In 20 minutes you will go to the Westlake And 7th southbound stop in Seattle, where you will be attacked by a snake. You will permit this, though you might set it up to die slowly. You will then receive my favor.

…Well, her goddess has her reasons.

She'll do it either way, but is it fated to go well for her, and does that vary based on whether she kills the snake?

Positive, not varying based on the snake.

In that case she'll grab some poison and go play it by ear.

That's a big snake, with a mirror for a mouth. Someone is already running away screaming.

Well, that oughtta die.

She'll nick it with a poison arrow and then … stand still … while it goes to bite her.

She finds herself at the same intersection, going by the street signs, but the surrounding buildings are different. One, a nondescript office labeled simply "Amazon", is guarded by two armored women, a human with a taser and some kind of snake creature with a labrys. Passersby don't seem to notice the guards, or in most cases even the building.

Thaaaaat's putting excess weight on the Veil though apparently she didn't catch it until she got bitten by the snake.

She can pass for a cosplayer but cosplay security guards are a stretch and a snake is a lot more elaborate than some green makeup (and tusks she keeps covered with a mask).

She'll approach.

The human is wearing a name tag reading "Janelle". The snake woman—who has green scaly skin, tails for legs, and no breasts—is "Savannah".

"Can I help you?" asks Janelle.

"Yes, I'd like to know why you're seemingly putting so much weight on the Veil."

"You mean the Mist?" asks Savannah. "Um, not to be rude, but have you perhaps not been on Earth in a few centuries? This is nothing for it, these days."

"I do most of my work on Earth! I get that humans have advanced a lot in costuming technology, but if you're playing the role of security guards then you should understand that most Earth companies don't allow their employees to wear costumes like that to work. A costume tail like that would interfere with job duties."

She sighs.

"Do you actually think this is a good idea or are your superiors just telling you to act like you think so? You can pass me along to them if you'd like."

Maybe she hasn't re-formed in even longer than Savannah thought?

"No, like, they can't see the tails. It's like the disguises the gods use to look human, that's on by default for all of us now."

Imrijka uncovers her mouth and approaches someone on the street.

"Hey, what do you think of my Warcraft cosplay?"

The guy looks a little confused.

"Uh, cool hat? Sorry, I don't play that game, so I wouldn't know who you're supposed to be or how accurate it is to the character or anything."

"Fair enough, and thanks!"

She heads back for the security guards.

"You win. I think I'm not on my usual Earth."

"There's more than one? Like in Marvel?" Janelle asks.

She turns to Savannah.

"Savannah, did you know there's more than one?"

"...no."

Turning back to Imrijka, Savannah says "Yeah, I think you're right about this being a problem for my superiors. Care to come in and wait in the lobby while I call this on up the chain of command?"

"Works for me."

The lobby is a small, cozy room. There's a receptionist typing away at a computer, an apparently unarmed and unarmored hunan woman wearing glasses and a name tag reading "Joy".

"Hi there! Feel free to have a seat while you wait. The WiFi network is AmazonGuest; password is snore hyphen scrap hyphen green."

The chairs are plush and comfy, and in a basket near each one there's a selection of newspapers and magazines: the New Roman Times (headline "Calydonian Boar Sighted in Florida"; subtitle "Third re-form of the decade?"), Man's World (cover model is a tall, slender, long-haired young man in a floral print button-down, makeup, and a collar; advertised articles are about fashion, parenting, and interior design), and the Journal of the Amazon Medical Association (promising jargon-laden explanations of the synthesis of drugs for human enhancement).

…she's already gotten out her copy of Undying Love 2: Red Kiss (a book with a pale man on the cover with fangs and a revealing outfit) but probably it would be wise to read the news. She can have novels time later. Maybe this universe has a similar but not identical set of novels.

She tucks it away and picks up the New Roman Times.

The boar article begins by relaying reports from the "mortal media" summarizing a string of incidents of escalating violence across the state of Florida. First is a building collapse in Miami attributed to shoddy materials and poor construction, that has cost millions of dollars in insurance payments and lawsuits. Next is a multi-car pileup on the interstate, attributed to a distracted driver who was texting in heavy traffic, that put several drivers in the hospital with severe injuries. Finally there are some grisly deaths at a nightclub in Tallahassee, attributed to a mass murder-suicide by a crazed gunman.

Several photographs, reportedly taken by an anonymous "New Roman intelligence officer" with a "Mist-penetrating camera", illustrate the real culprit of the incidents: a boar the size of a compact car. Its tusks are big even for its huge body, and are shown in the photos penetrating steel and concrete with apparent ease. It's said that "due to the locations of the attacks and the speed with which the monster moved across the state, it's believed that the boar is once again using the Labyrinth to travel, likely with aid from a third party or the maze itself to maintain geographic consistency of the sites of carnage".

The article concludes by explaining a joint operation by "the Twelfth Legion Fulminata" and its allies: "Delphi Strawberry Service"; "the Hunters of Artemis"; "Amazon, Vanguard, and other front corporations of the Amazon Empire". One aspect of the operation is "providing robust reputational and legal defense to the scapegoats". The other, and more involved aspect, is the deployment of arned guards to "monitor all Labyrinth entrances across the continent of sufficient size and appropriate operation mechanism to allow easy entry and exit by the boar, with a particular focus on containing activity in the Southeastern USA".

These guards have, apparently, successfully beaten the boar back into the Labyrinth on several attempted exits and saved mortal lives, but not yet killed it. One series of photos shows the monster surviving a lightning strike while an Amazon (she looks like Janelle, the human guard Imrijka saw at the entrance) stands by glaring; it's captioned "Amazon warrior Janelle Arden shocks the boar with Tesla's bolt". Another shows a pink-haired teenager with a Roman-style gladius talking (or maybe singing) to the boar, followed by the boar peacefully plodding away through a garage door, which when closed is shown to be spray painted with a big red triangle; it's captioned "Third Cohort centurion Alyssa Waters turns aside the boar using charmspeak".

A short bio of the author at the end consists of two small headshots of a middle-aged blond individual, one of them in makeup with their hair down in a feminine style and the other bare-faced with their hair hidden by a hat, and the caption "Norma(n) Brewer (they/she/he) earned their Roman citizenship through service in the Fourth Cohort involving a successful kill of a hydra, and graduated with honors from the New Rome University school of journalism. In their spare time, they enjoy swimming, duck and deer hunting, reading a good romance or detective novel, and role-playing games both video and tabletop."

"Mist-penetrating camera"?

"Mist-penetrating camera"?

She's going to buy a cheap camera and take a 'selfie'. And then dress up as one of the mortals' orc characters, stupid oversized pauldrons and all, and take another.

For now she's going to have her archaic scissors symbol out, it seems maybe socially relevant.

If the receptionist gets any information out of the symbol, she doesn't react to it.

