...Actually, she'll take a break from this and calm her nerves by runebinding a piece of junk wood left over from something else into a nice, simple, straightforward and brute-force-y force talisman to pin the damned thing in place, then stretch and see about... Dinner? And what Luna's up to, maybe.

Luna has finished dismantling the carcass of the tentacled mole-thing, and has the meatier bits stashed in the smokehouse. This leaves a bloody pile of bone, fur, and gristle, set aside on the dirt, along with a less-significant pile of organs, stacked on something like a large wooden plate... which is getting even smaller as Luna eats it raw.

Well, she seems to be having fun. And if she hasn't gotten sick yet... Sure. Whatever.

She flops on her back and stares up at the sky with a sigh.

Nothing really makes sense anymore. She misses home. "I could be doing something useful or interesting," she says to herself. "But instead I'm a gigantic pile of angst and hormones. Fun."

Luna finishes her meal, surprisingly unbloody for having just butchered and eaten an animal. She scoops up the remains of the carcass, before heading off into the woods with it.

Well, cleanliness magic. She has some too. It's convenient. Isekai thing, maybe.

She actually does get up and follow her briefly at that. "What's that for? Bait?"

Luna shakes her head vigorously.

"No. Luna takes away. Bad smelly thing likes? Not want near."

"Good point. I would've just burned it, but you're strong and don't have magic, I guess."

Luna nods.

"Fire is hard! Luna have to knock down tree, break into bits. Not fun! Luna break tree only when need. Easy to take away smelly bits. Luna do, then hunt more."

"And I really don't wanna go in there 'cause of the nasties. So good luck." Sigh.

She heads back. Luna is Luna.

...It's around sunset, right? She should probably scry the apothecary. It's totally not that she's procrastinating working more on the collar she tried so hard to steal. So, she has a meatless dinner and scries, first.

The especially obvious scrying targets remain as irritatingly distracting as ever, especially at this distance... but Wynn focuses and locates the apothecary through a correctly-pointing window. The apothecary is as it was when Wynn last checked, and lacks red smoke today. Tomorrow evening, perhaps? That'd be 'Rainday', which was when Daisy said she'd be sending her signal.

"Did I screw it up? What even is time, anyway..."

After mulling over the likelihood of it being a trap, she decides to take a quick peek at the especially-shiny spot. Mostly, she admits to herself, because she's bored and thinking about the collars kind of makes her want to scream and cry.

At first, she picks up a view a couple inches away from a wall, but the image quickly rotates, revealing a tired-looking robed man sitting at a desk, who frowns and concentrates on the mirror for a few moments before saying...

"You've reached Grimshire Guildhall, Node 7538. I see that you are not scrying from a registered node; do you have an account number to reference?"

Her eyebrows are: Raised. Like she sort of predicted, they can apparently backtrace her. Something to be careful of.

"Account number? What is this, a bank?"

The man sighs.

"That is among the services we offer, yes. If you had an account with us, such as one tied to a registered scrying node, you could draw upon funds linked to that account to order a number of useful services. Since you don't, keep off my mirror; you've wasted my time, and may be blocking a paying customer."

So saying, he unceremoniously flips the mirror back to point at the wall.

"Rude. What if I wanted to open one?"

But she drops it.

She's kind of run out of excuses not to try poking at the Complicated Kind Of Collar again. She goes and makes sure it's really nicely pinned down and, basically, pokes it a few more times, trying to backtrace out what needs to happen to activate the bit that looks like it deactivates and unlocks everything.

Different errors this time, refining more as Wynn tries and tries again. The key is getting closer to being correct, and gets further through the checking sequence as she refines her model. With the collar being held in place instead of touched, there's also some kind of error that seems to mean something like "target not found, aborting". Perhaps she'd get a more useful result on something closer to being alive? Even one of the severed tentacles in the smokehouse might give a more interesting result than a block of wood.

Yeah, thaaaat's a problem. It's kind of like trying to figure out if a remote control is working while the TV is unplugged?

Like FUCK is she going to go enslave something she might not be able to un-enslave, though.

Whatever. She'll try... One of the less gross tentacles or other bits of meat inside the collar, still with a defensive spell wrapped around her, to see if any more of the complicated magic lights up as she pokes it in different ways.

Even severed, dead, and partially-smoked, the tentacle is kind of magically interesting? Despite clearly not being alive, it's got more energy than might be expected from a dead thing. It's actually kind of useful! Wynn is able to further refine her key pattern like this, until she eventually manages to get the collar to snap shut for a moment before getting an error like "unable to connect to target, aborting".

It's also pretty late out now, and by the time Wynn looks up from her work, there's a naked Luna sleeping in her bed.

Friggin magic monster flesh, she guesses.

She yaaaawns.

...Of course Luna just sleeps there. Why not, right? It's a bed, and it's there. It's too damn late to make a new bed, but she also doesn't want to sleep on the hard ground again, ugh.

Would it be so bad to... Share? She feels the constant low burn of arousal swell.

.....Tempting but also aaaaaaah? It seems like that. Would not lead to sleep happening. It would just work her up more. Besides, in her current mood she seems to be surprisingly het. Like, a lot more than usual. A naked woman is still !! but - she feels like not as much as it should be somehow.

Whatver. Yeah, she's not going to do that. Luna thinks she is a cat, and It Would Be Weird.

She makes a ""bed"" of softened dirt in the kitchen, and resolutely thinks about runes, light and logic chasing each other around. Maybe she'll actually fall asleep at some point, too.

When Wynn wakes up, Luna is already gone.

Lots of picking apart these weird complicated runes on the schedule for today, then.

Well, after a quick breakfast of a bit of Luna's meat, cooked, and some random berries her bonus knowledge says are fine.

She's not going to go enslave something for better data. She's just not. But these things are almost like superconductors in a way, in that if you actually carefully break them up into different modules and make sense of each one individually, you learn how the whole thing works. She still needs to look at Luna's collar later, but it can't be any more complicated than this thing. Plus, there's only so many possible ways a 'key' could be formed.

Much of Luna's meat isn't ready for a non-carnivore to eat as-is yet, but that's nothing a little magic can't fix.

Luna, for her part, is generally around, returning irregularly with rabbits, and deer, and the occasional scary tentacled thing, as she steadily works to stock her smokehouse. Occasionally she knocks down a tree and comes back with a heap of wood.

After a while... A whole day almost, it feels like, she takes a break to improve the smokehouse out of ?guilt?, before telling Luna, "I need to take a close look at the collar and write down the designs on the inside, so I can figure out how to get it off."

"Okay."

Luna crawls up to Wynn, arching her neck to show off the collar. Naturally, all the complicated runework is on the inside, where it's not visible to casual observation... but there are ways around that.