She attempts to investigate all her affinitied options in the listed order, starting with Witchery.

Witchery is her mothergifts and the extradimensional hammerspace they come with. Even if you have rank 0, you can summon and dismiss them - you won't be able to modify the shape or coloring, and it's 10 minutes of meditation to summon, but you can, and they'll never stay damaged. The 'rod' - staff or wand - makes magic a little stronger and less tiring.

Rank 1 lets you shift the rod into a broomstick (and back) that flies at bike speed, and lets you do immediate summons and dismissals, replacing your other (nonmagical) clothes/hat. Ten minutes meditating lets you totally reshape all three. Higher ranks speed up the broom and increase its weight capacity, and speed up the shape-altering. By rank 4 the broom can fly at a megameter a thousand kilometers an hour and carry ten times your weight, and your reshaping can happen automatically while summoning, which takes only a instant's thought. Garments also protect you from the elements (rank 2) and prying eyes (invisibilty, rank 4, also covers your broom and passengers); you get a nice little bubble of comfortable air around the broom (rank 3). Rank 3 gets you the ability to pull a rabbit, or anything else, out of your hat, though you have to put it in first. You can also turn the broom into a carpet, half the speed but also half again the passenger capacity. Rank 4 lets you do alterations to someone else's rod, hat, and garment - tailoring for people who only have rank 0, usually.

"It was very thoughtful of Mother to make the broom turn into a carpet, rather than the garment. Though I'm sure there's someone in Lunabella who's a little disappointed about it."

"Why Lunabella specifically?" she asks, distracted, as she goes on to investigate Aethernautics. Witchery ranks don't sound that useful right off the bat but she's keeping it in mind as an option.

"If you're using the carpet rather than the broom, it's because you need to carry several other people. There is a kind of person who would be really into having to be naked in front of them when you swap, and that kind of person is one who probably sees Lunabella's hierarchy as a feature."

Is Gwen teasing April on purpose? ...Maybe a little.

"Not my kink," she says dryly.

"Yeah, I noticed. It's... between the weirdly intimate charging methods - and you haven't seen the most intimate ones - and places like Lunabella being in the civics-or-whatever classes for kids below ten? The world behind the veil is less precious about kink and sex in general. Hang around any crowd for ten minutes and you'll see some very enthusiastic public kisses and a couple people in day collars pass by. Personally, I got used to it in the first year, and still forget to bring it up half the time."

April silently marks a tally in her mental count of reasons to move to Mars and refocuses on looking at the magic. Where was she? Right, Aethernautics.

Aethernautics! This is the magic for manipulating and traveling planes. It also lets you track celestial bodies by name or sight, learn their true names and keep their positions in mind, and protect yourself from traveling through vacuum and more exotic environments. How many celestial bodies you can track goes from one at first to thousands at rank 4. The tracking helps you keep your bearings when moving through other planes and demiplanes. The protection extends to the Void (a non-space with non-existence) 

At rank 3, it allows folding space, making temporary shortcuts at short range - up to football fields, or impossible paradoxes, with rank 4, and permanent if you also have skill with Portals. At rank 4, you can enter and exit other people's extradimensional spaces, if you know enough about the spaces or their creators - you can learn a plane's true names from contact, and this lets you return. You can also step out from the boundary of a demiplane into the raw Aether, and from there travel quickly between planes or demiplanes, as long as you know where you're headed. (This doesn't help much moving between normal space - you show up at the analogous position in the new plane, so on the alternate Earth rather than alternate Mars.)

...neat, and useful even if not all that useful for Mars colonization specifically. She doesn't grab any immediately, but she does make a mental note and then move on to the next one, which was... Hexes, if she's remembering right?

Hexes! This is another with a rank-0 effect: turning your personal mana into Kisses, which takes an hour to mint 10 Kisses worth of mana, scaling linearly with the amount you're making.

"There's a common type of relic for making Kisses much faster. If you want to mint them in volume, it usually pays to rent one of those and give the owner their cut. That takes ten minutes for making a chestful of One-Kiss coins, which can take a new witch with pretty high capacity from full to empty all in one go."

