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We’re sure many anime fans shared our excitement last May when the newest replica of the pendant from Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky was announced. Sure, there had been chances to buy a necklace modeled after heroine Sheeta’s magical levistone accessory before, but this was the first time we’d be able to get our hands on one that actually reacts when you speak one of the film’s incantations into it.

Likewise, we’re sure many of the Ghibli faithful were as heartbroken as we were when the initial shipment of the special pendants sold out almost immediately. Still, the six months it took for a restock was a just a minor addition to the 20-plus years we’ve been waiting to try the pedant out since we first saw Laputa.

Now, finally, we’ve got the levistone pendant in our hands, and we’re ready to field test its ability to respond to our mystic commands.

In the film, uttering the word balus (or, since Japanese doesn’t actually have the letter L or terminal consonants, “barus” or “barusu”), triggers the terrible Spell of Destruction. But it’s one thing for an in-anime artifact created though powerful, ancient, and mysterious means to react when spoken to, and another for a 2,400-yen (US$20) anime trinket to do the same. Would our store-bought levistone pendant really be able to tell the difference between “balus” and other, similar-sounding words like ballet, bulb, browse, and banana? We had a sneaking suspicion that the accessory might just be rigged to react whenever it picked up any noise, so we decided to put it to the test.

As you can see in the video above, the pendant passed with flying colors, remaining inactive in the face of our many attempts to trick it. As soon as we said “balus,” though, a blue light began to flash from within, although thankfully this wasn’t followed by the office collapsing and our team of writers and editors tumbling to the Shinjuku streets below.

Frequent Laputa viewers, or simply the ones with incredibly sharp memories, may also remember a second spell Sheeta was taught by her grandmother, which is activated by the lengthy phrase “Leetay latuparita ulus arialos balu netoreel,” which is supposed to mean “Save me and revive the eternal light” in the lost language of the Laputans. If you can say the whole thing without getting tongue-tied, the pendant will reward you by flashing in a different, less aggressive pattern, although again the anime’s exact on-screen effect, awakening a fire-spewing guardian robot, is not duplicated.

And once more, try as we might with sneaky alternatives like “Detail margarita lose Ariel’s blue metro eel,” there was no fooling the pendant. This thing is seriously clever.

Some of you might be wondering about all those Ls and Rs in “Leetay latuparita ulus arialos balu netoreel.” As we said above, there’s no L in the Japanese language, and the sound is usually switched to something close to an R in adopting foreign words and phrases. So to activate the levistone pendant, should you use all Japanese-style Rs, or mix in a few Ls for good measure?

Actually, it doesn’t seem to matter. As shown in our video, we tested it both with a Japanese-language native, whose pronunciation was chock-full of Rs, and an English native who favored Ls for most instances. Both brought forth the pendant’s mystical light, leading us to think that maybe what’s inside isn’t an audio sensor, but an actual bit of magic.

Related: Excite
Photos © RocketNews24