"No affinity there, and that comes in at rank three, so five points. You couldn't get flight but better memory and intelligence would work - you can pick two, that would be your two. Generally being lighter on your feet, intuitively understanding crowds, minor premonitions of disaster or death... there's a lot of associations and you can pick and choose. You'd already be able to speak to all crows or rabbits and understand them from rank two."

"Oooooh, better memory and intelligence! Yes. Very much yes. All the yes. Getting flight would be nice, but I imagine there's other ways to do it. Being able to speak to crows sounds fun! Is it picky about species or do I get all the other corvids for free?"

"At least all the corvids, should be most birds in general, and with some practice more animals than that. Supposedly it's easier to pick up the kind of animals you might have chosen as your own familiar, but that might be superstition."

"Well, I mean, I already speak bunno, so there's that. Anyway, five ranks in FLESH, three ranks in familiars, what's next?"

"Other elements? They mostly have a pattern of small-scale everyday amounts at the first rank and moderate resistance to elemental dangers, then up to mundane immunity and destructive potential like a multi-truck car crash - if you have elementalism at rank 3 you earn the title Hazard, and then Disaster and Calamity for ranks 4 and 5, which scale... more than linearly, at least. Psychotics is weird because it's entirely mental, it protects against trauma and things women were not meant to know, and it's more utility and personal head-messing than calamitous. Metallurgy's also pretty flexible for utility and low on destruction, though metallurgy Hazards can still make impromptu cannon barrages in about a minute."

"Oh, protection against trauma seems... useful. How much points would that be? I'm also definitely interested in utility, so I'll probably grab some Metallurgy!"

"I don't think I'm particularly interested in being a Calamity from the get go? Seems the kind of thing that gets the wrong kind of attention from... whoever is paying attention?"

"Well, there are monsters, and Calamities can earn a lot of favors being on call to jump through a portal and handle something quickly. And with Visceramancy you're going to be a Calamity, it's just a matter of how much harmonizing you can do with other elements. Metallurgy 3 gets you manipulating a car's worth of metal at a time out to a thousand feet, cold-forge alloys or separate them, make quasimetal gunpower a handful at a time. Rank 4 would be about ten times that in mass at triple the distance, make living armor, be a sniper without the rifle, make the cannon barrage in a second. Rank 5 you're approaching 'drop a bus from orbit' levels of magical railgun, control a short train's worth of metal out to ten miles, make a cannon and literally shoot the Moon - don't do that, it's inhabited and Lunabella has enough trouble distracting the mortals as it is, but you could."

"Wait, I could control trains with that power? Fuck it, I'm in! I love trains. Plus I would definitely want the rank 4 anyway, living armor seems useful if I'm going to fight monsters, so might as well spend a bit more and I guess this amount of metallurgy could be useful for spaceships and stuff."

She can't resist the pull from the joke. "This elementalism stuff is so metal."

"These two more than others. That will be fifteen points, but I've seen it be useful, I won't dissuade you. Do you want to pick up more elements, or look at the formula magic? Beyond the very basics, those will mostly be cheaper than more elementalism, since you'll have matching affinities for some."

"Let's have a look at the other magics, then we can circle around to more elements. What are my options? I guess I should mostly focus on things I have affinities for."

"Well, there's the two everyone has affinity for - Witchery, which is getting better at summoning and altering the hat, cloak, and rod that everyone was gifted by an ancestor we just call 'Mother', and Aethernautics, which is planar astronomy. For your affinities specifically, there's Hexes, which is transmutation magic, Necromancy, which works with spirits and bones, and Consortation, which summons demons to work for you, with deals depending on their natures. There's also Alchemy, Runic enchanting, Curses, Portals, and Divination."

"What is magical about astronomy? It's just... looking at stars?"

"Transmutation may be helpful... necromancy is... is it as sketchy as the name implies? Making deals with demons seems dangerous tbh? Faust and all that."

"Portals! Tell me more about portals!"

