"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?"
The next day he has his sister and his sister's girlfriend (for ambiguous definitions of the word) with him when he shows up.
"Hello. It's nice to...well, not meet you, we've met, but we didn't really hang out for very long. I halfway feel as though we ought to apologize for bailing," Jaromira says, laughing a little.
"Thanks for not being weird about the thing, by the way, Kanimir said you weren't weird about the thing."
"The -? Oh, yeah, I'm not gonna be weird about the thing. And no need to apologize, we got lots of cool magic learned."
"Sounds it! I heard something about invisibility, right, invisibility is awesome, I want to go proper flying."
"I did my homework! I have no desire for people to blow themselves up trying to do magic. I dunno how much help I'll be, though, you guys are doing this way more seriously than me, if I find something you missed it'll probably be pure luck."
"The fact that there might be luck involved is why we want more eyes on it. If you want to flip heads and you have a pocketful of change, flip them all."
"If there's anything wrong with it, neither of us could tell after looking it over independently and then conjointly."
"Oh good. Because I wound up staying up really late last night and finished an entire diagram with my starting rune."
"That's probably a good thing, I wound up nearly falling asleep in my first class this morning. I need double-checking." She hands over a spell diagram.
He double-checks the spell diagram. There is one minor error, probably the result of fatigue.
She goes back to her scratchwork around when she placed that rune, finds the root of the problem, rederives that layer of proscription, crosses out her mistaken diagram, and writes out a new one with the error fixed.
May hands over the incantation, which is a stilted but grammatical translation of the one in the book.