"Good luck. A real thing for us, by the way."

Click.

(Her Puchuu is napping - or pretending to - on the couch, curled into a fluffy little ball.)

She will go sit next to it. "Can I pet you?"

Puchuu wakes up and blinks sleepily, then shakes its head.

"Sure! Petting is nice."

Scritch scritch. "Tanya was helpful, thanks for giving me her number. But you can probably cover most of what I need to know. Apparently costumes are not practical by default and I can fix my clumsiness?"

"Your costume is going to be a big swooshy dress unless you change it! And as long as you have a relevant power or spend some coins on it, you can make yourself magically agile and coordinated, yes! Want to go over everything you need to know about awakening now?"

"Yeah, though I'll probably want to hold off on actually doing it till after I've met up with Tanya."

"Oh, you're going to meet up? That sounds fun, chuu."

Puchuu sits and focuses closely on her.

"Everyone takes the transformation differently. The things you'll get are already determined, and telling you about them is next after I go over all this to make sure you're not missing anything! Every magical girl has a costume that serves as magic armor, a magic weapon that they can summon to their hands, a transformation chant that you shout out to transform- But you can pick it!- A specialty that they can use to do fairly free-form magic as long as it's related to the specialty, a major power, and at least five minor powers. The powers are eclectic and not necessarily related to your specialty. They're just things you can do. Every magical girl also has a new appearance to go with their new magic. They look like themselves, but older or younger or maybe with a different body type. Magic also makes you much more capable in five broad ways while you're transformed. Strength, toughness, agility, magic power, and luck! Some magical girls can throw cars, and others are as fast as a bullet! While you're untransformed, you won't be able to use most magic, and the being-stronger effect mostly goes away. You'll be only about as strong and coordinated as a normal adult human while untransformed, but that's still the minimum, you won't be clumsy anymore even untransformed.

Puchuu pauses and head-tilts.

"Absolutely everything about your awakening can be changed in specific limited ways using bronze coins, and changed to almost anything you can imagine as long as it's not more powerful than the original using silver coins. The coins can also be used to increase how much strength, toughness, magic, agility, and luck you get when transformed. And a gold coin can get you new powers- A second magic weapon, or another major power, or two minor powers, all custom designed to suit you best. I have a gold coin, three silver coins, and five bronze coins right now, but the gold coin is really precious, chuu! If you want to use the gold coin, you need to promise to help out as much as you can!"

"I mean, I wasn't planning to just take the magical powers and not fight the civilization-destroying monsters with them but I will want to... ever do other stuff?"

"The other magical girls on the team still have time for school and sleeping and hobbies. Except for Tanya, she's almost always working, but that's because she chooses to."

"Presumably the time magic helps. What kinds of options do I have with and without the gold coin?"

Puchuu focuses and produces an illusion flickering in midair: Obviously her, but - taller, and her face subtly different, a bit younger looking perhaps despite the change in stature, and wearing a costume.

"Without making any changes, you'll have a fist-type weapon- Spiked gauntlets or boots, claws or gloves that emit bursts of fire, something like that. That kind of weapon makes you stronger. A bronze coin can make it a magic focus like a wand or staff instead, that will improve your magical strength!

"Your costume is currently determined to be an elaborate ballgown. The exact style and details are variable as long as it stays as fancy as that. It makes your magic stronger. You can also adjust this with a bronze coin, either to something loose and flowy like robes for physical strength, or something more like a uniform for toughness and stamina." (Helpful illusionary adjustments accompany this sentence.)

"Your major power is called Focused Assault. If you stand still and focus one one single foe, it allows you to overcharge your magic and your weapon attacks, to get through tough defenses! A bronze coin could change this to different kinds of special attacks, like big explosions, or a 'killing blow' or a barrage of smaller attacks. A silver coin can change it a lot more- To things like regeneration, a personal pocket dimension to store things in, or the Third Eye that lets you see magic even untransformed."

"Your minor powers are the Disguise Artifact- You get a trinket that can do disguises for a few hours a day and can call it to you like your weapon, Emergency Metamorphosis- In dire straits you can choose to get a lot stronger for a short time but also kinda turn into a monster a little bit, Magic Handbag- Gravity Maven says I should just say 'it's like Hermione's!', Improved Sustenance so you don't have to eat or drink or breathe much at all, and Gifted Magic- It makes you a lot better at using your specialty. Silver coins can change these pretty freely, do you want examples of some more minor powers? Oh, and a few minor powers like Gifted Magic also make you stronger. In magic strength particularly, for Gifted Magic."

