Okay. 

She's going to need to do more research on the factions, but "Witches Helping Witches" and Witchipedia together should definitely be able to teach her something basic about magic, right...?

She spends some time clicking through tutorials, finds a basic potion recipe using only common household ingedients and tools that should theoretically be simple enough for even a newly-awakened Academic witch. Apparently it's the witch equivalent of a glowstick; it glows pink. That's all it does.

She goes into the kitchen and starts working.

Okay, she has some hypotheses for her thing now.

It... didn't feel like a thing she could solve just by trying super hard, like a numb hanging arm that won't take commands. But she's still going to try super hard anyways because that's who she is as a person.

She lets her eyes flutter closed and turns inwards.

Within Marianne Belor's soul sit eight wells. In each of those vessels sits the crackling abstraction of power. There is no nuance to it: no equations of electricity or gravity. It is pure more than even a concept could be, for ideas can be tainted by other ideas. Were Plato to be looking over her shoulder, she has the idea that he would be blushing.

She can touch the power, certainly. It just doesn't respond to her will. She dips her fingers into the ontologically simple sublimation of catalysis and it feels like cold water. She demands and coaxes and dances inside her mind and pleads. She feels faintly broken.

Also newly arrived in her soul: a set of very weird but cool armor and a necklace that smells faintly of smoke. Come to think of it, she's not sure how she substantiated those. She thinks back to it and sheeee wasn't especially trying to do that. Maybe Penelope did it for her — she didn't seem very surprised at Suddenly Armor. Or maybe witches are just more stoic. They are immortal, so the demographic would skew older...

Marianne opens her eyes with a headache.

Lily has gotten out all the ingredients and the water she's put on the stove has just begun to boil.

She has strawberries and she's supposed to mash them to paste. A fork will do. Then she needs to mix in the salt and the butter and put it under a light, the brighter the better, and let it sit for five minutes. (She steals Marianne's sunlamp for that.) While she does that she needs to chop pecans into milk and eggs and put that mess into the boiling water and stir and add mana until she gets a thin brown liquid, then add the lightbearing strawberry paste and make this gesture illustrated in the video with the spoon repeatedly. The mixture should gradually pinken and turn luminous...

... And it does seem to be turning pink. Remove from heat and allow to cool to finish. 

She also feels like she's spending energy, indefinably. She's a little... it's not quite hunger the way she knows it, but there's an emptiness there. 

A tall blue woman in a silent armor-dress places two cold fingers in between Lily's shoulderblades.

"Hiiiii Isabel. Got any statuses to report?"

Lily closes her eyes for a moment and takes a breath.

"Sorry, you startled me. I'm just finishing a potion here. It's not anything to write home about, just a pink glowstick, but I wanted to - see it for myself, you know."

She points at the liquid in the pot, which is just now starting to glow a little. 

"It looks like it's working."

She peers over Lily's shoulder. "Oh gosh, you are so far ahead of me! I'm embarrassed."

(She realizes she's handicapped again. Starting with yet another disadvantage. She doesn't suppress her facial expression standing behind Lily as she is, but keeps the tremble of irony from her voice.)

"So there's recipe blogs out there, or something? Do you need grocery money?"

"I found a group called Witches Helping Witches. They have some very basic recipes for free - I get the impression this stuff is common knowledge among witches. This one has an obvious effect, so I tried it first; the other ones they had were like cold cures and so on - there was a warning not to attempt more advanced potions before you get your mana control down better, apparently there's some kind of internal ranking system for witches - Academics generally have an instinct for potions, is why I thought it would be safe, and the dangerous stuff takes more specialized ingredients -"

Lily cuts herself off. "Sorry, I'm rambling. There are better ingredients I could get at a witch market, but I would probably just ruin them if I tried right now. You need training for anything beyond what you'd be able to find over the counter at a mortal drug store."

"I still can't believe you were Assigned Scientist at Birth, giving you scientist instincts — or do you suppose you were marked like me? Is some fucker running around bopping people with scholastic potential?"

She touches her cheek. "The hypothesis space here is slightly broad. I would like to sit down and read witchipedia for eight hours but I am sooooomewhat distracted with the personal issue."

"Did you learn anything else relevant to the short-term?"

"For faction it's looking like Arcadia or Hawthorne are the serious choices. Hawthorne has placement tests and scandals and sororities; Arcadia seems more of a community college kind of place, though they do do research. I'm leaning Arcadia right now but that might change. There's an open source warding rune project out of Arcadia that implies we should probably look into some form of self-defense; I also found a free witch transport website - I have it in a tab right now, I don't know if we want to try that yet."

