"And if I'm only taking one rank of each to start out, then either twist would not actually save me any points, right?"

"At this time, right."

Poke poke. "Looks like the Hawthorne twist saves me at most one point if I go up to rank three, and the Lunabella one saves me two, if, again, I go up to rank three, it'd matter more in both cases if I could get higher than that but I can't. And the Lunabella one again drops to one point in savings if I expect to get a Nature affinity, which I seem to have a whole lot of reasons to do. Aaaaand I am not sure if I value 'not being fated to do stuff' all that highly, but I might value it more than one power point. I guess the perks are a different consideration but the Hawthorne one wants Mothergifts, the Lunabella one is... I mean, I like food as much as anybody who's been through the Scholomance, for sure, but most places you can simply buy food? And I should not take the Arcadia one because if May rejects me it may be necessary to flee in shame."

"I think it will probably not be necessary to flee in shame but I realize I am not the expert here."

"I appreciate that it is at any rate not a religious precept that I do so!"

"My religious precepts are more along the lines of, 'find the good you can do, and do it.'"

"...What's the Arcadian discount wand perk like?"

"Ten percent boost to magic when using appropriate implements, approximately."

"Are the implements I have to use anyway always appropriate?"

"No, they have to be modified in a specific way. Which I can do, but there are plenty of implements that aren't."

"Huh. ...I'm not really finding any fate twists all that tempting. Am I making a mistake not taking any?"

"Not everyone chooses to. You don't get any particular compensation for not, but none of them are such that you're going to find it awkward not to have it."

He pushes them aside. "Is loot next? Are you going to run out of loot? I don't super need any loot."

"I am not going to run out of loot. Don't knock the loot, some of it is incredibly useful." Here have a bubble with the concept of a Hydron in it. 

"- changed my mind I need loot."

"Thought so. There's also a knife that functions as a syringe that lets you treble the dose of a given potion." She pushes that bubble at him too. The knife can also be used for human sacrifice, but the potion tripling thing is very much a thing. 

"Huh. Stabbity. ...does it work on the Andean monopolist thing."

"It does!"

"And I can simply not relieve anybody of their anima in the process, presumably? That's like really hard, perhaps even impossible, to do by accident?"

"You have to both kill someone with the knife and activate the plunger while doing so. So, take normal knife safety precautions, but yes very difficult to do by accident."

Nod nod. .......oooh he likes this bubble? "Is this 'alchemist stash' thing nerfed very badly without Mothergifts?"

“It is not! And neither are your bonded relics.”

Poke poke - "Oooh, you have one already on hand."

“I do, but you should be aware that the knife only trebles the potion form, not the bond benefit.”

"...in a way that would make it unsuitable for reverse-engineering?"