He feels an open summons and lets it grab him -
"Right." Cam produces a book which is sensitive to Latin, and in Latin suggests that it rise.
"Yeah, looks like you can make magic ones."
"Until now I don't think anyone's done what you did. Copies of books this old were usually made by hand around the same time as the first one, so they're just as likely to be weird."
"How peculiar. Okay, anything that would be really nice to have for magical reasons of which the primary drawback is rarity or difficulty in manufacture or something as opposed to it trying to bite your face off?"
"...Hell, I don't know," he says. "I'll think about it. You probably don't want whatever I'd think of off the top of my head."
"I mean, I'd also take a referral to anyone better informed than you who would not be super racist against me in any way I couldn't head off via cosmetic adjustments."
"All the people I know who know anything about magic know less about magic than I do," he says. "And the people I used to know who know more about magic than I do would be a bad idea for you to go talking to even if you hid the wings and tail. They'd find out somehow. It wouldn't go well. They're not that keen on outsiders regardless."
"How would they find out? Under the wings and tail I'm basically human, just indestructible, would they attack me unprovoked or do you think I'd trip some kind of magic detector?"
"Some kind of magic detector, or someone scrying to see where you came from, or if you said something weird and they realized you weren't from this world... and, again, even if you didn't trip anything up that way, they still wouldn't just tell you things about magic if you showed up out of nowhere asking."
"Yeah, fair enough. Are there people you don't know personally but do know of who I could try?"
"Nnno. I'd say to check out local magic shops, but not all of those sell real magic, and a lot of the time it's mixed in with the fake crap. I don't see any really good ways for you to tell the difference every time."
"I'm tempted to find such a shop and offer to make fifteen of any single item suggested by the proprietor for them, but that has obvious prospects of backfiring."
"Yeah. They could be shady types and suggest, I don't know, the Gem of Amara. Don't make any Gems of Amara. It's supposedly a jewel that confers absolute immortality on any vampire who wears it. Completely useless to you, it'd make some scheming bastard rich, and then there'd be fifteen unkillable vampires in the world."
"It hasn't been seen in a couple centuries, and I'm remembering a book I read about it when I was ten. My information's not that specific."
"Okay. So, yeah, not going to do that, it was mostly thinking out loud anyway. The Gem of Amara sounds unfathomably useful to vampires. Has no one bothered to make something equally cool for use by other species?"
"Apparently not. A lot of 'unfathomably useful' stuff like that is old, so old nobody remembers when or how it was made."
"That explains everything. I am currently tempted to go with the strategy 'anonymously go around doing things until caught, wing it on the assumption that nobody knows anything about me even if I don't know anything about them either'."