"Looking at stars and knowing their natures is necessary for charting any new courses to planes we don't have regular contact with. It's not terribly exciting. Necromancy's all working with the dead, but it's not just animating corpses and manipulating bones; finding ghosts and talking them into accepting a psychopomp is in there as well. Rank five gets you lichdom, which is... the most secure immortality short of phoenixes, who I'm only pretty sure exist. Transmutation's pretty broadly useful, it's mostly fairly specific changes but you can do a lot with it. Low-rank demons, up to rank three, are much more useful than dangerous, and working relationships with the fringes of Hell come in handy for a coven, but at rank four and five you can get yourself in trouble - summoning a wrath demon is rarely wise and never safe, but some people feel cornered by something else dangerous and give it a shot anyway. I'm considering rank four for the other type it gives me, servants who are paid in my own sloth, but I don't intend on ever learning the fifth, that's making deals with greater demons and it is, absolutely, Faust territory."

"Portals come in two types - Gateways and Rifts. Rifts are temporary, flimsy, and cheap to make. Initially you get about six inches across and sixty feet range, but those both double each rank, they get more durable, and you learn to make one-way rifts to elemental Proximae - fire and ice at second, lightning storms at third, water at fourth, and sucking void at fifth. Fifth also lets you get permanent rifts and a stronger connection; hotter, colder, more electric power, more water pressure. Gateways you start out with one at most, fifty mile range, takes a ritual of sacrifice - anything with real economic value - to create. You can do back-and-forth touch-and-go objects instead of doorways if you like. The number active roughly doubles per rank and the distance quadruples until the limits drop - distance at fourth, number at fifth."

"Isn't lichdom... evil? Pretty sure it requires something horrible, and it also means you stop being a person and start being a... thing puppeting a human body? Doesn't sound pleasant. On the other hand helping ghosts is something I could do, if it's valuable."

"I... if Hell is real I also probably need to reconsider a couple more things. How do pacts with demons work? Do they damn you soul or something?"

"Portals seems very useful, I probably want all five ranks to fully use them. There are a lot of things that can be solved with a well placed portal."

"Nothing of necromancy requires harming anyone living or dead, as far as I know. There are liches who work closely with the goody-two-shoes Watchers without tension so I doubt they're hiding any secret atrocities. Demonic pacts for lesser demons are time-limited and don't affect your soul unless you want them to... Hell and Heaven exist but none of the mortal religions are correct about how you get there. The general theory is that you go where you think you deserve, so unless you're a Lilin going to Hell is mostly a skill issue."

"Yeah, no, no plan on going to Hell. Nor to Heaven, to be honest, there's just so much work to do here!"

"Necromancy and consortation don't sound super interesting, but I'll tentatively grab five ranks of portals."

"Expensive, but certainly useful. Do you want to hear more about Hexes? That's a cheaper sell for a Jotun."

"Sure! You said it's about transmutation?"

"Anyone who hasn't banned themselves from Hexes can turn mana into Witch Kisses slowly. For actual ranked magic, it's slow, ritualized, and tiring - like a mile's jog per rank, whether you cast the normal way or reversed. And this isn't a good way to get rich - that strains the veil and it's easy to track. Each rank takes a medium of increasing rarity and expense, or you can substitute Kisses. A twig for a cubic foot at rank one, a large metal coin for two, a fifth-of-a-carat topaz or quartz for three, a fistful of ebony or ivory or some other dead and ancient materials for four, a fifth-carat diamond, opal, or corundum for five."

"For what you can actually do - rank one does stone to mud, clay to glass, iron to tin, or salt to sugar, or the reverse. Two gets you cloth to leather, water to milk, paper to plastic, copper to bronze, and oil to bread. Three does egg to chocolate, water to petrol, or vegetables to meat. Four gets you wood to cheese, air or steel to cloth, or fruit to candy. Five does old to young, water to wine, lead to gold, or flesh to stone. All of those work in reverse."

"And then there's polymorph. Rank one affects living things up to a cat's size and does real animals within a size limit of double or half the mass. Rank two up to a large child, and it can do imaginary animals as long as they're basically mundane. Three, up to an adult's size, still only double the size but shrinking can go any amount down to mouse-sized. And do reshaping of objects with consistent materials. Four, any living thing into any other living thing, from nearly microscopic to a blue whale, or turn creatures into objects."

"Also you can animate objects like Mickey Mouse from rank three, relatively small weight limits. A set of cleaning sponges and dishes that clean by themselves is the typical example of how complex it can get. Rank four lets you do golems, and you can bind spirits or sacrificed humans to make them intelligent - you need necromancy for binding spirits. They're still cleverer than normal animated objects if you don't. And rank five you can duplicate any objects whatsoever, though that doesn't preserve magical properties and you can't make a profit on the medium needed."