"I'm gonna be real methodical about this," she says, and starts examining the leftward connections in detail one at a time.

"Reasonable."

She lands on Sorceress first. It's red, and while she's touching it, she can see some of the web shade reddish as well, and feel easier to reach, smaller dots less distant. A particular large piece of web, which she can feel a sense of power and simplicity about, has its entry line widen from a single thin but firm thread to a wide tangle of them, though it feels tentative, ready to shrink again if she releases the Sorceress cluster.

"Those are the Elementalism - Academics and Warlocks can only pick one element, other than ones that their race gives them an affinity for - there will be two elements, but not all of them have an elemental magic - and Sorceresses can pick as many as they like."

There's also a strong sense of what it feels like to be a sorceress - feeling embodied, flexing magic like muscle, intuitively understanding your own magic. There's also the 'oomph', which feels like making April's soul flare out around her, in a way that makes her stand out if she wants to, and can be sort of coated around elemental magic to make it be very visibly their own, coloring it (in a completely different sense of color from the 'redness') to match the color of her soul, but magnifying it, going further and with more force and durability.

"What color is it showing you for your soul? It's one of the few things the Awakening shows you that I've never learned to interpret for myself, so I'm always curious."

"...huh," she says, metaphorically squinting. "Sort of a black and gold type situation? Are soul colours a thing, do they matter?"

"Just cosmetic, but that can matter for what elementalism you can safely do near mundanes. Red water or purple fire, you're putting more strain on the veil."

"Black and gold is not very auspicious on that front," she remarks. "Okay..."

The what-it's-like of Sorceress feels very right. But that's no excuse for stopping there. She checks out one of the others, whichever comes to hand first.

Next is Academic. It feels 'blue', and there's the same sense of some lines turning bluish and getting closer. This particularly emphasizes the other big cluster of complicated webs - about half of them pull toward the blue cluster. These feel cerebral, orderly, and so does the Academic cluster itself. Besides the feeling of focus and understanding, mapping out reality in your mind slowly every day, April can feel the sense of shortcuts and optimization - doing more with less, whether with the (hypothetical/prophetic) feeling of watching a steel cauldron boil or one of carefully writing symbols into leather and silver with gold dust and incense, or of planning out a portal or ripping a fragile one into the air quickly. The image of April wearing her 'mothergifts' also shows up, and she can see herself changing them to suit herself, or turning a wand into a broom in moments.

"The shortcuts manifests as doubling the results created, or halving one of the things you spend to get it. Time or mana, usually, though some magic is physically tiring and you can cut that down too. Only applies to things that have a strong tie to academic magic."

Also, she can feel two dim lines trailing from the cluster, ready to reach out to anything, filling the whole of a branch, whether elementalism or not. But it wouldn't be a normal connection, in some abstract way.

"That one's hard to understand. Basically, it gets you two types of magic, mastering it to the limit of your capabilities - looks like you'll be able to hit rank four, but not rank five - with no cost from your natural energy, but they still will take just as much time to learn. That's probably about three years of dedicated study for each."

"...huh. Hard to get a feel for how tempting that should be before I know what all the kinds of magic even are."

In the meantime, she lets go of Academic and checks out Warlock.

Warlocks feel 'green', and the other half of the big cluster of non-elemental magic tugs closer. There's a sensation of what a bond to a patron feels like - subtle, but constant. A previously almost unnoticeable part of the web opens up connections to this cluster, and brushing against them gives a very concrete impression of various magical relics that are being offered to you upfront. Where that fan of connections reaches the cluster for the Warlock, it twists through a sub-bundle which conveys the feeling of summoning and dismissing the tools you have made part of you. There is also a sensation of marking a portion of yourself onto items and allies, using it as an anchor to touch them at a distance or just make sure you notice any harm done to them.

Entwined with the relics is a selection of bright nodes, which look very different from anything else in the web. These have personalities, noticeable even before touching them - a dozen of them all feel nearly the same, one substantially brighter than the others.

"Those are patrons, and the similar cluster is the demons; the brighter one is Mephistopheles. The other patrons I haven't seen often enough to tell you what they are blind. Probably you want to check out these three first, though."

The three she's 'gestured' to are, as it turns out, Spider Anansi, who is charmed by her outlook on life; Ash, an Egyptian god of oases, who likes self-reliance; and Xaphan, a modern veiled-only god who was an Outsider and got out with Watcher assistance and thinks that when she gets thrown into a blender she will come out of it okay, and ultimately stronger.

