Ooh, doodads!

"Huh, kinda like a telephone. How do I use it?"

"Hold this button, say your message.  Push this button, listen to your messages one at a time.  It'll vibrate when you get one and if there's one in the queue when you're listening.  What's a telephone?"

"Oh, that's really handy! I was a little worried about what would happen if you had something to say to me before I got home, but this means we can both have privacy and convenience."

She presses the button to make it listen. "Testing! Hee hee."

Looking back at Hali: "Oh, a telephone is like… an enchanted object? They have them in the guard stations, and in some stores, and rich people have them in their houses as well. Any one telephone can connect to any other telephone - they all have assigned numbers, so if your phone's assigned number is 107 then anyone who has a telephone can put that number in and that'll make your phone make a jingling sound, and then you take the phone off its housing - it's shaped kind of like a banana, with an end you put to your ear and an end you put to your mouth - and you can talk. I don't think it can record messages for later, though. At the Vasillias' place, there was a room that we kept the phone in and there was supposed to be someone in that room at all times so that if it rang we could either bring it to the person the other guy was trying to reach or write down a message by hand."

bzz bzz goes the matching stone in Hali's hand.  And it plays back!  "Testing!  Hee hee."

"Interesting; how does it work?  You say 'like' an enchanted object, which leads me to assume it is not."

"Oh, whoops, that 'like' was more of a filler word, my bad. It is an enchanted object - or at least, it has one inside? I don't know all the ins and outs - hey, maybe I could learn how to enchant objects, actually! Since I've got all this extra magic itching to be used. Anyway, enchanting is tricky, because magic likes to move around and not stay in one place all the time. It's why magic constructs do… this."

She puts her hands up, focuses, and manifests a translucent glowing red cube between them. She makes a fist with one hand and raps her knuckles against a side, making a sound similar to a wood block. She relaxes the mental muscle, and the cube vanishes, dissipating into red light. The process looks… pretty similar magically as it does visually, except magic sight shows how the magic flows from her soul into the shape.

"Pretty much the only thing that magic will stay put in is a gemstone, which I think is why magicians use them? And then enchanting is… a step past that. I don't know what goes on inside the phones, just that there's enchanted jewels inside that power them."

"Interesting.  You and I...our magic directly complements eachother.  I've been looking for a robust storage solution, one that won't get blown away by a strong enough magical headwind, for a while, and you could learn quite a bit about how to make magic that does things with less wrangling from what I've figured out of why runes work as they do.  I should, perhaps, test these theories, though.  Or rather, hypotheses."

She nods, making up her mind that as long as it's not going to eat up all her savings she will learn all she can about how magic works. She knows how many doors magic can open for a person, and probably that there are even more that she has no idea about because they're behind other doors that have been closed to her all her life.

"Sounds like a plan! Okay, I'm gonna go home, catch Tobi up, take a shower… I'll give you a not-ring once I'm done, and I'll keep the stone nearby in case you've got any questions. Oh, before I forget, is there anything you want me to not mention to him, at least when you're not around?"

"Not anything that I expect that you already wouldn't want to be careful mentioning.  Be safe, okay?  I'm going to go wander around, and then I suppose I'll find you before sundown."

Thumbs-up!

"Okay, have fun!"

She heads up the stairs.

And Hali, after a moment's work configuring her runes, follows.  There is, after all, new magic to see up ahead!