"Troubling," she agrees. "I'd be tempted to investigate, but being required to have a familiar does not sound like my jam. Is forging my soul into weapons and armour as dire as it sounds?"

"This one I've seen before, and it looks like you can choose to make it dire but that's an edge case. Some people behind the Veil have these things without witchhood, and some witches who take it vanish and are never seen again, but unless they're lying about it, that's because they got shunted off to some other world. Or universe. It's supposed to be impossible to destroy the things its forges and really hard to get them away from you, so... stay out of Hell and don't pick fights with greater demons and you're basically safe?"

"...I think I'll pass. Okay, how about the big long list of names, what do those all do? It's by and large not obvious."

"Sure, quick versions in ascending order of price: Prestidigitation does a bunch of small things, whoever wrote D&D had apparently seen the actual list because it's basically the same. Skimmer Dancing lets you walk on water, or other liquid if you want. Gunwitch lets you replace your Rod with a gun, can still broom it or ride a rifle like a broom. Also you get absurdly good with it. Transformation Sequence lets you Sailor Moon it up and switch between your current form and witch form. Most magic can't be done in apparent-mortal form. Levitation gives you perfectly-controlled flight, as fast as your broom. Memorize lets you see any physical maneuver and instantly know how to copy it flawlessly, permanently. You can be physically male with the stupid name one. Beacon Gates let you use fires as small portals, but you have to light them or know them very well, and mostly can't use magic through them. Blood Witch does elementalism with the element 'blood' and lets you replace mana and materials with blood and human sacrifice. And then, huge jump in price here, Aspicio Mori lets you look closely at any living thing in sight and determine how to most effectively and efficiently kill it."  

"...what are Beacon Gates good for, what's their range, do they combine usefully with normal portals..."

"Easier and faster to set up than stable portals, not going to strain you like holding open rifts. Looks like range is worse than the rifts you'd have now, but if you reuse one a lot, say the fireplace in your home, you'll be able to stretch the distance, fifty kilometers or so is achievable with a decade of daily use. That's the highest known range but there's not a known hard upper limit. Also a little dangerous to use if you aren't a firecaller or Fire-element race, in case one end goes out while you're using it."

"Well, luckily for me," she says wryly. "I like 'no known hard upper limit', anyway. And I like Transformation Sequence but I probably shouldn't, going around unable to do magic so I can keep my featherless face sounds like the bad kind of tempting idea. I'll think about it. Okay, next section?"

"Drawbacks, then. There's a lot, so short summaries again. Let's see, the ones I think you might like first:

All Natural: All your choices stay, but you forget and don't get anything until something naturally triggers it. Fate-guaranteed to not get preempted by death or disability, but no timeframe guarantee. You'll remember me again once it kicks in. This one's big, enough to get you all of Runes on its own.

Restriction: one type of magic is barred to you, you don't even get rank 0. Small, but you can take it up to three times and the first time counts double because it's sorceress-like. But it can't be elementalism unless you have the affinity for it.

Tsundere: if you don't watch anime, this means 'very bad at showing affection'. Fit Witch: you need to work out regularly to keep your magic working at capacity. Witch Mark: you have an extra nipple somewhere, which is in all the witch-hunter handbooks. Can't be removed, but can be moved. Those three are all in the 'small, but counts double' category.

Like a Duck, or a Stone: respectively very light or heavy, especially in water. Small, 'Duck' gets the sorceress bonus.

Any of those sound worthwhile?"

"...sorry, 'very bad at showing affection' like a curse that changes my personality? Pass. Some of the others aren't bad. When you say type of magic, do you mean, say, I could ban myself from the Demonic Bad Idea Zone for profit?"

"More or less to the first, exactly that to the second. Any others you want to hear more detail for?"

"I would love to ban myself from the Demonic Bad Idea Zone for profit." She does so. "How much does All Natural tend to suck?"

"Well, enough that at least a fifth of the time it involves dying and then resurrecting as whatever race you're going to be. It's hard to quantify how much pain and suffering that typically involves, so I don't have a great picture."

"...admittedly pretty yikes, but hey, if I get to be immortal afterward..."

"As my awakener told me: Temporary drawbacks are usually worth it. Maybe it sucks for a century, but you've probably got thousands of years ahead of you, and you'll have the benefits that whole time. I didn't go with this one but she was wise."

"...yeah, I think I'll go for it. What more can you tell me about the experience of being very light, being very light sounds weird."

