"A school with that wide a mandate seems kind of weird but I don't actually know such a thing doesn't exist on Golarion already, even. Okay, thanks for clearing that up."

"Yeah, Golarion has...lots of stuff," the angel agrees, glancing at her interface again, mildly perturbed. "Anyway. The last things to go over are the perks and flaws. Besides the ones you get for free from other options, like 'Ohohoho!' you get four perks for free, and then after that if you want more you can take another perk for every flaw you pick." She offers Seshka a folded-up piece of paper plucked from apparently nowhere. "I absolutely can list all this out loud, but it turns out when I do that a lot of people have a hard time keeping track. A document you can refer back to has this problem less often, when my client is literate. With most of the options there aren't enough of them to have this problem, but there are a lot of perks and flaws. Each, not just together."

"...Thanks." Sesha unfolds the document and raises an eyebrow. "It's illustrated?"

"Studies have shown that for basically human-brained folks, having a picture to associate each option with makes it easier to keep them all straight and find them again for reference than just plain text." 

"Well, I can't argue with science." 

She skims the perks. 

"...What does 'Alfirinic Heroine' mean? Like, I see the description, but like. Alfirinic?"

"Unfortunately your dialect didn't have a good word for 'women who are attracted to other women' already. Alfirin was a wizard during the Shining Crusade who got cut out of the Acts of Iomedae because she was briefly Iomedae's lover and the church thought she was a bad example." 

"Huh. Neat." 

A lot of these perks are only remotely interesting if you intend to seriously compete for the attentions of a guy who otherwise sees no reason not to throw you over...by no means all of them, though. Magical Prodigy is a must-have, obviously. Early Start looks good...she should not be as tempted as she is by Goddess of Beauty. It's not that she was unaware that she was objectively kind of vain but the amount of tempted she is by Goddess of Beauty throws it into sharp relief. 

"Do I only get these perks once I actually reincarnate, or can I have them now? Unearthly Insight seems like it could be really useful for this process."

"Unfortunately you only get them once you reincarnate. I can't finalize anything until we're done, and you can't test-drive the mental perks."

"Mm. Had to ask."

She finishes her first pass of the sheet and sets it aside. 

"I think...I think what perks I want is going to depend on stuff we haven't filled in yet about the world," she says slowly. "You've used the phrase 'magic system' a couple of different times in a way I don't think I quite grasped all the connotations of; can you explain?"

"Right, so, the way magic works on Golarion--and the different ways it can work in other parts of Pharasma's Creation--are only one way that magic can work. Different worlds have completely different kinds of magic...and different cosmologies, too. Worlds without any magic at all either have no afterlife or can't access it, for example."

"...This is one of those things where if I decide to go ham Pharasma's going to tell me to fuck off, isn't she."

"Based on our acquaintance so far I absolutely believe in your ability to go ham hard enough to put Pharasma off."

"Th...anks?" 

She starts drumming her fingers against her leg again.

"What do you recommend? I--am really unsure of my ability to design a system from scratch without going ham. I assume just copying Golarion's would be fairly safe..."

"It would...and if you're not a witch, you won't get nearly as much use out of Ohohoho!..."

"I assume I can't give the place a totally different magic system and then also separately keep my own witchness." 

"With what patron?"

"Thought not." 

"Of course, you could start with Golarion's magic and then...tweak things a bit; perhaps not the underlying spell structures, if you want your current understanding of theory to go on being applicable, but the ways people actually practice your magic are deeply diverse and there's nothing to say that things can't be expressed here in ways that are different still." 

"Ooh. An excellent point--actually, you know what, it is bullshit that witches can't cast Prestidigitation and I would like to fix that." 

The angel makes a note of that. "Can do." 

"And...can I design my own patron?"

"I don't see why not. Although, fair warning, if at any point you decide to dump 'Magical Prodigy' I'm going to have to scale back your own personal magical goodies substantially, if you assign yourself anywhere near as many of them as you could."

"Not that I expected to do that anyway but fair enough." 

She drums her fingers some more. 

"...So...gaining circles by doing your spellcasting under pressure, in high-stakes scenarios...that's based on perceived stakes, not actual stakes, right? --Is that the kind of information you have?"

"I have...a lot of information that, if I gave it to you, it would be harder for you to go back to Golarion with it." Because it would come out of Pharasma's intervention budget if she ok'ed hooking up the new world to her Creation while a mortal with that information was super going to come over." 

"If you tell me or if I know it later, because I'm looking at the Unprepared flaw and I'm wondering if I could set things up so things happen to me that are, like, objectively dangerous, but for 'story' reasons, or for reasons I set up ahead of time to go through by normal causal means, I'm definitely not going to actually die of them, and if I don't know that they're secretly safe, or at least safer, could I still get the full benefit of doing reckless shit."