"If you can plan ahead, it's very manageable; the main problems are usually when you get blindsided by some situation you didn't see coming. Someone ambushing you with a stinkbomb or lighting a signal flare right in front of you or whatever. Too much senses is not as big a power boost as too little, I maybe should have ordered that differently."

"Can I pick which senses I fuck up?"

"Yep, pick any of the standard five."

"Might want to flip my eyesight to 'too good' just to spite biology, then."

"Sounds good. Get some really thick sunglasses, though, sunlight will be almost blinding."

"Damn, unable to escape the curse of wearing glasses all the time." (She is not, in fact, wearing glasses.)

"Or squinting! You could always be squinting at people. Keeps them on their guard, too."

"Bonus empirical testing of the theory that your face will get stuck like that!"

She examines her constellation of power and mulls over her options. The drawback for being uncovered by the veil gives her more points than the perk for having a transformation sequence takes away, so she picks those two up as a pair, though she's not sure this is actually a good idea. She also definitely wants Beacon Gates... and the drawback for being obnoxiously pretty, sure... and is that enough to leave her sufficiently balanced to take rank 4 in Runes? Let's find out. And maybe she wants Hexes too, transmutation seems like a fun game, but...

"Is there a plan for the thing where doing Hexes consumes quartz and stuff? Like, is there a way to get matter back from the uncaring void, or are we just gonna run out of quartz like modern industrial civilization is just gonna run out of petroleum only worse because burning fuel doesn't delete it from existence?"

"For most mundane ingredients elementalism can produce more,  and most magical things are produced by magical life or natural processes in high-background-magic areas. Also there are elemental planes, which are very large and more magical than Earth; they probably are self-replenishing at a sufficient scale. Quartz you'd probably need a rank-4 Earthmover with practice creating specific minerals, but it's definitely doable."

"Don't tempt me, I'll end up all unbalanced."

She does in fact grab Earthmoving up to rank 4, and rank 3 in Aethernautics which she remembers liking, and... "Man, can I reasonably take the extra heavy drawback or will that make flying suck and be bad? I guess I could pick up Levitation alongside it but it looks like they'd just cancel out in power..."

"Flying would be awkward and tiring, but you'd still be able to fly. You can actually take both Stone and Duck together; you'll sink in water, get knocked around like you were light by impacts, and have them mostly cancel out the rest of the time - you end up heavier than normal but not double-weight like for Like a Stone alone."

"...bizarre... I dunno, I think I'd hate getting knocked around like that. I have the instinctive feeling that punching me should be like punching a brick wall. Would levitation get me out of trouble with drowning, though, and make flying suck less?"

"Drowning, yes, definitely. For flying... probably? Definitely it would make it easy to stop in place and hover, that wouldn't be tiring."

"Guess I'll dither about it some more then."

She gazes wistfully over her collection. Runes is such a cool thing to have but it's so expensive...

"Most witches pick either Runes or Alchemy, not both," Gwen volunteers, "They're both versatile, but time-consuming, and common so you can trade. Though if you are going to stay pretty solitary, that might not apply."

"Yeah I am gonna be not so much with the trading. And Runes is cooler than Alchemy. But it's more expensive and there's a lot of cool stuff to go around! You see my dilemma."

"If you wanted, you could swap race to Sword and shuffle all your affinities around; that would leave you with a Rune affinity, Metal. And you can just learn one or two ranks now, and study and practice later."

"Absolutely not, immortality quality trumps everything," she says immediately. "...thanks for the suggestion, though. Hmmmmm. Any other bright ideas or stuff I haven't seen yet or might be overlooking?"

"Hmm, I usually don't suggest it because it's letting Fate mess with you and in some sense short-sighted, but you can funnel off some of your natural power to arrange for certain relics to come your way. They wouldn't be stuck-on like Warlock relics, it's just things that you will get given, or mysteriously inherit, or find for $5 in a curiosity shop - I think it's been mine occasionally, but not for anyone I've Awakened, I just have new witches walk in every few months and happen to find something that I don't remember ever stocking and definitely wouldn't have priced that low if I had. Once you have them, you can lose them, or use them up, or trade them away, or whatever you like."

"Most of the ones the patrons offered I could set you up to get - the elemental pearl of affinities came to mind for the Rune question, but it would cost nearly as much as rank-4 Runes all on its own. I couldn't set you up to get the battleship or the tame Outsider amulet, but the tattoo inks, the armor, the lightsaber, definitely, or if you want your own Kiss minter. Any of these you could save up for and buy yourself eventually, which is why I don't usually recommend it."

"Think I'll pass on that one. Wait, what's a Kiss minter exactly?"

"I mentioned it with Hexes, I think? The thing that lets you turn mana into Kisses in bulk, without wasting time minting them one at a time. Other than races with really high mana generation and low capacity, most people who want to make a stock of Kisses borrow one and pay a cut to the owner."