Good question! Maybe the girl sitting at the bar with an enormous chocolate milkshake knows the answer.

Right. She walks up and says, "Er, hello. Have I hit my head a bit too hard recently, or has the supply room door turned into a portal to a bar, of all things?"

"I can't tell you if you've hit your head, but if you have that's not why you're here," she says. "This place just does that."

"...It probably says something about my life that this isn't even the strangest thing I've ever stumbled on. And geez this place is loud, magically speaking anyway."

"Magic has loudness?"

"To me anyway. My special is seeing it, or hearing, or smelling, whatever the synesthesia decides. And then imitating it. But this place is just... Incomprehensible."

"Huh. Well, that doesn't surprise me hugely. Anyway, what's your name? I'm Anna."

"Grendyne, call me Gren." She holds her hand out for a shake. Her hand and arm are well muscled and, not covered in scars, exactly, but there are several. This may be a good time to mention the vaguely military-looking uniform.

"Nice to meet you." Anna shakes Gren's hand. She doesn't have scars on her arm, but she does have what looks like a thorny white vine wrapped around it.

That vine is very magically interesting, too.

She turns to the bar and says, "Nice to meet you, too. How much for something with lots of caffeine?"

The bar indicates that the first drink is free.

Anna says, "So, imitating magic?"

"Yep. Some of it's easier than others - the further away from the usual sort of thing other Witches' magic does, the harder it is... Doesn't that vine hurt? It smells like pain."

"Yeah, it does, I'm just used to it."

"...Yeah. You get used to it."

"I wouldn't recommend the flowers to anybody who's not really used to it, though. Especially not this one." She pats the vine affectionately. "It's the worst."

"Can you make more?"

"Yeah. Why, you want one?"

"Definitely. Pain doesn't mean much after two and a half years of fighting Neuroi, shorting out on mana whenever we have a close fight, and they seem like they'd be a huge help."

"What's a Neuroi?"

The white vine sprouts a tendril that buds a tiny black flower, which rapidly opens into a soft-petaled black rose. More vines snake out of Anna's sleeve to open new flowers beside that one: a red flower on a black stem, a blue flower on a purple stem, a pink flower on a yellow stem.

...It's sort of gruesomely beautiful. She gets distracted from the question, watching/listening to the magic unfold.

"Ah, right, Neuroi... Are giant flying monsters that like to blow everything up." She produces a to-scale still illusion of a team of Witches fighting a bus-sized Neuroi. "That's a little one."

Anna squints at this picture and says, "Not very little, is it." She cuts four long-stemmed roses. "Well, here. Careful of the thorns. If they break skin, the flower goes for you, and you'll wreck the hell out of your clothes."

"No, it's not. We've lost most of eastern Europa, by now. Greece was gone five years ago. Russia's on the brink. Thank you." She levitates the roses rather than actually touching them, and scrutinizes each in turn, both physically and magically.

The black-petaled rose with the white stem and black-tipped white thorns looks tricky and powerful. It hurts more than the rest, but grants flight as a basic power. Its magical focuses are object conjuration and some other things that don't come clear immediately.

The red-petaled rose with the black stem and red-tipped black thorns seems to draw part of its magic from each of the other flowers. If that's true, it seems like there's at least one more kind of flower out there that isn't represented in this bunch of four. It draws blood when it unites with someone, and makes them faster and more agile as a basic power. Its first magical focus is cutting (which is what Anna used to cut those stems), and the others are healing (shared with the pink/yellow rose), altering magic (shared with the black/white rose), telekinesis (shared with the blue/purple rose), and light (not represented).

The blue-petaled rose with the purple stem and blue-tipped purple thorns is themed around physical force. It leaves bruises when it unites with someone, and enhances strength as a basic power. Its first magical focus is telekinesis, the one it shares with the red/black rose.

The pink-petaled rose with the yellow stem and pink-tipped yellow thorns is harder to pin down thematically. Its basic power is grace, and it unites without drawing blood. Its first magical focus is healing, shared with the red/black rose.

Anna watches the floating flowers curiously.

"These seem... Tricky. I don't know if you want to go home soon or what. Do you mind if I go change in the restroom and practice and get some advice from you?"

