"One hour every day, or extra to make up slack. Strenuous, no sitting on a yoga mat doing stretching, but podcasts allowed while you run swim play soccer whatever. Never gets worse than fifty percent worse than best performance fixed up with five hours exercising. Two extra points if you let slacking instead drain you all the way - you are underlyingly elf not empusa, so not fatal. Exercise does need to be in chunks, half-hours at least, so compulsion slightly dicey but probably designable to be good for you."

"I was thinking I might compel myself to go out for a jog - a half-hour jog, I suppose - every time I tie my shoes. I suspect if I did this I would come to regret it, but it's so tidy, you see. With of course the option of tieless shoes for those times when a half-hour jog is just not in the cards. But aiming to manage it at least twice a day. How much in the way of magical riches would that come to all together? With, let's say, the two extra points for being reckless with my charge."

"If you tie your shoes twice a day usually to go for two jogs, eight. Plus four for the needing exercise in reckless version."

"And if the weather's miserable I can find a gym with a treadmill and bring a shiny pair of running shoes to it. And when I am trying on shoes in a store I will just have to bring a little barrette to secure the shoelaces with and decline to explain myself. I think it works! I'll take it. What else was there... am I forgetting any drawbacks? Oh, there were the limbs. I think I'm still going to keep my limbs. It would be so silly to do all this jogging and have no legs left to appreciate it. Right, how many points am I up to now?"

"Thirty-six! Get spendy!"

"Oh, I mean to! Let's see... I am so very sorely tempted by the fairy ring but I think I'll hold off on that until I've gone another round of less expensive purchases. I remember being tempted by alchemy and portals, I'll go up to three ranks on each of those, and up to three ranks each of earthmoving and naturalism too since I remember something about those coming with damage immunities and I love not being damaged by things. And I wanted the full stack of divination but shied away from the price, I'll take the full stack of divination. Am I in the red yet?"

"Not yet! Fifteen more to spend."

"What more can you tell me about that performance power from way back in the tidbits section? What counts as performance for it? If I want to be the world's most scintillating conversationalist at will can I do that or must I sing and/or dance and/or do standup comedy?"

"Must perform. Bardic arts, like. Conversation will not do."

"Is standup comedy a bardic art? Not that I hanker particularly for it, but it's good to know one's options."

"Standup comedy is! Also fake magic, with the cards and things..."

Lenore considers this.

"I am not," she says, "quite the person I would be, if I decided to pursue a career in faking fake magic with real magic and using more magic to draw spectacular crowds about it. But I've just imagined her and she's pretty fantastic. Okay, I'll take it. I might not have a use for it but it'll bring me joy just to have. Which leaves me with... thirteen points, I think? And is there anything left to spend it on that we haven't covered?"

"There are faction magics. You can only take them if you are going to affiliate, though."

"All right, tell me about factions and what it would mean to affiliate with them."

"Eff-why-eye, I am officially neutral! This is an awakener requirement. Every faction is full of pros and cons and amateurs and the innocent. All are big. All would squash me like the big butterflies if I were doing propaganda about somebody they didn't like. I am neutral. You do not have to be! I will not become offended."

"Understood. Go on."

"Each also has a little perk that comes with, but quick overview -

"Most popular in my years as awakener, Arcadia. Party college - good academics, but, relatively speaking, very party - but it is in a magic pocket dimension. Faction magic is called digicasting! It is like that Yugioh TV show almost - silly and fun making things from books and TV and suchlike come to life or lucid dreaming them. Efficiently conquer Skyrim or whatever it is you do in Skyrim while you are sleepy.

"Hawthorne Academia, ancient and traditional and extremely not party! Rigorous school - minimum power requirements to get in but you clear them by miles - and old-timey hitting-people kind of disciplinary situation and uniforms and mandatory classes but very good pass rate. Faction magic is wands - dovetails nice with your crutch complication - and it does many fun little utility dealies.

"Watchers! Abrahamic interfaith society. Probably does not play too nice with Hestia but they have Mormons and Shiites and Jews, oh my, all under their umbrella. Magic is summoning angels, like consortation but, well, angels.

"Hespatians! Many isolated cell-type covens, 'families', doing all kinds of arcane thises and thats. Usually not favored by Consortation-restricting types as they have headquarters in Hell. Faction magic called occultism - is rituals that do little utility things but spookier ones than the wands kind, and also you have to be very naked or very clothed and high ranks doing blood sacrifices of fuzzy animals or tantric funsies or both.

