"Wow I don't wanna do that one."

"Yeah, I thought not. Should I explain mothergifts?"

"Yeah!"

"So, a hundred generations or more ago, one of the earliest witches, who we refer to as Mother, put a blessing on all her descendants, which at this point includes approximately every witch alive. Everyone, even those who don't put any energy into 'Witchery', can summon Mother's gifts - the Garment, the Hat, and the Rod. The classic witch's robe, hat, and wand or staff, and the Rod helps your magic a little."

"They start out plain, and without training in Witchery you can't change them. Put a couple ranks into it and you can summon and dismiss them instantly, replacing your current clothes or hat, and shift their shape by spending ten minutes or so meditating on the design you want. You can also turn the Rod into a broomstick, which starts out at bike speed but can go up to a car or with high ranks a passenger jet. High ranks also lets you put things in your hat or sleeves and pull them out later, a storage pocket in another dimension."

"Even at high ranks, that's all roughly at touch range - summon them in your hands or on your body, dismiss them if you can see them. Hat Trick, the other little magic I mentioned, breaks that - you can summon several copies nearby, move them around telekinetically, and jump into one hat and pop out of another like little portals."

"Both Witchery and Hat Trick match with every element, so they're fairly cheap; they're academic, but pretty easy to get a little training in."

"Oh those sound so fun! Is it redundant with -" She gestures at Hot Swap.

"No, without Hot Swap it will take a long time to change their shape and at any time they'll all be the same shape and size - with it, you could have staves, wands, dresses, suits, cloaks, even armor and weapons, and use them all interchangeably with your mothergifts. Excellent for being a very fancy fashionista, even apart from the practical benefits."

"Also for superhero purposes!"

Gwen giggles. "True that."

She will tentatively put... hmm... three?... ranks of witchery in her shopping cart next to Hot Swap.

"Okay, other small magic... oh, I missed a couple cheap ones, whoops. Fascinate has a lot of overlap with the siren voice; basically any time you're performing, you draw attention and people don't want to look away even if there are distractions. You also get better at performances of all kinds, and if you learn curses you can cast them via your song or dance. Energize lets you give off a little electricity - you smell faintly like ozone and anywhere within a dozen yards you can charge batteries and damage devices. You can send zaps further away than that, and in a storm direct the lightning strikes. And then an expensive one, Apex: that would make you a super-Siren; faster flight as a bird, your song would carry further and be more enchanting, easier to carry yourself on the wind even in human shape."

"That's everything unless you want to try your luck with the things I call adventures in unguided spacetime journeys, that essentially have another whole system of magic borrowed from another world, with a whole extra set of choices you have to navigate setting up without my help. I generally do not recommend them for most people."

"Wow, this is already confusing enough, yeah. The energized one sounds fun, and the fascinating one - I'll just have to give lotsa concerts, huh? For the mana and for fun. Do you recommend super-Siren-ing?"

"I think probably not. It's neat, but it's expensive - for that much energy you could get four ranks in almost anything."

"Gosh, that is expensive." She will leave it be and swing back over to the big magic. Hmmmm.

"I didn't explain most of the academic magic - it's more expensive, but you'll probably want at least a little of some of them. Aethernautics is another like Witchery that matches every element, so it's relatively cheap. That's the magic of traveling to parallel worlds, but you need high ranks for it -  the first two ranks just let you orient yourself to every star and planet you can see in the sky, and slowly travel through vacuum with some practice. Rank four would let you go into the aether, the space between parallel worlds, the same way, which can travel much faster. Aethernautics isn't too popular, honestly."

"There's also portals, which lets you make gates or touch-and-use portkeys to travel between places you've already been, and open rifts to elemental planes. Potions is about what it sounds like, at early ranks you can duplicate any mundane chemicals and at higher ranks stuff magically better. Runes is also 'enchanting', you use various concepts and put together artifacts that have magic effects. The first rank works with luck, courage, chill, and fertility - including reversing them; higher ranks get more obviously magical, like binding other spells into a bracelet or making blanket protection from magic and harm. Let me know if that sounds less annoying, I could explain more about how it works."

"Oh, 'enchanting' makes it sound kind of more appealing but still kind of Having An Etsy Shop. Portals sound neat though..."

"It is still definitely Having An Etsy Shop. Which I don't mind, as you can see" she waves around at the shop what she is actively having "-but I can see why you might not want to. Portals the main things that grow with rank is maximum distance and how many you can keep at once; for gates and portkeys they start with a max of fifty miles and you have to see the endpoint and be within a football field and you can only keep one, and at rank three you can keep six, and they can stretch... about from Chicago to New York. The rifts let you access unlimited fire or ice at rank two, electricity at rank three, and water at four."

"Before you finalize things, do you want to look at drawbacks and complications? There's usually some that you don't find too onerous, there's a lot of personal preference."

"Oh, yeah, sure, maybe some of them are fine."

"So these don't have elements but they still have affinity for warlock/sorceress/academic - the ones that match will give you more natural energy to work with. I'll note those where it comes up."

"I'll start with the ones that are fairly popular. Restriction bans you from a particular type of magic, like Consortation or Curses. You can pick up to three types for that. Like a Duck and Like a Rock make you lighter or heavier, respectively, which is fairly easy to get around - you can buy weighted clothing because Duck is so widespread. Eye Catcher makes you very attention-getting; people remember you, often just as 'the hot one walking by earlier' but it's hard to go unnoticed. Might be tricky with the tasks your patron wants. Witch Mark gives you an extra nipple somewhere on your body, which can be moved, but not removed or hidden, by shapechanging. There's Sensory Disability and Shock - you can make one of your senses either abnormally, often painfully, sharp, or abnormally dull. There's a couple variations on making yourself dependent on a substance or habit, psychologically or physically, and some of those are warlock-aligned. And Unveiled, which is one of mine - the Veil doesn't really protect me, I have to be careful not to let my scarf fly loose in public or it'd start causing metaphysical backlash when people saw my feathers."

"Let's ban Consortation! I don't wanna come within spitting distance of consorting with demons! Um... I probably wouldn't mind not having much of a sense of smell? Or being light and having to wear heavy things. Is there... any good place to put an extra nipple, it sounds like no big deal just a giant mole but I can't think where it'd go."

"I just have one a little below one of my normal nipples. I have to customize my bras a little but it's basically fine. Just to warn you: loss of sense of smell is pretty major. Like, if some meat falls behind the stove and is rotting, you won't notice for a couple days. And being very light makes swimming annoying - you can't dive without a bunch of effort, you're really buoyant. But yeah, those are all reasonable choices."

"If I take the water elementalism can I swim with that if I really want?"

"Yes but it would feel pretty weird, like the water was trying to reject you. ...That's odd - one of the sharp senses variants seems to have extra affinity to you particularly, I've only seen that once before and I think it was a patron playing games. You'd get extra if you took Touch Shock - it makes it so that you're more sensitive to pain and find most clothes and textures uncomfortable, most people with that end up wearing mostly silk and really finely-spun cotton, at least as an inner layer."

"Is it mostly just about clothes? I have clothes magic already, so I guess that wouldn't be awful?"

"Touch in general; you'd probably hate some oven mitts and types of silverware and types of wood in your furniture. But the big ones are clothes, because clothes are constant, and pain because it can be fairly debilitating when it comes up, and often that's the worst possible time to be debilitated."

"But this one... likes me, for some reason, and mostly I just shouldn't get hurt and have things that feel okay? ...can you tell why it likes me, is it Selaliel or what."