"Let's go with three then. What else is there to pick?"

"In the major magics, Curses, Divination, Witchery, the two crafting schools, and Aethernautics if you want to push it to rank three or four and get the interesting planar toys. Each of the factions worth mentioning has their own major magic as well, but they're extra pricey if you don't join up early."

"I feel like I kinda want to have everything, but I guess it pays to be slightly more specialized than that... tell me more about them? Æthernautics sounds fancy, do I get to visit other planets? Solar systems? Galaxies?"

"Dimensions are much easier than long-range spatial travel, but it would help with visiting planets and moons. Low ranks give you a sense for true names and spatial sense for local space and the relation to celestial bodies and passively track them as landmarks. At rank three you can start creating folded space for temporary connections, which works nicely with portals. Rank four you can make those lasting, and you can step outside dimensions to the cosmic medium - the aether - between dimensions, and then step back in in another dimension. Targeting is tricky unless you know the true names of the place or person you're looking for. And change local gravity and other spatial properties. Rank five makes you extremely hard to keep out of anywhere you know the true name, regardless of defenses, folded space areas like a small town, distort time within one, disconnect your personal aging from your personal timestream, micromanage gravity anywhere nearby, and create lasting polluted hellsites with a spatial rip that's an attack basically impossible to block. And create planar defenses that anyone but another rank-5 aethernaut can't bypass, and those only if they try."

"Oh, wow, those sound amazing! Would I even need portals if I can just fold space? How much does it cost to get the full ranks? I've always thought that my superhero power would be to manipulate space and/or time!"

"Nine for the whole thing, but if you want long-range travel you still need portals. Getting in and out of a folded space for anyone else will still need portals, too, unless you're there for every trip to babysit."

"Well, it's probably still a yes for the full five ranks even if it sounds expensive. At the very least I think I want three ranks for the space folding and almost definitely four for the teleport. Ok, next, you said something about curses? I'm probably not interested, but worth knowing what the options are."

"The basic curses are Sickness, Pariah, Madness, Disaster, and Spellbind. Spellbind lets you set a condition and another effect up to your rank of curses, and then it activates. Doesn't have to be harmful - storing a healing potion for when you're hurt, for example. The other four range from a bad cold that lasts a day, hostile insects nearby, a rush of anger, or a nasty fall at rank one, to potentially-lethal fever or accident, all nonsapients within a mile hating you even plants, and thoughtless feral anger for hours at rank four. Rank three lets you curse without visibly pointing and do mass curses, or make voodoo dolls that inflict damageless pain; rank four lets those control or cause damage. Rank five enhances that to huge areas well out of sight, as long as you do it under a full moon with expensive potion ingredients for a ritual, but mostly you get it for the curses of immortality and mortality. Strip all resurrection capacity and agelessness, or curse someone to age and take damage and pain, but never die no matter how many organs fail. The most reliable method of not dying there is, and some Neutrals and Daeva will pay for it just to be sure."

"Doesn't sound super interesting? Maybe one rank for the conditional effects..."

"Fairly popular, yes. You're stuck to very weak conditional effects at that rank, a decent healing potion that helps in an urgent situation is rank 3, but emulating some mundane things like anti-overdose injections you can do at rank 1."

"Yeah, I think I have good defensive options with the rest of the magic, I'll grab one rank. I can still learn higher ranks later, right?"

"Of course. As long as you spend the power for it. What next - alchemy?"

"Let me guess, something about transmuting lead into gold? Wait no, that would be Hexes. Then I have no clue. What's alchemy, and why is it magic as opposed to just... chemistry?"

"Alchemy is potions, more or less exclusively. The basic types are curatives, stimulants, and novelties. They take ingredients and an hour of work, increasing in rarity as you go up, but you can always substitute kisses - ₭10 for the first rank, a factor of ten for each one up.  You can sell them to mortals, for the lower ranks, if you convince them it's homeopathy or some nonsense magic they believe in that doesn't really work; they'll believe that anyway so the Veil doesn't care. About two cups of liquid for an effect, but you can condense them to a drop without losing effectiveness, it's just slow."

"First rank is just duplicating mundane effects with an hour of brewing and mana instead of complicated manufacturing and research. Caffeine, painkillers, dyes, that sort of thing. Rank two gets you triple effectiveness, booze with no hangovers, fireworks, and prescription drugs. Rank three, you stop having to do physically plausible things - directly reknit flesh, slowly but without natural healing's limits. Make the mind unable to register pain as unpleasant, not messing with nerves. Put a full night of sleep in a shot glass, though trying that for more than a few days in a row is a bad idea. Oh, and grenade-effect potions, not much use for a serious elementalist but nice. Rank four, any disease up to recent death is fixable. Quadruple your strength or perceptiveness or memory for hours, serious-business love potions, cosmetic surgery in a vial including eagle eyes, feathers, or adorable bunny ears and cottontails. This is the rank where materials start to be genuinely difficult to get, you'd need favor-trading. Which I am quite good at, of course. Up at rank five arch-curatives restore youth and prevent aging, or restore perfect health even to the long-dead with a body to apply it to. Love arch-potions are scary and don't need to be sticking you on a person. Perfect memory editing, or gifting. Full physical reshaping to anything you can describe well enough to hold in mind. But ₭ 100,000 for the materials is usually the easy way at that point, and that's something like a year of mana production once you've grown into your adult mana capacity, ten years at the start."

