Chatterpen

The chatterpen is a writing implement programmed with magic to transcribe what it hears. While chatterpens are traditionally ink pens, they have now been adapted as styluses to work with Slates.

Mechanics & Inner Workings

The chatterpen has a small chamber containing a tiny cloth with the necessary runes to program it to listen, levitate, and write on its own. This cloth must be regularly infused with quintessence to power it. Once first programmed, the chatterpen must take several hours of listening to spoken language to learn it before it can properly transcribe anything. It must repeat this process to learn any further languages. Chatterpens are notorious for struggling with accents or dialects if they have not learned to recognize them.
Along with the runic control cloth, the chatterpen has a second cloth in its chamber with a word or phrase that, when heard, will turn the pen on or off. To avoid activating it accidentally, these are usually nonsense words or in another language the user does not expect the pen to hear. The control word can be changed by simply swapping out the cloth. Without this, the pen will just start writing until it runs out of quintessence.

Manufacturing process

The basic design of a chatterpen is pretty simple, especially since it does not need to be that ergonomic or sized for specific hands since it writes for itself, and even an apprentice blacksmith or bonecrafter could make one. A rune artist must then properly draw out the correct runes on the cloth to command the magic and control the flow of quintessence; the artist is usually also the one to perform the first quintessence infusion. This is a mid-level skill for artists, since the runes must be perfectly copied on a very small cloth.

Significance

Chatterpens were primarily developed for use by organisms who cannot use conventional writing utensils, such as lacking opposable appendages; this is especially important for the Voiced. However, chatterpens are also useful to disabled people, dragons who wish to write without scratching it out with their claws, myulins with weakened telekinesis, or even just people who are busy with their hands and need to record something in the moment.

Rarity

Uncommon

Raw materials & Components

Metal, ceramic, or bone (casing), ground minerals (ink), fabric (usually stalkweave, since it's fairly conductive of quintessence while also being cheap) (cloth)