"Ah, see, our monotheists go 'well, our god lets us summon celestials by doing good deeds and turn into pseudo-angels, while there isn't a special class of useful spirits your god created for you to summon, and I get quests and power from an archangel who's a mere servant of my god, and it's good of your god to run a decent afterlife but our god also does and I'm in touch with my dead husband there'. So like it or not there's clearly something there."

Rob nods.

"Also, demons offer to buy people's souls reasonably often. One of my responsibilities is passing the offer along when it's made to a newly awakening witch as part of a patronage offer, so I would know. Ah, Lunabella uses 'matron' to refer to a witch who takes other witches into her household with a magic covenant, so 'patron' ends up getting used for a specific type of deity-witch relationship regardless of gender, it's a bit silly."

"Hmmmm, I'm not sure if it's higher-priority to ask 'is selling your soul to a demon as bad of an idea as it sounds like?' or 'so people aren't definitively in or out of your world as a status fixed at birth?', either one seems like it could have massive implications."

"It certainly has many downsides and ends with being stuck in Hell for many people. I don't know how bad an idea it sounds to you."

"And yes, many people are born into mortal and seemingly mortal families and end up awakening as witches. This can happen naturally, but that tends to be messy and put strain on the Veil, so people like me run little traveling buildings that lure in potential witches, and then we offer guided awakenings so that nobody is going to suddenly change species in the middle of the street."

"Is 'Hell' what it says on the tin? Lake of fire, outer darkness, wailing and gnashing of teeth?"

"Pretty much. There's a range of biomes and some biodiversity but none of the biomes are great places to be normally. Summoning the imps – those are weak demons – seems to work fine for plenty of people, though. The imps also aren't having a great time, so you can buy their time with a nice lunch or porn videos or such. Mammon also offers some very straightforward deals where if you can summon his interface he sells normal things at a very high markup in normal currencies, people pick up the knack sometimes if they expect to be stranded in inconvenient locations. That might be related to mortal perception of price gouging as evil?"

"Huh! Our mortals hate it too and we don't have a Mammon, for what it's worth.

Amd, uh, if anyone's doing anything about the Hell situation in a way we could contribute to if interplanar trade is established, I expect the cabinet would be happy to.

Resolving our own afterlife torture situation is one of the most important reasons for promoting a better hierarchy within the pantheon—Zeus makes Hades run the courts as a jobs program for his failsons, when Hades hands down sentences directly they're just restitution through labor.

...uh, except for Hitler. He hates mass murderers to begin with because of all the extra work they make him, and on account of Hitler being his son he was extra pissed about the stain on his family honor."

"I personally am required to be neutral on the Heaven-Hell conflict unless I formally resign as an awakener. I will say that if you can successfully interfere with Hell without massive collateral damage you will probably be very popular. If you interfere without world-ending collateral damage and, say, 'merely' destroy large chunks of an elemental plane or two and kill billions of people, you will potentially still be somewhat popular. You might want to talk to the monotheist faction, called the Watchers or the Followers of the Apocalypes, they may or may not be doing something but if any identifiable major faction is it would be them."

"Good to know! And I expect we wouldn't interfere unless we could avoid massive collateral damage, there's reasons we're opting for a political solution to our own afterlife issues rather than more direct action."

"That's good. Do you want to hear about horrors outside the universe next or about gender politics next?"

"Hit me with the horrors."

"Infohazardous beings considered hostis magi generis. Their allies also are considered such. If you ally with them I will do my best to kill you and it'd probably be a favor. Average mortals go mad if they perceive them at all, with strong-willed mortals and supernatural beings generally doing a bit better. It's possible to build a tolerance, but not a perfect tolerance."

"Yikes! We will do our best to avoid them."

"Very reasonable. If they do come over here I have significant resistance so I will definitely fight them. I would if it comes up appreciate combat support."

"Anyway. As for gender – before you discussed politics I assumed the reason everyone I'd seen here was female was demographics. Witches skew very female, and male witches trend weaker. Part of the reason there is that staying male during awakening costs power. Or becoming male, occasionally someone really wants that for some reason. It's my job to facilitate choices even if I don't agree with them. Working with an awakener is supposed to be a strict upgrade over natural awakenings. But it's very easy to draw conclusions about people who seem to care more about sex appeal than magic. Nowadays you're supposed to be polite about it, and say 'they' instead of the generic 'she', and such, and I try to be good about it in mixed company."

"We'd provide whatever support we could! And...with such a gender-imbalanced population, what are your dating and marriage norms like? We have a slight skew towards men, around here, so some of our warriors have two husbands."

"Some witches are naturally attracted to other women and that's straightforward. Some witches don't want long-term relationships and that's also straightforward, contraception is easy. If you're not naturally attracted to women and you want a long-term relationship you have a few options. You can find someone who'd objectively be a decent partner and save up for a love potion with her, that's what my wife and I did. You can have a psychic poke at the issue but that's a lot more open-ended so you'd have to really trust her. You can spend a lot on making a mortal unaging and defending him. You can go for a fae, fae don't have the same skew, but you'll have cultural gaps. You can also hold out for the male witch of your dreams. Which is fine in principle, but it's a bit of a test of wisdom and character, and if you look at social environments near male witches you will sooner or later find people failing that test. Do not tell those people about the two-husband situation unthinkingly, they will get jealous."

