"Hmmm, wait, I'm not sure I'm correctly seeing the connection here, why does this suggest lust and so on don't damn people? Because if they did the Light's faction would be focusing on those things instead of disease eradication and kindness and charity?"

"I would expect Celestials to not count establishing a Unitarian Universalist group as a valid offering, in that world. I would expect, on the witch side, to see Watchers outright discouraging lust and gluttony and such, instead of what I do see, which is that sometimes Watchers from mortal religions happen to stick to the policies from their religion. I would also expect it to be much harder for any sex act to qualify as an act of kindness."

"Hmmm, yeah, I see. Pretty cool of the Light, then.

...but, if the imps just value those vices for their own sake, it sounds like summoning them might not always be such a bad idea? I expect leadership will declare some state of formal opposition to Hell, but if they just want more lust and so on at seems at least some win-win trades are on the table."

"You would certainly not be the first person with that viewpoint. The imps don't even want more vices in general, they want to personally take a nap or have a meal or watch pornography or whatnot. There are demons that instead want the summoner to indulge but those are stronger ones that are harder to summon."

"I strongly expect leadership will be in favor of that!

...hey, if summoning Celestials is possible too, what magic area is it under?"

"Ministration. It's faction-linked and difficult to pick up unless I bind your fate to the Watchers, but I have rank 1 and you can probably get that at least. Rank 1 lets you summon Mediaries, which emit light that provides language comprehension and freezes lesser demons and spirits."

"Oh, cool! ...I should probably finish up the list of regular magics before I start considering it, though, what's next on that?"

"We were actually still discussing Consortation, I never went over the higher ranks. At rank 2 you can summon minor envy demons for theft. They want items precious to you or to the target. At rank 3 you can summon seduction demons, skilled at sex and espionage, who take sex as payment. You can also summon more competent gluttony demons, if you, uh, want demonic chefs who specifically want you to overindulge, even though you have a perfectly good cafeteria whose cooks are less invasive."

"Huh, does it still count as theft if you're having them steal from people you're actively at war with?"

"Yup."

"Nice. It's convenient that like...demons' interests have just enough divergence from the reasons why we consider bad things bad to enable cooperation."

"There's also a fairly major demon lord whose main interaction with witchkind is selling things at very high prices in normal currencies! Witches with Consortation can pick up a knack for calling him."

"When it comes to celestial and infernal related witches … There's a witch type derived from fallen celestials. There's also an infernal-derived witch type, and that type gets dragged back to Hell when they die and can be resummoned with Consortation. I don't know exactly how representative this is of the Light and Hell's broader approaches, but it seems suggestive."

"Yikes, of all the things our universe could share with others 'people born destined for the bad afterlife' isn't one I'd vote for! —I'm talking about monsters, to be clear, if your guide hasn't gotten to it yet Tartarus is often not very pleasant for its natural inhabitants either.

I bet price-gouging demon will be popular with leadership, though. I can still hear the voices of Finance Minister Said and Deputy Minister Jenkins from one of those videos my middle school econ teacher would put on when he wasn't feeling like teaching, explaining how price gouging is Good Actually. 'Times of crisis are exactly when we most desperately need accurate signals of where goods are most valued...'"

"You do have to spend points on the option to contact him that you could spend on other forms of emergency preparedness."

"Oh, I don't think they'd recommend using him, just... they'll have some respect at least in the abstract for his approach."

"Aha."

"Okay, what's next on the list? Portals, right?"

"Yup, portals. Portals come in three forms: shuttles, gates, and rifts. Portals default to being hidden and unusable to mortals. Shuttles are objects that bounce back and forth between two locations and bring along people touching them. Gates are doorways that act as portals when triggered. Rifts are holes cut in space, and produce a bit of color before they open. By default you have to trace the outline. Shuttles and gates require a ritual sacrificing about 1K per 10 miles worth of stuff, while rifts can be created on the spot and are tiring to create and maintain. Portals can be damaged, including rifts."

"At rank 1, your rifts can be about 6 inches in diameter and within 6 feet of you connected to a point you can see within 300 feet, or one you know of within 60 feet, and they're about as sturdy as paper. You can also make one shuttle or gate linking two locations you've been to within 50 miles of each other. At rank 2, you double rift diameter and range, and they're more like glass. You can also have up to three shuttles or gates with 200 mile range. At this point you can, instead of targeting rifts at two familiar locations, do a one-way rift from a dimension proximal to an elemental plane, 'proxima' for short, targeting Fire and Ice. At rank 3, you can skip tracing the rift outline but it's more tiring. You can go up to 3 feet in diameter, double again the range, and they're like steel. You can do up to six shuttles or gates, up to 800 miles apart. And you can access the Storm Proxima for power supply."

"Oh, that is going to make some people, perhaps me, very very rich."

"Perhaps! Often I have to deter people from plans like that but the Mist is thick here and you already are part of a secret organization with a business arm."

"Oh, we make some effort to be hard for mortals to detect—even if the Mist means a mass unmasking of our world is impossible, attempts still tend to be bad both for the mortals making them and our operations.

The thing is, we could still get a lot of use out of portals even if we stick to using then only in entirely supernatural-facing commerce. A static, predictable teleport is unheard of on our side of things."

"Oh, huh."

"Yeah, the Labyrinth allows anomalously fast travel but its passages shift, hellhounds can teleport but they're animals with animal needs and limitations, and of course gods can but gods don't take orders. I think some of the other supernatural communities might have better portal situations but for the Greco-Roman world that's about all we got."

"Well, maybe you'll want to pick up some Portals, then."

"I bet I will!"