There are nine things, two of them the same, but one of them feels distinctly more technological even if she doesn't look too closely.

And now she has a slightly ominous-looking black cube with fractal engravings, buzzing faintly. (A sense she gets from Energized will feel it has a power pack that does not need charging and is probably charging itself somehow, not that she probably can interpret that all that precisely yet.)

"Yep, that's a Hex box. Your phone will connect to it automatically."

"Ooh, buzzy," she says, shivering a little. She gets her phone out of her pocket.

"Your browser's default search will probably be redirected to Oracle, and you can find Hexmail from there. I'll give you my address if you want to ask questions; for a lot of things you can check WikiVeil, and WhereHunter overlays portal and pocket dimension locations on top of Google Maps, and ghost and monster sightings if there are any. Arcadia College has at least a couple entrances in Chicago, and they're often a good place to look for odd jobs, or turning mana into Kisses."
Beat.
"...Kisses meaning money. The main magical currency is Witch Kisses. They look like metal coins but they're mana in solid form. You can make them yourself slowly, but there are chests you can use to do it quickly, and you can rent one for a small cut of the money anywhere there are a lot of witches."

"Huh, cool. But regular money also works? We're, y'know, comfy."

"Oh, good. I'm kind of used to giving kids the good news that they've found their ticket out of poverty for a lot of people, but better not to need it."

"Mm-hm! Not that it won't be nice to have the career options, but for my immediate silk clothing needs it's good." Hexmail. Probably "rebecca" is taken?

It is, but rebeccadillard is free.

"You should probably take a look at Arcadia - and maybe Hawthorne - for other reasons; Arcadia has good classes in magic and everything else and it's free for all witches, and Hawthorne is pretty exclusive, and very strict, but their magic professors are the tops of their fields and have mostly been teaching for fifty years without slowing down. You want to be in the twenty best in the world at something, apply to Hawthorne."

She doesn't want her last name on there, because one day she hopes it will change! How about "songbirdrebecca".

"I can't be, can I? Since there are people who can do five ranks and I top out at four?"

That's available too.

"A lot of those are lazy. At least by Hawthorne's definition of lazy."

"I think... that possibly... I am lazy. - except about singing but it kind of sounds like they are about magic and not about being a Disney princess."

"I don't think their music is particularly good, no. Anything else I should cover before you go... I could give you the short versions of describing the other big factions in the world, I covered the schools, Watchers, and Alfheimr but there are four other big players."

"I can be pals with Watchers and still go to a different faction's school, right? But yeah, please."

"You can. Arcadia takes anyone, and Hawthorne specifically does teach a lot of Watchers. Also a lot of Hespatians, despite them being rivals. Speaking of: the Hespatian Covens are secretive cults, a lot of them, loosely associated with each other. The nicer ones are hedonistic sex cults and do orgy-rituals; the nastier ones have rituals including human sacrifice, occasionally consensual but rarely. People are often semi-open about being Hespatian but always secretive about which kind and which cult."

"I didn't see any orgy ritual magic on my options!" And a good thing too!

"That's their faction-specific magic tradition. All the Big Six have their own, but you have to associate with them for a good while to get tutoring."

"Oh. If someone wants to buy my golden fish in five years does that mean they're evil?"

"No, there's other uses for voluntary sacrifice. And, to be fair, there are some perfectly lovely Hespatians who know how to do the human sacrifice but would never consider it. They're a small minority but they exist, I've met some."

"Okay... who else've we got?"

"Next, Lunabella. It's a city on the back side of the Moon, nicknamed 'New Olympus'. It's absolutely gorgeous and they have so much magic that even the poorest Lunabellans have really good lives. But. Their government is weird - legally everyone is a slave, including the king, who is a slave to the constitution; making sure you're healthy and happy is the personal responsibility of your master. Also, even by Veil standards they're very sexually open, you see people making out in public while you're walking down the street."

"Gosh."

"That's most people's reaction. They're... lovely people and it works for them, but I have no idea how they... got there."

"Also, uh, Veil standards?"

"I mentioned we're more liberal about sexuality and gender, I think? Partly because a lot of mana charging methods are very intimate, or outright sexual - nymphs charge by making people feel intense desire, dolls charge from serving others, orcs charge from having blood-children, mimis charge from head pats and massages. So it ends up being that people's baseline for how much intimacy with not-particularly-close friends is normal gets higher, and that ripples through everything else, so people are much more physically demonstrative in public, and you'll regularly see, like, people in a D/s relationship who quietly wear a collar while they're working an office job or out doing errands."

"Gosh."