"That does sound very nice! It sounds like witch healing is way better than wizard healing pretty much across the board and I would not object to having some."

"Both Lifeweaving rank five and Witch-Alchemy rank five are able to resurrect the dead and Lucy decided to go hard on the alchemy instead of taking a magic talisman, which is fair of her."

"Well, that suggests maybe I should diversify, then."

"I don't disagree. There are several designs, do you have a preference between, hm, any of these three?"

Above her spread hand are images of three different talismans; a flower crown of red lotuses, a diadem with an elaborately etched design of rays, starbursts, and lotuses, and a circlet of some silver metal with golden stones set regularly around it, with a centerpiece at the front of a superimposed sun, moon, and star. 

"Oh, wicked," giggles Bella. "I'm gonna go with... this one." She pokes the diadem.

"Excellent. I can also give you a couple of inexpensive items--let's see, you could have any one of a riftblade, a pitcher of endless healing water, a set of supernaturally convenient and effective armor, or a cauldron that lets you brew weather. And then you can have a pair of violet lenses and/or a magical tattooing kit without trading off against anything else."

"I will happily take both freebies, the water sounds plausibly redundant with the diadem... do you have a ballpark on how long it's likely to be relevant to my daily life that I am very tasty?"

She considers it. 

"I can't guarantee anything, you understand, I see the future in non-quantized probabilities, but the odds of you getting eaten by anything are small and dropping fast. Odds that you get eaten beyond the next year aren't substantially worse than that of the average witch. Also, if you do die, then assuming that nothing happens to your soul--which is even less likely--my afterlife will catch you for as long as you count as my follower. And can I resurrect people out of my own afterlife at will, and do so on request."

"So I probably don't want to stick magic armor onto my soul forever just because it might help if something took a chomp. Brewing weather sounds fun."

"Cool. Okay, so the rest of this is going to use a system of quantized power points--you get twenty of those to start, plus there are ways to boost it a little more than that."

"Is that a lot? I have no idea of the scale here."

"It's...about average for the general population, below average for the selection of witches you have met so far."

"Well, maybe I will get amazing synergy with my wizardry to cope. How does it spend?"

"There are basically two things to spend it on: ranked magic, and wild magic. For a ranked magic that's neither in-affinity--witch affinity, generally, although I wouldn't be shocked if wizard affinities helped--nor attuned to your class, the first rank costs one point, the second two, etcetera. Most witches are capped at rank three but I can give you the potential for one rank four and one rank five; Lucy chose Alchemy for her rank five and Aethernautics for her rank four; she thought the latter would go nicely with her wizard affinity. Something that's attuned to your class costs two less, which means the first rank of anything warlock-aligned gives you a point. Anything in-witch-affinity costs half as much, rounding up, with individual ranks purchased separately. How much a point will buy you of wild magic depends on how good you are at shopping for wild magic; there's some stuff that's very good that's pretty cheap and some stuff that's expensive that isn't as great."

"Well, turn me loose in the magic mall and we'll see what there is to see, I suppose!"

"Well, there's the neutral type perk--you get to pick a second magic class, and get their advancement type although not the other advantages, plus you get a twenty percent resistance to hostile magic. There are complications, which can either expand your starting pool of magic or raise the cap to which you can ultimately rise. There are ranked magics, which can essentially be divided into three categories--general, elemental, and specialty. The general magics are Alchemy, Runes, Curses, Hexes, Witchery, Necromancy, Familiarity, Portals, Aethernautics, Consortation, and Divination. Except that the difference between general and specialty magics is more of a soft limit than a hard one, and actually Witchery counts as a specialty magic for you, one you don't qualify for, because it's something open to the descendants of its inventor, which is, uh, pretty much everyone in the known planar hypersphere by now. However,"

"Indeed, I am presumably not related. The advancement types being study and practice? - what in the world does 'twenty percent' cash out to."

"If I say that, for example, if someone threw a fire spell at you, it would only do eighty percent as much damage if you had this, and if someone cast a spell on you that would last for a minute it would last for forty-eight seconds instead, would that make sense?"

"I guess! That sounds nice but I'll see what else my budget buys - complications can only do one of those two things, I can't have some to do one and some to do the other?"

"Sorry, you can buy complications to raise either, but any given complication can only raise one or the other, you can't take a complication that gives ten points and put five of them in each."

"Gotcha. Well, let's start there so I know how conservative to be with my points."

"Okay, you'll want Witch Mark, that one's basically just free points, for two points you get a supernumerary nipple somewhere on your body--it would be more or less random where under most circumstances but even then it could be moved, and since I'm designing your entire magic in potentia I can just put it wherever. Kryptonite is a variable-point one--it makes you vulnerable to a substance, and you can choose which substance and how vulnerable; the more common the substance and the more kinds of vulnerability you add on, the more points it gets you. Levers to make it more cost-effective include extremely high rarity of substance and choosing substances that are more common but easy to avoid physically touching and choosing a range of touch. The number of points it gives for ubiquity bottoms out at 'rare,' so by choosing something really rare, you can get more out of it that way--you can't do something that only theoretically exists, like neutronium or meitnerium-282, but you can do something really rare that you'd have good reason to avoid anyway, like antimatter or plutonium."

"I can't say I've ever yearned for a supernumerary nipple but I guess we can stick it behind my ear or something. What kind of vulnerable are we talking here, will I just die if I pick the wrong thing and then run into it?"

"Well, you'll probably die if you run into antimatter," she snorts. "You choose one of 'completely cut off from magic and ongoing effects' for four points, or 'magic effectiveness halved' for two points, and then there are some additional bits you can add--'rapidly drains mana store' I can't imagine would appeal, although if you were wearing a power-sharer you could get around that a bit by just shoving all your personal mana into it. I've seen anyone take the 'open to hypnotic suggestion' one for four points but not, yet, anyone take the the option that makes the suggestions persist after exposure ends for an additional plus two. And 'death while exposed prevents passive methods of death circumvention' for six points would be a reasonably good deal for you because right now I am your primary method of death circumvention, and that doesn't count as passive."

"Antimatter doesn't normally stay that way very long and I could imagine having a high quality shield versus gigantic explosions, but fair enough. Would cutting me off from magic cut me off exclusively from witch magic or would it affect wizard stuff?"