The first time she sees the store, she stomps onward, determined not to be lured in by advertising when she has a destination in mind.

The second time, on the way back, light rain and a cup of hot chocolate have put her in a more adventurous mood. She ducks inside to get out of the drizzle and looks around.

"Welcome to Wake's Curios! Can I help-" Gwen does a subtle double-take. "Oh, nice, I definitely can. Today is your lucky day."

"...Go on," she says skeptically.

Gwen is (as always when at work) wearing a scarf and a loose drapey thing which cover the feathers on her neck and shoulders. In a practiced motion, she sweeps them both off, and leans back to show off the ways sirens don't look quite human.

"Magic exists!", she says with a grin.

After a pause (a siren isn't going to skip a chance to take someone's breath away), she continues, "And you get some of your own. If you want it, that is."

That's uh. That. What.

"...my own feathers??" she blurts, bewildered.

"No, that's just for my... race. I Awoke into a witch, and so can you. Lemme see..."

She summons a very precise breeze, and suddenly April's hood is being blown up and back, and the sleeves are billowing out and flapping around her arms like she's standing on a subway's exhaust vents at full blast. Just for a second or two.

"—hey!" She grabs her hood and yanks it down, scowling.

"Fine, say I believe you, what then?"

"Then I temporarily lock the door and close the shutter, you take my hands and meet my eyes, and then I guide you through the process of Awakening and making the choices that come with it. And fill you in to the basics of the world behind the curtain. You can get that part even if you don't want to Awaken today, though I do recommend it."

"How about explanations before mystic rituals."

"Fair enough. So, there's a masquerade. Important safety tip: do not put strain on the masquerade. It is metaphysically important that most people think the world follows straightforward physical laws. If that breaks down, we either get Heaven and Hell fighting a war with all of Earth as the battlefield, or Earth and most of its interplanar neighbors stop existing. Telling your immediate family and significant others is fine, telling your fifty third cousins and your Intro Philosophy seminar not fine."

"...okay, so, first of all, yikes?"

"It's easier than it sounds. First, it supposedly takes a lot of strain and hasn't happened for sixty-five million years. Second, there's something called The Veil, which makes most people just fail to notice magic things. Most of the time, I can take the bus in a t-shirt and no one will notice the feathers, except people who have witch potential or are particularly credulous about cryptids and magic. And, like, I'm pretty sure Bigfoot exists, but even people who believe in him will only get the grainy bad photos unless they're magical themselves."

"...and the grainy bad photos have not yet destroyed the universe, okay, sure. Go on."

"Yeah, we're pretty safe. There are two major witch schools, four other major witch factions, and two mortal-focused groups in on the secret - I'm not in any of them. And then there's the Outsiders, who everyone else agrees are Kill On Sight. You know Lovecraft? That's the Outsiders. The less you know about them the better, and I mean that very literally."

"Ooookay. What, uh, is a 'mortal-focused group'?"

"The big six are all majority-witch, but Alphazon Industries and The ORC are about 80% ordinary mortal humans, 10% non-witch magical species, and 10% witches. Alphazon is a bona fide international megacorporation straight out of a cyberpunk novel, and they have a monopoly on designing and producing most magical technology. They're pretty amoral, but they pay very well, and pay their witches extremely well. The ORC are like Interpol with bigger guns; mostly they keep the Masquerade intact from people on both sides of the Veil, but they also do ordinary law enforcement behind the Veil and more than their share of Outsider hunting. They're very militarized, which would be more concerning if it wasn't obvious that they totally, totally need it."

"Wow, okay. Are there any... non-terrifying crowds to hang out with."

Gwen's smile turns a little wry. "Well, how do you feel about religion? But yes, the College of Arcadia is completely nonthreatening. Liberal arts-and-magics school in a cluster of pocket dimensions, free registration and room and board to any witch whatsoever, classes in everything and low requirements for students, and has a very cute little town nested around it. I went there for a couple years. They're polite rivals with Hawthorne Academy, who are more 'strict boarding school'. They have corporal punishment - no lasting scars, but witches are tough - and if you go way over the line it can escalate from there. But most people who enroll stick with it and say it was worth it. The best of the best in any field are usually four thousand years old, but the ones who are less than a millennium almost all went through Hawthorne. Also, Hawthorne's rules keep them well clear of Outsider contamination, and Hawthorne's admin claim Arcadia has at least a minor infection somewhere on campus at least once a term. It's not proven but it's plausible."