If this were her Earth, Alphazon would not publicly admit to having such a shoddy surveillance system and Occult Research and Containment would be handling the legal side of things.

She should tell her wife she's going to be out for a while.

«My precious pearl, is now a good time?»

«Yes, my ivory. I'm in the bath~»

«…not what I meant, sweetheart, sorry. What I wanted to tell you is that it seems I've got a long quest and will be away a while.»

«Oh, Immie…»

«Hey, at least we don't have any kids at home right now?»

«Small blessings. I love you and I'll miss you. …how available are you right now, anyway?»

«Oh, right now I'm in a waiting room corresponding to the Amazon instance of the Earth I'm on. Apparently Amazon being a front does resonate across the Earths, but it seems like what it's a front for maybe varies, isn't that interesting? This Earth has a weird aggressive version of the Veil, Amazon allegedly doesn't even have a good surveillance network because normal cameras don't cut it even for witches. And people don't appreciate my Warcraft cosplay, I checked.»

«Aww, but your green skin is so smooth and even in color and doesn't transfer pigment, and you have a really nice set of tusks…»

«You flatterer.»

«Guilty as charged!»

A muscular woman with a name tag reading "Rob" emerges from the door behind Joy the receptionist, chats with her quietly for a minute, and then addresses Imrijka.

"Hi, I'm Rob! I'll be your guide and bodyguard while you're an honored guest of the Amazon Empire. Could I get your name?"

"Hi Rob, I'm Imrijka. I'm not sure if I'll really need a bodyguard, but nobody here has seen me fight, so I understand the desire to err on the side of caution."

«I ought to go now, but I'll try to get back to you tonight, depending on how things go. Love you!»

«Love you too!»

"Nice to meet you, Imrijka! And we don't really expect any fighting to happen on the base, Queen Hylla's administration runs a tight ship. But it's the tradition to provide a bodyguard anyway, for a foreign diplomat, which is...about the closest classification we have to 'visitor from another universe', what with this never having happened before."

"That makes sense. So, Queen Hylla is your leader?"

"Yes, in the sense that she's the commander-in-chief of our armed forces, leads the fully assembled forces in battle, and has the final authority to overrule any decision. In practice she never uses it except on martial matters and the day-to-day responsibilities of administration are handled by her cabinet of ministers."

"How long has she been in office?"

"Queen Hylla was crowned four years ago, after the death of her predecessor in the Titan war. Most of her cabinet is carried over from the previous queen, though. Prime Minister Jackson—no relation—has been in office for twenty.

...ah, my bad, bit of a verbal tic. There's a war hero of some of our allies who has the same surname and I'm used to clearing up confusion."

"May I ask what might be an offensive question?"

"Sure."

"Do you not have any means of resurrection, even for your leadership?"

"...no, we most certainly don't."

"I see. But the boar in the news does?"

"Yeah, monsters respawn."

"I would recommend that you look into acquiring respawn methods should we get to the point of interplanar trade."

"...I mean, like, we could petition the gods to fling open the Doors of Death right now, if we wanted? But the last time that happened was really not fun for us. We would much rather resolve the respawn imbalance by getting the Underworld locked down tighter, so their guys can't get out either."

"Huh. Do you think it would cause problems if you purchased a deck of magic cards for resurrection? In the shorter term, it sounds like we should test me in combat, because if I can land a curse and I have the mana it can interfere with respawning."

"We're unlikely to use it unless the, uh, broader theopolitical and geopolitical situation changes such that the cabinet become convinced maintaining the 'dead humans stay dead' norm is no longer our least bad available option, but I expect we would be happy to purchase it. Having more options is always good if we have to make an emergency judgment call.

...Not knowing how your universe works—I'm excited to hear whatever information you're willing to share—I should clarify that 'dead' doesn't mean we can't talk to them, the cabinet benefit greatly from consultation with the spirits of their blessed ancestors, we aren't deprived of the wisdom of millennia.

And yes, we should test you in combat! That would be greatly valuable to us and all humanity, if it works."

"If Atropos wanted me to not give you the same information I'd give any new witch who asks, she'd have told me so. And it's good to hear you're a mature faction, so many people won't listen to external sources of wisdom. How would you describe the theopolitical and geopolitical situation?"

"Okay, so the vast majority of humanity are mortals, who have different traditions of religion and folklore in different regions of the world, and are arranged in...if I say 'republics, capitalism, the United Nations, nuclear weapons, constitutions, the Internet', are those things ringing a bell?"

"Yes, the Earth I was on recently has the same."

"Okay, great!

So, each mortal tradition of folklore about gods and monsters is associated with an actually existing supernatural community, shrouded behind a veil that obscures it from mortal perception. Different people call the veil different things; we say 'the Mist'. The power and influence of a supernatural population correlates with the wealth and status of the corresponding culture, the weight of years of tradition, and probably other factors we haven't figured out.

The most numerous supernatural population, and the one with the greatest influence on world events—the one that would be called 'the supernatural community', if any of them could—is that connected to what we call 'Western civilization', a loose grouping of cultures that have at some point considered themselves the heirs to Greece and Rome, and participated in the literary tradition that includes Hesiod, Homer, and Virgil.

Within that community, the main advocates for humanity—the strongest forces in favor of good things being allowed to happen—are the eldest Olympians, the daughters of Kronos, the goddesses of civilization. Vesta, Ceres, and Juno, or Hestia, Demeter, and Hera, if you prefer the Greek names. The names technically stand for different aspects of their personalities, but we use them pretty interchangeably around here.

They're beset on all sides by a variety of problems that outclass them in raw power, most of them tied in some way to the primal forces of nature. The Mist, which in spite of the best efforts of its patron goddess Hecate has grown so strong over the centuries that most mortals would struggle to live in a base like this without damage to their sanity from not knowing what's going on all the time. Their ancestors, the Titans and primordial gods, avatars of the Hobbesian 'state of nature'. Their own rebellious younger brothers, whose egos were inflated by the manner of worship given them by tragically misguided patriarchal mortals and who have forgotten their proper place in the pantheon.

The Queen and Cabinet consider themselves to be endowed with the responsibility of protecting humanity and civilization. Their current long-term strategic plan to achieve these aims is to infiltrate the governing organs of mortal society until we can—safely, and from a position of power, authority, and respect—emerge from the shadows, reinstate public prayer and sacrifice to the Olympian gods, and—openly and proudly before the world—practice the proper roles of women and men in our marriages. 

We believe that this plan is, among our available courses of action under current constraints, the most likely to sufficiently strengthen the Olympians to overpower and defeat their enemies, and to promote an arrangement of gender roles among divine beings that empowers the entities whose interests are most aligned with civilization."

"Does this plan involve openly reinstating magic, or just using mundane methods and a bit of statistical luck which mysteriously fails to appear for studies to promote prayer?"

"Just mundane methods, I don't expect we even could reveal magic to mortals in a way that convinces them until the Mist problem is solved, and that one's the least tractable."

