"Totally possible to be uninvolved in scarinesses. Limits careers and tourisms - and you will be powerful enough as a grand alchemist, to get shook down for things, if indefensible enough and not very secret - but witches die less often than humans and come back more often. Just, you do not want to bring a knife to a sorcery fight. Avoid the fight or go armed.

"Any elementalism a fine armament if you outrank the other girl. Runes very good for warding starting around rank four. Portals good for getting out of Dodge. Divination to not be in Dodge to begin with. Really anything can be good in a fight with time to get ready, alchemy is good for this too!"

"Oooooooh, I think I'd like to hear about Portals next, that was one of the ones that sounded cool anyway."

"Portals, cheap for you, five ranks for seven points just like alchemy. The portalest kind of portals is rifts - cut reality open here and it leads to over there, you must see or know very well the over there. There is also making a doorway or something into a gateway, usually not always-on; and portkeys - used to have another name but portkeys caught on following certain literature - objects that swap places with all aboard. Rifts are fragile, something hitting it from the wrong side or trying to squeeze too big a thing will rupture it. Portkeys and gateways are expensive, ritual sacrifice of expensivenesses to make them. None of these things move around - except for portkeys doing the swap dance - once they are made. Standard use of rifts is one-way ones to elemental planes, ay kay ay proximas - ice tray, hot plate, suchlike, starts at rank two. Add Storm Proxima at third for jumping your car, at rank four Water Proxima to fill your Brita, at five tap the Void to pull things into it and listen to it whisper creepsome shit. Size of rifts, range of rifts, range of portkeys and gateways, depth of proxima rifts and how intense accordingly, number of these things you can have - all of this increases numberswise rank over rank."

"I'd like to go for rank three. Runes next?"

"Runes! Magical ritual and inscribing onto a thing, poof, thing is magic. Time consuming as poofs go though, so good thing you do not have to do them all at once. Rank one runes are luck, fertility, courage, chill, and augment! Also can do their opposites, most runes will. Mostly what they sound like but augment is mostly used for soaking up damage - by affinity, which is fun, like your splash grenade potion will do less damage if someone's tattoo is an augment for Water but, even if it is a fireworks exploding burny potion, not if the augment is for Fire. Rank two, runes are disease and heavy - mostly used for opposites, though, those are just their names. Rank three, talent and wind. Playing with talent objects is terrific fun, I learned the harp this way. Wind like a fan or like a chainsaw or like one of those indoor skydiving places. Rank four, Spell and Warden runes, for attaching other magic to runed things and for dispelling magic on contact respective-like. Rank five, Time - prevent aging, keep your bouquet of flowers forever, make your wine fancy in a hurry. Protection - object stands in for whoever has it to take damage in their place should they trip and fall into a staircase or an argument. Relic - some extra special magic items are called relics and this rune copies their whole deal onto a new object, or a creature."

"Very cool! How does the Spell rune work? Can I make a magic item out of any spell I know, or are certain kinds of thing best for it?"

"Most anything! Cursed necklace, toasty-warm-all-over hat, enchant a broomstick to act like a Witchery one for someone who hasn't got the convenience, put your healing potion in a chunk of crystal to make it look woo enough to the mundanes, make a thing psionically invisible all by itself, suchlike."

"I'd like to go for rank four! Could I go over Aethernautics next?"

"Less popular. Your one net positive rank for being academic gets you true names of any rocking celestial bods, or also the gaseous ones, if you see it. Tell how far away it is too, get a little better at thinking about those big numbers. Party trick, unless you are astronomical. Rank two, you can survive in space, no trouble breathing or with the exploding eyeballs or anything. Rank three you can track littler space things too, like the space station. Float around as fast as you could on a broom even if you do not have one. Bit of space folding, dovetails nice with portals. Rank four you get to bop around among atheric spheres, alternate dimensions, and things like that. Go pick pocket dimensions and break and enter if you like, if they do not have security. Make your own, like dumplings in the dough of the world, twist and pinch and the house or whatever is tucked away. Twisty trippy geometry silliness. Messes something awful with teleportation type things. Reorient gravity for you and other things you touch if you care to have tea on the ceiling. Rank five, better at stopping teleportation on purpose in bigger areas, better at picking pocket dimensions - useful to know the owner's true name for this - do little time loop dioramas in your dumplings. Scary combat power at this rank, black distortiony shears in the world, make magical radioactive Superfund site, not recommended. If you were going to age, you don't at rank five, unless you feel like it, forward or backward. Immune to time stoppage if someone puts you in their time-runed pantry or something."

"Heh. I'm noticing a bit of a pattern to the rank fives. And heck YES, I wanna breathe in space, I'd like to go for rank two.

...could we jump back to the disadvantages for a bit? I've thought of a few more questions."

"Three ranks windkeeping also gets you breathing in space but if that is the main draw two aethernautics is far cheaper. What are the questions?"

"So, first of all, instead of 'sunshine' for my requirement, would I be able to do 'having my hair dyed pink'? Or just having dye in it at all; I feel pretty locked in to pink right now but it's not impossible that in all the ages of the world I'd wanna be a green girlie again."

"Yes, that is doable!"

"Great! ...I think I might want to bump it up to 'need like air', in that case. Assuming it can be a binary thing like the wedding ring example, I can 'breathe' if there's any amount of visible unnatural color and only die if I let it totally fade?"

"Wedding rings are more binary than hair dye, you might begin to feel a bit faint if it started fading."

"I think I could manage carrying an emergency bottle around. Oooh, hey, would alchemy let me do better dyes than regular chemistry? Less prep time and damage to the hair and such?"

"Absolutely. And fancier effects. Dye stripes out of one bottle if you want. Sparkle-shimmer it. Make it glow in the dark."

"Yessssssss.

So, I was also wondering if you could tell me more about the compulsion drawback? Do you have examples of the sort of things that count?"

"Points by how often it comes up - compelled to do a dance when fireworks go off, one point, compelled to howl at the full moon, two, compelled to pet every dog - I do not recommend this, as you decided dogs shall hate you - either four or eight depending on how common dogs have been around you before in your life. Possible to overcome but tremendously difficult."

"Hmmm, the first thing that comes to mind is 'give cash when I pass a beggar on the street', but perhaps that's cheating like 'addicted to jogging'. Actually...if I swapped out makeup for another addiction, could I make it 'touch up my makeup whenever I see myself in a mirror'? Would that be four or eight points?"

"Compulsion does not have a cheating problem like addiction! Totally possible to be compelled to give to beggars. Makeup touchups at the sight of a mirror look like... eight points. Need not even de-addict yourself to makeup, fine to double dip this."

"Even better! And, thinking about it more, I've decided it's worth taking some sensory issues after all. I'd like to go for heightened sense of taste, reduced sense of smell."

"I hope you do not like spicy food."

"Nah, I'm not a big fan. What do I have left among the ranked magics...Necromancy next?"

"Ghosties and ghoulies, yes! Do you have a religion which I must culturally sense?"