She's down to just under a tenth of what she started with; if she puts her left hand in, takes her left hand out tests one of the unpicked 1st ranks and then pulls back and compares, she'll see that she has enough for two of those. Not much.

"If you want to look at everything, there's Runes, Curses, and Necromancy, then minor magic and drawbacks. Where to?"

"Let's tour the rest of them before I move on."

"I am shocked, shocked, that you are looking at everything. I would never have guessed after how you totally skipped over Consortation. Definitely."

Runes is about learning fragments of the First Language which are inherently magical, and using those concepts to place stable effects on an object (or with the right tools, like those tattoo inks she was offered, directly on a person). Each rank learns a couple concepts, which can be reversed -  Chill into Warm, for example. Most of them are pretty straightforward, though they all have pretty clear limits on what they can do that April can inspect if she wants to look closer. Guessing what runes and amounts of mana and materials will go into a complex effect, and what rank it will count as for ritual time and skill requirements, is something you get intuition for with practice.

The rank 1 concepts are Luck, Fertility, Courage, Chill, and Augment. Augment is mostly about magical combat - you pick an affinity and have something get resistant to it, or reverse get more vulnerable to it. Rank 2 has Disease (usually used reversed for sanitization) and Heavy. Rank 3 brings Wind, and Talent, which enhances (or inhibits) coordination, reflexes, memory, and other aspects of picking up practical skills. Rank 4 has Spell and Warden, which are arguably each other's reverse forms. Spell imbues an effect from another type of magic into an item, like a Familiarity boost giving you your cat's grace imbuing into a belt you can give to someone else. Warden items dispel magic on contact, or suppress permanent effects for several hours.

"I love this," she admits. "Too bad I can't afford it. Next?"

"You'll have more power later; the part up front is generally about a third of the total. And drawbacks can give you more now, most people consider some of them a trade worth making. Like the Veil doesn't protect me, and that was good for two ranks of Divination and a bit more."

"Ooh, good to know. Okay, next up was... Curses?" She doesn't have high hopes, from the name.

Well, as an alternative to a prison system, cursing someone to "never do X or you'll suffer" looks pretty good. You can attach conditions to curses so that they won't trigger until that's met. And it's possible to curse someone with positive effects, just awkward.

There are five basic curses - Sickness, Pariah, Madness Berserk, Disaster, and Spellbind. Sickness ranges from a bad cold that lasts a day at rank 1, to a potentially-lethal fever with vomiting at rank 4 - tough people can survive without medical care, but it's hard. Pariah causes hostility in animals, from all bugs within ten meters at rank 1 to all nonsapient animals and even plants within a couple kilometers at rank 4. Berserk goes from 'just' a rush of incredibly strong anger at rank 1 to 'feral hunting predator with no memory of self for hours' at rank 4. Disaster at rank 1 causes spontaneous tripping for a minute; at rank 4 it lasts half a day and causes seizures and potentially-fatal accidents. Spellbind takes some other magical effect, with all costs and preparation taken care of, and binds it to take effect on the target when the desired condition occurs. Rank 3 lets you curse a big group at once, and has the Voodoo curse - initially they just feel anything you do to the doll, and at rank 4 you can puppet them.

"Arcadia and a lot of Alfheimr use conditional curses instead of prison, at least as an option on the table. It's... probably better, assuming it's not one of those things where they are going to just do the thing again anyway no matter how much they know it's a bad idea?"

"I can think of very few careers I want less than 'cursing people who would've gone to prison otherwise'. What's the next one again? Necromancy?"

"Yeah, it would be intensely unpleasant even in the best cases. Necromancy, to get this rounded out:"

Necromancy: seeing spirits and interacting with them! Plus working with corpses. There's still plenty of corpses involved. Being able to see spirits is rank-0 necromancy, which also lets you see the true form of disguised demons and some similar things. Most dead people pass on to an afterlife (usually some deity who claims them), but some stick around rather than get reaped, and witches can see those.

Rank 1 necromancy lets you make spirits visible to mortals or make spirits which hide from witches reveal themselves, and animate a few small relatively-intact animal corpses at a time, to act roughly as they would if alive. You can also contact a deceased spirit from its grave, though it may refuse to answer and you might get something unpleasant on the other end of the line instead. Rank 2 lets you take spirits you have managed to subdue and purify them, which restores their mind and can flag them for definite collection by a reaper. Most of a dozen dog-sized animal corpses are yours to reanimate, and you don't need them to be single-sourced as long as you have all the important parts from somewhere. Also, you can do elementalism-like tricks with bones, which improve from here.

Rank 3 lets you grab two dozen human-sized corpses, and if you convince a spirit to anchor to one of them, that one will stay animated if you lose focus on it or go to sleep. Also, use runework on bones if you like. Rank 4 lets you have nearly a hundred animated bodies, as big as whales if you can find (or make) the bodies. The fake animals will now be able to fly, swim, or do magical things they could do in life, even if the body doesn't really support that. Your bone-kinesis now extends to the living flesh and bone of anyone you want to make suffer, though this can be warded against pretty easily by witches. More pleasantly, you can cut out the middleman and directly send a subdued and purified spirit to the afterlife of your choice, though the divine proprietor may send them right back if they disagree.

