“Ah, you’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart and the fluffiness of your ears?”

"Not at all! Business model very much exists, just does not charge you. Natural awakened witches are so much less useful for everyone to have around, so aforementioned everyone compensates awakeners for doing the job and for being very neutral about all of everyone."

“Less useful?”

"You do not have to work for any of everyone if you do not so wish. But natural awakenings come out with things like the water allergy, which is real and can hurt not you but people who have it, and they have ranks in magics they do not want to have jobs in, and inconvenient talents in things like making the weather change with their mood, and species that are unpleasant to be and hard to do workplace accommodations of. Bad for the labor pool, for recruitment, et cetera. Like if everyone were coming out of universities having accidentally got a double doctorate in basket weaving and history of australopithecene dance, perhaps it would be nice to open a nursing school and a computer science program, you see? Also all the everyone would like to be able to send their children to professionals, too - you are something of a sideline."

“That makes sense. So how does professional awakening work? On my end, I mean.”

"I walk you through what-all you have the potential for and you pick things and you walk out a witch! You will pick a species and a way of getting better at magic and some magic to already be able to do, and if you want more points' worth of magic than you already have the potential for you can pick up some inconveniences. Such as the water allergy. But you did not sound keen on it. There are more popular ones."

“—species?”

"Species!" She pets one of her own ears. "I am an oread for instance. You can stay a human, or, the PC thing to say is 'neutral', because you will be a witch human not a mundane human. But many species are more fun or make it easier to learn more of some or another type of magic."

“Neat. Disguisable?”

"Varies. Oreads have the convenient shapeshifty thing as you saw, that comes standard with us-es. If you stay neutral but do a cosmetic tune-up of your true form while awakening, the Veil will cover that. If you walk out of here on four legs, Veil will have a bit of a time, but you could get a special wheelchair for pretending in and that would most likely do. If you go around being hashtag ifrit pride it will be pretty hard for the Veil to conceal that you are at all times very much on fire, so you should be also invisible or something if you do this."

“Flexible. All right. What do I have the potential for?”

"In the species department?"

“Well, for everything, but we can start there, why not. I do want to get the whole picture before deciding anything.”

"In your family tree way back it looks like we have... neutral, aforementioned; daeva, souped-up superhero-comic-book-human-ish guys; dryads, treeple; lamia, like a snake-taur; elf, what it sounds like; undine, water elemental; sprite, tiny insect fey; lilin, demonic folks; erinyes, fallen angels; pixie, tiny plant-theme fey; fairy, tiny party fey."