"We'll need capital before we can acquire the machines to do so, but--yes. Yes, we can absolutely do that."

"Little flashlight wands. Wand-shaped ones."

"...Yes, absolutely. Wooden-looking ones and pink ones with hearts and stars."

"Tacky. I guess there'll be a market for that once there are enough people who know about magic."

"I'd say 'there are girls who would like that sort of thing' but it sounds sexist when I actually consider saying it out loud."

"I imagine boys who liked that kind of thing would choose not to buy it anyway for various cultural reasons, so it's not an inaccurate summary of the market segment, anyway."

"Yes, people in general like tacky things sometimes."

"We will sell tacky wands without regard to the gender of the purchaser!"

"Something covered in chrome and military camo."

"Eugh. I'll stick with wood. Possibly decorated wood, but something tasteful. Silver wire and semiprecious stones maybe."

"Oh, sure, for us. Because we have taste."

"I am so glad that you are not a camo or a pink hearts person. It would be an irreconcilable difference."

"Pink hearts aren't always terrible, but casting them in plastic and putting them on a wand is too much."

"They are acceptable on Valentine's Day," allows May.

"I saw a shirt once that was black with a hot pink heart-shaped pocket. It wasn't to my taste but I don't think it was tacky."

"...Yeah, I'll give you that one on both counts."

"So there are a number of isolated exceptions to the rule. Which does not make it cease to be a useful general guide."

"Yes. ...So now I know I have powers I want to try the hack-together-some-runes-and-go method of quick dirty unsafe spellcasting and I can't think what to do. I don't want to teleport somewhere and forget what runes I put down or something. Neither of us needs healing."

"Do you have a camera so I can take pictures of the runes?"

"Yeah." May goes and gets a camera. "But a badly designed teleport spell - which will probably turn out underpowered because I'm just canceling the unwanted effects, not funneling all the power into the wanted ones - might leave me without anything except myself, say, and that would be awkward."

"Yes...that would be awkward. Do you think you can target a badly designed teleport? So that you could start at my house but end up at yours or something similar."

"I was planning to throw that into the incanta- I bet it's safe for me to incant in English. Might correct for underpowered hackjob runes."

"Well, if you can teleport to somewhere with the materials to teleport back, and reasonable privacy if by not bringing anything with you that includes clothes, that's--workable, as a test of principle, even if not anything you want to be relying on."

"Yeah. Maybe I should just teleport downstairs? But it might be better to think of a test case with fewer obvious failure modes than teleportation as a first pass."

"Yes. And if your downstairs doesn't have the curtains shut probably better to teleport to here from there even if you were teleporting, just to be safe. What has fewer obvious failure modes than a teleport...not healing," he shudders.