"So, on that cheery note: Drawbacks next, or minor magic?"

"Let's see minor magic, so I can get my wishlist all filled out before I start taking sketchy surveys for cash."

"Heh. Right, let's see what's on the table..."

They mentally glide over to the web of small effects which take energy to open up a cluster.

"Okay, two here that will give you power, actually, and one that's free. Witchflame is basically a party trick, but you have affinity and class-match, so you'd net back a point like elementalism. Jack-of-All is a hybrid drawback-boost thing. You'd lose access to rank 4, but you'd get extra power worth the first three ranks of Runes, plus get very good at 'every mundane skill', which is not considered an exaggeration from what I've heard. Heritage would be free, though you might not like the retroactive Fate nonsense it entails."

"For the normal costs-power stuff, I'll just give you the names. Transformation Sequence, Prestidigitation, Blood Witch, Gunwitch, Beacon Gates, Aspicio Mori, Skimmer Dancing, Memorize - that's a very physical/embodied one, name's not great - and Levitation. Plus the one which the standards choose to be prudish about. I refuse to call 'trans- your -sexual to male' 'Elephant Trunk'."

"The list is actually longer, there's five other things involving multiple universes and Fate nonsense. They get good reviews if you get guided through them, but I am not at all qualified to guide those; you'd get results mostly chosen by chance and Fate. Your call."

"...every mundane skill is a lot of things!"

She'll take Witchflame, whatever that is, for the free power.

"What kind of retroactive Fate nonsense is Heritage?"

"Choose a relative of yours. They're retroactively a potential witch, or possibly retroactively already a witch and have been hiding it from you. You do not get to pick which of those it is, though if you do pick this I can scrutinize it and give you a pretty good guess which it's going to be. They'll be an average rank-3-capped witch and you can make a couple nudges about what things they specialize in which will probably work. Supposedly really good Awakeners have more control over it."

"...that's weird and fucked up, like, how does that even work, how is it a thing that can work—?"

"I don't know and I'm not sure I want to, it's crazy-making enough as it is. I think it's more like divination that predicts what decision you'd make far enough in advance to set it up than actually rewriting history, but the more I thought about it the more disturbing it got, so I decided to just... stop doing that, as much as I could."

"...you do you, but I don't think that solution is gonna work for me. I don't have any relatives who I want to see turning up as witches, particularly, anyway. Speaking of which, what are all the things with Fate nonsense that you didn't name and I probably shouldn't take?"

"The thing that made me finally stop thinking about it was the idea that examining it too closely might be inconvenient enough for Fate that it decided to retroactively squish me. Probably not true but gaah!"

"Anyway, adventures in unguided spacetime journeys: Get entered into a duel to the death between people with magical-beast souls grafted onto you for fabulous prizes if you live. Meet an ancient witch who will decide to teach you secrets of the multiverse. A magical-girl subculture also inducts you - which would be less concerning if I'd ever met one or heard of someone who had. A goddess introduces you to a little pixie companion who's been waiting for you. Someone lets you use your soul and mothergifts as raw material for blacksmithing into a weapon and/or armor."

"...hypothetically speaking, and I can't believe I'm saying this, does my extra super fancy immortality protect me against dying in duels to the death? Like I imagine I wouldn't get any prizes that way, but I wouldn't be dead, yeah? Or do you not know the answer to that?"

"I have a sort of flyer for this, let me see... You won't be a witch going in, not entirely clear whether you'd get the race enhancement or be an ordinary firebird. It should just be a failure, but the ones who run the deathmatch are from a Hell of some kind, so don't rule out some sadistic exact-words trick."

"I should prooobably pass then. Secrets of the multiverse sound fun, though, what's fucked up about that one?"

"Actually that one might be fine, it looked like the others but I haven't checked too closely. Give me a minute."

There's a sound of keys clattering at a computer...

"...Okay, this one seems basically fine. It will make you interact a little weirdly with the Veil, there's some other kind of Veil created differently and you'll be subject to both. There's a choice in there to get one enormous wish for whatever is your 'true heart's desire', which might not be what you think it is, and that can do arbitrary Fate bullshit in the course of implementing it. But if you steer away from that, it should be fine."

"...wacky. I sort of wish I had a clearer idea of what some of this stuff actually meant. How much does it cost?"

"Life affinity, so... about the same as you paid for Portals. If you want her to teach you multiple things, you can take it more than once."

"How many Veils can one world have? —speaking of which, what more can you tell me about the magical girls one?"

"All the things you'd learn from her would be covered by a single second Veil. Magical Girls... presumably have something resembling a Veil too? Let me look."

"You pick a 'nice' emotion to be powered by... Or some 'mean' ones, actually, or just 'perverted', that's someone's idea of equal opportunity. You get mana from the emotion, have tools and a familiar... looks like that's required... You can pick from a slate of powers but that costs extra... I'm not seeing anything that should keep these girls from being noticed; the 'nice' ones mostly can't be recognized by crowds but the 'mean' ones can and do, as can anyone who chooses 'cute' as their power emotion. Honestly, that's more concerning than there being an explanation of their second - third? - Veil."