A stone is a bookmark, not a battery
People ask me how a crystal stores a spell, and the honest answer is that it doesn't, not the way they imagine. A programmed crystal is a bookmark for your own attention — a small, dense, unchanging object you have chosen to associate with one specific intent, so that every time it catches your eye you are pulled back to the meaning you pressed into it.
How to program one honestly
Hold the stone. Name the single intent — one, not five. Say it plainly while you look at it, the way you'd look at a candle flame, until the two are welded in your mind: this stone, that meaning. Then carry it where you'll see it. The programming is not a one-time charge. It is the returning.
That's the science, stripped of theatre: repetition, association, and a physical object stubborn enough to outlast your forgetting.