"Alfheimr and Lunabella. So, both ways we're leaving Earth. Lunabella gets called 'New Olympus', and they're on the far side of the Moon. Legally, everyone in Lunabella is a slave, including the king, who is legally the property of the Iron Tablets, which are basically their Constitution, written back in 660. But the tablets are very strict about rights of slaves, you can appeal anything straight up to the King and, if he doesn't act, the Founders, and they do act pretty quickly. The low women on the totem pole in Lunabella probably live in more abundance than any of the other Big Six, though Arcadia's trying to steal the title and parts of Alfheimr aim to be as good or better. There's a lot of duties about the upkeep of the city and the air bubble, which you will of course be commanded to do by your mistress."

"...aaaand moving right along...?"

"Yeah, that's most people's reaction. Play tourist there sometime, though, it's lovely. Anyway, the Alfheimr Alliance. Rather than up, they're sideways - they're an alternate Earth, one a little closer to the Realm of Chaos - I can get into the cosmology if you want, but it probably won't come up in your life absent a couple rare races with extraplanar resurrection methods. They're the realm of the Fae, with a thousand or million small feudal countries who feud with each other intermittently. The Summer Court are relatively authoritarian, rigid, and legalist, generous but with very intricate codes of law and propriety about what Lords and Ladies may do to their inferiors and what the inferiors must do for their superiors, and which rights they have, sometimes only if they're familiar enough to cite them. Sort of Lunabella Lite, mixed with the classic stories of the Sidhe. The Winter Court is chaotic; most Winter Ladies hold power through charisma and personal power, and things shift regularly. You - probably not you right away, but in a couple years if you start on the high end of new witches - might secure a castle by espionage and blackmail, by being rich, or by fighting some particularly dangerous beast - they have a lot more of those than Earth. But then someone might try the same on you, and your legitimacy only lasts as long as you can convince everyone else it should."

"And that's the Big Six. There's a bunch of smaller ones, but the only one I know well is the Awakener's Guild, and you don't seem like the type."

"I do not feel that I am the type, no," she agrees. "Well. That all sucks. But at least I probably get to be immortal, which is cool." Assuming she is not currently being scammed, never a wise thing to assume.

"You do not have to join anything. Keep a close eye on HexNet - that's the masquerade internet - if you don't, for warning about monster movement, Outsider activity, and maybe masquerade warnings, but plenty of people go it alone. I can maybe give you tailored advice if there's a particular suckage you want to avoid?"

"Monster movement?"

"There aren't many on Earth, but they sometimes leak in from other worlds. Dragons, hydras, yetis, fox devils, various gribbly things - lots of them are people, but some aren't. Witches can fight them off pretty well, unless they're taken by surprise. Anyone with at least rank-3 elementalism is nicknamed a 'Hazard', or 'Disaster' or 'Calamity' if you're stronger than third, and we get asked to go drive them off, or kill them if necessary. I'm a Hazard twice over, windkeeping and earthmoving; most sorceresses are."

"Ooookay. So what's your tailored advice if I want to just... quietly and comfortably be immortal and not get eaten by monsters and not have to deal with anyone's politics or weird boarding school vibes or Perfectly Reasonable Space Slavery. Or is that not a thing. Is there anybody living on Mars? Can I move to Mars and farm potatoes in a dusty red valley? Eh, it'd probably strain the veil if the robots found me."

"I don't know of anyone on Mars; you have to be rank-5 portals to use them to go anywhere you've never been, and if anyone's picked Mars yet, they didn't publicize it. So maybe they didn't want visitors any more than you. Probably would work if you can get there, though, the robots have covered, like, a few city blocks.
But, hmm. I think I emphasized the wrong part of the Winter Court for you, actually. If you just plop down a house in some established duchy and very emphatically say you're not getting involved in any power struggles unless someone attacks you, you'd probably get knighted and then only interact with the local lady when a new one sends you a messenger to tell you you nominally owe fealty to her. A friend I Awakened does border patrols in winter and doesn't talk to anyone but her partner for weeks at a time, though she probably fights their wildlife more than you'd prefer.
And if you don't mind being very careful about the veil, you can just get a big house, out in the suburbs or the sticks. The exchange rate from mana to dollars is very good, you can probably get a twenty-room house built to order in a year or two. Faster if you deal directly with Alphazon about it, but their contracts are, well, I'd rather sign theirs than one from Mephistopheles but it's still pretty Faustian."

