, I think."

"That all tracks. I, uh, I picked the worms because they're definitely not going to hurt anyone in their current state, not because any of what they were when they were alive was worthwhile. And the wax, haha, yeah. If I tried to do anything that wasn't a weapon with them, it'd be, like...a water heater. One for, like, tea, not showers, so it'd be harder for it to spontaneously burn people."

"I think it would make the tea taste bad!"

"Mm. That sounds right, but I wouldn't have guessed it beforehand."

"It would at least try, anyway. I don't think it would make a much better weapon than I can get stuff off mals for, though, and it does look harder to work with. A patrol golem would be fun to make but maybe redundant. I do not know if we want to talk to people in maw-mouths. Do we want that?"

"...I don't know if we want to hear from them, but if we could give them any kind of input that wasn't suffering, that sounds like a strict improvement."

"...trickier. Do you want to spot me while I do the diamond part? It's mana intensive and I've never done it before for that reason but it's not complicated."

"Sounds good. Honestly, two-way communication is probably the best outcome; I don't know if I want to talk to someone inside a maw-mouth, but isolation is really bad for people. Being able to talk to someone--even just knowing that there was someone listening to you scream--I don't know that it would help. But."

"...who's gonna volunteer to listen to the screams, though." She starts gathering tools for superheating the ash in a crucible.

"Oh. Me."

"That does not sound like a super healthy thing to do but maybe it's a Beholding thing? Be...hearing."

"I don't anticipate doing it one hundred percent of the time, or anything, but--yeah. Beholding involves a lot of bearing witness to terrible things happening to people. And, also--I think The Rescuer could help me get people out of maw-mouths, so being more emotionally invested in doing that could, in fact, actually help."

Nod. She double checks everything in her mise en place, gets her gloves on - "Any special handling instructions for the ash?"

"No, the ash is perfectly safe. The wax I would handle with protective gloves, but everything else is totally safe to handle."

She funnels the ash into the crucible, murmuring in Hindi to get it all to move along and not cling to the jar or funnel in the process.

She puts the lid on the crucible, moves it over, drops one of the full Radiant Mind crystals into her bra because she's got gloves on, and starts sucking it dry getting the crucible hot, encouraging the carbon to separate from everything else and keep the intent pure in the carbon alone. While that's going, she puts together a mold that'll crush the resulting purified carbon into a nice gem shape so there won't have to be too much materials loss from the lapidary step. That's just a profligate application of make-and-mend on some scrap-sized materials. Then she sings the crucible cool, separates out the carbon from the wastage with a bit of English that also serves to monopolize all the marshmallows in a box of Lucky Charms, and pours the carbon along. She gets a fresh crystal just in case at this stage, checks her spellbook, and starts chanting to press it into a diamond.

Kareen is watching raptly. 

The diamond chant is a pretty long one, and it's English, though occasionally something jukes in a way she doesn't approve of and she dips into a Hindi couplet that pushes it back on track. Then she sings the cooling spell again, and then she dismantles the mold around the diamond.

"It doesn't do anything yet," she says. "But it will."