"Good. In that case while I will likely not endorse your conquest schemes unless my goddess tells me to, it seems I am under no obligation to oppose them. Also, unrelatedly, I think I've been implicitly assuming that an empowered Amazon employee would of course be recording everything I say, but given that mist-piercingness is a notable property of cameras, should I instead assume that if you want something recorded someone will have to take notes?"

"The Mist interferes less with sound than visuals and audio recording equipment than cameras, the only time I'd expect significant distortion is on, like, the roars of a hydra that mortals are seeing as a car.

We don't actually make a habit of recording everything on our own bases. If you'd like to record for your own notes you're welcome to, but I would ask that if you have to send the audio files anywhere you encrypt them in transit—as a separate problem from the Mist interference, individual supernatural beings can spy on and mess with electronic communications. The specifics of the mechanism are unclear but anything that 'feels' like it should help does, like encryption obscures the contents of a message from monsters."

"I generally do telecommunications with magic."

«Like so.»

"Oh, cool! The higher-ups will definitely be interested in that, if there's a way for us to get it."

"It might be that some of you have witch potential, that seems like a possible reason for me to be sent here. And of course you can ask me to pass along messages to anyone I've met, though I might decline. Anyway, I ask about recording because I've been assuming that if I explain things to you now then of course your queen and cabinet will hear everything in full detail, but maybe I should save the lectures for later?"

"I can take notes to pass along, if you're ready to explain your world!"

Rob gets out her phone.

"I type really fast, I can transcribe exactly."

"Nice! I am absolutely ready, I do this all the time for girls who thought they were mortals."

"So, to the best of my understanding the Prime Earth in the Prime Sphere is the center of the universe. Mortal beliefs there matter a lot and if enough mortals there start believing in magic then it's really bad for the integrity of the universe. Various parties set up the Veil in the past, and it's flimsier than your Mist. Doing implausible things strains it, even if the mortal you do them in front of doesn't obviously catch on."

"On the theopolitical side: As mentioned, I happen to serve a Greco-Roman goddess. This is not because Greco-Roman deities have a specific power advantage, it's just she made me the best offer. The divine factions can be broadly divided into celestials, demons, and everyone else, and the Greco-Roman deities are part of 'everyone else'. There was a point where the celestials and demons were openly at war. At the time, a different world was the Prime Earth, or whatever it was called, and even though this war was on a different world, what's our current Prime Earth still ended up suffering the K-T event. Are you with me so far?"

Type type.

"Yes! And, uh, yikes."

"Yikes indeed. So, the celestial-demon situation can be somewhat mapped to the Abrahamic religions or Zoroastrianism or Manichaeism, if you have any of those, but demons will just say whatever they feel like and celestials are pretty quiet on a lot of theological questions. I can in principle summon lesser celestials and demons but I usually don't."

"We have all of those, yes, though if a capital-G God actually exists on our side of things in the same way as the lowercase-g ones they don't take a lot of actions. It's a common hypothesis that there's something like the Greek/Roman split personality thing going on there but to a much greater degree."

"Huh. The Light that the celestials serve doesn't tend to take obvious actions, but the usual assumption most witches make is that it abstains to avoid escalation."

"That one is a popular explanation among those of us who go in for monotheism. It's just that, for better or worse, few do.

Call it rationality and pragmatism or call it human frailty and weakness, but not many people wanna hold to 'thou shalt have no other gods before me' when those other gods are the ones doing miracles that save you and your friends from painful deaths, and running the afterlife paradise for your dead grandma, and so on."

"Ah, see, our monotheists go 'well, our god lets us summon celestials by doing good deeds and turn into pseudo-angels, while there isn't a special class of useful spirits your god created for you to summon, and I get quests and power from an archangel who's a mere servant of my god, and it's good of your god to run a decent afterlife but our god also does and I'm in touch with my dead husband there'. So like it or not there's clearly something there."

Rob nods.

"Also, demons offer to buy people's souls reasonably often. One of my responsibilities is passing the offer along when it's made to a newly awakening witch as part of a patronage offer, so I would know. Ah, Lunabella uses 'matron' to refer to a witch who takes other witches into her household with a magic covenant, so 'patron' ends up getting used for a specific type of deity-witch relationship regardless of gender, it's a bit silly."

"Hmmmm, I'm not sure if it's higher-priority to ask 'is selling your soul to a demon as bad of an idea as it sounds like?' or 'so people aren't definitively in or out of your world as a status fixed at birth?', either one seems like it could have massive implications."

"It certainly has many downsides and ends with being stuck in Hell for many people. I don't know how bad an idea it sounds to you."

"And yes, many people are born into mortal and seemingly mortal families and end up awakening as witches. This can happen naturally, but that tends to be messy and put strain on the Veil, so people like me run little traveling buildings that lure in potential witches, and then we offer guided awakenings so that nobody is going to suddenly change species in the middle of the street."

"Is 'Hell' what it says on the tin? Lake of fire, outer darkness, wailing and gnashing of teeth?"

"Pretty much. There's a range of biomes and some biodiversity but none of the biomes are great places to be normally. Summoning the imps – those are weak demons – seems to work fine for plenty of people, though. The imps also aren't having a great time, so you can buy their time with a nice lunch or porn videos or such. Mammon also offers some very straightforward deals where if you can summon his interface he sells normal things at a very high markup in normal currencies, people pick up the knack sometimes if they expect to be stranded in inconvenient locations. That might be related to mortal perception of price gouging as evil?"

"Huh! Our mortals hate it too and we don't have a Mammon, for what it's worth.

Amd, uh, if anyone's doing anything about the Hell situation in a way we could contribute to if interplanar trade is established, I expect the cabinet would be happy to.

Resolving our own afterlife torture situation is one of the most important reasons for promoting a better hierarchy within the pantheon—Zeus makes Hades run the courts as a jobs program for his failsons, when Hades hands down sentences directly they're just restitution through labor.

...uh, except for Hitler. He hates mass murderers to begin with because of all the extra work they make him, and on account of Hitler being his son he was extra pissed about the stain on his family honor."

"I personally am required to be neutral on the Heaven-Hell conflict unless I formally resign as an awakener. I will say that if you can successfully interfere with Hell without massive collateral damage you will probably be very popular. If you interfere without world-ending collateral damage and, say, 'merely' destroy large chunks of an elemental plane or two and kill billions of people, you will potentially still be somewhat popular. You might want to talk to the monotheist faction, called the Watchers or the Followers of the Apocalypes, they may or may not be doing something but if any identifiable major faction is it would be them."

"Good to know! And I expect we wouldn't interfere unless we could avoid massive collateral damage, there's reasons we're opting for a political solution to our own afterlife issues rather than more direct action."

"That's good. Do you want to hear about horrors outside the universe next or about gender politics next?"

"Hit me with the horrors."

