Epson Quills

Look, I'm not saying all magical research is bad, but whatever idiot decided to create these stupid things deserves whatever punishments the afterlife can throw at him.

— Jasper Cameron, Leader of The Bronze Ravens

Excerpt from the (slightly charred) Research Journal of Kodak "Cannon" Epson

Honestly, the intent of my experiment would have no doubt benifited the world. Imagine, an animated quill that never runs out of ink, never needs to return to the bottle. Notes taken in a lab without having to pause an experiment. Making a copy of a book or spell text simply by carefully reading the original.
Oh how wild magic changes YOUR CYAN INK BOTTLE IS EMPTY...... PLEASE REFILL YOUR CYAN INK BOTTLE...

DAMMIT I THOUGHT WE HAD ALL THESE THINGS IN CONTAINMENT! OH, but your willing to write that are you? I'll teach you... the rest of the page has been burned away.

What Makes a Species?

Are Epson Quills even alive? This is up for some debate amongst the magical communities of the world. We will not be discussing that here. They can move, posess some measure of rudimentary awareness and self preservation instinct, and can undoubtably reproduce, although their methods of doing so remain a mystery. For the purposes of this, we will consider them alive, and a species.
These quills appear as any other animated or "dictation" quill if you will, but there are a few things that set them apart. First, rather than being linked to one single ink bottle, as is the standard, they will link to every ink bottle in an increasingly large area. Should one of these ink bottles run empty for any reason they will repeatedly write out which specific ink needs to be refilled, regardless of whether the current work requires that ink or not.
They will, unfortunately, also take control of all other quills in the area, magical or mundane, link them to the network (thus, reproducing) and then those quills will propegate this same message. Luckily the area of influence appears to grow as a logarithmic function, approaching an upper limit, although we have yet to determine what that limit is.
During the initial creation of Epson Quills only 5 were created. By the time the danger was realised nearly 17,000 quills across the College of Silmere were displaying these unfortunate tendancies. We had thought all the quills in question were rounded up and burned with prejudice, but apparently some escaped, and they have been cropping up here and there across the world ever since. Let this be a lesson as to why magical research should be kept strictly theoretical during times of VIRIDIAN (III) INK BOTTLE IS EMPTY.

Discovered by

Kodak "Cannon" Epson

by Drunkenpanda with MidJourney