You look up a few more subjects: darkness spells, runestones, and enchanting of living organisms.
Darkness and blindness spells will impair the vision of a target, by rendering a portion of its surface darkened by a light-absorbing matrix of arcane energy. They will only darken a medium-sized area around the spot hit, so precision must be employed when casting these spells for greatest effect.
Runestones are stones which are inscribed with an active rune, such as frost, flame, corrosion, electrical discharge, etc., and a pair of runes insribed inside the dominant, active rune. The two are a shattering rune and an activation rune with another, even smaller rune to its right for a variety of signs which would indicate an enemy. Common runes to place here are magnetism runes, heat runes, pressure runes, and sonic runes. Respectively, they trigger the runestone to shatter and activate when vital electrical impulses (such as those which keep the heart beating) are near, when body heat is detected, when the runestone is stepped on, or when a sound is made close by, such as a footstep or a voice triggering the rune. Then, on the back is an inhibition rune keeping the thing from blowing sky-high before it's ready. This one contains a deactivation rune inside it, which in turn has a smaller heat rune to its right. Thus, when the palm is placed on the runestone, this triggers the deactivation rune, which in turn deactivates the inhibition rune. Then, the runestone is primed, and can be triggered to activate the dominant active rune on the front. Interestingly enough, the deactivation of the inhibitor only lasts so long, and the runestone can be reclaimed if not tripped within a certain period, usually ten minutes on a standard military runestone. The packaging in which a runestone was found can be checked for the exact time, along with the precise activation method, but caution is advised when reclaiming the rune -- do not hold the rune too long in your hand when picking it up again, or it can reactivate, and it is preferable to wait a few minutes more than the listed cooldown time for the rune, since the arcane energies can be somewhat unpredictable.
Living enchantments are a type of enchant which is performed on a living being, usually a human. The effects of a rune often differ between living enchants and item enchants and, overall, the rune inscriptions must be performed more carefully since a violent arcane reaction is not, generally speaking, desirable on a human being. For instance, a frost rune drawn on the back of a hand will not freeze what the hand touches, but will instead slowly encase the hand in ice, perhaps to be used as a club, and render the hand unusable until the rune wears off or is deactivated by a strong blinking spell. Complicated workarounds must be employed to achieve what might ordinarily simple effects to attain on an enchanted item. For these reasons, extreme caution is advised when self-enchanting or enchanting others -- the ill effects can be disastrous, and semi-permanent. It is usually more effective to use personal spells than living enchants to make magical alterations to one's body, and spells are much more easily removed, and in fact must be actively sustained.
Experimentation of living enchants on other human beings is illegal, and experimentation on oneself is frowned upon, mostly because of the self-endangerment it involves.
(@aziz: the armour you have equipped is currently enchanted with multiple unidentified runes, and you are uncertain as to the quality of the inscription. Adding your own enchant whose effects are certainly covered in the enchants currently on the armour would be terrible risky, and most likely not worth it. Imagine you have a patient in your care with serious wounds which have been sewn closed and bandaged well. You don't want to put another bandage on the guy -- you could shift his previous dressings and open recently-closed wounds, and he could bleed to death. It's like that, but more explosive when it comes to runes.)
(Ert: I'm mostly drawing the runes for fun, and for partial illustration of the story. Also, if you do happen to want to try out an enchantment with multiple runes, but don't want to have to describe the arrangement in words, feel free to draw what you mean! Also, you're closer than you think when you mention portals...
About strategy... I dunno, what do you think? Whatever you do, it'll have a result, eh?
(Buggy: yup. Any spell that generates a spike in arcane energy [which is most, I'll tell you] can knock out the rune flow spells holding the skeletons intact. So, even the frost runes should do it. That is, when they thaw, you'd just end up with a pile of bones.
(Ert again: runestones react to certain stimuli, and cannot discern between you and the skeletons, unless one of you is not providing the stimulus. So, if it's a sonic activation type, and you're wearing boots enchanted to create no noise, then they will not detonate for you. However, if you're caught in the radius of the active rune when the stone is tripped, it still will not discern you from the enemy. Once again, the magic here is objective, and unless you tell it to do something, it won't do it. About the vending machine, the military's attitude towards magic is that if you're not a specialist required to perform magic as your job, you learn the spells on your own time and money.
(Buggy again: I guess the enchanting process is a bit like a programming language, not because it is in any way sequential, but because a given set of runes will put forth a given result, and if the enchant goes wrong, you screwed up, not the magic.)