"Nah, go ahead, I was planning to stay a while."

"Thank you thrice."

So she goes to the restroom. The flight uniforms are relatively quick to put on and take off, thankfully.

She takes a deep breath and inserts the pink rose to her skin.

The stem burrows into her arm and grows from there, splitting off a few times to coil through her body and then emerging again from other points. She ends up wearing a sort of minimal bodysuit made of unnaturally tough pink rosepetals stretched between thorny yellow vines.

And breathing pretty heavily. But it turns out it's true that the anticipation of pain is almost worse than the pain itself. Right now she's not even feeling as bad as after a long patrol.

She tries the... Weapon-like feeling, aiming for a very simple spear.

Yellow vines and pink petals grow rapidly, forming into the shape of a spear, which solidifies a moment later into a pink-and-yellow spear made of something more like wood and metal than like rose parts.

Huh. Neat. Not like using mana at all. Highlander will love these - she'll probably like them more for the fact that they hurt and she won't need to retire if the flight power is fast enough.

She lets the spear go, and absorbs the other roses one by one, and walks back out to the bar, folded clothes in hand.

"Nice going," says Anna, observing the many-coloured petalsuit. "You okay?"

She is visibly affected. But not that much. "I'll want them gone sooner or later, but I've had to keep fighting and keep focused feeling worse than this. Adrenaline gives you wings. Unf. What kind of practice do you recommend? Just go over their basics, fly, make and heal some scratches, TK some stuff, manifest and unmanifest weapons?"

"It's actually really hard to practice healing on yourself, or on anyone else with a flower in, because the flowers usually heal it faster than you can," says Anna. "When you get really good with one flower's first specialty it'll let you pick the next one from its group that you want to try, but I don't know if there are kinds of practice that work better or worse than other kinds."

She starts playing with the minor powers, leaving off the healing. "These are delightfully powerful. Our kind of magic runs out completely if you try to do too much, and your power level goes down sharply as you get older. It's really inconvenient that the most experienced fighters lose their magic. Running out of mana also hurts like hell, but then mana burn is less of a concern than, you know, actual burns."

"I haven't had flowers for long enough to know if anything happens when you get older, but it'd surprise me. They don't run out of anything or anything like that, they just hurt."

"Makes sense. I'll be on the lookout." She levitates one of her boots, but only for a moment. "Please tell me your world's in better shape than mine."

"My world's pretty great. A total lack of giant murder monsters."

"We've had people try to talk to them. Apparently they're not even sure the Neuroi know humans are people. They're very alien aliens."

"Huh."

"Anyway, as long as I'm here I think I'll have a nice steak-and-whatever's-recommended dinner, with real-for-certain-values-of-real Corunda coffee. Got plenty of pay saved up and I haven't had steak in ages. The ice ships are too slow, it just spoils before it can get to our base and there are hundreds of more important things to reserve teleporters for."

"Ice ships?"

"Yeah, big old ships with special insulated rooms full of ice. For moving things that spoil around."

"I don't know what we do about that kind of thing in my world but I'm pretty sure it's not that."

"Well, where do you get cold from if not ice? Magic? Some kind of fancy steam or chemistry thing? I don't understand science much."

"Honestly, I couldn't even tell you. I'm not that big into science myself. It just sounds weird, like, ice ships? Maybe we have giant refrigerators."

"...The translation is giving me chained lightning going into a machine and it making cold."

"...You don't have refrigerators?"

"I'm starting to think our technology is terrible. It was even worse before the Neuroi, the bloody Church lifted its ban on science because otherwise we'd all die... Do you recognize this map? The year thirteen twenty four?" The globe she illusions is... Not quite Earth. China, parts of America, and parts of Africa are wrong.

"It looks mostly right. My geography isn't the greatest."

"...You know if we're going to be talking for a while, I'm gonna take everything but the yellow one out." She does that. White/black first, hunching over breathlessly as it goes.

"Yeah... wait, thirteen twenty-four? Okay, that explains the lack of refrigerators."

"Hah, ow. What's. Your year?"

"2014. I guess I could ask what calendar."

"...Jesus Christ died in zero?"

"Yep. Okay. Well, you're from some weird alternate past, I guess."

