"...okay, that's what they sounded like but for all I knew making assumptions based on our background culture would be as misleading as assuming things about wizards based on Harry Potter. You have afterlives? On top of being immortal?"

"We have souls, and those persist unless something happens to them. Generally psychopomps usher you off to a sort of celestial waiting room if you don't have a strong enough affinity with a particular deity for them to claim you right away."

"I wanted to stick around as a ghost but a psychopomp rudely kidnapped me while I was...admittedly ineffectually...trying to get through to my grieving boyfriend."

"...can we test if we have souls without dying? Seems important."

"I'm sure it's possible but I'm not sure how, off the top of my head..."

"I assume 'get temporarily swallowed by a lamia and then regurgitated intact once she's confirmed whether you charge her mana or not' also does not appeal."

"I would have to know her real well."

"...this is a tangent but is it always a her? I'm starting to detect a gender ratio here."

"It's not always a her, see our friend Johann here, but yeah, male witches are much rarer."

"You sometimes get people who start out with a testosterone-dominant system who find themselves switched to an estrogen-dominant system upon awakening, and this...causes less dysphoria overall than the baseline rates of mtf transgenderism would suggest."

"Huh. Wizards are fifty-fifty."

"This isn't important at all but I'm curious what that does to your family dynamics."

"Hexes to give someone new equipment aren't hard, I have two moms and was apparently conceived the natural way."

"My mom was a witch and my dad was human."

"My dad's a mundie too, high five."

She high-fives her. 

"It's much more common for wizards to have mundie moms. We owe more of our population than I'd like to guys sowing wild oats among unsuspecting random women who have no idea what's going on or why their kid most likely doesn't make it to adulthood, and if those guys do it enough some of the kids do make it to adulthood."

"One of my grandpas is one of those. - is one of those kids, a great-grandpa I've never met would be the oat-sower."

“Gross but unsurprising. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were any guys who decided to take advantage of a lot of human women but there’s not such obvious incentive for r-selection.”

"I met a maintenance track girl who came from a background sort of like that except all the women were from this one particular village the guy was keeping the CCP away from and she'd had dozens of brothers and sisters and two older than her still alive when she scored a seat. - she died our junior year."

“Well, that sucks. Better than leaving all the kids to fend for themselves but wow that’s a low bar.”

"Indeed."

“Not that I’m not in favor of keeping the CCP away but not at that price. —I’m from Taiwan.”

"I knew some kids from Taipei. I did not understand their internal politics at all but at least they weren't as much of a mess as Shanghai."

“What was wrong with Shanghai?”