"That's me! You must be Katarzyna. I was friends with your, uh, counterpart? Kanimir, in school. I did not know that you could do that with a boxful of Kisses, that makes them substantially less ridiculous."

"Yes, spending six minutes on every small copper would be no way to fuel an economy. A reasonable fraction come from that source, because not everyone has access to a mint and sometimes you really need ten kisses within the hour, but the great majority come from mints. Generally we charge for its use on a sliding scale based on how fast the species of the borrower generates mana, up to twenty percent for mimis, but trading favors is also worthwhile. Johann's tattooing equipment is lovely and I just mastered an excellent new rune." 

"Oh, what's it do?"

"The hekyll rune allows one to bind an unrelated magic effect to the object or person the rune is inscribed on. Tell me, has anyone told you of the practice of Familiarity yet?

"I saw it in a book! Wizards can have familiars too, though differently."

"Did you see the part about acquiring familiars' traits?"

"No, go on?"

"When you reach the third rank of Familiarity, you have the option to acquire two traits associated with your familiar's species. 'Associated' according to the general cultural gestalt of outside-the-Masquerade Earth, not according to biological reality. For example, if one had a chameleon familiar, one might get better at blending into the background, despite the fact that camouflage is not actually the purpose of a chameleon's color-changing. And one's familiar-attributes are a popular target for the hekyll rune. 

My familiar is an elephant."

"They've been kinda hyperfocusing on survival, she didn't recognize the legend of Faust or the names Goethe and Marlowe." 

"Why did that come up?" 

"We were discussing the worse-case scenarios for warlocks." 

"An elephant mostly sounds like a really inconvenient familiar, honestly."

"An elephant 'never forgets'?"

"Ohhh."

"Precisely."

"Still, where do you keep an elephant? Did you shrink it or something?"

"Yeah, I think most wizards don't go for anything bigger than a horse and even that's pushing it in a lot of places."

"It's not ideal, but when I reach rank four she'll be able to take on human shape."

"Is your familiar sapient or is she just going to be an elephant in a human's body?"

"Your basic familiar is more intelligent than standard for their species, and they increase in intelligence with every rank. It's sort of ambiguous where exactly the line of personhood falls but she will definitely, unambiguously be a person when I hit rank four."

"...huh. Wizard familiars don't really get to person-level smart unless you put a lot of very specific work into them."

"I think she's been a person all along, honestly. Elephants are very, very smart and social."

"I do not know much about elephants. - Aadhya has more, uh, general education than we do, her parents went kind of hard on making sure she had a nice childhood in case that was it."

"They made that mistake with my sister and then that was it, you see."

"- I didn't know you'd had a sister."