"I will be staying far, far away from the cyberpunk dystopia section of this wild ride," she says firmly. "It can't be that tough to be careful about the veil, right?"

"Depends how much magic you wanna do, and which kinds. Runes and potions in your basement? Easy. Elementalism? Hard. My serious practice I pay to use Arcadia's gym, because it could be seen for a block around if I mess up."

"...fair. Maybe the Mars colony is my best bet after all. Or I can sign up for one of those jobs caretaking a decaying castle in the middle of nowhere in Europe."

"If you want to stay away from the big flashy stuff, you can do that - some of the smaller options you get while shaping your Awakening cut you off from some options to give you more power to use on others, and 'give up all of elementalism' is the kind of trade you can make. But the castle takes a lot less care. Travel to Mars would be... years, unless you can manage the portals, which takes rare natural power. But I'll probably ask around about it, I'm curious now."

"So how does this Awakening thing work, and do I owe you anything for it?"

"It's a soul-synesthesia thing, you acquire some temporary new senses. You'll see sort of a web of places you can put down bits of your natural power, which will shift in how 'close' and 'big' they are as your other choices affect it. Nothing is irrevocable until you reach the end and very specifically will it to be complete - usually I mentally shield off that action so you also have to push me away, to be extra sure you don't do it by accident. We'll be able to talk while you consider, which will feel normal though in some technical sense it's not actually our mouths and lungs doing the speaking. The only thing I need from you is contact information that will stay good for at least a year afterward; I try to keep in touch, help people out when they're new and arrange some favor-trading when they're more experienced, but if you're sick of my occasional check-ins by next year, that's fine, I'm not relying on it. There's a stipend that pays me, and I do actually make money - dollars and 'Kisses', those are basically crystalized mana - off the shop."

"Speaking of which, what is up with the shop?"

"It draws the attention of people with witch potential, and some, but less, of people who are already behind the Veil or are just generally credulous about magic existing. And lets me get a better view of which of those apply than my native magic would. It's also not always in the same place - like, can you actually remember which cross-street you were at before you walked in?"

"I passed it twice." She thinks back. "I can't swear it was on the same corner both times, though."

"And it probably won't be on that corner tomorrow either. I don't actually know how that works, both the movement and the attention-grabbing are standard issue from the Awakener's Guild. The woman who Awakened me has a crazier one, doors open on five continents and a weird time bubble that makes it so everyone who opens the door meets her at a different time even if three doors open at the same wall-clock time outside."

"Wacky."

She thinks over everything she's heard so far.

"...you said I can back out anytime, but can I try again afterward, if I screw something up and have to start over, or if, I dunno, I dither for three hours and have to run home and come back another day?"

"Definitely. If you wait months or years, you might have less natural power available, but that's not going to be more than, like, 10%, and there's never on record been a measurable change in less than a month. Also, if you leave and then come back looking for the shop specifically, I'd bet you find it within an hour tops."

"Mildly spooky, but in a convenient way. All right, I guess." She eyes Gwen dubiously.

She extends her hands. "Whenever you're ready."

She makes a sort of wryly skeptical noise and takes Gwen's hands.

She meets her eyes, and then they both start experiencing some unusual senses. It's somewhat like sight and somewhat like proprioception for a body neither of them had a minute ago, and it's pretty obvious that Gwen is 'supporting' April. The web has three main branches from here, two of which are really large clusters and one of which immediately splits off into dozens of smaller ones.

"The one on the 'left' is class - and you have all three, looks a bit thin on potential patrons but you'll have a few options if you want to explore that. Over on the 'right' is race, and you have some rare ones, might take me a minute to work out which races they go with. The other cluster is the disadvantages and weaknesses I mentioned that can give you more power. We could skip to types of magic, but I'd really recommend picking at least a tentative race and class before that, how difficult they are to learn changes a lot based on your 'affinities'."