"It's pretty all at once sidereal, but subjectively, there's plenty of time to feel out all your options and make decisions. That's part of what I mean when I say I'm the best--I'll be guiding this process, and I can scaffold an awakening-structure that would give you years to make all your choices, if you needed it."

"Wow. Cool. Is that a rune thing?"

"Nope! It's a little bit psychotics, a little bit of wild magic, and a lot of experience and practice."

"Gosh. ...do you mind if I Google you, do you have wifi in here -"

"HexVPN, which you'd pretty much need to access the witch internet with that device. The current password is capital-X-thirteen-lowercase-c-o-r-h-o-r-b-a-t-s-t-a."

May pulls out her laptop and attempts to connect to the wifi.

There is a wifi network called "HexVPN-Penelope" which accepts the password given. 

"Last name?"

"--Oh, I don't have one, sorry. You could try 'Penelope new witch' or 'Penelope awakening' or something." 

"Huh, okay." She tries these.

The page takes a moment longer to load than it ought, and then a popup window appears, informing her that her query has been flagged for potential relevance, and would she like to be redirected to the witch internet. 

- ah. Yes please.

She is redirected to a search engine called "Alphasearch."

Her queries are repeated in new Alphasearch tabs; they both have the same first hit, a forum thread dedicated to people born on the mundane side of the veil describing how they crossed it. Mostly witches describing awakenings, but some people had a loved one awaken, or had a witch significant other reveal their true nature to them, or got dragged into some kind of mess and got brought up to speed afterwards because the ORC are not the MiB and don't tend to memory-wipe people. 

...well. Realistically the fact that, in witchery as in mundanity, there exist sketchy organizations, will not stop May from getting magic powers. She's here to assess Penelope. Anybody complaining about Penelope?

There exist any complaints; not everyone gets along with her personally, and not everyone agrees with her life choices. There are a couple of people who maintain that when she warned them against doing a thing and they did it anyway the consequences that ensued are her fault for not having dissuaded them more strenuously and/or not having prevented the consequences so that they could do the thing consequence free. She is in places described as flighty or silly or oversexed.

There aren't any credible claims that she is bad at her job.

Cool, okay, magic powers ahoy then.

"Anything else I should know before we see what I've got buried in my magical introns or whatever the heck?"

She considers this seriously. 

"You probably want to know about Outsiders, given your reaction to my door. Outsiders are the number one reason for people learning lots of Psychotics in self-defense. They're a--faction, of sorts--but not a conventional one; Outsider influence is contagious and corruptive, and they can be extremely infohazardous. Encountering them is very, very rare; most witches never stumble into their path more than once in a human lifetime, and mostly they escape unscathed. But they exist, and are dangerous enough that approximately everyone else is agreed on eradicating them wherever possible."

"...like a, a Langford basilisk, or does infohazard mean something else?"

Penelope has to pull out her own phone and look up Langford basilisks. 

"They don't generally kill you," she says after a moment, "but that's not necessarily a good thing. Depends on the exposure level and level of resistance. But something like a Langford basilisk, yes." 

"And then you contagiously turn into one or something?"

"If the corruption is bad enough, yes." 

"And the options are high ranked psychotic defenses and...?"

"Run for help immediately if you see tentacles and too many eyes."

"Oh, these are vaguely Lovecraftian, good to know. The help will always bottom out in psychot- you know what, I'm a perfectly valid member of the Anglophone population and I'm going to just not fucking call it that - bottom out in psychic defenses?"

"Generally the people involved will have other things in addition to psychic defenses, but yes--there might be some form of wild magic that does more or less the same thing, but that would be much rarer."