"Goodness, that does sound interesting.  ...Why that boon, or mutation, or - why want that specifically?  ...And how do you know if you have one, actually?"

"I think that's one of those things where you just...know? I believe that in many cases the god in question may also send a vision or something of the sort to clue you in, but that's not guaranteed."

"Well, here's hoping; I wouldn't know how much of my capacity is simply from what I'm made of versus what I may have been given.  A lot of how I am is presently a mystery even to myself, for some reason.  Like whoever started writing the documentation gave up halfway through.  ...I don't blame them; I'm clearly quite a lot of stuff in a trenchcoat.  Still, it's somewhat annoying, y'know?"

(A different Myria has filed into the room and is diligently working on the problem of printing while she and Beatrix talk, and considers an interesting sidestep of the problem of pigment production - not that she's not working on that.  What if you use hair, and weave it into the shapes of letters and illustrations inset into the paper?  Or just...make pages of hair-cloth by that mechanism?  She has to figure out flesh-plausible methods of weaving, but...hair has things like colors, and she's almost sure that there's fancy colors available, despite not directly observing such yet, because this world absolutely has anime hair as a thing.  She'd put money on it.)

(Another Myria is investigating chameleons' chromatophores on the other side of the cube, and attempting to fleshcraft up chromatophores in general.  She knows they exist, which might plausibly be the hard part!)

...And a different Myria has shown up, because she has magic questions for Beatrix!

"So, you do the wards around here; would you mind showing me the schematics?  I have an idea."

"Yes, I sympathize with the struggle of not knowing exactly what you are. I –  sorry," She gets distracted by the Myria attempting to make chromatophores.

"Certu can make chromatophores: that's how he was able to make all of the furniture here different colors. But we haven't been able to make colorfast pigments that would last on paper. I tried using earth magic to experiment with colored minerals, but many of them are toxic and since Certu doesn't have earth magic, it wouldn't be a good idea for him to try creating ink with that. Our current system for color printing is to use scrying magic to construct a picture, then separate out the different colors of the picture. Then, I use earth magic to carve stone blocks corresponding to each color, and then apply color to each one and press the paper against them.

This works, but it's very time consuming to do the carving. And it can only replicate flat color pictures that have no blending – it can't replicate gradients at all. It works great for things like graphs and diagrams, especially for geometry texts, but illustrations more complex than that have to be hand painted."

"Ah, the book wards. Sure, I can get them for you."

She leaves for about five minutes and returns with a booklet held together by a paperclip.

The schematics show a system where thin plates of stone are attached to the corners of the book's covers, as well as a long thin one on the spine. There's a long appendix detailing the runes to be etched and in what combination in what places, and approximately how long it would last. Assuming normal conditions, the rune bindings would last around nine months until it runs out of magic and needs to be recharged. Sooner, if the book is kept under worse conditions – more magic is expended if the enchantment needs to protect against more damage.

A clever part of the design is that there's a small rectangle attached to the spine plate that's colored green. It is separate and is bound to the spine plate only by magic – once the rune binding expires, the rectangle drops off, allowing the librarian to see which enchanted books have lost their enchantment just by looking.

"Yeah, I'm approaching this from first principles with a bunch of random chemistry shoved in my head.  And alchemy too, probably, but I trust the chemistry more," says chromatophore Myria.  "Thankfully, I know food-safe dyes exist, and so does dot-matrix printing, though reimplementing old devices in new mediums is usually not the best way to go about things..."

"Though I'm going to be working on doing interesting things with hair, because if this world doesn't have an absurd variety of hair colors I will eat my nonexistent hat; there are probably reasons nobody makes cloth books, though I don't know what they'd be, really.  ...Still, if I can get it to be pigment-related instead of microstructural, morpho blue," she says like it's a curse and then remembers that butterflies' wings being blue because of nanoscale structure is pretty cool actually, "which, that's a an example of a really cool way of coloring things that is nonetheless unhelpful because it involves the wavelength of blue light being fourhundredsomething nanometers, rather than any pigment, and also positive evidence for possibly bioprinting scrolls of Chirr, actually; anyway we'd have hopefully bio-safe pigments...or we could just dissolve the underlying keratin if I'm feeling like I want to make something especially janky..."

"Anyway, book bindings!  ...Hmm...Ooh, that adhesion is neat.  Could do a whole lot with that trick...  And you have paperclips!  Ooh, do you have - probably not by the name I'd want to use for it, though.  Damn.  Duct tape's pretty good stuff, for an entirely material substance.  But I doubt you've needed to invent it ever, even if it's the sort of stuff that can almost do anything.  ...though I wonder if I have synthetic fabrics in my archive at all..."