"...ah, yeah, don't mean to rub it in. I'm sure that would be a tough situation to deal with. I wish we could help, offer to contribute some of our surplus males, but there'd be the cultural gap and most of them age and die."

"I'm fine, I'm a happily married woman. I'm sure some people will appreciate a dating pool of men who are already aware of the supernatural and used to being the weaker party."

"Good to hear! Hmmm, what haven't we covered yet... what are the major witch factions like?"

"Hawthorne is the most prestigious magic school. They're well-defended and have some very skilled teachers. They offer magically income-sharing agreements to students who can't pay tuition, which is most of them. They do sometimes practice corporal punishment, and it's dim enough there that some people need artificial lighting for their sanity. They developed a Wands practice that covers a lot of miscellaneous utility magic."

"They have a newer sister school, Arcadia, which is free and has better coverage of mortal-led modern fields like computer science. They do have some security issues, though in serious conflicts Hawthorne backs them up, and are not trying all that hard to ensure even unmotivated students succeed. They developed Digicasting, which allows for entry into mostly-unreal realms like works of fiction and computer networks, and eventually drawing power from them.

"Lunabella is a polity on the moon. These days it's mostly migrated to the far side. It's beautiful and luxurious and people who join need to become clients of existing matrons, with magically binding agreements. The system goes all the way to the top, the king is bound to their fundamental law. They use Lunabellan Greek, which is different from both ancient and modern Greek. The matron-client system has been compared to slavery and in the higher echelons of society there can be a lot of pointless status games. They expanded combat zones, an ancient system for reducing collateral damage from fights, into Dominion, which lets you create bubble environments complete with air and such, great for living on the Moon."

"I've already mentioned the Watchers. They worship the Light and represent the largest organized effort to improve mortal welfare without disrupting the Veil. They have some concerning radical elements, though. I don't know if they actually developed Ministration, which is the summoning of celestials, but they're certainly the best at it."

"Hespatia is the oldest witch faction, still operating on the system of distributed covens. They know more of the secrets to ritual magic than I would expect anyone else does, and like the Watchers they also have a lot of mortal connections. It is also the case that some covens sacrifice of nonconsenting subjects and are responsible for Outsider incidents."

"There's also some factions which are not actually witch-dominated per se but should be mentioned for completeness."

"The Alfheimr Alliance represents a broad coalition of Faewild polities, mostly in either the Summer or Winter courts. The Summer court is, depending on how you count things, plausibly the largest magical polity. It has a lot of rules to get used to that many find unintuitive. The Winter court is much less unified. I usually recommend it to people who want a lot of independence but can't make a pocket dimension, or who mostly want to live alone and kill monsters but also to impress others when they show up with something's head. The witch magic associated with them is Covenants, facilitator of the aforementioned magically binding agreements, and it's probably derived from nonwitch fae."

"Occult Research and Containment is a fairly human-dominated group integrated with some Earth governments. They're very focused on defending mortals and they're good allies in veil maintenance but they can be difficult to work with. They probably have the most magical girls of any faction I've mentioned, which still isn't all that many magical girls."

"And then there's, uh. Your counterpart. I kind of wonder if part of why you exist is that Amazon being sort of a front organization for a conspiracy is a pattern from the prime Earth that resonates, but I'm not actually sure. Anyway. Your counterpart is Alphazon, an Alphabet-Amazon merger. They are the youngest faction I've listed, but not necessarily the weakest, because they have been trying very hard to acquire power as quickly as possible. Which is a terrible choice for people who also plan to live forever. They don't listen even to really serious warnings. The problem is that the O.R.C. likes them because they like humans having power, so they'd defend Alphazon from serious attacks, and also they provide real-time translation and a lot of internet and commercial conveniences, so they keep being able to trade with other witches."

"What distinguishes magical girls from witches? Can you elaborate on the O.R.C. being difficult to work with?"

"Witches who put in effort develop in power over time by questing or studying or practicing – I'm the questing type. Magical girls often start magically strong and don't grow from there. We do witch magics – occasionally a witch won't be able to go beyond the very basics, or will be locked out of a field, but pretty much every witch can use the telepathy I demonstrated earlier, for instance, while magical girls can't unless they're also witches. Witches draw power from a method that's generally species-dependent, while magical girls always draw power from a mental state and some of them are states I've never heard of witches drawing power from, like hope. Witches get summonable magic outfits that can be changed and usually aren't essential for our powers, just convenient, but magical girls need their magical outfits and can't get them restyled. There's other differences, too, there's a magical girl who's a hired cursebreaker and I don't know of any other power source that would let her do that."

"The O.R.C. takes a harder line on destroying information sources on Outsiders than witches do, because we're more used to some people having resistances than they are, I suppose. At one point this escalated to bombing a library. They count exposing mortals as a cost even when there's a psychic witch to do cleanup so we don't put strain on the veil. They're picky about responding to prophecies that don't come from one of theirs even though they don't have an amazing diviner that we know of. They have a habit of using mundane explosives which don't have as many safety features as magical options do. They do technological surveillance that Alphazon gets into sometimes."