Hexes are permanent until reversed (by you or anyone with Hex skill at least as good), and tiring to place, like a long run. They mostly come in discrete spells, and a new one replaces the old unless you know about the old one and the target isn't sapient. You need some raw material which vanishes when used.

Rank 1 uses wood for the material, and can do transformations of stone-mud, clay-glass, iron-tin, salt-sugar, either direction. Also, polymorph, turning animals up to the size of a cat into others within a two-to-one mass ratio either direction. Rank 2 consumes metal and does cloth-leather, water-milk, paper-plastic, copper-bronze, fuel-bread (anything that burns counts as fuel, same raw calorie count); its polymorph can go up to child-size and can do any living thing you can imagine. Rank 3 uses quality quartz or topaz and does egg-chocolate, water-gasoline, vegetable-meat; its polymorph goes up to adult-size, can turn animals/people into anything smaller than them (but at least mouse size), and can reshape objects without changing material. Rank 4 consumes ebony, ivory, amber, petrified wood, fossils, or fulgurite, and can do wood-cheese, cloth-air, steel-cloth, fruit-sweets; its polymorph can go nuts, turning whales into tardigrades or vice versa, or turn any living creature into any inanimate object.

Rank 3 and 4 add new spells - animate objects at 3, straight out of Be Our Guest (none of the intelligence of the rest of Beauty and the Beast) or The Sorcerer's Apprentice, levitating and following commands, only up to three at a time. Very simple conditionals are possible. Golemwork at 4 allows much more complicated instructions, equivalent to a decent video game NPC, and animates a humanoid statue with more agility, strength, and manual dexterity; if you give it a soul with necromancy or human sacrifice, it can react intelligently.

"Fair warning: trying to get rich with transmutation tends to invite masquerade violations in the modern world. The ORC won't come after you unless the mundane government catches on, but ORC will be watching the government closely about it, and it's legitimately hard to get away with it. Commodities get tracked more closely than you'd think, if I remember right mostly for tracking tariffs and stuff."

"I don't super want to get rich via transmutation but if I did I think I'd make and sell jewelry, seems harder to track than big heaps of gold. Anyway."

Next was... something. Familiarity? Which also comes with the discount that means she should just take the first rank regardless of whether she wants it? If it's about having animal companions she is suspicious that she doesn't want it. She investigates regardless.

"Jewelry should be fine, just don't go making, I don't know, twelve of those big East African neck-lengtheners out of solid gold, where it was all tin when you bought it."

Familiarity is pretty much that! It has a rank 0, which lets her summon a familiar - the magic presents a list of small animals as examples, mostly the kind of thing you'd see as a familiar in a fairy tale; crows and cats and frogs and dogs and such, but also butterfly, weasel, octopus and sea horse. The biggest examples are goat, cow, and horse, and the concept is fuzzy but clearly marking the smallest and largest things it's willing to accept, and the most aggressive - the cosmetic details (even sex) are yours to pick, within natural variation, and you can get a mongoose instead of a weasel or a fox instead of a cat dog weasel catdog dog(?), but you can't get a wolf, elephant, or tardigrade. It's as smart as a trained dog, as loyal as your soul, doesn't age, and can be resummoned or dismissed whenever you like (even if it dies). Familiars are spirits until you bind them (it's voluntary), and are helpful for interacting with spirits; they can see them even if you can't. (You probably can. That's rank-0 Necromancy.) Rank 1 removes all your animal allergies (and the magic seems to consider lactose intolerance to count as one), lets you have your familiar carry out parts of your magic for you, and lets you communicate telepathically, though in emotions and intentions rather than words.

Rank 2, where she'd start to have to actually invest energy, lets her talk to all animals that fit the given list (including the variations); they understand your meaning delivered in ordinary human words, and you understand theirs in extraordinary animal words(?). Not that they'll necessarily do what you ask, especially if it's out of character for their ordinary behavior. Rank 3 lets you have some of your familiar's traits, with common perception mattering more than actual biology - you won't pick up nine lives from a cat, that's bigger than this can 'fit', but if you wanted you'd always land lightly on your feet no matter the height of the fall (which cats can't actually do). Flight is also too 'big', breathing water 'fits' but it's near the limit. Two traits only at this point, a third with rank 4. Rank 4's main effect is to raise your familiar to full human intelligence, and let both of you shapeshift to each other's species, or any mix of the two. Their personality and appearance will reflect common perception of the animal's personality, but they'll still be extremely loyal and defer to you on anything really important.

