"You are infinitely more interesting than Mike Newton?" suggests Bella.

Darren laughs. "Thank you. I wasn't comparing myself to him at all, actually, but I'm glad I win in a contest against him."

"You are also highly interesting on an absolute scale, I assure you."

Well that just makes Darren blush and be flattered! "You are, too," he says, giggling.

"Thank you. My ego was not troubled, so it does not need soothing per se, but it can always use a bit of inflation."

"Of course, is that a secondary job I have? Along with a luggage carrier, an ego inflater?"

"Yes. I might wind up giving you so many tasks that I have to abbreviate your job title to 'personal assistant' or something."

Darren snickers. "Exciting stuff. I can move up in the world!"

"Mm-hm."

That is when Vernon shows up to collect them! "... Coming with us, Bella?" he asks, raising an eyebrow.

"Yes please. Also if it's okay with you I'd like to borrow the car to go out for dinner with Darren."

Pause. Consideration. "Hm. Okay, go ahead, but your father is going to be informed of this, right?"

"...That I'm driving, or that I'm going out with Darren? I mean, the answer is yes either way, but it hasn't escalated to urgent information yet."

"Making sure. Responsible parenthood, it's required."

"Oh, by the way," says Bella, "I don't have my computer with me, but I got a ways into making Excel spreadsheet formulas produce sums of the final totals of how much of each effect a set of runes at various size multipliers will yield combined. It can't actually draw it for me, or suggest rune sets, but it'll do the calculation for most of the runes I've picked up so far."

Darren grins! "That is the best idea. I've been focusing on getting as many runes as possible rather than using them efficiently, that's kind of a huge help."

"Once we have your entire extant rune dictionary loaded up into the spreadsheet it'll be a good checking step in spell creation. How much have we covered of what you've got, so far?"

"About a third. There are an absurd number of runes, it's ridiculous."

"And you don't even know about all of them. Well, I think that's all to the good, anyway, the more there are the more flexibility there is, even if it's a steep learning curve. We should see if photocopied spells work soon. Do you have a safe smallish one that would be a good test subject?"

"Not yet, it's actually kind of difficult to find a spell that will probably be safe even if something goes wrong with it."

"Let's see... with the effects I know to exist... boiling water's not safe if it mistargets, same problem with freezing it, turning something blue would be bad if it was permanent and hit one of us... okay you're right this is hard."

"Very. The best idea I had was something that redirects light, but then I remembered ultraviolet light and other dangerous things in light and realized that could end really badly."

"Are there any spells you can cast with one rune in the inscription? I wouldn't imagine it'd be very practical to produce a near-random slew of effects like that, but it'd be simple, it'd be predictable, and it'd tell us if photocopies work."