Private message to Linus Moon

[alt_antonin]

Your work is excellent as always, my dear boy. Thank you for all the time you've spent on it; I know it has been a significant amount of effort, and you have risen remarkably to the occasion.

I am working through the results, and there is one thing I wanted to clarify with you, before continuing. On the final page where you highlight the inconsistencies, is column 14 a numeral 1 or a numeral 7? The spell to unredact the contents assumed 7, which produced some rather odd and illogical results at the other end of the process, so I manually overrode it and ran it again assigning that value as 1 -- which caused the whole gestalt to collapse so firmly it could not unredact anything.

I am prepared to assume the first results are correct, however illogical, but I wanted to confirm that my charm-work and I were not misreading your writing before acting upon anything contained within.

Comments

[alt_linus]

Highlighted with the glitter charm? A seven, sir.

I hope the glitter charms at the end did not inconvenience you. I had run out of annotation colours, and Lav and I had been working together on some amusing charms which include glitter, so I used them. There was another charm with a rather more pulsing effect, but it seemed unnecessarily distracting, so I restricted it to the glitter.

If there's anything else you need clarified, I am of course at your service, or will be as soon as I get back down from Astronomy Tower. Professor Siz and I were discussing Guild news and notes. It is very good of her to keep me up on current doings, though I don't know whether or not I'll be available for further work for Guild Master Bright in the near future. NEWTs, and all that, and of course you have first claim on my remaining free time.

[alt_antonin]

No, the glitter charms did not inconvenience me -- I will confess, I laughed. (As to the running-out-of-colours problem, I believe i can solve that for you, or at least mitigate it somewhat; I've just sent in an owl order to Scribere et Manu for a set of their highest quality and most varied Arithmancer's inks. Use them with my compliments.)

And thank you for clarifying. I rather thought that was the case, but I didn't want to assume.

I do have another round of data for you (and several other collections that are of a lesser priority), but with luck they ought not be enough work to keep you occupied for an entire term's worth again; I expect that you will sail through your NEWTs with little difficulty, but I still would not want to distract you. That having been said, though, I imagine I will always have something for you to work on if you do have time.

[alt_linus]

Scribere et Manu? Oh! Rapture! Thank you, more than I can say. I look forward to putting them to use on those smaller projects.

I suspect that Lav will not mind awfully if I am slightly less busy for a bit, though of course she would never breathe a word of reproach.