"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?"
"My first thought is that immortality ought to be considered a higher priority than nearly anything else, since of course if we have forever then we can achieve everything else. But of course if it were within the reach of a pair of novices then someone would surely have let it slip by now. Perhaps some form of healing, to build up to that eventually, or a locating spell, so we can eventually find out if there's any lost information on the medallion creation process still intact."
"Yeah, healing would be my answer. I think it's unlikely that we'll get outright permanent invulnerability to death in general. I've been reading up on the extinction war and there's no inkling that anybody had that, even at the height of magical knowhow, so it'd probably wind up being at most anti-aging unless we're lucky enough to be unprecedented prodigies - and we're a little young to need that urgently. A locating spell's a good idea." Write write.
"I was thinking anti-aging, yes. I do expect it's not currently urgent, but since it's not currently known to be possible, I'd rather not put off getting started until it is. Healing is a good first step."
"And there's a bunch of runes that are good for it directly. Did you wind up trying the rune derivation procedure at any point? I haven't gotten around to it."
"No, not yet. I expect I'll do it with relative frequency once we're properly constructing spells and can't find something that works in a given context."
"Yeah. The dictionary's abridged, even. I wonder if there's a rune for every possible combination of things? If there is then with sufficiently exhaustive derivation you could not only waste your entire life hunched over graph paper but also cast useful single-rune spells."
"Hah. Not my fondest ambition, I'll admit, but that does sound like it could be nice, in the result if not execution."
"It'd let you cast fast if you needed to, but it's probably a better plan to frontload the work on having scrolls ready rather than on the graph paper thing."
"Oh, yes. I have no intention to waste away with a ruler and protractor and sheafs and sheafs of paper."
"If we become immortal I can put in my lifetime of graph labor over the course of several lifetimes interspersed with sufficient other activities to prevent wasting."
"I know, right? We were born a little too late to have any realistic hope of spending any amount of time having read all the books ever written even if we keep going till the heat death of the universe, and some people still don't seem to want to live forever, it's crazy."
"I could understand turning down immortality if literally only one person could become immortal, on the grounds that outliving one's loved ones would be too painful, especially if by deferring immortality someone more inclined could take it up instead, but there are an alarmingly large number of books where the immortality itself is considered a negative in its own right."
"There are! It's very frustrating. I'd probably take it even if I did have to do it alone, although I'd probably make different use of my social life. Anyway, there doesn't seem to be a single principle of runecasting implying such a thing."
"Immortality for all, and we'll outlive those frustrating people who write those frustrating books."