She steers entirely clear of the demon cluster, but investigates the rest, even though the feeling of having a patron is honestly kind of harrowing already and she is almost certainly not going to pick this option without enormous bribes.

Ash is going to want her to travel through unpleasant environments and find bright spots, or to do something difficult without asking for assistance, or occasionally find someone and nudge them to be more self-reliant, and offers relics that would transmute death into serious discomfort, a supervillain motorcycle, and a fountain of healing and purity.

Anansi declines to say what his tasks will be, but promises that they will be funny and that she won't be the butt of the joke unless she gets it wrong. (If she is the butt of the joke, that will count as completing the task, that's only fair.) He offers... a magitech flying battleship. No other options, it's just the battleship (though it does also have HexVPN wifi). He thinks this would be much more fun than a house in the suburbs.

Xaphan will not throw her into a blender, but cryptically states that all her large tasks will come from persevering in blenderish situations. Early tasks may instead be about helping people who are recovering from Outsider exposure gain strength from the experience. He offers some tattoo inks, an amulet that makes relatively safe use of Outsider parts to spy and teleport, a pearl that allows her to expand her elemental affinities, and a selection of weapons and armor, including a lightsaber. (Technically it's made of a 'rift', an impossibly-sharp portal, but it's a lightsaber.)

Okay so, a flying battleship is, both in letter and in spirit, an enormous bribe.

However.

All things considered, she thinks she is better off running with Sorceress for now, because even a flying battleship is not enough to make her skin stop crawling about the patron-connection.

"Sorceress, then? Okay, probably you want to look at the race options next. They all have a mana generation method, a maximum mana capacity, and a maximum mana generation rate - the units are fuzzy, but you can see a rough low-medium-high category for rate and capacity. This part, see?"

She 'gestures' to one of the race clusters. There are two pieces that feel like scalars rather than a complicated arrangement of practical and aesthetic traits.

"That race cluster is Neutral, which is the default medium rating on both scales. This little cluster off to the side is a race-enhancement; all races have one but not everyone has the choice to apply it to themself. There's a lot more detail about each race, like their immortality method and - usually, not everything - the magical traits they have natively. But you'll have to look deeper for those."

She reaches for the Neutral cluster to examine it in more detail. This is definitely a time for leaving no stone unturned.

Neutral feels familiar; this wouldn't change much about her body, and nothing about her mind. She'd age half as fast, and be generally more durable - no suddenly dying from a tiny blood clot in the wrong place or taking lasting brain damage from being too cold or unable to breathe for a few seconds. The general optimization of her body will also make her somewhat more symmetrical and attractive, and she won't need as much sleep, food, etc. They aren't naturally immortal, and gain mana from sleep, with the rate increasing the longer they stay asleep - six hours, which is what they need a day, fills two thirds of their capacity. They are tied to Soul and Body magic.

The race enhancement lets them pick a second class's method of improving themselves and have access to both, and also makes them resist about a fifth of any harmful effect from other people's magic. The various race's enhancements take different amounts of power to open up - this is one of the larger ones.

...okay, that race enhancement is certainly interesting, but she didn't actually like the Academic method that much and let's not even get into Warlocks, so she isn't especially torn about letting go of Neutral and grabbing the next one to see what it's like.

This one gives her a sense of emptiness and groundedness, feeling the stone beneath her feet and being sturdy and unmoved in winds sweeping across open spaces. She would gain mana from isolation - being away from any other people, and better if even animals aren't nearby. The maximum capacity is medium, but the gain rate is pretty low unless there's no else within a mile. And if she dies, she'll revive if there's no one anywhere near where she died, or the biggest piece of her body left. It's associated with Wind and Earth.

"Oh, I recognize this one. They're called Moorwalkers, they look like a weathered-down statue, with translucent hair made of wind. They can't do handshakes properly, it's like they 'just missed' and the air hits the other hand, which is inconvenient for the veil. And they don't gain mana in space, they need the earth and air nearby. I think the enhancement is that they can terraform desert or bare rock, pretty slowly."

The enhancement does feel something like that - taking the moors with you in your soul and leaching them outward, rather than just gathering power from being in moor-like conditions.

"A very Mars-colony type of thing to be," she remarks, turning away from the temptation of ultimate introvert powers to check out the next cluster.

"Might be inconvenient if you don't want neighbors, but yeah."