"Infohazardous beings considered hostis magi generis. Their allies also are considered such. If you ally with them I will do my best to kill you and it'd probably be a favor. Average mortals go mad if they perceive them at all, with strong-willed mortals and supernatural beings generally doing a bit better. It's possible to build a tolerance, but not a perfect tolerance."

"Yikes! We will do our best to avoid them."

"Very reasonable. If they do come over here I have significant resistance so I will definitely fight them. I would if it comes up appreciate combat support."

"Anyway. As for gender – before you discussed politics I assumed the reason everyone I'd seen here was female was demographics. Witches skew very female, and male witches trend weaker. Part of the reason there is that staying male during awakening costs power. Or becoming male, occasionally someone really wants that for some reason. It's my job to facilitate choices even if I don't agree with them. Working with an awakener is supposed to be a strict upgrade over natural awakenings. But it's very easy to draw conclusions about people who seem to care more about sex appeal than magic. Nowadays you're supposed to be polite about it, and say 'they' instead of the generic 'she', and such, and I try to be good about it in mixed company."

"We'd provide whatever support we could! And...with such a gender-imbalanced population, what are your dating and marriage norms like? We have a slight skew towards men, around here, so some of our warriors have two husbands."

"Some witches are naturally attracted to other women and that's straightforward. Some witches don't want long-term relationships and that's also straightforward, contraception is easy. If you're not naturally attracted to women and you want a long-term relationship you have a few options. You can find someone who'd objectively be a decent partner and save up for a love potion with her, that's what my wife and I did. You can have a psychic poke at the issue but that's a lot more open-ended so you'd have to really trust her. You can spend a lot on making a mortal unaging and defending him. You can go for a fae, fae don't have the same skew, but you'll have cultural gaps. You can also hold out for the male witch of your dreams. Which is fine in principle, but it's a bit of a test of wisdom and character, and if you look at social environments near male witches you will sooner or later find people failing that test. Do not tell those people about the two-husband situation unthinkingly, they will get jealous."

"...ah, yeah, don't mean to rub it in. I'm sure that would be a tough situation to deal with. I wish we could help, offer to contribute some of our surplus males, but there'd be the cultural gap and most of them age and die."

"I'm fine, I'm a happily married woman. I'm sure some people will appreciate a dating pool of men who are already aware of the supernatural and used to being the weaker party."

"Good to hear! Hmmm, what haven't we covered yet... what are the major witch factions like?"

"Hawthorne is the most prestigious magic school. They're well-defended and have some very skilled teachers. They offer magically income-sharing agreements to students who can't pay tuition, which is most of them. They do sometimes practice corporal punishment, and it's dim enough there that some people need artificial lighting for their sanity. They developed a Wands practice that covers a lot of miscellaneous utility magic."

"They have a newer sister school, Arcadia, which is free and has better coverage of mortal-led modern fields like computer science. They do have some security issues, though in serious conflicts Hawthorne backs them up, and are not trying all that hard to ensure even unmotivated students succeed. They developed Digicasting, which allows for entry into mostly-unreal realms like works of fiction and computer networks, and eventually drawing power from them.

"Lunabella is a polity on the moon. These days it's mostly migrated to the far side. It's beautiful and luxurious and people who join need to become clients of existing matrons, with magically binding agreements. The system goes all the way to the top, the king is bound to their fundamental law. They use Lunabellan Greek, which is different from both ancient and modern Greek. The matron-client system has been compared to slavery and in the higher echelons of society there can be a lot of pointless status games. They expanded combat zones, an ancient system for reducing collateral damage from fights, into Dominion, which lets you create bubble environments complete with air and such, great for living on the Moon."

"I've already mentioned the Watchers. They worship the Light and represent the largest organized effort to improve mortal welfare without disrupting the Veil. They have some concerning radical elements, though. I don't know if they actually developed Ministration, which is the summoning of celestials, but they're certainly the best at it."

"Hespatia is the oldest witch faction, still operating on the system of distributed covens. They know more of the secrets to ritual magic than I would expect anyone else does, and like the Watchers they also have a lot of mortal connections. It is also the case that some covens sacrifice of nonconsenting subjects and are responsible for Outsider incidents."

"There's also some factions which are not actually witch-dominated per se but should be mentioned for completeness."

"The Alfheimr Alliance represents a broad coalition of Faewild polities, mostly in either the Summer or Winter courts. The Summer court is, depending on how you count things, plausibly the largest magical polity. It has a lot of rules to get used to that many find unintuitive. The Winter court is much less unified. I usually recommend it to people who want a lot of independence but can't make a pocket dimension, or who mostly want to live alone and kill monsters but also to impress others when they show up with something's head. The witch magic associated with them is Covenants, facilitator of the aforementioned magically binding agreements, and it's probably derived from nonwitch fae."

"Occult Research and Containment is a fairly human-dominated group integrated with some Earth governments. They're very focused on defending mortals and they're good allies in veil maintenance but they can be difficult to work with. They probably have the most magical girls of any faction I've mentioned, which still isn't all that many magical girls."

"And then there's, uh. Your counterpart. I kind of wonder if part of why you exist is that Amazon being sort of a front organization for a conspiracy is a pattern from the prime Earth that resonates, but I'm not actually sure. Anyway. Your counterpart is Alphazon, an Alphabet-Amazon merger. They are the youngest faction I've listed, but not necessarily the weakest, because they have been trying very hard to acquire power as quickly as possible. Which is a terrible choice for people who also plan to live forever. They don't listen even to really serious warnings. The problem is that the O.R.C. likes them because they like humans having power, so they'd defend Alphazon from serious attacks, and also they provide real-time translation and a lot of internet and commercial conveniences, so they keep being able to trade with other witches."

"What distinguishes magical girls from witches? Can you elaborate on the O.R.C. being difficult to work with?"

"Witches who put in effort develop in power over time by questing or studying or practicing – I'm the questing type. Magical girls often start magically strong and don't grow from there. We do witch magics – occasionally a witch won't be able to go beyond the very basics, or will be locked out of a field, but pretty much every witch can use the telepathy I demonstrated earlier, for instance, while magical girls can't unless they're also witches. Witches draw power from a method that's generally species-dependent, while magical girls always draw power from a mental state and some of them are states I've never heard of witches drawing power from, like hope. Witches get summonable magic outfits that can be changed and usually aren't essential for our powers, just convenient, but magical girls need their magical outfits and can't get them restyled. There's other differences, too, there's a magical girl who's a hired cursebreaker and I don't know of any other power source that would let her do that."

"The O.R.C. takes a harder line on destroying information sources on Outsiders than witches do, because we're more used to some people having resistances than they are, I suppose. At one point this escalated to bombing a library. They count exposing mortals as a cost even when there's a psychic witch to do cleanup so we don't put strain on the veil. They're picky about responding to prophecies that don't come from one of theirs even though they don't have an amazing diviner that we know of. They have a habit of using mundane explosives which don't have as many safety features as magical options do. They do technological surveillance that Alphazon gets into sometimes."