She makes a face at the word "love potions".

"I guess I could just buy the potions if I needed them, the lower ranks don't seem to interesting, and the higher ones sound expensive. And, uh. Is there a way to protect against love potions?"

"What about Divination? Is it the look-at-the-future or look-at-far-places kind?"

"Nothing perfect nor easy. Warding runes, as a tattoo if you're very worried - that's rank four but common to buy young - and high-rank Psychotics will usually keep it to a level you can manage and seek help about. Diviners who have the talent for 'true prophecy' can dodge pretty well. But if an arch-alchemist wants your mind whammied... have powerful friends who'll notice and can pay for spellbreaking. They will get you, so strength in numbers to make them struggle to keep it in place or keep deniability is the best you can do."

"Mind you, I'd notice even without magical help, and I am a true prophet and have another working for me. And it doesn't come up much; there aren't many alchemists who can make them and most of the heavy hitters disapprove, so they don't risk getting caught. Divination sees information of all kinds, so keeping it secret is very hard."

"I'm not super worried, I just... you know those children books where they are treated as some kind of prank? Well, I don't find it a prank. I find it comparable to rape."

"But if it's not as common, I can probably just worry a reasonable amount. Which segues into... it seems like I might want to get five ranks in Divination?"

"I can't deny it's useful, but half the effect you can get from a friend, and you're getting high in fives - there's a certain amount of stability you need, as many fours as fives, and no more fours than you have of the lower ranks. And-" she gestures to another part of the cloud of power "-I'm not seeing true oracle potential, so you'd need to do most of your own detail work and explicitly ask, little to no passive information gathering."

"Oh, let me check... I currently have... six at tier 1, two at tier 3, four at tier 5. That doesn't seem particularly balanced..."

"I guess I could bump up some of the elemental ones later to rebalance. I kinda care about the tier 5 effects. Considering I'm not an oracle, how many ranks is it worth getting in Divination?"

"Hmm, two gets you identifying magic and people you can see, with just basics for people, a status check on anyone for mundane afflictions and weak magical ones, and a loose good/bad/shrug augury for the next half-hour for a specific question. Three makes identification passive, details on the status check, augury for half a day, make maps of everything in sight and add more details as you learn them, a quick substitute for photographic memory, and a half-second general battle precognition, but that's terribly draining on mana and stamina. Everything just gets better at the higher ranks, nothing terribly new, except targeting spells through a map at four, and information countermeasures at five."

Also learning True Names at five, which would be relevant since she likes her Aethernautics, but that's not that new, this is not, technically, lying.

"Then I guess three ranks for now, and we'll see how to balance it up later I guess."

"What else can I pick with the power I have left?"

"We haven't gotten into any of the minor magic, and there's a fair amount of it. Some of it in large chunks, but it doesn't come in ranks, so 'minor' - and a lot of it has affinity for sorceresses. No sleep for one point, add a second race without charge method for four, be a peak specimen of everything your race has to offer for five - that's double discounted for you, body and sorceress - swapping your charge method is six, no affinity, but you might want it anyway. Blood magic is three, perfect kinesthetic memorization is two double-discounted, and oh, you can be a crossbreeder for one; that lets you help a mixed-race couple get the exact combination of child they want, that's always steady money. Cold flames are free, prestidigitation is one, you can get mood weather cheap but it doesn't make you many friends, levitation without a broom might be nice, you could be a gunwitch for two or swap out whatever you like for your rod for six. Or... well, if you want to blow all of it in one place and then some, you could learn a trick I wasn't quite sure wasn't rumor - a sense for the most efficient way to kill anything you see. Sixteen points."

"No sleep sounds cool, change charge method definitely, I'm not fond of the idea of depending on meat if I can have anything else, although six is not nothing. Perfect learning yes and very thank you. The crossbreeding one seems worth it for income, if I'm not supposed to be the one bearing the child, you know, I had never though about it before today because of... genetics. Prestidigitation sounds useful, is it like the pathfinder spell? Levitation sounds cool, how much does it cost? Guns are... unappealing, to be honest. Swapping out my rod (eh), I'm not sure what I'd need that for. I... I'm not sure 'a sense for killing anything' is how I want to live my life? I'd much rather... not that."