"Hmmm. I guess we'll have to wait and see if the latter really comes up much."

"I would've imagined you'd know!"

"I've never heard of it! But Axis is a big place, and the only evidence I have besides not having heard of it is that people will pay you to live there when you're newly arrived."

Isam nods.

"It was a delight meeting you," he says as they leave. "I'll see you again in a few days."

"I'll break out the highest-carat gold," smiles Isam.

"Good fortune," he says, and then departs and thereby stops interrupting the flow of traffic into the poor restaurant.

And on schedule Isam does indeed get out his loveliest gold wire, after breakfast, and start assembling a phylactery.

He comes by around lunchtime and checks to see if there is a sign providing insight on whether he can interrupt Isam.

The sign says "come in". He will have to go around Khalil, who successfully knelt without being elbowed this time but was in the way of the door.

Well probably that's solvable without doing anything ridiculous like teleporting. 

He'll step into Isam's office a minute later.

The workshop is a largish open-plan space, drawers of supplies in the back festooned with padlocks, a door to the courtyard in the back where presumably everything that gets hot is kept, and worktables with various appliances and tools scattered on them and mostly women and a couple men and one fourteen year old girl sitting at them. Isam's munching falafel out of a paper packet, critiquing the fourteen year old girl's handling of the kickwheel that she's using to buff the silver backing of a cabochon pendant. "- and now bring the wheel to a stop."

"Was it that bad -"

"No, you had it right but I don't want you to hurt yourself or the necklace when you notice his grace."

"Ack!" Fourteen year old girl and all the other persons who had not yet noticed his grace get down. Isam follows suit.

"You can continue, I'm observing," he says once he has brought the workshop to a standstill. He looks - not exactly apologetic but slightly distressed for the lost productivity. "Good to see you again," he says to Isam.

Isam gets up and smiles at him. "Likewise. Go on then, everyone," he adds. He pops the last falafel into his mouth and meanders over to his own table, closest to the supply shelves. The girl resumes buffing her necklace, looking nervously at Merenre. Everyone else gets back to work too.

Isam unlocks drawers, gets the things he wants all into a divided tray to bring back to the table, calls toward the door for one of the women between tasks to flip the sign. "Didn't bring any wizards?" he asks.

"Something came up," he says regretfully. "They were very intrigued. Perhaps some other day."

"You can tell them all about it, I suppose. Here's the one I made this morning," he says, sitting down and offering a hair pin. "You can fit it under a hat if you don't want everyone to wonder what it does and then think you're not as virtuous as people who do without, though they're quite ornamental and most people don't check their friends' possessions for magic." And then he gets underway on the second one of the day.

He examines the pin and then watches!

And Isam proceeds to spend four solid hours making increasingly tiny adjustments to a similar pin, though he puts different stones in this one than the first.

He has Detect Magic up, so he can see the point at which this works.

Near the end. Pliers go pinch, he makes a couple of final adjustments and holds it up to the light, and then turns in his chair and smiles. "Ta-da."

He applauds. "That's fascinating. You just learned what, specifically, it has to look like, and that's enough once you get it looking like that?"

"I can make it look like whatever, more or less, I could do this as an earring instead. It's more I know what looks different when it's magic from any baseline, which is much harder, if anybody could string three beads on a pin and call it a day this'd be a very different business."

"Wow." He reaches for the pin.

Isam relinquishes it.

He studies it for a while and then hands it back. "Thank you."