"Those do seem like some serious challenges to work with. I hope we can manage to collaborate anyway, if contact is made; they seem like the organization most aligned with us in mission, though I expect there will be a great deal of interest in collaboration with Lunabella as well."

"If you can at least somewhat adopt the attitude that they have authority over the prime Earth then you can probably manage, Lunabella loves working with them and I think that's why."

"I imagine that'd be quite workable."

"That's convenient."

"Would now be a good time to inquire as to your preferences regarding food and lodging? Our cafeterias are open 24/7 and accommodate a wide variety of dietary restrictions, and the quarters for visiting foreign dignitaries are open to you if you'd like."

"Both of those sound good."

Rob hands her a lanyard containing a card with the Amazon logo.

"This is a key card for guests. It's the one we use for the Roman ambassador, so it'll have access to the sections of the base open to the general public, plus your quarters and the conference rooms where you might meet with the Finance Ministry people about selling your magical services, or the full Cabinet if multiversal contact looks to be on the table."

She hands over a folded up piece of paper.

"And here's a map of the public sections of the base, if you'll permit a brief detour before I show you to your room I'd also like to get you a smartphone so we can send documents and arrange meetings electronically."

"Do you have a plan for if the Roman ambassador also wants to be here for some reason? And I can take a smartphone, but there are circumstances under which I'd want to leave it here."

"There are four sets of dignitary's quarters, in case the full alliance wants to meet with a potential new member. If the other three factions wanna show up, we'll give them the other three cards as they arrive. And you're absolutely not required to bring the smartphone around with you, we just wanna give you an option for electronic communications here other than the PC in your room."

"Sounds good. It's just when you said it's the keycard you use for the Roman ambassador I wondered."

"Nah, it's not reserved for her, just that she's most frequently the first to show up so she's who we'd usually bring it out for."

Rob leads on through the hallways. As they descend underground, some faux windows and skylights appear, displaying virtual verdant surroundings with a simulated solar cycle.

Imrijka follows.

Rob stops at a room, enters and briefly converses with someone inside, and emerges with a smartphone for Imrijka.

Is it the kind with an apple symbol on it, or no?

Nope!

She's pretty sure that her kid who has a smartphone has one with an apple.

"Is there a resource you'd recommend on learning to use this model of phone?"

"Oh, yeah, we've got a little pamphlet for ghosts and monsters who have returned after centuries on using our computing tech."

She pokes her head in the room again and emerges with the pamphlet.

"That's good. I've used a computer but this doesn't have a keyboard and I hear they put different O.S.es on these, except maybe sometimes it's the same thing they use for a computer just with layers on top, or something."

"Nah, it's different. And there's a touch screen virtual keyboard."

She continues leading the way to the ambassadors' quarters.

She continues following.

They arrive at the ambassadors' quarters!

"Yours is the first on the right, cafeteria is at the end of the hall."

"Thanks."

What are they like?

The door opens onto a living room containing a couch facing a coffee table and TV with some game consoles, a bookshelf stocked with mortal bestsellers and ancient Greek and Latin texts and accompanied by two comfy chairs and a lamp, and a small dining table with placemats.

There are four rooms adjacent to this one. One is a small kitchen with appliances, non-perishable ingredients, and a fridge and freezer (currently empty). Another is a laundry room with a washing machine, dryer, and a bronze statue of a man in a maid outfit. The last two are bedrooms, each containing a king-size bed surrounded by a purple curtain, a large desk equipped with a personal computer, wide variety of peripherals, notebooks, and writing implements, a walk-in closet (empty), and a bathroom with a shower and large bathtub.

Presumably there are also toothbrushes, toothpaste, soaps, et cetera, as it'd be silly to skip those.

The bathroom is fully stocked with everything one would expect a bathroom to have!

That's good. Whenever they have a batch of non-reincarnator kids and they need to do actual parenting Coralie generally wants to tell the kids that Mommy and Mama both brush their teeth every day. Never mind that the decent magic toothpaste is only rank 2.

It looks to be a reasonable hour for dinner and she'll accordingly head to the cafeteria.

Rob heads with her.

The cafeteria contains a stunning array of delicious food that this author isn't feeling like writing descriptions of. Meals meeting various medical, moral, and religious dietary requirements are marked with symbols.

A group of four women are eating at a table that Imrijka passes by. One of them has witch potential.

Imrijka stops walking.

"Good news!"

"Hi! I'm Raven, nice to meet you! What's the good news?"

"I'm Imrijka, good to meet you as well. You have potential to be my kind of witch."

"Oh, are you the multiversal traveler? I saw a post on the base forum announcing probable contact with other worlds but no further details. That's amazing! How do I, uh, activate it?"

"I'm a trained awakener and I can facilitate for you. Physical contact like handholding combined with eye contact works best for me, but you probably want to be sitting down and have a smaller audience. Also, technically, if you wait for a crisis it'll plausibly come out on its own. However, there's a lot of different ways to be my kind of witch. If you do an awakening you can pick from a menu. If you do it fully naturally you get something thematic instead. Not recommended."

"I would like to be awakened! Awoken? What time works for you? Is there a fee?"

"I can do this evening. I'm not sure what a fair fee situation looks like – your faction has been very hospitable and even though you're aware of the supernatural you can't go awakener shopping."

"The cabinet will ensure you're compensated for awakenings, it's in the empire's interest to have witch citizens. I could arrange you a meeting with an official from the Ministry of Finance tomorrow to work out a fair pay arrangement, if you let me know what time works for you? —uh, I can't promise this ahead of time but if all goes smoothly with awakening Raven and with that meeting, I expect the cabinet will all want to meet you and be checked for witch potential themselves."

"If Raven gets a good mana production method I would appreciate part of that compensation being in solidified mana. My own mana production is somewhat poor at baseline. And my calendar is currently wide open, but I might be called on by my goddess with short notice."

"Noted."

"Yep, I can do that! Is meeting in your room after dinner good for you?"

"Works for me."

And she'll have a look at the cafeteria. She wonders if it's vegetarian – nobody's mentioned food conjuration or meat plants to her yet and they seem to have lots of other moral concerns.

Many options are labeled as vegetarian or vegan, though there is one featuring fish and another with beef.

Okay. Maybe they want steakmelons?

She'll serve herself a plate of food (including some beef) and pick a seat arbitrarily unless her escort has already picked one.

They would love steakmelons if they knew such a thing were on offer!

Rob follows her in seat choice.

Imrijka clearly has a sense of what foods are and are not considered finger foods in American culture but tends to pick up foods which are not finger foods on a fork to take bites out of them, if it's not too messy to do so.

Rob has no comment on this. She digs into her meal, several slices of pizza with mushrooms and olives, as quickly as is compatible with dignity and decorum.

Soon enough they will both be done eating unless someone decides to have a conversation during dinner.

