"It does ever happen, but it happens a lot less often than humans turning into something else. If your awakening is guided by someone who's good at it, it pretty much doesn't matter, but if you're a human with little bits of lots of things in your bloodline, there's--well, it varies how many bits and how little they are exactly, but you have a very good chance as turning out one or more things other than human. If you're, say, a dravir, with a great-great-grandparent each of, say, lilin, hannya, and sprite, you have less than a one in ten chance to end up as anything other than a straight dravir."

"Huh, so a human background is more malleable or something?"

"Right. It's been suggested that other species besides human are also more or less 'malleable' relative to each other, albeit probably to a lesser degree, but there isn't any rigorous data on that in public circulation."

"Huh! Curious. - elven empire, fate thereof?"

"Oh, right, that. Tee el dee arr, having slaves, uh, does not work out in the long run." 

"Wow. Are they all dead or just diaspora'd?"

"Oh, super diaspora'd, like, a bunch of them did, in fact, die, at the time, and with as many as several of them it stuck, but elves are hard to kill and witches are pretty good at evacuating places that are going bad. Actually a bunch of elves still, like, live there, they just don't...be an empire about it."

"Huh. What's the modern state called?"

"It's not really a state, it's a bunch of villages clustered around lifeshrines sturdy enough they survived the uprising. --Elven lifeshrines are a kind of relic that exists in the form of a sessile building--moving one destroys the magic, if you manage it--and any elf who visits one respawns at the last one they visited. The elves--well, some elves--know how to make more of them, there's one at Arcadia, but the really old ones have special religious significance." 

"Gotcha."

"What else...oh, there used to be a faction called New Alexandria, it was a giant library whose central tenet was the accumulation, preservation, and free distribution of knowledge, but they, uh, got nuked by the ORC in the seventies. Because they refused to compromise on their central tenet even when the knowledge in question was intensely unethical stuff that benefited from, say, kidnapping mundanes to do horrible things to." 

"...can... kinda see both sides there?"

"That is also my perspective but you should be aware that a lot of witches--especially older witches--are really mad about it, it's a touchy subject that you don't bring up in casual conversation, like...I can think of mundane examples but not wizard ones for obvious reasons."

"Good to know."

"I'm not immediately thinking of anything else that wants time-dilation...and it's not a one time-thing..."

"Archmage-go-time?"

"Archmage go time." 

Eeeeeeeeeee~

And she falls back into her body. 

As Lucasta predicted, she hadn't had time to fall over; hadn't even had time to do more than stumble slightly. But there is a whole new magical structure attached to her, an incredibly friendly one whose functions are clear to her before she even touches them. 

Also, where a roundish middle-aged man in tweed was previously standing, a buxom blonde with horns wearing extremely fine chainmail from chin to finger and toe is unwinding a blindfold from around their head. 

"I am three kinds of magic now!!"

"Three kinds?"

"There's a magical girl addon."

"Oh. I might not have counted that separately, but fair enough. The situation is extremely awesome, either way." 

(Lavinia takes one look at her husband and starts laughing.)

"Congrats," Bella tells the chainmailled figure.