"Lunabella! Luxury kingdom on the moon. Absolutely lovely for visiting. Usually what makes people not want to stay is that full citizenship means you must be somewhere in their network of covenants - those are a faction magic but not, actually, Lunabella's - thus being, in a word, enslaved, but it is very different from anything called this on Earth. Faction magic is Dominion; it has a rank zero you can do without belonging, to just take a step back from reality and be in an empty bubble, good for private chats or dragging monsters away from collateral hostages. More ranks improve bubbles in size and creature comforts and control of features - maybe redundant with the fairy ring you so yearn for.

"Alfheimr! The Summer and Winter courts of the Feywilds. Summer is fancy and bureaucratic, many rules, lots of etiquette; Winter is wilder and shiftier and libertarian-er. Place is full of monsters to beat up too. Faction magic is covenants, binding promises for people who sign or go on your turf or whatever.

"The ORC! Magic law enforcement. Lots of them not witches but they will hire witches. Instead of magic they issue cool spy gadgets. Which might be magic. But thinking cool spy gadgets from Men in Black isn't far wrong.

"Alphazon! Giant megacorporation. Probably owns every giant megacorporation you have ever heard of. Agents get backed up to their servers, useful if you don't have your own immortality, mostly just not having privacy otherwise. They run the magic internet. Magic is called Integration, going full Inspector Gadget magitech. They have nanobots.

"Those are the ones I have to be neutral about. I do not have to be neutral about the outsiders. Those are Lovecrafty monsters. If you espy one run and tell the scariest person you know. I also do not have to tell you what throwing in with them would let you do, besides have your brain eaten into a gibbering horror."

"All right. I will pass on the interfaith society, the headquartered in Hell, the spy gadgets, the megacorporation, and the Lovecrafty monsters. I'm not so keen for my very own redundant bubble that I'll go be a slave on the moon about it. I'm wary of fey courts. I want to hear more about wand-related magic and what it's like at magic party college."

"Arcadia, magic party college, is awake all hours - classes flexibly timed, so sleep in and miss one and go to the other section that afternoon or that night as you like. Lots of field trips, practical hands-on lessons, free time. College town is full of stuff like arcades and cute shops, and pocket dimension has changing scenery redone from hot springs to rock climbing paradise to forest every now and then. Bonus perk is a watered down perk from anywhere else, twice, because of how they are so cosmopolitan.

"Hawthorne, strict old college, perk is a specialty wand they issue with the uniform. Rank one wands gets a light spell, small illusions, force bursts that can slap or push or pull or stab, a magic marker spell if you haven't a chalk or brush on you, make you or something else jump better, and counterspell things of same rank if you can catch them. Rank two has a light flash enough to make it hard to see, a sound version of same, removing or way increasing oxygen in a sphere, starting fires like a zippo but you can toss them, little electricity zaps, creating water like a hose, conjuring up a glob of gluey stuff that you can also eat if you really want to for some reason, and one that just hurts like a bullet ant... shall I go on?"

"This specialty wand of theirs, do I get to summon it back to myself if I lose it like I do with my broom? Does the wand-related magic work with my broom or only with their wand? What's special about their wand compared with any old wand? And yes I want to hear the rest." She considers. "Also, if you happen to know, does either Arcadia or Hawthorne have counselors on staff? Therapy-style not academic-advice-style."

"Not automatically; possibly you could ask it to be enchanted this way. Works with both - also works with some other things, you can use magic books and crystal balls and suchlike, your witchery rod is simply most convenient most times. Wand magic works with either, specialty one much stronger than rod or borrowed wand or something. I do not know but would guess that Arcadia yes Hawthorne no but this is guessing based on their respective modernnesses.

"Rank three wands does levitation, silence, a slash sort of attack, stopping one person from doing things for a moment, bit of earthmoving, bright daylight spell, sleep spell, extra disembodied hands to do things across the room. Rank four, mostly upgrades to prior things but also a voodoo dealie where harm is mirrored from one target to another, and a gravity control thing letting you do the Spiderman business. Rank five permanencies magical effects, very handy, or lets you contingency them for if-then fanciness, or slice up everything a lot in a big place, or a great big elemental or force attack in a line like you are a dragon with a wand for a mouth, and also this one lets you make things bigger on the inside, that one is lovely."

"That does sound lovely. It's a real pity that all this lovely wand magic goes with the school that probably won't want me to pursue my real career there. —my real career is therapy, it's what all the cool kids with massive emotional problems are doing. Not that I'm not happy to pounce on another opportunity when it comes up, but I just know I'm going to end up getting restless if I don't get to share my hard-earned wisdom. Maybe I'll just ask around and see who needs a mom friend."

"No real reason Hawthorne should not want you to be a therapist when you grow up but the curriculum is very magic. I have heard they have class meetings on health, physical mental spiritual? Not a clue if this is your thing."

"I can always finish getting my psych degree and then go to magic school afterward. Unless I can't."

"You can but how long is this to take? Can't put off a fate twist that long."