"I don't think it's especially a foreign language at this point? People talk about Norse Mythology in English all the time."

"We were all brought up on the understanding we'd be going to the Scholomance and needed to focus on what we'd need there."

"Fair enough. Vanir the actual witch species are not gods but the word's the same as a kind of god from Norse Mythology and so I occasionally insert first-person pronouns into invectives that would usually reference divinity because I find it funny."

"Why do you have the same word?"

"My best guess is that we had it first and then some people mistook us for gods but I don't actually know all the historical details."

Icecreamicecreamicecreamicecream.

Aww.

"It's also possible that when the fey folk decided to start calling themselves the Alfheimr Alliance some other stuff got Norse words slapped on."

"That is also possible, yes."

"Fey folk?" Caio is picking apart his pomegranate reverently.

"Uh...well, in practice, the Alfheimr Alliance is a set of loosely-associated polities in a particular plane mostly grouped into two factions, summer and winter, with the summer ones being more authoritarian and the winter ones being more libertarian. Everyone there is, if not a witch, at least a non-human."

"Are most witches not human? Are many non-humans non-witches? Wizards are just a kind of human, sometimes we even pop up with two mundie parents."

"Okay, so...for most cases, a species acts like a species, except when witchness gets involved. If I have kids with another Vana, our kids will come out Vanir, and may or may not ever awaken as witches. But if I have kids with, say, a Jotunn, our kids will come out Vana/Jotunn hybrids, and if they ever awaken as witches they might awaken as hybrids, or they might awaken as full Vanir or Jotunns. And if I have kids with a human, and they have kids with a human, and so on and so on, then eventually you get what are basically humans with bits and pieces of heritage from whatever else lying around. And when a human awakens, they might awaken as a human, or they might awaken as some random thing they've got ancestry from. So, like, assuming Eliza and Johann have kids someday, any one of those kids might awaken as Neutral, or an Oread, or a Neutral/Oread hybrid, or some other thing that one of them has lurking in their gene pool, or some hybrid of that and Oread or Neutral, or even a Neutral/Oread/third thing chimera. --Eliza and I were both born human."

"Lisao is the only one who lives here who wasn't born human, she's a Daeva/Mimi hybrid and her parents are a Daeva witch and a Mimi witch." 

"What are those?"

"Oreads and Mimis are both species with animal traits--any land animal, actually, Lisao and I are both catgirls but that's just a coincidence, if I had Oread children they might come out with fox traits or deer traits or even lizard traits--but Oreads have a deep connection to the earth, whereas Mimis are more connected to other people. If I die, I can come back if you bury my body; if Lisao dies, she can come back if someone builds a shrine to her and weeps for her there. Daeva are--basically if someone took a human being and was like, 'okay, what if this, but without all the parts that suck.' Daeva are taller and stronger and don't get periods or headaches or acne or cancer or allergies or...you get the picture." 

"Also, on average, they have bigger breasts." 

"Which I suppose is evidence for the idea that whoever decided to redesign humanity had never had to deal with them." 

"We have a very easy potion that makes periods shoo. If there's a market for that among species that do not enjoy this feature naturally."

"Most species don't get them, which ironically makes finding potion recipes to do that harder for Neutrals. I know some exist but you can certainly make money selling them."

"You can do it on basically anything you'd reasonably call a 'tea' and a few things you cannot reasonably call a 'tea' in a pinch."

"You can...put the potion into the tea, or use the tea as an ingredient in the potion...?"

"...our potions are not just mixtures, you have to incant over them."

"Same with artifice."

"...Huh, we ever have incantations as part of potion-making but it's generally secondary to mixing things together, I don't think I've ever heard of a potion that was just--an ordinary liquid with an incantation."