"You weigh the same as a duck, and are therefore a witch... Well, more than a duck, technically, but Monty Python has poisoned all our brains. Reduces your mass, but not your strength; it's a common enough drawback that you can buy weighted clothes to compensate, and that works fine. Makes you easier to blow around in the air, but weights help with that anyway. Water specifically will reject you - no matter how much weight you add, you'll be supernaturally buoyant and have to expend active effort to go below the surface."

"Man, see, that's just wacky, and I'm conflicted about whether it's worth it because I'm having a hard time imagining what it'll be like."

"Yeah, some of these make more sense than others. Hmm, if you try to 'open up' the cluster for this, you'll get some predicted-sense-memory of what it's like. It's this one; you might need to grab deeper than you've done with others."

She tries it. Tell her your secrets, weird little abstraction-cluster thing.

holding on to a flagpole as a sudden storm gusts

diving in a pool for a falling metal ring and fighting for every inch

kicked by a small giant and flying through the air

There's a small feeling of discontinuity before

flying as a phoenx in a light wind, everything as it should be

...huh. Interesting.

What decides her, ultimately, is that sense-of-wrongness again, insisting that blowing around in the wind is not correct as a way for her to be. In fact it kind of feels like the opposite thing would Feel Right, but it also seems like it will lead to drowning a lot over the course of a long enough life for the risk to come up, and she is not into that. Pass on both.

"Yeah nah. Okay, so where does that leave me..."

She relinquishes the Incorrect Duck Feelings and tries to get a sense of what her arrangement looks like all together.

Looking at the reddened web of things she's picked for her, she can see it slightly reshaped around the largest things she's selected.

On one side, the powerful elements - Lifeweaving and Firecalling, splaying out slightly like a trumpet horn. On the other, the equally-large but 'tenser' and more dimly-'colored' pair of Divination and Portals. There's some tension in the web between, space where weaker magic is being pulled sideways to support the network; her moderate skill with Windkeeping and Alchemy are bearing most of that strain, with Familiarity and the many minor elements supporting them.

"Oh, that tension is a constraint, though one that doesn't bind tightly on most people; it mostly comes up with the rare rank-5 talents. Trying to make your magic too 'top-heavy', maximum power into a few things with no intermediate-power sidelines, can be a little unstable. I'd recommend you not try to add another rank-4 from here unless you scrounge up the power to add two smaller things, rank 2 or 3 or a good-sized small magic like Beacon Gates, first. Worst thing that happens is a small uncontrolled drawback cropping up, no bigger than Like a Duck, but that's worth avoiding. You shouldn't need to worry about that after awakening, if it does affect you you'll feel the strain yourself. And at that point, it won't hit you with backlash, you'll just get sick and unable to make the change stick. Migraines are the most common illness there."

The pool of power she has to dole out from here is more than half the size of what she had at the very beginning, though most of it feels less vital than that initial pool did. The eighth of her current pool that is original stands out slightly - it's ready to grow over time, and this new power isn't.

"I mentioned that you'd grow to about triple what you started with, in time? That doesn't apply to power acquired from drawbacks and things that were cheap enough to cost less than nothing. Though there's a twist you can put on them that makes the boost affect your long-term capacity rather than your starting power. That's generally only worth doing if so many drawbacks appeal to you that the power you get from them is more than you started with - that's not stable either, this early, so you can just push that into the room for growth and it'll sit there."

"...I mean I guess that's better than wasting it if I can't think of anything to use it all for right now... I have not met that many drawbacks that appealed to me, though. Are there more of them?"

"There are. Quick descriptions, ascending order of reward given:

Rejection: Animals don't like you, nature is unhealthy when you're around.

Dislikeable: People dislike you for some reason.

Cold Heart: You dislike people for some reason.

Inadequacy: Impostor syndrome forever.

Dysphoria: Your body feels the wrong shape forever.

Crutch: You need tools to work, and need to prep the tools in advance.

Eye Catcher/Hideous: distractingly attractive/ugly, gets unwelcome attention, can't be fixed by shapechanging. Hideous is twice as big.

Addiction/Requirement/Compulsion/Fixation/Kryptonite: Variants on needing an unusual experience/material/mental state on a regular basis. Power varies.

Unveiled: Veil doesn't protect you, masquerade is still enforced on you.

Sensory Disability/Shock: some of your senses are very weak/very strong, respectively; this is very unpleasant."

"Huh. I'm not sure I'd mind being distractingly attractive, I can always bail out and go to Mars if people are being annoying. And strong senses are maybe useful, if I can figure out how to handle them. How handleable are they?"