"Yeah. It's like selling... chainsaws, flamethrowers, that sort of thing."

"At least the results of being horribly irresponsible despite copious warning to the contrary are only likely to do grievous harm to the irresponsible individual. That much one cannot say for chainsaws."

"I mean, you could inconvenience people by turning them invisible when they didn't expect it, but yeah, as long as we're careful what we sell."

"I doubt we can completely eliminate the possibility that people are going to use our products to behave like assholes, but we can prevent the most obvious offenses. And ban anyone we hear about behaving like an asshole with our products."

"Yeah. ...Or, instead of driving that ignoramus out of business, we can make it his job to actually work retail for us while we do research and production."

"We might not be able to do that until we've driven him out of business. It probably wouldn't be that difficult to find someone with retail experience who doesn't have a reason to have a grudge against us."

"We had one conversation, I'm not sure if we've escalated to 'grudge', but yeah, we should check in case he dislikes us enough to turn down suppliers."

"Oh, I think I was thinking something different. If we drove him out of business and asked him to run a shop for us, he would have a reason for a grudge."

"...What I meant is, he doesn't make any of his own stuff. If we make wands, we can let him figure out who to sell them to and how to package them," she explains. "If he doesn't dislike us too much to do business with us at all."

"Right, I get that now, but the first time you said it I thought you meant opening our own store and hiring him to run it for us."

"Oh, no. If we were going to start ground-up like that I'd want to hire somebody else. His only advantage is already having a place and customers."

"It's probably a better idea to start out as suppliers for other peoples' shops, whether or not we open our own eventually."

"Yeah. We should find out where more Avalons are and which ones have magic shops."

"I wonder if there's a directory somewhere."

"Not a really complete one. It seems like what you do if you're going to travel and want to visit an Avalon while you travel is you talk to your own Avalon's elders and council people and see if any of them know, and if they don't they'll call other elders and council people... and apparently it just doesn't come up because monsters don't travel much and nonmonsters can just skip Avaloning on their holidays to Hawaii, which is why they haven't gotten fed up with this and made a complete list. One more for the to-do list, you know?"

"Definitely. I wonder if there's some way of finding Avalons, if you find yourself in an unfamiliar city and suspect it may have one. Magically, I mean." He takes out a to-do list and jots it down.

"Generalized magic detection, maybe, or something specialized to find medallions or critters. The bugbear lady said that some people - particularly bugbears - can sense turnings, so there's something there to sense at least the once."

He adds the relevant information to his to-do note. "It might be worth doing to ask a bugbear more about magic detection in general, then."

"Yeah. I'll talk to her."

"I wonder if the shopkeeper would tell us about his peers or if he would protest about the competition again."

"I don't think he could reasonably be considered to compete with people in other Avalons unless he does mail order and doesn't advertise it in his own shop."

"That's true, but I don't know for sure that he would see it that way. If nothing else he might think he was competing for suppliers with them."

"In that case the quandary is convincing him that we'll be more willing to supply him if he's cooperative."

"Are there any other magic shops in this Avalon, do you know? I wouldn't expect so, but if there were we might be able to get the benefit of working with him without the awkwardness of poor first impressions."

"Just the one for the Toronto Avalon. Closest other one that I've heard of is Niagara."