"You need to either be doing things you're confident you're morally right to be doing, or close to other people who are, either close physical proximity or being in the general area of someone you are emotionally close to. I think there's some element of it having to stand out from society's view, but they're not common so there's not great data on that; you don't hear about firebirds charging by walking through a nursery and not killing babies, though, you know, that seems like you'd be pretty confident you were doing the right thing."

"Also, I promise I won't point the ovary-hunters your way. Not a kind of favor-trading I'm okay with."

"Much appreciated," she says wryly. "Okay. Let's... tentatively say I'm going with the phoenix option." Enhancement tentatively included, even though it's not especially practical.

That charge style sounds pretty grim, it's not like she wants to make a habit of going around taking morally valent actions and feeling emotions about it, and still less does she want to hang out with a lot of other people doing that. But as much as she liked Moorwalker for the chance to profit from her introversion, being a phoenix feels right in a way that being a wind cryptid doesn't quite. For now she can run with that intuition; if Gwen's been telling the truth, she'll get to reevaluate it later.

"So what's next?"

"Three main things. Your main magic - elementalism and the other group, the things that come in ranks. The various smaller types of magic that come in isolated packets, which range from 'become a guy' to 'invisible telekinesis servants' to 'be really really good with flying your broom'. The guy one is weirdly expensive, actually, whatever makes witches exist would rather we all be female, but if you have some well-concealed dysphoria it's there. And the opposite of those - drawbacks, some of them affecting you physically and some of them setting up mishaps that Fate will ensure come your way, which give you more power. Also, I can explain the rough accounting system for how you spend and gain power, if you want that rather than just feeling it out."

"Let's hear the accounting details, that sounds important."

"You have a certain amount of power, which you can simplify slightly and say is a certain number of 'units', which isn't the smallest amount of potential power you could possibly put into something, but is the smallest thing that can clearly and legibly entirely power the smallest bits of magic on offer. Looks like you have about 25 of those, which is about what I'd expect from rank-4 potential. I mentioned there's a cap to how much you can get - yours is probably about 80, maybe 85; mine was 60 and I've gotten pretty close to hitting it. Anything that you have an elemental affinity for costs half as much. Anything that is connected to your class costs two units less, or gives you two units more, and the first rank of things costs one unit to start with, so you can and probably should take all the elementalisms you can see at rank 1 and you'll gain power from it. Power you gain that way, or from the ordinary drawbacks, doesn't count toward the cap, it's like a separate pool. Small magic and drawbacks have a set cost; ranked magic increases in cost for each rank, one two three four, and the class boost just applies to the first rank. If you have a matching class and element, you get the whole stack for less than half the cost for someone with neither."

"Elementalisms are specific - either you have the element, or you have one particular pair of other elements that make it up like Wind and Metal for Fire, or you don't. Non-elementalism magics are either universal and act like everyone matches them, like 'witchery' which means 'messing with your mothergifts and their extradimensional storage space', or they have three elements associated with them. So, for example, if you want to get a familiar that's exotic or smarter than a clever dog, you can learn 'familiarity', which has affinity for Beast, Soul, or Nature, and is a sorceress magic."

"All the factions have some magic associated with them, and they'll teach it to you about twice as fast as if you find some other way to study it. I can't help you pick those up now unless you accept a Fate that ties you to the faction - you wouldn't have to stay forever but you would have to join and be a member in good standing for years, or you'd get backlash, which usually manifests as random drawbacks that you're then stuck with. Otherwise they're like normal non-elemental magic. Don't study Outsider magic, obviously."

"I'm not totally sure I get it, but okay. Why, uh... why are there drawbacks, also. Why's that a thing."

"Because Fate likes to mess with us and awakening on purpose lets you keep the option? It's possible to be Awakened 'naturally', it's just better not to because it's usually traumatic. Whether because it gets triggered by trauma in some idiosyncratic Fatey way, or just because suddenly being a different shape, size, and half the time physical sex, plus magic that you have no understanding or control for, is frequently traumatic. No one has ever met Fate, as far as I know, and that's probably because if they have a nose we'd all want to punch them in it."

"...I would say 'fair enough' but uh. 'Unfair enough', maybe. Anyway."

She attempts to investigate the available elementalisms.

There are many! The shiniest ones are Firecalling and Lifeweaving. These are appealingly cheap, and let you manipulate fire, up to a pretty huge scale, and do impressive healing and light manipulation (or harm demons and undead). Rank-4 lifeweaving can't bring back the dead, but it can do pretty much anything short of that. There's also Windkeeping, Waterworking, Earthmoving, Naturalism (plant magic), Metallurgy, and Psychotics (mind magic). These do not come labeled with names, so she will not learn of the silliness of the name 'psychotics' unless she asks.

If she follows the advice to pick up a little of everything, does she get back more than she put in, as promised?

She does! This leaves her with about a third more than she had. Also some mostly-ghostly-feeling new senses, one per element. Hard to use right now in this weird synesthesia-soul-space, but clearly ready to go once she's out in the world.

Hmmm, how much would it cost to crank Firecalling and Lifeweaving up all the way? And can she get more detail on what the rest do? She grabs the plants one at semirandom and inspects it more closely.

5 apiece, so if she did both she'd be a little bit below where she started. Maxing one of the others from here would take almost double that (9).

