"Where's the third nipple go?"

"Your pick."

"Hmmm, I'll think about it. Next magic?"

"Next is … not Witchery, actually, no free magic outfit for you. Familiarity. Rank 0, you can call a helpful spirit to bond with you. Without you putting in more power it's about as smart as a well-trained dog. You can pick the animal form it takes when you first call it. Sometimes un-awakened witches already have an associated familiar spirit and in those cases you can't always pick the form. They're very loyal, they don't age, and you can call yours back even if it dies and dismiss it if, say, yours is a horse and you're going indoors."

"At rank 1, you lose any animal allergies, gain a telepathic bond, and can channel your magic through it. At rank 2 you can speak to and understand your familiar and any animal a normal familiar could take the shape of, though that doesn't mean they can or will do what you want, I hear bribery helps. At rank 3 you can pick up qualities culturally associated with your familiar's animal type, like intelligence for a parrot."

"Oooh, cool. And is it normal to have an area of magic off-limits?"

"Yes. There's some obscure fields of magic it's hard to get access to because they by default require the right items or rituals or bloodlines. Witchery requires a bloodline, it's just that bloodline is extremely common and includes every human on the prime Earth. It wouldn't be surprising if you could get in on it somehow but it would be work. Also, some witches take restrictions on fields of magic they're not interested in for extra points. I did that for Familiarity."

"Huh, good to know! Might do that myself for Curses, I see the utility but it's not me. What's next on the magic list?"

"Necromancy. At rank 0 you can see most spirits. At rank one you can animate up to 3 small animal corpses at a time and they act how they did in life. You can also try to speak with someone's spirit by visiting their grave. At home you could let a human see spirits but I don't know if that would work here, and you can also interfere with spirits trying to hide from you. At rank two, you can soothe a corrupted spirit you defeat with a brief ritual and mark the spirit for a psychopomp if appropriate. You can also animate 9 larger animals, with Frankenstein situations if you like, and control bone telekinetically. At rank three, you can reanimate up to 27 human-sized corpses. You can bind a cooperative spirit to the corpse so it takes less attention for you. You're also better at telekinesis and can do dead flesh too, and conjure bone from nothing."

"I'd be interested to see how letting a human see spirits interacts with the Mist. I would expect it doesn't work; seeing through the Mist as a mortal is usually conceived of as a skill issue, you have to have the open mind and independent spirit to not let it do its work on you.

I'd expect it won't be popular if not, though, we can already pretty reliably achieve speaking with spirits by digging a hole and pouring in sheep's blood. Or, uh, Big Macs, I've heard of a guy who did it with Big Macs."

"Huh. I have some necromancy, I could run the test if the circumstances were otherwise right."

Raven thinks for a minute.

"You know, I actually think we might have already done so? I just skimmed the paper and the memory is only now coming back to me, but I wanna say our own efforts at replication suggest that it's the cultural role of the offering that matters, not the physical composition?

So like a Big Mac would be very nearly as effective as sheep's blood, a Whopper only a little less so, a frozen grocery store burger not much at all. I waaaaaaaana say the discussion section mentioned the Impossible Whopper as a direction for future experimentation, maybe providing a vegan-friendly method for the ritual? We can look it up once we're out of awakening."

"What is the cultural role that a Big Mac and sheep's blood share, though? Humans usually don't consume raw blood."

"I don't know? The idea of the ritual is that the smell of something—in the one case, animal blood, ideally sheep's; in the other, a fast food burger, ideally McD's—will attract the ghosts, but I don't know why the old version uses Not Food and the new version uses Food."

"Because," says Raven's entirely internal mental model of Hope, "they're both Not Food. Checks out!"

"Well, maybe if you go Academic you can make it a research topic, but it might not have enough applications to matter to you."

"Oh, maybe so. Does research as an academic increase your magical capabilities in general or only in the specific subject you're researching?"

"Mostly capabilities in general, study turns into units you can spend on points, but for the ranked magics you get without points you need to study specifically them."

"Living with a points system will be weird. Our world has its share of video-game-like elements, what with the procedurally generated Labyrinth and the monsters that dissolve into dust when they die, leaving behind only the good loot, and then respawn, but this is a different flavor from what I'm used to."

"Well, for now I'm here to help with the points system."

"Thank you! And on that note, how about the next magic?"

"Consortation, which is demon summoning. At rank 1 you can summon a range of imps, tiny demons associated with Wrath, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, or Lust. As payment, they want to indulge in their vices, which aside from wrath are very easy to satisfy."

"Does increasing the amount of lust or gluttony in the world have more effects than, uh, itself? Like, do those things get people damned to Hell where the demons get to torture them and make them into more demons and so on?"

"Not that I know of? If it were the case I'd expect to see different views from Light-associated actors."

"What are the views from Light-associated actors?"

"The least subtle moves I've seen by mortal allies were regarding disease eradication. Summoning Celestials takes acts of kindness at rank 1, charity at 2, forgiveness at 3, judging serious cases at 4, and establishing religious groups at 5, which I assume reflects their preferences."