"No, you're clearly from a shiny fantasy alternate future."

"Sure, that works too."

"I want to know what other stuff you have that I can't even think of. Fridges. The roses. I bet they get engines small enough for carriages, that's already happening, and more vaccines?"

"Yeah... uh, airplanes? Bicycles? Trains, do you have trains?"

"We have trains... I guess a flying machine could be useful, but it'd be hard to get anyone to put in the effort, Witches fly pretty well and we're getting better at making not-brooms. 'Bicycle' is translating really weird, can you explain it?"

"A bicycle is like... maybe I can conjure good enough to just kinda show you."

She concentrates very hard for about ten seconds, and ends up with a little model bicycle in her hand.

"So there's these two big wheels, right, and you sit there," she points at the seat, "and pedal it," she pushes one pedal around with a fingertip, causing the wheels to also turn, "and as long as you're going forward the whole thing doesn't fall over somehow?"

"...Huh, yeah I guess I can see why I was getting 'like a broom, but for non-Witches'. Neat."

"...Witches ride brooms?"

"Yeah. Well, the classic thing-to-ride is a broom, but they're actually kind of terrible at it? We call the new ones Steelwings." She presents an illusion of a machine that looks a bit like a wheel-less motorcycle jointly designed by Metallica and the Army Corps of Engineers.

"Nice," says Anna, beholding the Steelwing. "Yeah, flower flight just... works. If you've been wearing flowers for long enough you start being able to control the flower-outfit thing and you can give yourself wings for kicks, but they don't actually help much."

"I'm not a huge fan of the outfit, to be honest. But the powers make up for it."

"Yeah, the outfit's kinda freaky but the powers are cool."

"And the pain. But like I said, small prices."

"That part doesn't actually bother me, but I'm weird."

"People are weird sometimes. My boss likes blood. And no, she's not a vampire."

"Are vampires a thing?"

"They're a mythical sort of thing. I wouldn't rule it out. All sorts of random stuff that ought to be mythical turns out to exist and just be really rare instead."

"The only magical things I've ever found are the flowers and this bar... well, and you I guess. Oh, do you want a bunch more flowers to take home, by the way? It'll be a while before you can grow more yourself, and if anybody else wanted to try some..."

"That'd be great. You don't have any more colors?"

"Nah, these are all I've got. It looks like there should be one more, because otherwise where's the red rose getting that 'light' specialty, but I haven't found any of it."

She grows another set of four, and another, and another.

...That must be a lot of pain, but again, people are weird.

"Anyway, I think I'll hang out and practice for a while." She pressed the blue and purple flower back in and resumes moving her clothes around in random directions.

Anna is completely casual about flower-growing, even though the magic seems to think it should hurt as much as a transformation every time. She keeps going until she has three dozen roses, nine of each kind.

Levitate. Levitate. Move things over to the other side of the room. Levitate. The pink-yellow rose comes out, she may as well not run up her tolerance if she's only practicing one thing at a time.

"I wonder if you could tell me enough about airplanes and refrigerators and bicycles that someone can make them, back home."

"I probably can't. I don't know hardly anything about that stuff."

"Too bad. The magic roses will have to do."

"The magic roses are pretty nifty," she says. "Good luck with your giant monsters."

"You're leaving?"

"Probably not for a while, but it sounds like I've given you all the actual help I can, so 'good luck' seemed like the next thing to say, you know?"

"Makes sense. Thanks."

Back to practicing. She puts various roses in and out to change what she's practicing once in a while.

Anna continues drinking her enormous chocolate milkshake.

She tries to make small talk with Anna once in a while, telling anecdotes or asking something about technology between practicing with the roses.

After a while of this, she decides a break is in order so she changes back to regular clothes in the bathroom and orders a nice big delicious meal from Bar.

"Unless you can think of something else useful for me to do, I think I'm gonna go now," says Anna.

"Let me just scribble some notes real quick about what I think they do, and have you correct me if they're wrong..."

She gets out a notepad and scribbles. They're mostly right.

"Looks about right to me," says Anna, skimming the notes. "I haven't gotten to all the kinds of magic myself... you're not wrong about any of the ones I've used."

"In that case, good luck with whatever you end up doing, and thanks."