"How did these items get made if there's no way to learn magic? Are the magicians homeschooling their children and not writing any books? How did you learn?"
"Half this stuff is antiques," says the shopkeep. "Look, asking me a dozen times isn't gonna make the answer more to your liking. I don't have Hogwarts in the basement, deal with it."
"But where do you get the stuff that isn't antique - who made the Avalon itself? - isn't anybody panicking about the medallion supply? -"
"Kid, nobody knows how to make medallions."
"But some people apparently know how to make luck charms and protection amulets!"
"I'm not going to give out my suppliers' personal information. I wouldn't do it even if you weren't annoying."
"There have to be books -"
"Does this look like a library to you?"
Presently Daphne returns with a cardboard smoothie tray. She hands Jaromira hers and places the banana-peach and the blueberry ones in front of their respective nerding nerds.
Daphne tucks it into her purse and takes out the textbook. She and Jaromira pore over the bits they haven't gotten to yet, occasionally glancing over at one meaning set or the other to see if they happen to catch any errors.
And May sips her smoothie and tots up meanings and slips her shoes off to play subtle footsie with Kanimir.
(Although she does make a mental note that if those two get less discreet she does have an ambiguously-defined girlfriend with which to enact Vengeance.)
She will of course find May quite immune to Vengeance that comes in the form of public display of affection.
Well, as long as things remain under the table, Jaromira is unlikely to find this out just yet.
Eventually: "I have my meaning sets for an injury healing and a teleportation."
"Yeah. But they're pretty broad, and the incantation's natural language, so maybe what we've got really will do."
"I know, right? But it would be so hard to figure out what they do, we'd just be deriving a new rune and it'd go 'and also there's this thing!' and we would go 'uhhhhh'."
"If we had some way of safely flubbing spells we could probably find out by experimentation."
"It'd still take forever, wouldn't it? Because the incantation would have to match. So we'd have to get at least sort of close."
"True. I'll put it on the 'recreational long-term side-project if and only if immortality is feasible' list."
"Yeah. Unless we wind up finding some lost lore Indiana Jones style. Or figure out resurrection and consult dead experts."