"I mean, it's public - not advertised, but public - that the prize has been claimed, but I did ask for personal privacy. If he wants to go on TV and announce that magic is real that's his prerogative though. Long term I am planning to lightly extort rich people with cancer."

"Sure, but without you around he'd have a hard time getting anybody to believe him. Lightly extorting rich people with cancer is an excellent pastime. I still haven't decided how much to charge for medallions; possibly it should be enough that I could do it as a full-time job and/or hire other people."

If she does hire other people, she'll have them tracing diagrams and keep the otherwise-dangerous part for herself, but no need to mention that.

"I mean, there's an existing market for them, you'll have to slot in to that."

"True. Blanks go for a lot, and I might be able to reverse-engineer those, but if I want a lot of money I should find other things to sell too."

"And you can basically print money if you sell to species that don't work with the existing kind of medallion but you'll look kind of like a jerk if you gouge them too much compared to regular critters."

"If I can do them for arbitrary species I can probably do blanks, and just charge one price for everybody. If I can't do blanks, I'll still charge one price for everybody and focus on the species there aren't a lot of medallions for."

"Any guess why they made species specific ones in olden times?"

"I suspect blanks need larger diagrams, and a few more weird nested clauses in the section on midforms."

"Yeah, I guess that makes sense."

"Fortunately we live in the age of the photocopy. Or, lately, the large collection of photocopies taped together."

"They probably did inventive things with stamps back in the day."

"Yeah. Oh man, once the masquerade is down I bet someone will invent software that makes it feasible to design diagrams in an editor and print them off. And that might actually count as a new one like a stamp does rather than needing tracing like a photocopy."

"Why would that count?"

"Because it's going from a digital image to a physical one with no pre-existing physical one. If that doesn't work, maybe an equivalent of movable type would, but that would be harder to design."

"Huh, that might matter, that's a good point. Of course, you could test that with a scanner and like... erasing a rune in an image editor, then printing it out again."

"Oooh, yeah, scan one with an extra rune and take it out to make the diagram I want. I'll give it a shot next time I'm stuck on medallions." She writes down "scan+print" on the paper with the phone number.

"Anytime."

"Having someone to talk to and get ideas from is nice. Speaking of ideas, how did you manage walking through walls without falling through the floor? I can think of ideas but none it sounds safe to test." 

"Naive use of the word 'wall' worked."

"Oh, nice! Does that mean you can't go through trees or doors unless you special-case them?" (And how have you not died yet, doing stuff like that without dragonish cheating?)

"I included doors but yeah I'd have to change the incantation to do trees."

"That makes sense. I can't think of a reason you'd need to walk through a tree."

"Being chased through a forest?"

"True. But hey, now you can teleport. Which reminds me, I didn't explain the safety features. It brings your clothes and things you're holding, and if your destination is occupied by something other than air it just doesn't go. It doesn't stop you from appearing in midair, since we both have wings and appearing well off the ground is a good way to avoid obstacles."

"How does it define things I'm holding?"