"...I should mention that as an Awakener, I'm specifically required to give every faction except the Outsiders as fair a shake as I can. And if you want to get involved with Outsiders, I'm going to push you into the process on your own and shove you out the door but I'll let you do it. There's a treaty."

"...there are people who want to... of course there are," she snorts. "Okay. Is there... a good reason to want to be the best of the best, like, is this a rat-race situation or an ultimate cosmic power situation or...?" Probably it's somewhere in between, most things are, but you never know.

"There are some Powers of the Cosmos or whatever you want to call them who claim to be former mortals, but they're all old as heck, nobody knows if they're lying except each other. Power tends to get you wealth and safety. And if you have grudges against Alphazon, or ORC, or the Hespatians or the Watchers or some subfaction, or some other political goal, maybe you decide that Hawthorne is a necessary step. Or, like, any reason for normal people to go to Harvard, you know?"

"But an unambitious life is going to be a calm, comfortable, and long one, for basically any witch. We don't call humans 'mortals' for their fragility; even Neutrals live twice as long and just about every other race has a way to cheat death, usually repeatedly and robustly."

"...well, colour me intrigued," she says, only a little grudgingly.

"Yeah, nice fringe benefits, you know? Like, if I die, if someone recovers my body and gives it mouth-to-mouth a couple times a day, I'll revive in a week. If all that's left is a skull, I'll probably be back in a month. Sirens like me gain mana from breath - startling someone into skipping a breath, or just directly inhaling the air from someone exhaling. It's a little weird and intimate, most race's way of charging is."

Blink blink "what?"

(More confused than appalled, but not not appalled.)

"About the method of revival, or the mana charging in general?"

She blinks and shakes her head slightly. "Uh. Both, I guess? I was not expecting... any of that. How... do you tell what kind of nonsense somebody has? Or am I just gonna roll the dice on whether my resurrection method is skull makeouts?"

"It's consistent per race and that's either the first or second thing you'll pick. And everyone I've ever Awakened had the option of Neutral, which is basically just normal human plus magic. And you can back out any time before we hit the big red button and actually perform the metaphysical changes."

"You can buy immortality separately, though it's expensive and you'd be working and saving for a decade or three to get it. There are a lot of Neutrals, so making revival potions and runework contingencies is a common high-end career."

"...how does picking what race you are work? Is this some kind of weird genetic memory bullshit?"

"Yeah, sounds about right. You have, if you're average, blood from six or seven different races in enough quantity to matter. You can pick any of them, and if you have enough recent ancestry you might be able to take parts of two together, and shove some of your natural magic potential into making them fit right. That's pretty rare, but I've seen it twice and they were happy with it."

"What else is on the menu?"

"The other big choice is how you improve. Academics study, Sorceresses practice, Warlocks do favors for a Great Power that's their patron. It's possible you will be cut off from one of them, but I've only seen that once and it was me. Warlocks know who their patron is before deciding, and generally you have several options there."

"...sorry, wait, cut off from what?"

"I didn't get the choice to be an Academic. I still have no idea why."

"...weird. What does 'practice' even mean, anyway?"

"Like weightlifting but with the magic rather than your muscles. Like, with windweaving I might practice lining up a row of empty paper cups and blowing just one out of place today, and tomorrow practice moving ten pounds of weight strapped to a kite. I spend a couple hours a day on it."

"And Academics, what, read up on magical theory?"

"Pretty much, though I think when you're pretty advanced you start writing it, and occasionally doing experiments. Also, each of the three has some other perks, things they're better at."

"Such as...?"

"Academics get efficiency for slow magic, sorceresses get more oomph and more elementalism options, and warlocks get to take some magical artifacts and sort of staple them to their souls so that they can't lose them or be kept away from them. Also warlocks don't usually have diminishing returns to how much work it takes to improve, until they hit their maximum capacity. Warlocks are... weird."

"I'm not so sure I'm keen on stapling anything to my soul."

"Then you probably don't want to be a Warlock. I don't think their patron is quite as stuck-on as their soul-relics, but it's certainly hard to get rid of. Though also, you in some sense already have some of that. One of the standard things everyone has is a gift from a woman far enough back that we're all her grandchildren - hat, cloak, and staff, stuck to our souls, summonable and dismissible at will. They're called 'Mothergifts', though no one remembers Mother's name anymore."

