...was much easier. The crystal ball was a Halloween prop that Rachael found in town somewhere, and it is similar to this one on eBay:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Witches-Crystal-Ball-Magic-Light-Orb-Fire-Ice-Red-Lights-Halloween-Decoration-/401206398890

But in person, the plastic ball looked really cheesy, so the main modification we made here was to tear it apart and put the lumia mechanism into an actual opal glass ball, like teh ones used on lamps. This really improved the look of the thing. Other changes we made to the mechanism were reductive, such as cutting the wires to its speaker and rigging it to be triggered from a relay closure. This was easy because the crystal ball prop has a demo switch mode that, when the switch is pressed, it runs the demo for about 45 seconds and switches off on its own. This was perfect for our application, so the only other mod we made was to run it off 5V instead of the batteries it was designed for. Another wall wart transformer & we were good to go.