Rob doesn't have much to talk about, though when they're getting close to finishing she asks what time Imrijka tends to get up, for scheduling meetings.

"Does the clock on this phone match the solar cycle you're simulating?"

"Yep!"

"I'll probably get up around six."

"Good to know."

She sends a text.

"I'll want to eat breakfast at some point but I'm fine having a meeting before then. Shall we go check on Raven?"

"I don't expect they'll want to meet before ten. And yeah."

As Rob stands up, a three-legged bronze...table?...moving of its own accord comes by to take away her empty plate.

This seems to startle Imrijka, but not enough to prevent her from also putting plates on it.

Rob walks in the direction of Raven's table.

"Never seen a tripod before? Suppose you guys might not have them, if your supernatural community is less Olympus-centered."

"I haven't seen any moving tripods. Some witches get the ability to summon telekinetic servants but those are invisible unless you put clothes on them."

"Yeah, automata are a thing here, mostly tripods and androids. It's been a pretty big adjustment for me, I served in the Roman legion before I became a citizen of the empire and they didn't have nearly as many. The invisible telekinetic servant thing is possible but rarer, you've gotta be a pretty strong our-kind-of-witch."

Raven waves as they approach her.

"Hello again. We're about ready when you are."

"I'm ready!"

Raven flags down a tripod to take her plate and waves goodbye to her team.

Then they can head back to the ambassadorial suite she's staying in.

Raven sits down on one of the comfy chairs.

"So, how does this work?"

"We hold hands, you look into my eyes, and I pull you into the selection 'space', where we perceive your options. You can poke at and select options as much as you like, and nothing is final until we finalize it. We'll be able to communicate with each other during the process. We can drop out of the space, but that might leave some or all of your choices unselected when you return."

"I'm ready, are you?" Raven hesitantly extends her hands.

Imrijka nods and takes them. Her eyes are glowing.

And then, unless Raven tries to exist the effect, she's in a space of connected nodes, instead of her body.

What can she perceive about the nodes?

She can move them in relation to her but they do have different 'distances' from her. The three nearest to her are very strong in different 'colors' (red, green, and blue, if she goes with the visual metaphor).

If she focuses on things in the 'distance', she'll notice that many of the other nodes also have these 'colors'. They also often have a quantity that could be analogized to weight (though it only comes in integers), and another thing that there's at least a dozen 'flavors' of.

"Ooooh, fascinating! What is it exactly that I'm seeing, Imrijka? What are the three big nodes?"

"You're seeing the choices you can take. The three big ones close to you are your class: Academic, Sorceress, and Warlock. Each one has a different means of gaining power, different discounts on other things, and a few neat tricks."

"What're the means of gaining power?"

"Academics study. 4 hours a day gets you a unit of power gain, 8 hours for two units, and then your first point costs 10 units, the second 20, the third 30, et cetera. Sorceresses do practice to the point of it being taxing, 1 hour a day for a unit or 4 for two units, same pricing on points. Warlocks do quests for their patrons and get points directly, based on quest difficulty."

"Hmmmm, not seeing one obviously jumping out to me as more attractive than the others, maybe the side benefits will decide. What are warlock patrons like?"

"Gods and powerful spirits. They always have an agenda. We can have a look at who's made offers to you, if we focus more on the warlock node."

Raven deepens her focus. What does she see?

Hey, uh, you know how when you suddenly got access to witch stuff it was cool? What if everyone suddenly got access to everything? That'd be even cooler, right? 🝝 sure thinks so. Raven can help if she isn't squeamish. She could pick from things like a talisman for not dying and for growing extra eyes, a key to anywhere, a sword that's a portal, a candle that helps with alchemy, lots of cool stuff. It'll be great.

Okay but 🝝 won't let Raven see the truth of all things, unlike 🜓. Does Raven want to mistress a field of magic far more thoroughly than she normally could? See emotions and heat and look through objects? Visit the Index of Everything? A lot of this could be hers, if…

"Pause! These are offers from horrors from beyond the universe and you should not take them. There should be some other offers here also, but I guess I should have expected more Outsiders than usual given that I'm far from home."

Raven isn't zero percent tempted by whatever the "Index of Everything" is, but she knows a trap when she sees one. No thank you.

"Generally it's possible to acquire relics presented in warlock offers through other means, the advantage of taking relics here is that you can't lose them. Let me see if I can find you some better ones."

Arakiel, whose name is a sequence of phonemes and not a raw difficult-to-translate concept, is a celestial who favors silicon-based things and knowledge. For a while he focused mostly on stonecarving and lenscrafting but these days there are computers and possibly that is what he was built for all along! Truly, the Light is magnificent in Its wisdom.

Stuff he can offer includes the same glasses 🝝 listed, a magic internet router that works nearly anywhere, a mirror that allows the operation of a scrying sensor which can even do two-way communication, and a packet of nonmagical seeds for crops which don't exist here.

Oh, the higher-ups would be very interested in seeds for crops that don't exist here. What kind of quests would Arakiel assign, can she tell?

Things Arakiel favors include assisting traumatized moderators, data archival, geological surveys, concerns regarding medical device engineering, but sometimes crises come up and he will also want help with those.

Not entirely things in Raven's traditional wheelhouse, but "assisting traumatized moderators" and "data archival" are, and the life of a demigod is nothing if not responding to crises. He's not bothered by the fact that she worships other gods and intends to keep doing so? She'd have expected that to be a problem for a servant of capital-G God.

The node doesn't seem able to answer that question.

Fair enough, presumably she'll get the chance to talk to someone about it eventually whether she picks this particular patron or not. Are any other options for patrons immediately presenting themselves?

"Hey, Imrijka, do celestials have a defined stance on the whole 'thou shalt have no other gods before me' thing? I'm getting an offer from one, and I would've expected the paganism to be a dealbreaker."

"If you're being offered a deal without that as a condition then it's not a dealbreaker. And they don't have a defined stance."

"Good to know."

Hecate likes magic and is interested in having a witch's perspective on the local magic. Things she can offer include a system for rapidly solidifying mana, a deck of cards that lets her summon and resurrect supernatural beings that sign them, a set of inks and needles perfect for magic runic tattoos, and a specialized cauldron that makes it easy to brew multiple potions simultaneously and combine them.

"Ah, to be clear, some of the things you're being offered are ones you could probably get from any patron if they want you to have one. I think the way this works is that patrons can give out items donated or sacrificed to them. Kits for building, say, those internet routers, get sold all the time and not for particularly high prices, I would be shocked if any of the normal patrons were unable to offer routers."

"Huh, I wonder if sacrificing things here would be a way to make them available to the broader multiverse, the Ministry of Finance will be very interested in testing that I bet."

This one is more appealing to Raven's personal interests and more theologically comfortable for her! (Even if it isn't her Hecate.) The admin would also be happy for her to get the mana-solidifying device, get a good start on properly compensating Imrijka. If she goes with the warlock option she's likely to pick this one.