This one gives her double vision. She sees a human body much like her current one, but in substantially better physical shape, but superimposed on it is... a sword. The color scheme matches the humanoid, but it's just a sword. And the sword is the more real one of the two. The particular shape of the weapon feels mutable and growing, like you choose what weapon you get as you age. They don't need their hands to use their magic, and can do everything while still even in humanoid form; they also can do simple telepathy with anyone wielding them. They gain mana from combat; their capacity is low, and so is their mana gain, but it slowly ramps up across several minutes fighting, maxing out around ten minutes at a pretty high rate. If they die and their weapon is used to take a life, they revive. The enhancement for this one is absent. Its elements are Blood and Metal.

"This one's neat, my Winter Court friend is a Sword - actually, she's a pair of them - and she loves it. Not a quiet life, though."

"Sounds like it requires having friends," she says, dismissing it and moving on.

"They're good at fighting in humanoid form as well, but it helps."

Next one - the immediate sense is 'fire ghost', the feeling of all the flesh on her bones suddenly and painlessly burning off, replaced by a steady flame in ghostly gold, black bones visible beneath it. It's a skin-temperature flame rather than actually hot, doesn't ignite anything by accident, and feels as tangible as flesh despite bleeding smoke and plasma if injured. Their elements are Fire and Death, and they both heal and restore mana by burning, destroying material with flames they created to charge and mending damage by absorbing active flames - except the skull, which needs ordinary restoration. They have a high capacity and a low charge rate, and their race enhancement lets them slough off their body and travel as a rocket-powered skull, though only their fire magic can be done without hands.

"I was wondering if you'd get any common choices here. This race is called Ifrits, they're not in the top five non-Neutral witch races but I think they're in the top fifteen."

"Somehow more metal than the literal sword, but still, I think not." She goes looking for another option.

"Yeah, you'd think the race with Blood-and-Metal elements would win, but Ifrits are way better at the aesthetic."

This one feels like change, more than anything else. Shapeshifters, who could be excellent impersonators of anyone if they could keep their form sitting still. They feel insubstantial, heat shimmer and mist more than actual flames or water. Primal Chaos mixed into their nature as much as the elements themselves; unstable, bodies reacting inconsistently - hard to hurt, though, even something that worked a minute ago might be harmless now. If they die, they wake up near the World of Chaos, in the borderlands near Earth, an unpredictable time later. They have a medium capacity and high charge rate, and charge by putting anything important to them at risk; more importance, more charge. No race enhancement visible.

"I don't recognize these. Fire and Water, charge from gambling, revive near the World of Chaos..." There's a sensation of riffling through a phonebook just out of sight. "Oh, Qareen, they mostly live in the Middle East and the deserts near Alfheimr. The risk to charge has to be natural forces or random chance, someone else threatening intentional harm doesn't count. You probably wouldn't have liked the missing enhancement anyway, it's about brokering bets with metaphysical stakes."

"Wow, all the charge styles are super weird! Putting important stuff at risk is not how I want to live my life," she says, dropping that cluster and looking around for one she hasn't tried yet.

"I think the rarer ones tend to be weirder, and that's why they're rare? But that only mostly makes sense, Sirens are common and our breath thing is super weird."

Apparently she has lots of Fire in her background, because here's another - a phoenix. This involves big feathers, many more than Gwen has, but none of the little ones. She can also feel that the bonus enhancement lets her turn into a pure bird, eagle-looking. There's a sense-prememory of flying, the feathers turning to flames as she moves and creating her own thermal to push her higher and further. There's also a sensation of slowing down and seeing the flames turn back to feathers. That whole transmutation applies to the eagle form, as well. Death creates an egg in the flames that will hatch, and if it's destroyed or otherwise sealed away, it will manage to hatch anyway. They have ordinary capacity and high charge rate, which they gain by feeling or being near conviction.

"Oh, wow, you're a potential Firebird, and it looks like a True Phoenix to boot. They're widely considered impossible to kill, even most methods of True Death don't really work on them. Also, if you take the phoenix form piece, you get an extra elemental affinity for Life, on top of Fire and Beast. It's supposed to be reasonably possible to hide your feathers with careful clothing choice, even if the Veil isn't helping. Also, probable drawback: a whole bunch of Siren families will try to send suitors to romance you. There's an old superstition that Sirens are all 'failed phoenixes' in some way, there used to be cults about it and the old families don't really believe but they still go through the motions."

"...dang," she says, mildly impressed despite herself. "As much as I hate the idea of a bunch of strangers coveting my ovaries, that one is pretty cool." Her previous semi-reluctant top choice was Moorwalker but Firebird has advantages such as 'rumoured totally impossible to kill' and 'badass fire wings'.

She nevertheless looks around to see if there are any more options available, because it's important to be thorough.

And, also because it's important to be thorough: "I'm... not sure I understand the charge style on this one?"