"Some people make really odd choices for what traits to borrow from their familiars. The woman who Awakened me, who's probably the most skilled and well-known practicing Awakener, has a cow familiar, and for some reason she picked udders. Though I guess it makes people guess the whole 'less-inhibited' thing without her having to actually talk about it."

"Not your kink, huh?" she says, contemplating the parameters of this branch of magic. As loyal as your soul? What does that actually mean? It would be great to have a person around she could actually trust, if only she could trust that she would be able to trust them.

She'll take the Rank 1 for the free cash back, but she's reluctant to buy any more before getting a better sense of what else is out there. Next up: Consortation, which sounds like it is going to be the worst magic of them all!

"So not my kink. And even if it was, I have been told on good authority it makes your back hurt like Hell. Speaking of which: Consortation. Not as dangerous as it sounds, but not pleasant either."

Consortation lets you summon demons. You make a circle, lit by (a fair amount of) fire and without any sunlight touching it; thematic mood decorations like incense and music help make the summoned demon happier to agree to a deal, but aren't magically relevant. Summoning is tiring, dismissal is easy; while they're here, you can communicate telepathically, including projecting 'I want to talk' - you can refuse this from them, they can't refuse from you. You pay up front.

Rank 1 summons Imps, who are demons of Wrath, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, or Lust, about six inches tall, winged, human-intelligence but simple-minded and very simply motivated. For 24 hours of service, Wrath wants to hurt someone, Greed wants a shiny bauble, Lust wants access to the internet for its most traditional purpose. They have decent skills associated with their interests - Lust gives good massages, Gluttony can cook pretty well, etc.

Rank 2 gets foliots, which are a slightly more powerful demon of envy, which like to steal, ideally to benefit themselves but they're happy to steal on your behalf, too, while they're in there. They're pretty good at it, and can make things and people invisible, which lasts an hour after they touch it/them. They're the size of a small adult, and are happy to be summoned in duos or trios for larger jobs (if the pay's good enough). Rank 3 gets the classic in-and/or-suc-cubus, who are paid in sex, which can be part of the job. (Frequently it's the whole job, a very personal favor.) They're pretty good spies, as long as some random seduction won't screw it up. (They will absolutely screw it up if you let them.) Also available, nabasus, who are fantastic chefs, needing only that you provide ingredients and that you overeat to the point of pain and it gets to watch - that's enough for a week.

Rank 4 gets you balors, who do not negotiate. Summon one, name a target or indicate a direction, and then bug out, because they provide only one service, which is precisely ten minutes of unrestrained, unimpeded absolute mayhem. Their price is the risk you run of getting in their way. Also available, Astarothi, which are mute servants who do anything you want as long as you laze around and do nothing productive or useful while they work; if you aren't being lazy, they'll stop working until you are. You can get up to a dozen at once off the same leisure, though.

"You can't touch rank 5, so you don't get the offer of negotiating with demons who want your service and your corruption and are smarter than you. I'm grateful for never getting that option, honestly. I don't think I'd take it, but why run the risk?"

"As predicted, I hate everything about this," she says, moving right along to... Alchemy?

Alchemy is all about the potions. Cauldrons and fires (or hotplates and beakers if you insist). Bigger containers are usually better, though, because the effort doesn't scale as fast as the ingredients - most things will take an hour for, say, period-blocker whether you make two cc's or five gallons. Potions are idiosyncratic, but the basic recipes work approximately right for everyone; your brewing will have one or two consistent quirks, identifiable by an expert, and usually a theme, aesthetically related to your race and personality but often obscurely.

