"Variables suck," Wyn mutters, glaring at the circle of blue chalk drawn around her. A much-annotated book sits in front of her, and at this point she's seriously tempted to throw it at something. "I am in the applied sciences. There is no reason for anything to be this complicated except for sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of the Victorians."

Half an hour later, Wyn is ready to give up on the spell entirely. "If you've run out of alphabet before you've run out of parameters, you're doing it wrong." The circle is half-full of scrawling lines, Wyn's face is covered in smudges of blue chalk, and she looks ready to murder someone.

"Fuck this, I'm going back to Gaelic."