But what if, instead, she sold her soul and got a bunch of easy quests and a set of spikes that prevent death. She'd be fine as long as she doesn't slip up, and she knows she's good, right?

Four generations of Raven's ancestors await her in Elysium. No.

"That's not even a very good soul purchase offer. They should be offering you a Talisman for an appealing area of magic, not those spikes. I have a set of them myself for emergencies and they're a terrible long term life extension method, they hurt a lot."

"Maybe my soul's not worth much to them!"

"Their loss."

"Indeed."

Are more warlock offers presenting themselves, or is it time to look at the other methods?

There are more offers, but they're not particularly impressive.

There's a stellar deity whose quests would mostly take place in the vacuum of space and who's only offering a few cheap relics that add up to a much smaller package than other deities are offering. She has a few more even worse soul sale offers. Hestia is making an offer but isn't offering as good a relic selection as Hecate and doesn't have notably more appealing quests. And there are more Outsiders.

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."

"There's some ranked magics whose rank 1s aren't very useful but runes is not one of them."

Raven nods.

"So what's next?"

"Curses. To cast a curse, by default you point at the target and chant. Curses can take effect on a delay or on a condition, and you can divide up the duration for repeated brief triggers in response to a condition. There's a set of core curses, sickness, pariah, madness, disaster, and spellbind, which develop with curse rank. Spellbind attaches an effect of up to the curse's rank to a curse. At rank 1, sickness inflicts a brief bad cold, pariah makes nearby insects dislike the target, madness makes the target angry, disaster makes them trip. At rank 2, sickness requires bed rest, pariah makes small animals join in and increases range, madness means the target can't distinguish friend from foe, and disaster causes a muscle spasm. At rank 3, you can skip pointing, you can chant a bit more to affect everyone in your view, you can make an effigy of someone or something with their hair or close possessions for remote curse targeting, and you can also use that effigy to inflict pain by harming the effigy."

"This one seems like potentially a lot of fun for some other people who aren't me."

"I get a lot of mileage out of it but I have it at rank 5 for interfering with resurrection. And you can use rank 1 Pariah plus some alchemy on a volunteer to kill an awful lot of bugs. There's been some work on a 'null curse' for Spellbind but it isn't quite there yet, unfortunately."

"Oh, interfering with monster reforming would be a godsend, hope we get someone with rank 5 potential. And in any case I can guarantee you that if you're willing to use that ability for our side, the cabinet would pay a lot for it."

"It sounds to me like the monsters are killing mortals in highly public locations so my plan was to do some of that, yes, though the curse has to actually land and stay stuck until death, which isn't easy with tough monsters."

"If you're willing to hit known mortal-killers with that curse, we'd back you up with the best warriors we have, and gods bless you for it."

"It's going to be expensive but if someone's killing mortals in broad daylight I am unconstrained from killing them."

"Good."

"Expensive to cast, to be clear, I'm going to need some combination of rare materials or a lot of mana or to lose a limb and not regrow it for a little while. Though if people are willing to have a combatant as a gestational surrogate I can get a lot of mana."

"Huh, how's that work? The surrogate thing, I mean."

"Every race has a distinctive mana charge method, though it's possible to get a different one. Orcs like me draw mana from reproduction – pregnancy and childbirth produce a lot and then it slows to a trickle as the child grows up. If the kid's a straightforward reincarnation or otherwise not mine I don't get charge after childbirth, but I have a mint, so I can solidify a lot of mana from one pregnancy. It's not the most convenient charge method, but it's adequate and I'm pretty dangerous without spending all that much mana."

"Oh, you mean you as a surrogate, not one of us. I'm sure you'll find plenty of takers, especially if it helps us take out monsters for good!"

"That's convenient."

"So...hexes, next, in the order you're using?"

"Yup. Hexes let you transmute something into something else using a medium which is consumed. It has a rank zero, which every witch gets for free unless they restrict themself from Hexes, which I wouldn't recommend. The rank 0 for hexes is minting Kisses, six minutes per kiss, no medium."

"At rank 1, you can transmute stone to mud, clay to glass, iron to tin, salt to sugar, and polymorph small animals into other small animals. The medium is wood, about a twig's worth for several gallons, or K5. All the transmutations also go backwards. You can stack transmutations and do stone to clay to glass, but you can't always stack polymorphs, any polymorph spell cast on an intelligent creature gets reverted if anyone casts a second polymorph. At rank 2, you can transmute cloth to leather, water to milk, paper to plastic, copper to bronze, and combustible fuel to bread, using around an ounce of metal or K25 for several gallons. Polymorph can target larger animals or smaller children and do anything biologically plausible. At rank 3, you can transmute eggs to chocolate, water to gasoline, and vegetables to meat, with jewelry-grade quartz or topaz, about a hundred cubic millimeters or K100. Polymorph can go up to a human adult and reshape objects without changing the material. You also can animate lightweight objects and write behavior loops for them, up to 3 that you can switch to with commands but it's wise to save 1 for 'stop'. If you want complexity you need to create multi-object hierarchies."

"Oh wow, I don't know yet if I'll go for rank 3 but whoever can do human transmutation is going to be rich."

"Lot of demand?"

"As a wise webcomic author once said, 'the profits from transsexuals alone—'..."

"If you're not dealing with a magical body template alchemical testosterone can go pretty far."

"Nice."

"You are going to have a magical body template, by the way. Which you get to do design work on."

"Oh, I'll have to keep that in the back of my mind! My knee-jerk reaction is 'I'm perfect as I am, sunglasses emoji', but making all my other choices will give me time to think."

"You can actually poke at fingernail thickness and how long your maximum hair length is and dental stuff, not just broad characteristics. And if you can tolerate a third nipple you get extra points for it."

"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."

"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!"

"You can keep that in mind when we look at your type options and when picking a class."

Raven nods.

"Next one?"

"Divination. This one also has a rank 0. You can send pretty much anyone telepathic messages. It's extremely useful, you should not restrict it. At rank 1, you can chant 'Identify' to get basic public information about a target you can see. If you pointed it at me you'd probably hear that I'm Imrijka, an official awakener who serves Atropos. Point it at a rock, you might hear that it's pumice and cut into that shape as a hygiene tool. At rank 2, Identify can also discuss magical qualities of items and active magical effects. Status reveals ongoing effects modifying a target, like if they've been poisoned or cursed, but if the effects outrank your divination you can get bad results. You can perform auguries about whether events in the near future will go well or badly or neutrally. At rank 3, you can have identify on all the time, identify friend or foe, and automatically prioritize relevant information. Status is more informative and can also run passively, it'll estimate how long a disease will last. You can Map areas you can see and then go over them later, including with Identify. You can use the spell Archive, to store information you see and information about things you own. Augury has a 12-hour range. You can also use Foresight to get half a second of precognition, it's mostly useful for combat."