"Potions are neat. My theme is birdsong - everything either needs birds singing while I'm brewing or tends to produce faint music like it when you pour or stir. Makes it hard to sell to mundanes, but you can if you disguise it adequately - homeopathy is a good cover story if you can stomach it. Within limits you seem sensible enough to guess for yourself. Some things won't fly no matter how charismatically you mutter about secret government-prohibited medical hallucinogens."

Rank 1 gets you duplicates of most mundane drugs and chemicals, complete with side effects; anything over-the-counter, most simple prescriptions, coffee, whiskey, stimulants. Also could get you dyes and things that duplicate common non-ingestibles like whoopie cushion potions that go off next time you're speaking to a crowd or earplugs that protect your ears when a foghorn goes off. For anything you can make, an inverse (usually harmful) is also possible with the same difficulty. Ingredients are normal grocery-store stuff. Rank 2 can do the same but with much-increased effectiveness and much-reduced side effects, like beer that gets you the fun parts of drunk without hangovers, blackouts, or vomiting. Not technically impossible to overdose on rank-2 duplicate potions, but very hard. You can also do complex prescription chemicals, fireworks, and crazy hallucinogens. Healing at this rank speeds up natural healing about 3x and never scars. Ingredients are still mostly mundane, but rarer, you'll need to check specialty stores.

Rank 3 potions no longer need to be restricted to things you can do to a body - painkillers don't need to worry about affecting neurons, healing can transmute injured flesh to intact flesh without thinking about how that could work. These potions can heal any injury, given enough time to work. You can also make alchemical grenades that explode in a radius of five meters, coating everything with a potion effect or just causing damage with force, fire, ice, etc. You don't always need magical ingredients, but mundane stuff will be rare enough you'll need special mail orders most of the time. Rank 4 potions can restore the recently-dead, give perfect focus, memory, or stamina for a full day, induce permanent love (necessarily mutual), or do permanent, instantaneous cosmetic surgery including cross-species traits. The grenades can have timers or land-mine triggers. Magical ingredients are always necessary at this level, and some recipes will require materials rare enough that they'll have to be sought out personally in dangerous areas.

Definitely interesting. She tentatively picks up three ranks in it, though she's not sure she'll keep them.

What was next... portals? Portals sound neat, let's hear about portals.

Portals! Mundanes mostly can't see or interact with portals, but all witches can, and it's possible to make visible portals. Three main types: attaching it to a doorway or archway with some trigger to activate it, making an object that will periodically cycle between locations, and cutting a hole in space, which is called a rift. Rifts occur naturally, open as fast as you can trace out the outline when done on purpose, and are quite dangerous - very little can hit the edge of a rift and not get sliced open. Rifts are a little tiring to open and moreso to hold open; the other kinds just take expensive rituals. No kind of portal can be moved while open.

The main ways portals improve with rank are range, number of simultaneous non-rifts, and size of rifts. You also learn to open rifts to elemental planes to throw fire or ice or lightning at things. At rank 1, your rifts are only a hand-span wide, and they can only connect about a hundred meters, less if you can't see the other end; the others can bridge a hundred kilometers but you can only have one. Rift diameter and range roughly doubles per rank, topping out at two meters wide and a range of two kilometers at rank 4; the stable kind reach quadruple the distance and go 1, 3, 6, 32 at a time. Shoving elements through a one-way rift opens up fire and ice at rank 2, lightning at rank 3 - lots, it can power a whole city block while you hold it open - and water at rank 4; they also get tougher to break as you go. At rank 3 you no longer have to trace out the edges of a rift, though it's pretty tiring to skip that step.

—how exactly does the rift lightsaber mesh with the no kind of portal being able to move while open—probably not that important.

She dithers for a bit, then keeps looking without taking any yet. The next one was... Divination?

(The lightsaber does not follow that rule. Yes, it's a weird exception.)

Divination is another one that's mostly discrete spells, which improve across ranks. They all handle information; mostly they get some for you. Or send it, for the rank-0 sending. Sending sends messages to and from anyone you've met. Voice, live image/video, or text all work. Fortunately it's easy to reject messages and block senders, even for nonwitches on the other end.

