"Sorry, my youngest wrote it, she really likes pink. I don't know about all the best rites, but your purposes, definitely a plurality."

"But that... only matters if I want to buy up to S-rank?"

"No, you get all the C-ranks for your well free."

"Oh, that pushes pretty strongly in the Hope direction then. ...doesn't get me Agility unless I put something else back though."

"The bag of tricks cost one point and seems maybe not so urgent?"

"Yeah, I have wizard spells for all that stuff if I need it and do not have a backup if my shoes die on me otherwise."

"Okay...I'm going to stick the potential for every wild magic I've ever heard of on here because that doesn't trade off against things, so you'll have plenty to choose from later...I think that's everything mandatory?"

"Is there anything both cool and optional?"

"We already covered fate twists...I should probably help you get up to speed on some more things while we're time-dilated."

"Please."

"Okay...factions. The biggest mostly-cohesive ones are the Watchers, Alfheimr, the two academic institutions, the Hespatians, Lunabella, Alphazon, the ORC, and technically the Outsiders. I know you know anything about Arcadia..."

"I did hang out with some Arcadians for several hours! It seems like a nice place and if I were eager to go to college pronto it would top the list. Lunabella has the weird slavery thing, Hawthorne is where your Wilbur teaches."

"Right. Hawthorne is, uh--it's more--academically rigorous, but part of that is that it's more selective about who it admits; anyone with lower than rank three potential is automatically disqualified--I've heard of exceptions being made, but rarely. Plus their disciplinary system has some weird BDSM tones. Wilbur manages the latter by not interacting with the disciplinary system in any way and puts up with the lesser oppenness in exchange for the higher rigor--and it's still miles better than a mundane university, once you're in they don't, like, charge loads of tuition."

"BDSM overtones. I guess that's... well, my standards were set in a school with carnivorous homework assignments, but that still sounds a bit concerning. Well. I don't have to attend it."

"That was approximately my reaction, less the carnivorous homework. Occasionally I pester Wilbur to leave for Arcadia but so far he's been unmoved. Alfheimr is a parallel-dimension Earth with no masquerade. The planet is divided into 'Winter' and 'Summer' polities, and the rulers of each polity form Winter and Summer 'courts' which coordinate with each other to interface with the rest of the hypersphere. Summer polities are more legally uniform; traveling from one to another you can mostly expect the same laws and regulations to apply, and the systems of power tend to be particularly structured and formal. Winter, on the other hand, is much more about freedom--they tend to have fewer laws, which is sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad one, and more turnover in rulers of individual polities, although there are some very long-standing ones, and most of the coups that do happen are fairly bloodless; a loser who surrenders gracefully is generally fine afterwards, save for some loss of face."

"Sounds exciting in its own way."

"I'd move there before I'd move to Lunabella. The Watchers--do you know anything about the Watchers."

"Some kind of Abrahamic interfaith society. Seems like a weird thing to have exist when there's all these, uh, pagan deities, running around, but."

"Right, so, there are a couple things that are up with that. The first one is that people are, like, bad, at discarding their previous beliefs when presented with new evidence; Watchers are disproportionately born human and on the other side of the Masquerade, where they have a lifetime to accumulate and ossify religious beliefs before finding out what's up. The second one is that the Watchers do in fact have a direct line to the deity responsible for getting the Outsider gook off my soul, and that deity is in fact significantly more powerful than anyone else we know of. Not more powerful than the rest of everyone combined, but still number one on the list."

"...does this direct line let them clarify anything about their religious beliefs or is that not so much what people turn out to do with a direct line to God?"

"It's, uh, better than nothing? Like, I said they're bad at answering direct questions, but I understand they have managed to get across concepts like 'burning heretics is bad.' But they're not so interested in clearing up purely theological points that the Watchers do not still contain distinct subsets of Christians and Muslims and Jews etcetera."

"Okay. Well, my time of... not being in on the witch masquerade... did not saddle me with any religions Abrahamic or otherwise, though it was always kind of sweet watching the Muslim kids meeting up to do charity in the depths of the Scholomance."

"I didn't pick up much religion before I became a witch either. I always vaguely liked a lot of what I read about, but--there's this quote,  'I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.' But that's a sweeping generalization. Someone will always live up to their ideals."

"Okay. So, Watchers are on kind of medium-unstable epistemic ground but many of them are nice people and they work for a decent yet mysterious entity."

"Yeah, that's pretty much it! They founded the Disease Eradication Committee, we managed to eradicate malaria!"