"Huh, how does Identify affect espionage? Is there an arms race between diviners and people seeking to obscure themselves?"

"Yes. Higher tier divination lets you hide yourself, and there's other evasion methods as well."

"Cool! Hopefully one of our intelligence people has higher tier divination potential."

"We'll see."

"Next magic?"

"Aethernautics. Below rank 3 you probably only want this if there's an Amazon space program or you love astronomy. At rank 1 you can recognize the true names of cosmic bodies you look at and say one's name to learn its position, and you get better at geometry. At rank 2, you can passively track 3 such bodies. You can also meditate to survive in space – better than a human astronaut does, you resist radiation and meteoroids – and in microgravity or freefall you can move yourself at a walking pace. At rank 3, you can track up to a hundred bodies, including little artificial satellites. You can float faster. You can also fold space to link two doorway-sized regions you can see while you concentrate, or permanently with Portals."

"There is an Amazon space program! We have a research station on the far side of the Moon; its permanent staff are all automata but we've sent people up."

"Well, if you would like to participate maybe Aethernautics makes sense."

"I might! Previously my best ability was the hypnotic voice, which the moon base researchers weren't interested in testing, but maybe one of the new ones I'll acquire will be of greater interest." 

"Do the Amazons already have magic air generation? There's a faction magic that does some of that."

"We have a few magic artifacts that do it! Bags and jars from the wind gods. Captive storm spirits can also pull some off.

Magic methods don't completely obviate the need for technology but they can sustain our base's human personnel in emergencies.

What faction is it?" 

"Lunabella. They live on the Prime Earth's moon. Mostly the far side, these days."

"Oh, yeah, that would certainly be an incentive to develop that capability!"

"They're thousands of years old, too, so I'm not even sure if there was a way to get air on the moon without Wind magic then."

"Oh yeah, I'd imagine not, unless those ancient alien conspiracy theorists are right."

"These days if you had an airtight space and some starting air and plants and some Naturalism, possibly you could manage, but the mortals had a less refined understanding of air back then so I don't know if plants would have oxygenated it properly."

"Oh, the thought of oxygenating the moon with plants is so aesthetic—wait, do your mortals' expectations influence not just the supernatural but everything?"

"Yes. That's why we can't, er, shouldn't tell too many of them about magic. If they collectively learned about magic everything would destabilize."

"Yikes! I wish we could just like. Push off our excess Mist on your universe."

"That might be nice."

"I suppose the Hecates might be able to work something out."

"We'll see, I guess."

"If we were to look at ranked magics from here, they'd be the elementalisms, which depend much more strongly on your class and witch type, or faction magics, which I can't necessarily get you without fate entanglements."

"As cool as they might be I think, being the literal first ever test case of an Amazon witch I'm unlikely to want faction magics. Being part of two factions at once isn't impossible, even in the higher ranks—our Minister of Finance is also on the board of the Lotus Corporation—but it's tricky to navigate. It sounds like from here my biggest choice to make is my class, then."

"You can pick up some faction magic without entwining your fate with the faction. As I mentioned, I have some Ministration and I'm not a Watcher."

"Huh, are any of them available to me?"

"Digicasting and Wands are available to anyone, they come from the magic school factions. Digicasting lets you enter media, at rank 2 with friends, and at rank 3 travel through the Internet, but traveling through the Internet is complicated and I'd recommend sticking to Portals. Wands is a huge collection of individual utility spells that require rest between usage. Ministration we've discussed, I can get you up to rank 2. You can take Dominion, which we've also discussed, but your telekinesis will be notably slower and you'll have to figure out time dilation yourself."

"Hmmm, okay, good to know. What are some examples of the utility spells under Wands?"

"Rank 1 includes a bit of light, a little static illusion, a bit of force, making your … wand … produce chalk. I'm sorry. I'm used to awakening people who have the Mothergifts, which you don't. It is possible that you could design some other wand that Wands would work with, but I personally don't have the expertise for that."

"The Mothergifts. That's the free magic outfit, I assume?"

"Yes. Outfit, hat, and rod, and Wands can function with the rod."

Raven nods.

"I think I'd like to go over the classes in more detail. Do academics and sorcereses have any big initial choices to make like a warlock patron? Does my choice of class make a difference to how many points I have to spend today?"

"Academics need to pick their two fields of study that take time but not points, but that's not as big a deal as warlock patron choice. Sorceresses don't have a big initial choice."

"I see. And do they have starting perks like the warlock patrons' gifts?"

"The academics get an efficiency improvement, where they can produce twice as much of a potion with the same ingredients, or go twice as fast, or such, but not all of those at once. Sorceresses get auras and if they use the auras to empower their elementalism, the elementalism has better range and area of effect and damage."

"You also can use some of your starting power on relics, but they won't end up bound to your soul, so I really wouldn't recommend doing much of it."

"Huh, okay. Frankly those don't seem as appealing as the warlock bonuses, and Hecate seems reasonably value-aligned so far. Does she have any particular quirks, known to people in your world, that contradict what would be inferred from the myths?"

"Not known to me, at least."

"I"m going to take Hecate's offer, then."

"Then you can select the node, and everything else will account for your being a warlock. It's still not final until you finish awakening, but we can treat it as such."

Raven selects it. Does anything change, visibly to her?

Yes, some things are cheaper now, and she could select from the relics Hecate offers.

Only one relic, or do those operate on a point budget also? If only one, she wants the mana solidifier.

They operate on a point budget also. She has ten points.

At 10 points: A specialized amulet that counts as a rod for Wands purposes, automatically counterspells incoming hazards as long as it has at least .1 seconds warning, and can produce a barrier when a hazard gets within inches of the wearer. A pearl for getting an extra elemental affinity, improving Elementalism, and turning water into a useful alchemical or runic reagent.

At 6 points: The aforementioned mint. The aforementioned deck of cards.

At 4: A magic rifle, and a reloading bench for turning Kisses into magic bullets. (These are two separate relics, but they do synergize.) Also, a set of donated Mothergifts which, uh, includes a large hoop skirt, you can break the hoops but they reform, there's a reason it's available to her even though she's not in the relevant family.

At 2: The magic router. The specialized cauldron. A suit of mythril armor. A magically low-maintenance potted bonzai blood apple tree and bush-type steakmelon.

For free: The tattoo inks. A single servant doll (a lot like the automata, but it might be nice to have one soulbound). The results of one quick and cheap shopping trip in the other world, which, yes, could include seed packets.

She takes the mint, router, and cauldron. Does she get to take the shopping trip now or is that at the end?

She's not going, she just gets to make a list of requests. Which won't be finalized until the end.

Legit. What are the constraints on that, a shopping cart's worth? Only stuff available to civilians or could she get military tech?

"Honestly, this is nonstandard and I'm not sure. If I were you I'd list things by how much I want them and see what I get."