Marianne instinctively tuned out Penelope's noise about factions. Her brain is too useful to her to have politics in it!! She should probably disable this instinct.

She draws circles in Isabel's hair with a nail. "You're doing amazing. Read anything about Hell?"

"Not yet. I should really investigate that, I'm just kind of - caught up in what we're going to do about the practical things, of which "summoning demons" is probably not one. Like, are you going to go back to your job after this? I want you to be happy and that life isn't it, I see it on you every day. I need to figure out how to make Witch Adderall, it must be possible, probably better than actual adderall, and sort out the blood thing, and - there's a lot to be done. Help me prioritize."

"Sorry. I've been... the universe is cockteasing me. Oh here you go, you're secretly a witch. But you can't actually do magic, hahaha!! I'm infuriated and spent and it's only been like two hours."

"The prophetic search, did you see that, suggested I see a healer. So I've been looking at what witchdom has to offer and while it doesn't explicitly say so on their websites, I've gotten this distinct sense that none of them take Medicaid."

"But apparently Hell has filed adoption papers behind my back, so I was thinking maybe that comes with health insurance? In which case I think maybe actually yes, summoning demons might be a practical thing to do."

"That sucks. I maybe wouldn't petition Hell for money but there's probably someone who'd be able to help - or at least a job that'll let us earn witch money...

... And you can't go back to your job at Wells Fargo while you're blue. 

I need to get on the line to Witches Helping Witches and ask them for advice. This kind of thing happens all the time, right, there'll be some kind of solution. I hope."

"Baby, I know nonprofits. They'll give you a word document of four or five referrals. Two of them will be — disconnected lines, waitlist, not taking new patients, whatever it is. The others will be happy to waste hours of your time playing phone tag only to refer you someplace else on the list. You can leave them a voicemail if you want, but don't think of it as an out."

"—I really don't expect my benefactors to give me fancy gifts only to murder me two hours later. But plausibly I should do a bit more research, maybe go somewhere secluded so they don't have a murder outlet."

Lily sighs. "It's worth a shot. But you're probably right. I just feel like relying on actual literal Hell is going to end badly."

"And for your other question, of course I'm not going back to work tomorrow. I'm going to bed, bite me if you need anything."

"Alright." Lily smiles. "I'll get calling around."

She looks over at the stove. "Now, what to do with the glowy potion. For some reason I think pouring it down the sink would be bad."

On her way back to her room, Marianne lifts up the HexVPN and smiles at it, imperfect as it is. She rotates it to a particular face and leans in to give the engraved password a kiss. It's a good feeling, cold metal and precise indentation under her lips.

"Thank you," she whispers, fingers lingering on one sharp corner.

She heads to bed and lays flat and still.

Lily tries calling a couple places, but it's too late in the local timezones Arcadia and Hawthorne sync to; everything is closed right now. 

Alright, she'll join Witches Helping Witches' chatroom and ask around there. Someone should still be on this late, right?

Hi all! I'm a new witch and I have a couple, uh, immediate problems that I need help with. Me and my roommate both were awakened today and now I need blood and she's blue and having trouble casting. I was able to make a potion so my casting is fine but does anyone know anything about witches who aren't able to cast? Also my roommate is not going to be able to go back to her mundane job, which pays our rent, so we have kind of a lot of problems right now. Does anyone have any advice?

That sounds like a real mess you've been dropped into. Unfortunately this group isn't really a support group so much as a study group, but I can direct you to one or two things.

1. You can buy Blood Apples imported from Lunabella at most witch markets and they're a blood replacement for anything that needs it. 

2. Your roommate sounds like they have a casting dysfunction. It's rare among witches but some of us can't use magic beyond rank 0. Try getting her to summon her mothergifts, mint Kisses, or have her send a Sending to you. Even a rank 0 witch should be capable of those magics. If none of those work, something more serious is wrong and you should consult a healer. 

3. There are job boards in Witchdom just like in the mortal world. If you're newly-awakened I would take a courier job, there are plenty of people who want things delivered and all you need is the ability to use the public portal system, which even a rank 0 witch can do.

4. Don't let your blue friend go out in public without concealing her skin; the Veil might catch it but it's better to be safe than sorry. 

5. In the longer term Arcadia and Hawthorne provide housing to students, or you can get Witch Kisses converted to mortal money if you need it. 

Here's the basic Witch Kiss minting diagram. It's probably the best test. Good luck!

Thank you so much, I was really afraid I'd have to feed on animals or something. I'll ask my roommate to try your tests when she wakes up.

If I'm trying to figure out magic for the first time, what should I do?