"Well, magic's expensive, and rich people're also more likely to have taken lessons in magic or at least fencing or something, it isn't a clean experiment. The really high level casters I know are not getting people trying to stab them in front of me but I am a rich person and once one of my apprentices tripped holding a pliers and ought to have driven it through my foot, and I got a bruise? Didn't bother having that fixed though I did get the shoe mended, that's a cantrip, cheap as a few loads of laundry."

Margaret winces at the thought of pliers going through someone's foot. "That's really interesting. What makes magic expensive, if it's not dangerous or secret? Is it just the limit on how much someone can do per day plus it taking a long time to learn?"

"Some of it has expensive components, too, like diamonds for a Miracle or what have you, but for everything else, yes, mostly those."

"I wonder if I could learn some of your kind or if you have to be from your world to do it."

"Huh, I guess I don't know - I don't think you need to be anybody special to be a wizard, or anything but in good with a god to be a cleric, but it's weird if you don't have them and maybe it's because you can't."

"Could you try to teach me a spell? Or do one yourself, to see if it works in here at all?" It probably will, her medallion is still working.

"I'm not a wizard, I don't know any to teach you."

"Oh, the theory doesn't overlap with the artifact-making? I assume that requires materials to get anywhere with."

"Most people who make magic items are also spellcasters, I just found out how to do it anyway. And yeah, there's a kind of metal you can anchor an effect to and it'll power it."

"My magic doesn't seem to need a power source. It does use something, because effects that aren't attached to an object wear off eventually, but whatever resource it needs I can't see where it's coming from. I wonder if it runs off something completely different from yours or if it's the same kind of power but my world has more of it."

"Huh! S'pose you could attach an effect to something to power our sort of magic?"

"Maybe! I'd need to be able to describe what I wanted in very unambiguous terms--not the internal mechanism of how your magic works, just the external effects I'm going for. Or possibly I could do it by reference to an existing object."

"I have some on me. Do they need to be any particular sort?"

"I don't think so. If this works at all it will be because I can use my magic to produce your kind of power the way I can produce electricity, so if it's the same thing across multiple kinds of item it should work the same."

Ismat pulls off a necklace with a stylized hand-shape of lapis lazuli, and hands it over.

"Do you want me to duplicate all of this necklace's magical properties onto a different object, or just a subset? I need to know exactly what effect I'm going for."

"The chain's the power source, the hand does the spell. If you can dupe the whole thing that'd be very cool."

"Does it need to be a necklace with a chain, or can it be any pair of connected objects? I'll also need pencil and paper and a potentially annoying amount of time staring at diagrams, but I can see if the bar takes PayPal and it's not like either of us has much else to do right now."

"It could be a bracelet, but then the band needs to be pretty chunky or the metal a more expensive kind to hold more charge per unit mass. And I could do a bracelet all as one piece, the necklace is just easier this way."

"Okay. And does the chain need to be fancy metal to provide the charge such that I might be able to do it in a different material, or to hold it such that I need the second one to be the same substance?"

"I think it does both but I'm not a wizard. Some stuff might only hold and not generate, there are items with charges that don't renew."

"Well, I'll see what the bar charges for a nonmagical but otherwise exact copy; that's more likely to work."

She goes back to the bar and asks, after a quick check that she can temporarily suppress her own invisibility ring and is therefore still cheating awesomely.

She can still suppress her ring. I can't actually make exact copies of things that were never offered for sale in an approximately mass-reproduced form, although I should be able to find a similar-looking item somewhere.

"Okay. The important thing is that it be the same materials."

Bar can find a lapis pendant on a different style of pendant for her.

"The lapis isn't important, just pretty," Ismat says.