"Spooky. Okay. Anything else to explain?"

"I didn't get to the other four of the Big Six. The religious ones are Watchers and Hespatians. The Watchers aren't precisely 'the Christian witches', they include Muslims and Jews and others and they're not attached to any church, but everyone thinks of them as the Christians. They have ties with Heaven, which definitely exists and has angels, and with a Great Power they think is the Abrahamic God, which other people mostly don't believe them about. Hell also exists, and has demons; a lot of witches can summon weak ones. Nobody claims to be Satan, but there is a Mephistopheles, and he offers his patronage to everyone."

"Concerning. Is he as bad an idea as he sounds?"

"The favors he'll ask for will take less time and less effort than just about anybody's. But they'll be evil, and he does claim possession of your soul, if it ever permanently departs your body, which, you know, is probably difficult but not impossible. I'd recommend against it, but unlike the dozen other pride demons who will also offer to be your patron, there is a certain perspective from which he's a reasonable choice."

"I'm supposed to be fair and balanced about patrons, too."

"...still sounds like a pretty fuckin' bad idea to me. Uh, no offense. Anyway, continue."

"Yeah, I agree, just, well. Anyway, Hespatians. The Hespatian Covens are secretive, and very, very old, though there's kind of a Ship of Theseus thing where the oldest current coven is probably not nearly as old as the Hespatians in general. They have lots of political power, and varying degrees of ethics, there's rumors about assassinations and blood sacrifices and they never confirm anything but don't try to squelch the rumors either. They consider covens families, and if you're in, you have some powerful friends who will go to bat for you for just about anything. Everyone but the Watchers is on speaking terms with them, despite - sometimes because of - the rumors, and they have a lot of very secret rituals which are demonstrably very powerful. According to most Hespatians, they gave up the versions that involved human sacrifice centuries ago, and now it's all voluntary and mostly about breaking taboo rather than blood or violence. But no one denies that those old rituals existed, so everyone side-eyes them when they say that. I think at least four covens out of five have honestly given up the sacrifices, but for the other fifth, who knows? And it looks like they like it that way - probably if you cross a Hespatian they're a modernist, but one chance in fifty that they'll break out some ritual that sacrifices five people to lock away your soul until someone breaks in and destroys their sanctum, or whatever, is more danger than most people want to take."

"Dare I ask what you have to do to get in with the human-sacrificing witch mafia?"

"Well, having never been initiated, I don't know what their initiation ceremonies are like. But they are pretty happy to take in new witches with no affiliation to anyone else. They won't be ride-or-die for you right off the bat, but you'll be in, and within a few years you'll be part of the family. As far as I know. Which is, you know, well-informed, this is my job, but don't ask me to place any bets on it."

"Nevertheless I think I will probably pass. So who does that leave?"

"Alfheimr and Lunabella. So, both ways we're leaving Earth. Lunabella gets called 'New Olympus', and they're on the far side of the Moon. Legally, everyone in Lunabella is a slave, including the king, who is legally the property of the Iron Tablets, which are basically their Constitution, written back in 660. But the tablets are very strict about rights of slaves, you can appeal anything straight up to the King and, if he doesn't act, the Founders, and they do act pretty quickly. The low women on the totem pole in Lunabella probably live in more abundance than any of the other Big Six, though Arcadia's trying to steal the title and parts of Alfheimr aim to be as good or better. There's a lot of duties about the upkeep of the city and the air bubble, which you will of course be commanded to do by your mistress."

"...aaaand moving right along...?"

"Yeah, that's most people's reaction. Play tourist there sometime, though, it's lovely. Anyway, the Alfheimr Alliance. Rather than up, they're sideways - they're an alternate Earth, one a little closer to the Realm of Chaos - I can get into the cosmology if you want, but it probably won't come up in your life absent a couple rare races with extraplanar resurrection methods. They're the realm of the Fae, with a thousand or million small feudal countries who feud with each other intermittently. The Summer Court are relatively authoritarian, rigid, and legalist, generous but with very intricate codes of law and propriety about what Lords and Ladies may do to their inferiors and what the inferiors must do for their superiors, and which rights they have, sometimes only if they're familiar enough to cite them. Sort of Lunabella Lite, mixed with the classic stories of the Sidhe. The Winter Court is chaotic; most Winter Ladies hold power through charisma and personal power, and things shift regularly. You - probably not you right away, but in a couple years if you start on the high end of new witches - might secure a castle by espionage and blackmail, by being rich, or by fighting some particularly dangerous beast - they have a lot more of those than Earth. But then someone might try the same on you, and your legitimacy only lasts as long as you can convince everyone else it should."

