The Outsiders are Raven's cue to turn around and examine one of the other big nodes. Can she tell which is academic and which is sorceress?

Yup! The 'blue' is academic, while the 'red' is sorceress.

She further investigates the academic node.

Academics get more stuff from nodes in this collection of five-tiered nodes which are 'blue'. Where another witch would get one thing from one of these nodes, an academic gets two, or gets twice the duration of thing, or spends half as much of something on the thing.

Also, they can get any two of the nodes in the five-tiered-nodes collection with just time and not points.

"What are the things with five levels?"

"Those are ranked magics, the forms of magic that follow a straightforward and shared growth pattern. The maximum rank you can pick up today is 2 and the maximum you should expect to achieve is 3."

"Oooh, what are the types of ranked magic?"

"Alchemy, runes, curses, hexes, wi– no, you don't have that one, familiarity, necromancy, consortation, portals, divination, aethernautics, the elementalist magics, and some faction magics."

"Hmmm, what's the standard way to unpack all that? ...Can I take notes while I'm in here, or is there another way we can streamline this for the cabinet?"

"Not really, but we can drop in and out repeatedly and I still remember things when I'm not in here."

"Awesome! I expect the cabinet will want at least a brief writeup on their options before they even get checked, up to you whether you want me dropping in and out to do it or if you're willing to write some notes yourself if you get a meeting with them."

"I have already gotten my assigned escort to do notetaking and expect she will be fine doing more of it, unless you have a reason to think otherwise?"

"That sounds like it'd work to me! So... what are the ranks of each magic like? The ones I could attain, I mean."

"Alchemy rank 1 lets you replicate a lot of mundane pharmaceuticals and some other products like dyes, and sometimes finangle the 'opposite' of an effect, with simple ingredients or 10 'kisses', a unit of mana we'll get to later. Rank 2 lets you boost things you can do at rank 1 in efficacy while removing side effects, and also lets you replicate more chemicals including gunpowder. The ingredients are a bit harder to find, or you can use K100. Rank 3, you're not just doing better versions of mundane pharmaceuticals, your painkillers target the mind directly and such. Rare ingredients, or K1000. Also fancier explosives like ice grenades, which take more ingredients or K5000."

"Oooh, doing without side effects would make me really popular, our kind of magic lets us manufacture drugs beyond mortal capabilities but the side effect prices can be steep."

"I don't actually know if it interacts usefully with other magic drugs, though I'm sure it'd be interesting to find out."

"It would be! How many points do I have to spend right now?"

"Ten right now, though you can get more with complications. One rank of alchemy will by default cost you one point, but if you're an Academic or you pick up a race with an associated element it it'll get you a point."

"Okay, good to know. I think I'll hold off on spending points for now until I've heard about all the magics, then. What's next on the list?"

"Runes. You create reusable or sometimes persistent effects anchored to physical items carrying effects by spending materials, about four times the amount a same rank of potion would use. There's a limited but reversible set of runes. At rank 1, you get runes which roughly translate to luck, fertility, courage, chill, and augment, the last of which does elemental resistances. At rank 2, you get disease and heavy. At rank 3, talent and wind. There's some nuances to the runes here. For instance, chill seems to be the rune of cooling without phase change and its inverse is cooling with phase change, and you can invert fertility both for miscarriages and birth defects and for contraception."

"Huh, why is wind so expensive?"

"If you put it on a fan you can sort of turn the fan into a jet engine."

"Okay, yeah, I can see how that would do it!"

"I would recommend at least rank 1 of runes, fertility is– uh, fertility promotes positive traits including heritable magic, and your faction sounds like it has a lot of population turnover and nobody currently crafting witch runes, so under those circumstances it could be a significant force multiplier eventually."

"Yeah, that is definitely a potential game changer."