"You have academic discount but not affinity as a neutral, three ranks four points, four ranks eight."

"Hmmm. How much do I need for D&D-style potions of Cure Wounds or Bull's Strength?"

"Weaksauce ones at two, proper good ones at three."

"Yeah, let's go with three then."

"Two points. Now I have you down for your one better than free rank in witchery, aethernautics, portals, and runes, and three in alchemy, and no other things yet."

"I thought I said I wanted five in runes?"

"You did but then sounded dissatisfied with the quality of the anti-aging. Five after all?"

"No, yeah, it sounds useful anyway, and hopefully my awakening will be soon enough that I won't need to get any aging reversed, but even if it isn't that's not a big deal comparatively speaking."

"All right. Any Witchery, since we have covered it before?"

"I think I should probably take four ranks, since given how I'm gonna stand out visually invisibility will be useful."

"Four ranks four points. What next?"

"What does aethernautics do again?"

"Weird grab bag of stuff, not amazing at low ranks but at high ones it's got neat stuff to do with dimensional travel, stars and planets, breathing in space, space-folding, gravity manipulation, time loops, and you can adjust your age however you want."

"Dimensional travel?"

"At rank four an aethernaut can go right through the border of a pocket dimension - like a witch's hat, or like where Arcadia is, or whatever. And then you're in the aether and you can bop around between others, and break-and-enter them if you know their names. At rank five you can lock a space down, so people cannot go in or out."

"Sounds cool, but not essential. Maybe I'll come back to it. Tell me more about portals."

"There are three kinds. Rifts, portkeys, gates. Portkeys and gates are permanent, and how many you can have and how far they can go goes up by rank, and they require ritual sacrifice of expensive materials scaling per mile. Rifts are more tactical distance, their range and size also goes up and so does their durability - they start out paper thin and easy to wreck if they are hit from the back side. Very sharp edges. Rifts can also go one-way into proximas, elemental dimensions, so you can use them as hotplates and ice trays at rank two, electrical chargers at three, water reservoir at four, the spooky void at five; starting rank four the rifts can go both ways in the proximas but this is not overwhelmingly useful unless you just like to dramatically incinerate things and don't mind that it's a bit hard to shove things into a proxima. Rank five takes the cap off how many portkeys and gates you can have at once, and you can have permanent rifts if you want."

"Eh. This one sounds kinda boring. Not needing to pay for plane tickets would be nice, but not as nice as invisibility or luck manipulation. Skip for now."

"If the main use case is not taking planes you can pay to use other people's portal hubs. What next?"

"Have we done all the Academic-aligned ones?"

"Yup."

"Let's do warlock, then. Sorceress is higher stakes due to the whole one element restriction."

"If you change your class now the prices of lots of things including your complications will change, but warlocks get discounted hexes, divination, curses, necromancy, consortation."

"Oh, sorry, no, I meant just going through all the warlock-aligned magic types. Sticking with academic. We've already done hexes and necromancy, so how about divination?"

"Has a rank zero effect, phone in your brain - texts and pictures and voices and if you are rank five telepresence. Rank one gets you Identify, which tells you what a thing is - reminds you of people's names, tells you what kind of bird that is, catches you up on why some person is famous. That soups up with more ranks. Rank two gets you Status, keep tabs on your friends pets enemies - more like 'are they hurt' than 'are they coming to my house', though. And Augury, good-bad-meh forecasting for a question about the next half hour. These also soup up with more divination. Rank three: map! Works where Google never thought to tread. And Archive, like a camera or a scanner. And Foresight, next half a second you can see a shadow of it, good for a fight especially if you like charging into melee. And they all, yes, keep getting better. Rank four: everything is fancier and you add an auto-targeting spell, Lock On, for scry-and-die. Rank five, fuck with other people's map data. Sound fun enough I should go into how up the things all soup, or nah?"