Identify starts at rank 1, which gives you public information about something you can see. It starts including 'detect magic' at rank 2, at rank 3 it can passively run and give basic information like you had a HUD - names! last time you met! avoid social embarrassment at parties! - and rank 4 lets it give you private information, unless they use magic to protect against divination. It won't tell you True Names, though. (Poking that concept will make it visible to April that she doesn't relevantly have a True Name, and neither does Gwen. It does tell her that her name's Gwen, though, which she probably didn't know yet.)

Status starts at rank 2, and tells you about harmful active effects on the targeted person or thing, and active magical effects even if they're not harmful. Want to check if a bird is actually a hexed person? Sure, status will help. It gets more information as you rank up, and by rank 4 it will extrapolate the near future - 'they'll be dead within the hour' or something - and suggest countermeasures.

Augury is also rank 2, and will answer a question about the near future: 'Positive', 'Negative', or 'Neutral'. 'Complicated' is not included, so be careful. A half-hour at rank 2, 12 hours at 3, and 48 hours at 4; also at rank 4 you can get vague senses of 'bad omens' for things coming in the next month, for yourself or for someone you meditate on while touching.

Rank 3 brings Archive, Foresight, and Map. Archive lets you store information you can see - speed-reading, photographic memory, or tracking an inventory of what you own and where it is, at least on the level of 'pockets'/'at home'/'in that warehouse'/'in the mothergift hammerspace'. At rank 4 you can store the whole of a book with a touch, and it gets much better at searching. Foresight is mostly used as a combat meditation; it lets you see a half-second into the future constantly, while it's active, looking like 'shadows' of current objects; it improves to 1.5s at rank 4, and then lets you take a second or three to focus and get a detailed extrapolation of what's coming in the next hour, given what things you already know. It will not help your paranoia, anyone can mess it up if you didn't already know they want to.

Map sends out a pulse across line of sight, and then gets you the structure of the space to look at however you like - blueprints, hologram, whatever. You can have it gather data passively by focusing on maintaining it as you move around. At rank 4, it can map retroactively - it grabs everything from your memories like you'd always been gathering data. It also links to the only new spell at rank 4, Lock-On; this lets you pick a location you can see while you're mapping, and then later target any spell at that location, as long as you're within 20x the normal range for that spell. This still does need to navigate its way to the spot, floating its way around like a paper airplane made of mana.

"I'm not really sure why Divination has an affinity for Life, to be honest. Mind, sure, Soul I get, but Life? Also, just as a warning, Alphazon knows how to duplicate all of it with magitech they don't need witches to run. Cyberpunk dystopia section, like you said."

"...can this mapping trick extend the range of portals or is that a no-go?"

"I haven't heard of it? But that might mean 'difficult' rather than 'impossible'. Lemme peer at them a bit? An Academic might be able to tell you the rules but I actually learn more looking at it in this form than any other time."

This involves a feeling kind of like someone using two fingers to push your shoulder off a wall.

Sure, okay, she will tolerate this.

Gwen slides in, and now she's sort of 'holding up' the concepts corresponding to stable portals in one 'hand', and the one for 'lock-on' in the other, intermittently picking them apart with a third. She 'hmms' repeatedly.

Finally there's an 'Ah!'.

"Okay, I think I figured it out. That would work for extending the range of the portal, but the part of the ritual that makes it stable is different, that isn't really something targeted. So the cost in materials and mana to make it stick would be just as high as if you'd done it the simple way - assuming you had the range for it. You have to have it mapped, so you still have to have visited. And maintaining a spell takes energy and mana, so holding the lock on the other end could get exhausting, especially while the spell travels back from point B to point A at a very slow walking pace. You can get a large range boost, it's difficult not impossible, but between the drawbacks and needing to have both of them pretty strongly to make it useful, most people don't bother."

"Huh. Okay."

But she likes both divination and portals enough that the combination is too tempting; she takes Rank 4 in both, at least on a provisional basis. How's her pile of power points looking now? And what are the remaining kinds of magic that she didn't have any affinities for? Runes, Curses, and... Necromancy, she thinks?