"And that's the Big Six. There's a bunch of smaller ones, but the only one I know well is the Awakener's Guild, and you don't seem like the type."

"I do not feel that I am the type, no," she agrees. "Well. That all sucks. But at least I probably get to be immortal, which is cool." Assuming she is not currently being scammed, never a wise thing to assume.

"You do not have to join anything. Keep a close eye on HexNet - that's the masquerade internet - if you don't, for warning about monster movement, Outsider activity, and maybe masquerade warnings, but plenty of people go it alone. I can maybe give you tailored advice if there's a particular suckage you want to avoid?"

"Monster movement?"

"There aren't many on Earth, but they sometimes leak in from other worlds. Dragons, hydras, yetis, fox devils, various gribbly things - lots of them are people, but some aren't. Witches can fight them off pretty well, unless they're taken by surprise. Anyone with at least rank-3 elementalism is nicknamed a 'Hazard', or 'Disaster' or 'Calamity' if you're stronger than third, and we get asked to go drive them off, or kill them if necessary. I'm a Hazard twice over, windkeeping and earthmoving; most sorceresses are."

"Ooookay. So what's your tailored advice if I want to just... quietly and comfortably be immortal and not get eaten by monsters and not have to deal with anyone's politics or weird boarding school vibes or Perfectly Reasonable Space Slavery. Or is that not a thing. Is there anybody living on Mars? Can I move to Mars and farm potatoes in a dusty red valley? Eh, it'd probably strain the veil if the robots found me."

"I don't know of anyone on Mars; you have to be rank-5 portals to use them to go anywhere you've never been, and if anyone's picked Mars yet, they didn't publicize it. So maybe they didn't want visitors any more than you. Probably would work if you can get there, though, the robots have covered, like, a few city blocks.
But, hmm. I think I emphasized the wrong part of the Winter Court for you, actually. If you just plop down a house in some established duchy and very emphatically say you're not getting involved in any power struggles unless someone attacks you, you'd probably get knighted and then only interact with the local lady when a new one sends you a messenger to tell you you nominally owe fealty to her. A friend I Awakened does border patrols in winter and doesn't talk to anyone but her partner for weeks at a time, though she probably fights their wildlife more than you'd prefer.
And if you don't mind being very careful about the veil, you can just get a big house, out in the suburbs or the sticks. The exchange rate from mana to dollars is very good, you can probably get a twenty-room house built to order in a year or two. Faster if you deal directly with Alphazon about it, but their contracts are, well, I'd rather sign theirs than one from Mephistopheles but it's still pretty Faustian."

"I will be staying far, far away from the cyberpunk dystopia section of this wild ride," she says firmly. "It can't be that tough to be careful about the veil, right?"

"Depends how much magic you wanna do, and which kinds. Runes and potions in your basement? Easy. Elementalism? Hard. My serious practice I pay to use Arcadia's gym, because it could be seen for a block around if I mess up."

"...fair. Maybe the Mars colony is my best bet after all. Or I can sign up for one of those jobs caretaking a decaying castle in the middle of nowhere in Europe."

"If you want to stay away from the big flashy stuff, you can do that - some of the smaller options you get while shaping your Awakening cut you off from some options to give you more power to use on others, and 'give up all of elementalism' is the kind of trade you can make. But the castle takes a lot less care. Travel to Mars would be... years, unless you can manage the portals, which takes rare natural power. But I'll probably ask around about it, I'm curious now."

"So how does this Awakening thing work, and do I owe you anything for it?"

