"She did and there was no associated name. For Witch Mom. The awakener was called Penelope."

"I assumed your awakener had a name! I did not admittedly assume it was Penelope." 

"I guess if a powerful witch wanted to eccentrically refuse to have a name that would be something she could achieve probably but I don't think any of us were going to guess it."

"Maybe she just liked the idea of being a blank slate for everybody to project mommish feelings onto."

"See, personally, if I were going to do that, I'd be like, 'my name is Mom,' not, 'I have no name.'"

"What if that led people to transliterate and not translate it?"

"Enh, that wouldn't be so bad? If I had that concern I suppose I'd probably go with 'Mama' instead of 'Mom,' that's more universal I think..." 

"Huh, is it? Neat."

"Well, it's one of the first things a baby can say, I think, and I know that in Mandarin mother is also Mama, although I don't, off the top of my head, remember the tone. --It's one character repated, that I do remember."

"It's not in Japanese. I guess maybe really little babies say it but it's not as far as I know one of the words for mother. It's maman in French but French is related, the Chinese one is more suggestive of universality."

"Yeah, if it were only Indo-European languages I would just assume a common root and call it a day." 

May finishes her fruit salad and tells her maid hand to bus her tray and then to go put on the Maple Leafs t-shirt and put the other Maid Hands in the summer camp shirt and the Red Cross shirt.

Then it is time to dive back into the BOOK HOLE.

Wulong biology is pretty weird. There isn't, actually, any wholly physical reason for Wulong blood to be weird colors; it consistently contains hemoglobin and not hemocyanin or anything like that. Reflecting other colors of light instead of red light seems to be a magical effect, but they haven't wholly cracked what the active ingredients of the magic are. Wulong scales are also magical; there's serious debate over whether wulong blood should be considered a potion and wulong scales runes/relics or whether it makes more sense to categorize magical body parts as a separate thing. Wulong antlers are pretty ordinary bone structures; her spine does, in fact, run all the way out to the end of her tail, and this did in fact give her more vertebrae instead of elongating the ones she already has. 

Hell is...an afterlife. Not, generally, a very nice one. It has an unknown but large number of layers with different balances of power; there are powerful demons that rule multiple layers and powerful demons who rule fractions of a single layer and powerful demons who don't rule anything at all. It has been speculated but not confirmed that all of Hell answers to a single power greater than any single known demon. It is known that at least some demons are ex-mortals; it is not known whether all demons are, or if demons reproducing with other demons in Hell results in a baby demon, or if they just sort of spawn sometimes. The two authors don't disagree on any substantial details, although the Watcher author approaches the topic from a deontological perspective and the non-Watcher from a consequentialist one; the two books have substantial areas of non-overlap on details, and the Watcher author lends substantially more credence to the "Hell has a single big bad boss" hypothesis and assumes it to be basically the Christian idea of Satan.

Demons who answer the summons of consortationists tend to care about A) whatever "sin" they, personally, are themed around, and B) not being in Hell. Aside from that they are pretty much just people, although disproportionately traumatized people who have been normalized to concerning levels of bad things happening to people. 

Historically speaking, the most common species of witch in Japan has been Neutrals, with Hannya a close second. Kekubi, Oreads, Dryads, and Mimis also have substantial populations. Japanese Wulongs make up a fairly small chunk of the Japanese witch population but a relatively large chunk of the worldwide Wulong population. They have a slightly lower per-hatpoint population than China, on about the same level as Korea, and higher than anywhere else. 

The lady who invented blood apples is a Neutral witch from Lunabella, a sorceress who specializes in Naturalism, which is absolutely what was used to invent blood apples. She has invented dozens of other magical plant species but blood apples are the only one that have caught on to the point where a supermajority of witches will have heard of them. She's still alive, still on Lunabella, still messing around with plants, has three husbands, a wife, and a grey tabby cat familiar. 

Over the course of the next days until classes start, she gets a mission for one Favor to take this set of directions through the portal network to find a witch who had an accident that didn't injure her badly enough that it will take a high-rank spell to heal her, but since it's a head injury she's pretty out of it and vulnerable, and heal her. 

Huh, what kind of magical are her scales, can she make cool potions with 'em?

PER-HATPOINT!

May can bop through the portals to go Lifeweave the witch. She's doing a lot of passive mana recharging and minting Kisses is annoying so she's good for it.

Her scales aren't very magical, but their physical properties don't totally line up with their composite materials; they're approximately just made of keratin but much tougher than her fingernails or toenails would be at that thickness with no serious structural differences to explain it. They can absolutely be used in potions. 

Cool. She will ask her alchemy teacher when she has an alchemy class what potions they're suitable for.

Arcadia offers a lot of flexibility about when to attend classes - you can basically slosh around between sections as much as you want even mid-cycle, if you aren't trying to meet a specific classmate and it isn't a one on one lesson like her voice lessons are. May arranges her alchemy class to come first, since she has already started working on potions, shortly before her voice lesson slot, and zips there a few minutes early for the slot in question.

The lab is spacious but still manages an aesthetic of cozy-cute; lots of big windows propped open, herbs and dried flowers dangling from the ceiling, hand-labeled glass and clay jars in charming mismatched colors on shelves and tackleboxes full of ingredients under all the lab benches, recipe books piled up on the teacher's desk and along the windowsills. The teacher has a hydron of her own (or maybe she's borrowing it), up at the front of the classroom, and has added more of her cute colorful-bordered stickers of the kind that all the jars have, stuck to some hydron mouths to mark what they've been used for. One is SECTION 4 SPARKLE SPLASH REDUCE UNTIL 3:00 and two are marked SECTION 2 DEMO STIMCURATIVE COMBO with the first having "stim" underlined and the second "curative". One is marked THAMINA'S COFFEE DO NOT STEAL!!

May has joined this teacher's section 1, and walks in and chooses a seat in one of the high barstools at the front left bench. The blackboard says If you do not have your own preferred way to heat potions, take a hot plate! If you do not have your own cauldron, borrow one out of the cupboard in the back! and she grabs one of the hotplates on her way to her bench and sits down, summoning her hydron into place.

"Ooh, you have your own hydron? Nice." 

The girl who sits down beside her has a solid pewter cauldron with hanzi carved into the outside and has also grabbed a hot plate. 

"It was part of my warlock bribery package, it's neat. Yours is super pretty though."

"Thanks! My mom got it for me as an Awakening present. I went Sorceress but my firecalling isn't good enough yet to heat potions all by myself."

"Ooh, it makes perfect sense that there would be awakening presents but it hadn't occurred to me, I just ran across a magic shop while I was out and about and the lady in it was like, good news."

"Oh, yeah, my mom and her mom and so on have been witches for, like, ever."

"The gender skew puzzles me."

"I can't say I know what's up with it. I mean, I have a brother, he's still a brother and not a sister, if you're not willing to pay the points to stay the same body type you could just take a pretty androgynous figure and bind, you'd think..."

"I do not know from personal experience but I think they are likely to be pretty attached to anatomy that doesn't include. Wow, what a sentence to say before introducing oneself, I'm May."