"The failed attempts more than the successful one, but yes. The ritual." She taps her nose. "Foxes like me are good at sniffing out magic, but succubi, other demon types, hungry ghosts, nightmares, puchuus, werewolves, and vampires aren't bad at it. The big news that's good for people like you- Is that the Puchuu Mafia will absolutely murder magical beings who fuck with the status quo." Shrug. "So I'm not gonna kill muggles or unaligned sorcerers without a really good excuse."

She nods.  "...Is there a lot of that going around, then?"

"Murder? Tribalism among magic types? Unthinking menaces? Kinda, yeah. That's what happens when some people can literally ignore cops. I mean, puchuu girls are the magic cops."

"Well ain't that just great.  By which I mean absolutely terrible.  ...I'm kind of surprised the Puchuu didn't try for me, to be honest; I have an unfortunate rule-following streak."

"Maybe they didn't notice you. They're not infallible. And I might be overselling the doom and gloom. I don't think existing while magic is actually more dangerous than existing while black in inner chicago, for example."

"Being as white as bread and mostly raised in suburbia as I have been - though I suppose there was that time where the sperm donor was in the city and I split weekends - I'm not sure that works as an effective point of comparison, but I guess that's not a bad sign.  Comparatively.

"...I should hope that the police brutality is not as much a threat as that, though."

She makes a waffling motion with one pawhand and licks her ice cream.

"Most of Lilith's brood aside from a couple varietals, like succubi or dryads, have it bad from them. Sorcerers are mostly fine unless you go around collecting skulls or robbing stores and so on."

"Ouch.  ...Wait, whomst?  Is there really a Lilith by way of the Biblical apocrypha that that sounds like?  Damn.  That's not something that I was expecting to be meaningfully truthy, though having thought about it for five seconds now I can't say I know why I wouldn't have, given that, like.  Succubi demonstrably exist.  Though there could have been evolutionary pressures...  ...It's not like there aren't gonna be half a dozen occult traditions quote-mining the book of Enoch or what have you, anyway.  ...Though the question of the potential historicity of that apocrypha would be rather open in ways mere quote-mining couldn't possibly achieve, despite the overall lack thereof in Genesis...

"...Interestingly enough, they have actually found something that looks like it could've been Noah's Ark recently-ish, to boot."

"...Or is 'Lilith's brood' more of a cultural thing, than a matter of actual known descent?  That would fit different models.  But the way you said it...

"Well, you sounded like Lilith was a person who made design decisions, to be using the term varietals there."

She feigns sleepiness at the bible talk, then blinks twice.

"Lilith as a specific individual may be apocryphal- Disciples, an Empire, a legend, a tradition- But yes. 'Lilith's brood' refers to monster species which have reliably heritable magic, are people, can take humanoid form, and must get their magic from some external source, not generating it. The mother of monsters, the story goes, was put out that sorcery is decidedly not heritable, murdered all her sons and daughters, and then designed new ones."

"Huh.  The murder's not okay but the other bits seem pretty cool.  I do rather agree with her that it's rude of the universe that only some people get to be and-or do magic, as of yet.

"...The possibility of sharing is somewhere on my ever-growing to-do list, though."

"Stronger sorcerers than you have tried to spread sorcery."

"I'm sure.  But that just means that, to steal a line from Edison, we know three-thousand ways to not make a lightbulb.  And human imagination is vaster still than filaments."

She looks taken aback, then smiles. More genuine than smirky this time.

"Okay, I've decided I like you."

Yay!  Oh, hell, she's blushing.  And she needs to respond to the conversation!  "That's good!  You're pretty!  Um!  I mean!  Um!  Pretty likeable!  Too!  Um!  - oh dear - but I mean - I cannot possibly retract a true statement but I hadn't meant to actually be so forward as to say that particular thing in response even though it's true...?  Oops?"  ...Now she's blushing even moreso.

Her tail is wagging. She ducks her head and snickers.

"Cute. A girl does like compliments~. Ahem. I'm not one for romance right now. Still miss my last spouse..."

Contemplative look.

"Casual sex is fine though."

...She is not actually spontaneously combusting of gay, is she?  Right?

"...I'm pretty sure Sappho of Lesbos herself would astrally project out of Ancient Greece and whap me upside the head if I lied and said I wasn't interested, despite the bit where I'm currently rolling to disbelieve that this is a thing that could happen in my life, and not someone else's life that's gotten switched with mine through a celestial bureaucracy clerical error."

"Oh, I can show you some things Sappho would approve of... Nobody believes good things can happen to them until they do. But really... You did win the cosmic lottery a little bit. I'll admit the magic is part of what makes you attractive to me. It's a nice smell. I enjoy it. I also like messing with people a little bit, and flustering them via flirting is one form of that. But consider... You've spontaneously generated a pretty darn solid mental defense structure, and you're approaching this whole thing with diligence, caution, ambition, and kindness in your heart. It's not just luck."

She is very flustered!

"I'm, touched that you think so.  I wouldn't have thought myself that exceptional, even with the magic."

"There's exceptions and there's exceptions."

Wren has somehow ended up with a little bit of ice cream on her snout.

"Before we get too deep in the useless zone though, I really have to warn you about a couple things. Your foundation will take care of the worst sucker punches but you should practice something for physical-ish combat. Also, have you found stuff on the tentacles? They're nasty. Leftover bio weapons from the Janeway Cult."

"I'm gonna hate doing it, but yeah, I know, I've gotta be able to survive a fight getting physical.  I figure I'll start doing Jedi practice.  And I've found enough on the tentacles to know that I really don't want to end up caught by them.  Scary little fuckers."

"They're remarkably resistant to extermination, unlike the inventors. As for combat, even something like a fire spell you can snap off quickly, or little charms of physical protection, is a lot better than nothing. Escape tools are better yet."

"Ayup.  Good to know.  ...Mmm, I wonder if I could do, like, some sort of fancy rune tattoo thing...  Get the benefits of props, without the risk of being deprived of props."

"Ooh. I've met tattoo mages. They tend to be hard to undo if you fuck up, is my caution."

...Smirk.

"You're seeing about some corrections from some succubi, right? You could get a womb tattoo, once you have a womb to go with it."

"Hyaa..."

"...Oh no, you've gone and nerdsniped me about trying to take the difficulty of undoing out of tattoo magic instead of distracting me with lewd thoughts.  I wonder if there's much use of metamagic or component systems..."

She giggles. "Think about the kinds of effects a tattoo might have instead? I can maybe see about an introduction to a guy named Aoba later. He does the Maui thing- Tattoos of his accomplishments, that give boons related to said accomplishments."