"It's a soul-synesthesia thing, you acquire some temporary new senses. You'll see sort of a web of places you can put down bits of your natural power, which will shift in how 'close' and 'big' they are as your other choices affect it. Nothing is irrevocable until you reach the end and very specifically will it to be complete - usually I mentally shield off that action so you also have to push me away, to be extra sure you don't do it by accident. We'll be able to talk while you consider, which will feel normal though in some technical sense it's not actually our mouths and lungs doing the speaking. The only thing I need from you is contact information that will stay good for at least a year afterward; I try to keep in touch, help people out when they're new and arrange some favor-trading when they're more experienced, but if you're sick of my occasional check-ins by next year, that's fine, I'm not relying on it. There's a stipend that pays me, and I do actually make money - dollars and 'Kisses', those are basically crystalized mana - off the shop."

"Speaking of which, what is up with the shop?"

"It draws the attention of people with witch potential, and some, but less, of people who are already behind the Veil or are just generally credulous about magic existing. And lets me get a better view of which of those apply than my native magic would. It's also not always in the same place - like, can you actually remember which cross-street you were at before you walked in?"

"I passed it twice." She thinks back. "I can't swear it was on the same corner both times, though."

"And it probably won't be on that corner tomorrow either. I don't actually know how that works, both the movement and the attention-grabbing are standard issue from the Awakener's Guild. The woman who Awakened me has a crazier one, doors open on five continents and a weird time bubble that makes it so everyone who opens the door meets her at a different time even if three doors open at the same wall-clock time outside."

"Wacky."

She thinks over everything she's heard so far.

"...you said I can back out anytime, but can I try again afterward, if I screw something up and have to start over, or if, I dunno, I dither for three hours and have to run home and come back another day?"

"Definitely. If you wait months or years, you might have less natural power available, but that's not going to be more than, like, 10%, and there's never on record been a measurable change in less than a month. Also, if you leave and then come back looking for the shop specifically, I'd bet you find it within an hour tops."

"Mildly spooky, but in a convenient way. All right, I guess." She eyes Gwen dubiously.

She extends her hands. "Whenever you're ready."

She makes a sort of wryly skeptical noise and takes Gwen's hands.

She meets her eyes, and then they both start experiencing some unusual senses. It's somewhat like sight and somewhat like proprioception for a body neither of them had a minute ago, and it's pretty obvious that Gwen is 'supporting' April. The web has three main branches from here, two of which are really large clusters and one of which immediately splits off into dozens of smaller ones.

"The one on the 'left' is class - and you have all three, looks a bit thin on potential patrons but you'll have a few options if you want to explore that. Over on the 'right' is race, and you have some rare ones, might take me a minute to work out which races they go with. The other cluster is the disadvantages and weaknesses I mentioned that can give you more power. We could skip to types of magic, but I'd really recommend picking at least a tentative race and class before that, how difficult they are to learn changes a lot based on your 'affinities'."

"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?"

"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."

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?

She's down to just under a tenth of what she started with; if she puts her left hand in, takes her left hand out tests one of the unpicked 1st ranks and then pulls back and compares, she'll see that she has enough for two of those. Not much.

"If you want to look at everything, there's Runes, Curses, and Necromancy, then minor magic and drawbacks. Where to?"

"Let's tour the rest of them before I move on."

"I am shocked, shocked, that you are looking at everything. I would never have guessed after how you totally skipped over Consortation. Definitely."

Runes is about learning fragments of the First Language which are inherently magical, and using those concepts to place stable effects on an object (or with the right tools, like those tattoo inks she was offered, directly on a person). Each rank learns a couple concepts, which can be reversed -  Chill into Warm, for example. Most of them are pretty straightforward, though they all have pretty clear limits on what they can do that April can inspect if she wants to look closer. Guessing what runes and amounts of mana and materials will go into a complex effect, and what rank it will count as for ritual time and skill requirements, is something you get intuition for with practice.

The rank 1 concepts are Luck, Fertility, Courage, Chill, and Augment. Augment is mostly about magical combat - you pick an affinity and have something get resistant to it, or reverse get more vulnerable to it. Rank 2 has Disease (usually used reversed for sanitization) and Heavy. Rank 3 brings Wind, and Talent, which enhances (or inhibits) coordination, reflexes, memory, and other aspects of picking up practical skills. Rank 4 has Spell and Warden, which are arguably each other's reverse forms. Spell imbues an effect from another type of magic into an item, like a Familiarity boost giving you your cat's grace imbuing into a belt you can give to someone else. Warden items dispel magic on contact, or suppress permanent effects for several hours.

"I love this," she admits. "Too bad I can't afford it. Next?"