Besides letting her control plants, Naturalism makes her resistant to both plants and disease and discourages natural animals from aggression towards her - to full immunity at rank 3, though magic just cuts its damage in half for each rank. (This is something every elementalism has for its own element, she can now tell comparing it to Firecalling.) At rank 1, the plant control covers roughly a vine a couple meters long moving like a snake, or talking to plants to make them healthier (or more toxic, if you'd rather), and you can also talk to smart animals., At rank 4, that's up to a big spruce tree and/or twenty things spread across a mile's couple kilometer's radius, moving like bullets and strong as iron, encouraging unseasonal growth fast enough to be visible, and raising animals up to human intelligence.

Raising animals up to human intelligence mostly sounds spooky and awkward. She investigates water next.

Waterworking also includes ice and cold in general, both in what it protects against and what you do with it. At rank one, you can pull water from the air and move about a water balloon's worth around, and use it as a knife within a few meters. Rank two lets you make 'false ice' that isn't actually cold, just solid, and breathe water, among other things. At rank four you could control all atmospheric moisture for a couple kilometres around, or a full Olympic swimming pool, and control the heat of water from true ice to steam, and you can generate (temporary) water from nowhere, hitting like a truck or spiking through concrete walls. You could even surf on clouds of steam, make aerial ice-skating tracks that extend in front of you just in time, or other fun stuff.

Fun, but not necessarily her style. How about wind?

Wind includes some thunder and lightning the way water includes cold, and reduces the amount you need to breathe and how much winds blow you. Rank 1 you basically have a table fan anywhere you like it, and within the livable range can change the temperature of the air right around you. To fly using only Windkeeping takes rank two, or rank three if you want it to be effortless (and not take mana). Those also let you make static-shock amounts, or tazer amounts, of electricity, respectively. At rank four, you can make small tornadoes and make nearby clouds rain, hail, or stop. (If you want to make it snow, you'll need some Waterworking as well. Lots of elements can mix like that.) You can also generate enough electricity to stop, or start, a human's heart, though it's not going to extend far beyond your fingertips.

Given that she's going to be a flying sort of creature and backups are always nice, she tentatively picks up a second rank of wind, then turns her attention to earth.

Unsurprisingly, Earthmoving makes you resistant to blunt force from earth and stone; more surprisingly, this also counts if you, say, fall at escape velocity and faceplant into a concrete floor; at rank 3 or up, you'll be completely unharmed, and it won't hurt nearly as much with any ranks at all.

Rank 1 is about a bucket-worth of dirt/mud/pebbles, in a couple chunks at once; it's pretty good for digging through dirt and mud quickly. Rank 4 gets you about as much earth and stone as would fit in a pool, and you can handle small boulders the size of large boulders cars. Stone is as easy to shape and warp as clay, you can make dirt throw up stone slabs or hails of big rocks, and (slowly) cause a very localized earthquake, about 15m in radius but anywhere within your range (again, a couple km). Basically, anything Toph can do with rocks. (Metalbending is a separate magic, and tremorsense is one of the separate small magics. But close enough, right?)

Huh. It feels-right in sort of a similar way to how being a sorceress and a phoenix felt-right and she's not really sure what to do with that. She investigates metal instead of thinking about it too hard.

Metallurgy! The resistance protects you from metal weapons including small arms fire. At rank 1 you can move handfuls of coins, and can cold-forge any metal nearby, welding and layering it with anything available without any heat. Higher ranks let you extract trace quantities of metal from dirt and sand and start to shape them; by rank 4 you can create and separate alloys, make magical 'puremetal' gunpowder, extract trace metal from deep in the stone, and make rows of cannons or 'living' metal armor that shifts fluidly at joints without losing protective power.

"...sort of disturbing how combat-focused this one is," she comments, fishing around for another element to examine. Right, the mind one, she hasn't looked at that in detail yet.

"Metal's pretty, well, metal. Most of it has constructive uses, but you could assemble rebar or steel girders with rank 2, maybe rank 1, so the visible improvements are more destruction-focused than the other elements. They all have that aspect, the Hazard/Disaster nicknames exist for a reason."

Mind magic: protects you from the memetic hazards of Outsiders, ordinary trauma, and of course magical mental attacks. Generate mental illusions and mental invisibility and induce triggered responses to stimuli. At rank one the imagery is only softball-size and the responses are limited to headaches; higher ranks let the imagery affect more senses at once, maintain more of them, and make them bigger, up to a house-sized image affecting all senses of thirty people at rank 4. It also allows personal teleportation (rank 3), intangible psychic tools/weapons that have destabilizing effects on any biology they go through (rank 2, increasing in size and distance), and more precise control of the effects of triggered responses. Rank 4 also lets you get into someone's head and view a 'mindscape' where you get a physical-illusion mapping of their memories and thought patterns.

"Mind magic is creepy. The standard nickname is Psychotics, and it's weird but honestly? It fits."

"...teleportation is admittedly cool, but the rest... yeah."

She will tentatively keep her four each Fire and Life and two of Wind, and dither a bit about Earth and then leave it, and move on to the next section for now.

"Right, all the standard magic. Standard rundown is Alchemy, Runes, Curses, Hexes - which are more like 'transmutation' - Witchery, Familiarity, Necromancy, Consortation (with demons), Portals, Divination, and Aethernautics. Witchery and Aethernautics everyone has affinity for. As a Firebird, you have affinity for Hexes, Familiarity, and Consortation; that's these three. If you stick with the Phoenix upgrade, the Life element gets you affinity for Alchemy, Portals, and Divination as well; that's these. Familiarity you get the sorceress discount on top of that."