"--Lisao, do you have an opinion--"

"I think I am going to be a mana generator for this operation, it's fine by me if Lanhua calls dibs." 

"Then yes you may."

"Great. Mom, do you know anyone in New York -"

"No, honey, but you can probably just email their front organization asking for the contact information of the boy you have in mind?"

"Right. When I get a phone."

"We should probably have a debriefing, covering points such as 'these specific large weird animals are transformed witches and not mals, don't stab them.'"

"- that does sound important, yes. Though most mals don't look that much like any particular sort of animal."

She opens her phone and scrolls through pictures for a while before she finds the one she wants. 

The creature in the picture is clearly feline; it's entirely possible that someone who knew that it was supposed to be something could figure out that the thing it was supposed to be was a liger. But the brown-and-tawny striping is in scales like a pangolin's, not fur, and it's a little more than a story tall, and the end of its tail has spikes sticking out for several feet. 

"Okay, yeah, if I saw that and didn't know what was going on I'd assume it was an unusually pretty mal."

"Aww, thanks." 

"That's you, right? Nice." 

"Yeah, that's me." 

"Wow, neat. Is that hard to learn to do? How'd you decide to go with scaly-giant-cat?"

"--It's something some species of witch learn how to do. I could become a liger zooarch because I'm a liger mimi. The specific details of the form are, uh, most people have more volitional control over them than I do but I'm pleased with how it came out anyway."

"It is possible to do that kind of thing without being the relevant species if you do some particular magic to your familiar first, and then it's based on what your familiar is, not what you are." 

"Oh, neat, I didn't know that." 

"...You know, the mental boosts are an entirely sufficient reason for me to have chosen an elephant familiar, since Matka promised to house her in her pocket dimension until I hit Familiarity rank four, but the prospect of becoming an elephant zooarch is definitely intriguing." 

"Would elephant-you have scales too?"

"Might do, but I don't know, scales on an elephant seem less...elegant than that." 

"Scales aren't a universal zooarch thing, Mom doesn't have scales."

"Well, anyway, I'm sure whoever wants to join the honeypot of death will be able to avoid stabbing anyone who is Godzilla-ing their way through everything that comes through."

"Yeah. Also probably we should only let witches in who respawn, I don't think we can assume that anyone who goes down is going to have enough of a body left for an oread or a naiad or an empusa to get fixed up."

"Technically Erinyes respawn but nonetheless I think we shall be sitting this one out." 

"Except insofar as providing resources goes, yeah."