"You'll have more power later; the part up front is generally about a third of the total. And drawbacks can give you more now, most people consider some of them a trade worth making. Like the Veil doesn't protect me, and that was good for two ranks of Divination and a bit more."

"Ooh, good to know. Okay, next up was... Curses?" She doesn't have high hopes, from the name.

Well, as an alternative to a prison system, cursing someone to "never do X or you'll suffer" looks pretty good. You can attach conditions to curses so that they won't trigger until that's met. And it's possible to curse someone with positive effects, just awkward.

There are five basic curses - Sickness, Pariah, Madness Berserk, Disaster, and Spellbind. Sickness ranges from a bad cold that lasts a day at rank 1, to a potentially-lethal fever with vomiting at rank 4 - tough people can survive without medical care, but it's hard. Pariah causes hostility in animals, from all bugs within ten meters at rank 1 to all nonsapient animals and even plants within a couple kilometers at rank 4. Berserk goes from 'just' a rush of incredibly strong anger at rank 1 to 'feral hunting predator with no memory of self for hours' at rank 4. Disaster at rank 1 causes spontaneous tripping for a minute; at rank 4 it lasts half a day and causes seizures and potentially-fatal accidents. Spellbind takes some other magical effect, with all costs and preparation taken care of, and binds it to take effect on the target when the desired condition occurs. Rank 3 lets you curse a big group at once, and has the Voodoo curse - initially they just feel anything you do to the doll, and at rank 4 you can puppet them.

"Arcadia and a lot of Alfheimr use conditional curses instead of prison, at least as an option on the table. It's... probably better, assuming it's not one of those things where they are going to just do the thing again anyway no matter how much they know it's a bad idea?"

"I can think of very few careers I want less than 'cursing people who would've gone to prison otherwise'. What's the next one again? Necromancy?"

"Yeah, it would be intensely unpleasant even in the best cases. Necromancy, to get this rounded out:"

Necromancy: seeing spirits and interacting with them! Plus working with corpses. There's still plenty of corpses involved. Being able to see spirits is rank-0 necromancy, which also lets you see the true form of disguised demons and some similar things. Most dead people pass on to an afterlife (usually some deity who claims them), but some stick around rather than get reaped, and witches can see those.

Rank 1 necromancy lets you make spirits visible to mortals or make spirits which hide from witches reveal themselves, and animate a few small relatively-intact animal corpses at a time, to act roughly as they would if alive. You can also contact a deceased spirit from its grave, though it may refuse to answer and you might get something unpleasant on the other end of the line instead. Rank 2 lets you take spirits you have managed to subdue and purify them, which restores their mind and can flag them for definite collection by a reaper. Most of a dozen dog-sized animal corpses are yours to reanimate, and you don't need them to be single-sourced as long as you have all the important parts from somewhere. Also, you can do elementalism-like tricks with bones, which improve from here.

Rank 3 lets you grab two dozen human-sized corpses, and if you convince a spirit to anchor to one of them, that one will stay animated if you lose focus on it or go to sleep. Also, use runework on bones if you like. Rank 4 lets you have nearly a hundred animated bodies, as big as whales if you can find (or make) the bodies. The fake animals will now be able to fly, swim, or do magical things they could do in life, even if the body doesn't really support that. Your bone-kinesis now extends to the living flesh and bone of anyone you want to make suffer, though this can be warded against pretty easily by witches. More pleasantly, you can cut out the middleman and directly send a subdued and purified spirit to the afterlife of your choice, though the divine proprietor may send them right back if they disagree.

"So, on that cheery note: Drawbacks next, or minor magic?"

"Let's see minor magic, so I can get my wishlist all filled out before I start taking sketchy surveys for cash."

"Heh. Right, let's see what's on the table..."

They mentally glide over to the web of small effects which take energy to open up a cluster.

"Okay, two here that will give you power, actually, and one that's free. Witchflame is basically a party trick, but you have affinity and class-match, so you'd net back a point like elementalism. Jack-of-All is a hybrid drawback-boost thing. You'd lose access to rank 4, but you'd get extra power worth the first three ranks of Runes, plus get very good at 'every mundane skill', which is not considered an exaggeration from what I've heard. Heritage would be free, though you might not like the retroactive Fate nonsense it entails."

