Huh. How about that.

He takes a quick picture with his phone, on general principle. He double-checks the street names to be sure he hasn't mixed up which corner he's on. No, he was here last week on the way to that lovely park, and he remembers this bit because he was tempted to dally at the bookstore. The bookstore is still there, but now instead of nothing much being next to it, there's a couple of doors and then a strangely obtrusive little shop whose sign catches the eye all out of proportion to the number of recognizable letters that are on it.

Well. You only live once, as they say.

In he goes.

The door jingles. 

The shop is bigger on the inside than it looked to be on the outside. Part of its space seems to overlap with where, from looking at the storefronts, he would guess part of the bookshop to be. The space is packed with stacks and tables and piles of truly miscellaneous junk. 

An implausibly buxom woman emerges from a twisty corridor of stuffpiles. "Oh! Hello."

"...hi," he says, refocusing on her after an initial glance around. "What does the sign out front say? I couldn't read it."

"It says, 'Witch Awakening.'"

"Does it now."

"It does! Can you guess why?"

"Is it, perchance, because you are a witch?"

"That is part of it."

"I'm gonna need a hint or two, you're the first witch I've met. Probably. Definitely the first witch I've observed making a store appear that wasn't there last week."

She makes an abortive gesture as though suddenly remembering that some people don't like their faces touched and therefore booping strangers on the nose is not appropriate. 

"The other part is that you are a witch."

Well. In potentia."

"...go on," he says, eyebrows raised.

"What I do is I 'awaken' new witches--draw out that potential, and guide the new witch in making it real. There are choices to make, in every awakening--well, in every guided awakening--and it's up to fully neutral witches like me to find that potential among the mortal crowd."

"I see. And what should I know before I decide whether to accept this favour?"

"Well...there are dangers on the other side of the Veil. Monsters that want to hurt or kill you, Outsiders that could drive you mad, other witches with a bone to pick. But the average life expectancy for a witch is still much higher than that of a mortal human. Ah, the other thing is, turning into a witch tends to turn you into a girl. Although, with a guided awakening, that can be prevented! It would cost some portion of power, but that's still more power than you'd have if you didn't become a witch. And you have a particularly bright aura, so it probably wouldn't be too large a portion of your power."

"I can't say that I'd be all that upset to turn into a girl, actually. Well, I suppose it would be inconvenient to explain."

She waves a hand. "Oh, the Veil covers that." 

"...how so?"

She hops up to sit on a low table, barely avoiding dislodging anything, and crosses her ankles. 

"The Veil is a piece of magic that prevents the Masquerade from blowing wide open at the slightest provocation. Part of what it does is ensures that people don't notice magical things in their midst--for example, most non-human witches will be perceived as human by a random mortal; the mortal just won't notice their cat ears or duck head or antlers or what have you. And another part of it is that when a witch's human-compatible traits, such as gender, change on awakening, people tend to just fail to parse this as remarkable. They won't forget that you were a man before today, or fail to perceive you as female going forwards, it will just generally fail to occur to them to assign any particular significance to the combination of these facts."

"I suppose people do sometimes do that even without magic being involved. So tell me more about these monsters that don't manage to negatively affect my life expectancy."

"--Well, it's not that monsters couldn't possibly kill you, but most monsters are much less dangerous than a well-trained witch, and if you don't mismanage yourself entirely then you certainly oughtn't to die of disease or old age, and you can live somewhere where other people will reliably take care of any monsters that show up."

"Fair enough. All right then."

"Most witch species don't age at all, and even neutrals--essentially human witches--can generally find something before their clock runs out."

"'Find something'—meaning immortality?"

She waves a hand. "Well, unagingness, generally, immortality proper is a bit more difficult generally."

"Hmm. An improvement on the human situation regardless."