That would be pretty fair, I think, since he can't prove what I did with it. I suppose I could bring the diagram, offer to do it there and sell it back without it ever leaving his sight.

He won't be able to tell if it still works without getting it to attune to someone.

Yeah, thus the not expecting full price. I'll pick one of the kinds there are relatively many of, of course. And maybe test it on something more complicated than a glowing rock first.

There aren't many myrmidon medallions but I think there are even fewer myrmidons, check if he has one of those.

Thanks for the tip. What's a Myrmidon? I haven't heard of those.

That's because there aren't many of them. They're ant people and they lost most of their queens to disease a couple hundred years back.

I'm sorry to hear it. There are so many kinds of people, though, wow. I wonder how critters evolved. Or even if we did, maybe we started out as shapeshifted humans and it ended up hereditary somehow.

A guess I've heard is that turning into a critter is one of the more survivable kinds of magical accidents you can have.

That sounds like an overly complex thing to have happen on accident, especially if you were trying for something unrelated.

I don't know that I buy it, but you could have some things happen if you were trying to curse other people with animal transformation?

Yeah, I guess that would be a plausible way for it to go. But if it is, the sheer number of critter species means people used to incompetently curse each other with animal transformation a lot. Maybe they did, for all I know.

Some of the changes since then could have other causes, like all the varieties of griffins and stuff.

True. All the varieties of griffins almost seem like they could have evolved normally, except it would have had to be weirdly fast.

And some things could have been deliberate. Like a lion critter going "I want to be Superlion".

Yeah. I can definitely see why people would want to become a critter, or a different kind of critter, on purpose.

Maybe it's easy to be a different critter and impossible to be a not-critter at all. Then it only has to have happened once, critterizing.

That would sort of match with how the children of a critter and a noncritter are always critters.

I'm not sure if that'd be the same mechanism but it's at least not in obvious tension.

Yeah, it could easily be two unrelated things.

She sends, and goes to bed before the reply arrives. In the morning, she sets off for the Avalon magic shop, her backpack containing several copies of the reverse-engineering spell and a few of the glowing spell for demonstration purposes.

The shop is there as ever, nestled between a bar and a bookshop.

"Hello!" She says to the shopkeeper. "I'm interested in renting some of your items for a short time rather than buying them outright; is that something you're willing to discuss?"

"...Not something I usually do," he remarks.

"I have," she takes a deep breath, "a spell that can determine what runes went into enchanting an object. I was thinking I could help identify some of the things you aren't sure about. And I'd also like to take a look at a medallion." She twists a strand of hair between her fingers and awaits his response.

He frowns. "I can't really come after you with a lawyer in a court of law about it if you go all copyright violations on me."

"Of course. I wouldn't dream of messing with your intellectual property. I'll only do it to things that you didn't make and don't know how to make--the unidentified stuff and the medallions."