"So you might choose to start out with... the first two ranks of alchemy and portals, or instead get the first three ranks of windkeeping, and those are roughly the same amount of energy. That would let you make potions that did anything mundane chemicals can, but better, and make little portals a foot wide that cross a football field and one or two big gates that reach over a hundred miles. Or on the other side, gale force winds, enough wind to fly in humanoid form, and 'solid air' that can hold a lot of weight. With me so far?"

"I don't actually have a good sense of how strong gale force is but go on."

"Here's where it gets complicated - and I can give approximate numbers if you want to do arithmetic, but it's clinical and not perfectly accurate so I usually don't. If the elements match up - for a siren, the elements are usually called 'wind' and 'beasts', there are a dozen others - then it's about a third less energy. Windkeeping, naturally, is wind magic, so you could stretch the same amount of energy to four ranks, where you can make tornadoes, throw around cars, make a little lightning. Elementalism like windkeeping is mostly serious combat magic, especially at higher ranks."

"For class, it's mostly a discount to get the basics. Learning the very basics of alchemy or portals as an academic actually gives you a little energy, because it's a natural part of the class. Elementalism has sorceress affinity, and the rest of the major schools, the complex ranked magic, is about evenly split between academics and warlocks."

"Do a lot of people need... combat... magic... what am I saying, there are demons."

"Demons mostly only get out when summoned and bound, so they're less of a problem than you'd think. But there are also monsters. Griffins, rocs, hydras, dinosaurs, chupacabra - you name it. It's rare that they get to Earth, but other worlds have more, and some like Alfheimr have a lot more. Wandering knights with powerful elementalism are an institution there, and an important one."

"Alfheimr?"

"The Alfheimr Alliance is both a place and an organization; it's the Summer and Winter Courts of Faerie, which is one of the alternate Earths and also the source of most of the myths and stories of fairies. Alfheimr is one of the Big Six - the big factions of witches, sort of like countries, that most new witches choose to join. I already mentioned the Watchers; the other four are the Hespatian Covens, the city-state of Lunabella, and the two schools - the College of Arcadia and Hawthorne Academy. There are also two other big organizations which are Veiled but mostly composed of non-witches: The ORC, which are a law and Veil enforcement organization, and Alphazon Industries, which is an enormous megacorporation."

"Whoaaaa, faeries. Neat."

"Yeah, I prefer a peaceful life to an exciting one but I have some good friends who are knights in one of the Winter Courts."

"What are the Watchers, like, structurally, if they're not a school or a country and they're not even quite a church..."

"They have branches for every major strand of the Abrahamic religions, each of which collaborates closely with the others and with the celestials. They all coordinate with their churches, most of them pretty closely and Catholicism is one of those. They mostly don't act proactively in the world, just to oppose Outsiders and demons that get loose - that makes them unfriendly with the Hespatians, who can rarely be proved to be responsible but it's usually an open secret it was some coven's fault. Full-time Watchers usually take some job or position that lets them, well, watch. They are pretty sure an apocalypse is coming, and they want to be ready to respond to it. Other Watchers just keep in touch with their local churches and witches and pass on anything relevant, and occasionally get requested to deal with a problem or support one of the full-time agents in their job. They can teach you celestial summoning - technically it's called 'ministration' - which mostly is about doing acts of particular virtue that appeal to individual classes celestials so that they can descend and do favors for you. And they have a pocket dimension headquarters granted by an archangel a couple centuries after Christ, Eden, but not the actual Biblical one, just an imitation."

"Oh no, why's an apocalypse coming?"

"I don't know, and I never got the impression they were all that sure. Prophecy? That's not a kind of magic ordinary witches can get but it exists and I think angels and demons both have shown they can have it."

"Oh dear. Okay. Uh, so I don't know if I understand all this math but I think I get the general idea... I'm not a great, like, school person, just okay, so maybe I don't want to be an academic?"

"That makes sense. Take a look at sorceress or warlock, then? Sorceress is the one that 'looks red'."

Poke!

This node feels lively, active, and primal. The parts of the web that turned blue and came closer go back to where they started, and a different set of nodes turn reddish and come closer, most in a different fan-out of webs. A sense in which most of them were only barely connected recedes, and they all feel properly tied to her part of the web.

She can feel the magic flexing like a muscle, and there's a sense of oomph that attaches to the magic, a prophetic? memory of making the wind and fire and water move more fiercely, wrapping the elements around with her soul, which is pink, to control more at once.

"Sorceresses improve their magic the same way they improve their muscles - practice and exercise, both for strength and control. We're also the masters of elementalism - other types of witch can only train in the elements that match their race, and maybe one other; sorceresses mostly have at least a little of everything, and can train more of as many elements as they like. As a siren, you will definitely be able to do windcalling, but there isn't anything for the element of beasts except for very special cases, which we aren't."

"That cluster that pulled closer are the Elementalisms - 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. Sorceresses also have an affinity for working with and empowering familiars."

"What color is it showing you for your soul? I've never learned to interpret that for myself, so I'm always curious."

"Pink! Like, coral pink. What's having a familiar like, it's not just going to be a pet, right?"

"Nice. Mine's the same yellow as my feathers. Familiars are a spirit in an animal's form, and they get smarter as you put more magic into it. You also get some traits of the animal - like if you had a goat you might get very good at climbing and be able to eat anything, or a cat you might always land on your feet and have great night vision. You can pick, and you can pick some weird things if you want - the witch who awakened me has a cow familiar and for some reason chose for one of her borrowed features to be having an enormous bust. If you go all the way to rank four, you'll be able to shapeshift into your familiar's shape, and vice versa, or any intermediate form."

"That sounds... neat but I'm not sure it's that neat?"

"Yeah, I don't have one. But communicating with animals and spirits and being more like your favorite animal is pretty nice."

"My favorite animal is dolphins, so I guess that could be kind of fun, but I was going to do the whole, being a bird person, thing."

"It's true, sirens get the best bits. I am a little siren-patriotic, not gonna lie."

"It sounds awesome!"

What is the green dot?

As she touches it, 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 her 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.

"Warlocks advance their power by completing tasks and quests for their patron. That's usually less work than it would take for a sorceress or academic witch, especially as you get to the higher tiers of power, but you don't get to pick what it is in advance, and you can't always pick when, either. Most patrons are gods of some kind."

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 cluster that are similar to each other is the demons; the brighter one is Mephistopheles, the rest are various pride demons who are basically just Mephistopheles but less powerful. They offer to everyone, but I'm going to assume you're not interested. The other patrons I haven't seen often enough to tell you what they are blind. These three are the strongest and probably the main ones worth checking out - I think this first one is a celestial."

The celestial turns out to be an archangel Selaliel, who listens to mortal prayers and sends her warlocks to covertly answer them. Mostly ones from similar faiths to the ones the warlock holds, but there's some sense of Selaliel being kind of confused by how mortals and magihumanity understand religion and not being able to get that right all of the time.