"Good for Gravity Maven... yeah, I want more power examples." She grabs a page of unlined paper out of the printer and starts sketching, not that she's good at it but she can at least annotate a silhouette with frippery till it passes muster.

Puchuu cheerfully describes more powers! First, the swaps she can make on her minor powers with bronze coins.

Disguise Artifact to Escape Mechanism- If she's conscious but trapped, kidnapped, stranded, etc, she can teleport to a random-but-safe place! Once a week, and not if actively being watched or restrained.

Emergency Metamorphosis to Money Tap, a connection to a long-standing spell almost as broad as the Veil, a divine amalgam of a bunch of gods of wealth that passively gives her a couple grand in 'lost' mundane money each month, either in cash or in a card.

Magic Handbag to Absolute Direction, a power that- So long as she knows what she's looking for, she can always tell what direction it's in. Gets hinky if you look for things like 'the best Thai restaurant' or 'true love'.

Enhanced Sustenance to Wings. Which gives her wings that can magically lift her aloft; Though without another supportive power or some way to propel herself flight is pretty exhausting, though gliding is easier.

Magic Gifted to Cosmic Heal; An exhausting and draining healing power that takes tons of magic but can heal almost anything with time and focus.

A few other standout minor powers: Enhanced Weapon and Enhanced Outfit, Instant Transformation, Martial Instinct, Eternal Style (never deal with hygiene or cosmetics again and conjure mundane clothes at will!), or Sorcery (lets her learn a mundane method of magic that works even out of costume and can be taught on a small scale without the Veil punching back... Too hard).

Okay, she's not super into the disguise trinket or the emergency monster transformation. Does the sustenance one make her not need to sleep? She doesn't really object to eating and breathing most of the time. Absolute Direction is tempting but the handbag is also good. Healing power is tempting but it'll depend on how good magic gifted is in terms of what it lets her do, she doesn't have anything concrete on what being psychic cashes out to yet. Sorcery is going on the shortlist pending further detail. How long do non-Instant Transformations take?

Normal transformations take about twenty seconds. She can get down to just needing two or three hours' sleep with Sustenance.

Okay, not bad. Wings are tempting but if it's also exhausting maybe not that practical. Especially if she has an Escape Mechanism such that in any situation where she could fly she can probably also teleport.

The flight given by minor power wings at sixty miles an hour is about like a fast jog edging into a run.

Some other options for her major power include extremely potent regeneration and stamina, both magical and physical, so that anything that doesn't outright kill her can be healed up from; Or duplication that lets her make more of herself as hollow shells whose experience joins back into her when they run out of magic or get destroyed; Or the power of friendship that gives her a (not perfectly reliable) sense of how to make peace with and befriend other people, not just humans and magical girls, but even occasionally monsters; Or the power of Manufacture which gives her a suite of minor magic spells for heating and cooling and cutting and such and an instinct and mental catalogue of how to make most (non-magic) things really really quickly.

Flight and duplication and regen are tempting. Power of friendship is... she can't deny the practical upshot if it lets you get monsters onside (what monsters has this been done with, are they meetable?) but creepy.

What will her psychic specialty let her do?

"The psychic specialty is all about manipulating minds! Most psychic girls can track people and tell them apart, and make them afraid or asleep, or calm them down. You have to be pretty good to get more subtle and sense or change specific thoughts or emotions or senses. You can do mental defenses on yourself, and if you're good on other people. If you're really really good you can make permanent subtle mental changes in people and animals, like making people forget scary things or fixing bad habits. It doesn't work on things without minds, like robots or slime. Miss Evelyn even made some artificial minds in computers!"

"Who's Miss Evelyn?"

"Your great-aunt, I think you said. I can't tell for sure except that you're related."

"Oh. The present tense confused me, I thought she was dead - is she incarnated right now?"

"Yes, because Absolute Direction gives a direction, but it's through the Overworld and far enough away that the girl who checked didn't want to keep looking. I don't know why she left."

"I mean, presumably because she was understood to be dead."

"Maybe!"