"For the normal costs-power stuff, I'll just give you the names. Transformation Sequence, Prestidigitation, Blood Witch, Gunwitch, Beacon Gates, Aspicio Mori, Skimmer Dancing, Memorize - that's a very physical/embodied one, name's not great - and Levitation. Plus the one which the standards choose to be prudish about. I refuse to call 'trans- your -sexual to male' 'Elephant Trunk'."

"The list is actually longer, there's five other things involving multiple universes and Fate nonsense. They get good reviews if you get guided through them, but I am not at all qualified to guide those; you'd get results mostly chosen by chance and Fate. Your call."

"...every mundane skill is a lot of things!"

She'll take Witchflame, whatever that is, for the free power.

"What kind of retroactive Fate nonsense is Heritage?"

"Choose a relative of yours. They're retroactively a potential witch, or possibly retroactively already a witch and have been hiding it from you. You do not get to pick which of those it is, though if you do pick this I can scrutinize it and give you a pretty good guess which it's going to be. They'll be an average rank-3-capped witch and you can make a couple nudges about what things they specialize in which will probably work. Supposedly really good Awakeners have more control over it."

"...that's weird and fucked up, like, how does that even work, how is it a thing that can work—?"

"I don't know and I'm not sure I want to, it's crazy-making enough as it is. I think it's more like divination that predicts what decision you'd make far enough in advance to set it up than actually rewriting history, but the more I thought about it the more disturbing it got, so I decided to just... stop doing that, as much as I could."

"...you do you, but I don't think that solution is gonna work for me. I don't have any relatives who I want to see turning up as witches, particularly, anyway. Speaking of which, what are all the things with Fate nonsense that you didn't name and I probably shouldn't take?"

"The thing that made me finally stop thinking about it was the idea that examining it too closely might be inconvenient enough for Fate that it decided to retroactively squish me. Probably not true but gaah!"

"Anyway, adventures in unguided spacetime journeys: Get entered into a duel to the death between people with magical-beast souls grafted onto you for fabulous prizes if you live. Meet an ancient witch who will decide to teach you secrets of the multiverse. A magical-girl subculture also inducts you - which would be less concerning if I'd ever met one or heard of someone who had. A goddess introduces you to a little pixie companion who's been waiting for you. Someone lets you use your soul and mothergifts as raw material for blacksmithing into a weapon and/or armor."

"...hypothetically speaking, and I can't believe I'm saying this, does my extra super fancy immortality protect me against dying in duels to the death? Like I imagine I wouldn't get any prizes that way, but I wouldn't be dead, yeah? Or do you not know the answer to that?"

"I have a sort of flyer for this, let me see... You won't be a witch going in, not entirely clear whether you'd get the race enhancement or be an ordinary firebird. It should just be a failure, but the ones who run the deathmatch are from a Hell of some kind, so don't rule out some sadistic exact-words trick."

"I should prooobably pass then. Secrets of the multiverse sound fun, though, what's fucked up about that one?"

"Actually that one might be fine, it looked like the others but I haven't checked too closely. Give me a minute."

There's a sound of keys clattering at a computer...

"...Okay, this one seems basically fine. It will make you interact a little weirdly with the Veil, there's some other kind of Veil created differently and you'll be subject to both. There's a choice in there to get one enormous wish for whatever is your 'true heart's desire', which might not be what you think it is, and that can do arbitrary Fate bullshit in the course of implementing it. But if you steer away from that, it should be fine."

"...wacky. I sort of wish I had a clearer idea of what some of this stuff actually meant. How much does it cost?"

"Life affinity, so... about the same as you paid for Portals. If you want her to teach you multiple things, you can take it more than once."

"How many Veils can one world have? —speaking of which, what more can you tell me about the magical girls one?"

"All the things you'd learn from her would be covered by a single second Veil. Magical Girls... presumably have something resembling a Veil too? Let me look."

"You pick a 'nice' emotion to be powered by... Or some 'mean' ones, actually, or just 'perverted', that's someone's idea of equal opportunity. You get mana from the emotion, have tools and a familiar... looks like that's required... You can pick from a slate of powers but that costs extra... I'm not seeing anything that should keep these girls from being noticed; the 'nice' ones mostly can't be recognized by crowds but the 'mean' ones can and do, as can anyone who chooses 'cute' as their power emotion. Honestly, that's more concerning than there being an explanation of their second - third? - Veil."

"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?"

"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."