"A little what?"

"One of our magical currencies. MTU's fiat currency can't be backed against something physical, the arbitrage would just get ridiculous. So we have magical currency. Clarity is analogous to gaining or losing some mental horsepower for about a week, depending on whether you mint or redeem it. It's one of the more expensive ones."

"I mean, I assume it'd help me learn things faster, if I had any, but it sounds like I'd lose it again on the downswing and I'm not made of money, let alone magically-backed currency."

"Point. There are things you can sell - Physical capability, luck, emotion, I could scan you for ability to mint mana but I doubt you can."

"I don't really have a ton of physical capability to invest," she says dryly. "And how the heck does luck or emotion work? Or mana?"

"It's all temporary, except AP which is just permanent version of mana. Mana's generalized magical fuel for all magical traditions that run on a finite resource. Luck makes minor things like being late for the bus more or less likely, depending. Emotion dulls your feelings a small amount until it's paid off. Positive ones count for more."

"What do you get back if you turn in one of the emotion ones?"

"Magical anesthesia. It originally gave you emotions but this caused... Addiction and liability issues. So they spent a decade working over the system entirely."

"Huh. I bet there's overhead there. Why are positive emotions worth more, if you're not getting out what you put in?"

"Giving up positive emotion is a bigger sacrifice. The system these are mostly built on cares a lot about, fairness, for lack of a better word."

"...Metaphysically, or, like, economically?"

"Some of both? Market prices respond to supply, and cheating gets less effective over time. You can game the system a little, but it self-corrects after a while. Fairly sure that's designed in. MTU would be in trouble if one of them ran away in value from the others too much."

"But if they all produce anaesthesia, by what mechanism would a minting from a negative emotion be less useful at that than one from a positive emotion?"

"I'm not an expert on the underlying mechanisms, but... The gist is that negative emotions are overall more chaotic and thus harder to extract negentropy from. The anesthesia is almost an entirely separate thing, rolled into the emotions for now because minting pain isn't ready."

"It seems like that's going to wind up about as gameable as using shells for money, masochists exist."

"Which I suspect is part of why the suits are delaying it as much as they possibly can."

"Ha. I mean, inflation's not inherently evil but you do wanna be able to control it."

"Yeah, I am very much not an economancer. Sorry, economist, that was sarcasm. Some people who know what they're doing are in charge of that. Hopefully."

"I wish them luck. If everybody else is kinked funny I bet it turns my world into an economic powerhouse no matter what controls they put on it, at least whenever we get linked up, what's the waiting list on that like?"

"That depends on a lot of things. Population, general stability, and useful local resources chief among them. How does your unusual standard relationship dynamics make you an economic powerhouse, exactly?"

"Supply of masochists? I dunno, maybe you've got plenty, but it's much more often a sub thing than a dom thing, so if you don't have any subs..."

"If minting pain ever does become a thing, they'll probably tune pain down really hard and people stop minting emotion much, if a supply of masochists becomes problematic. And the connected worlds are a big, big market. What's your planet's population? Any active wars? Frequency of natural disasters?"

"Six billion about, perpetual conflict in the Middle East and other local clashes but nothing major globally, they usually don't go all the way through the alphabet naming a year's hurricanes?"

"Solidly above average population for a single planet. It is just one planet, right? What sounds like good stability outside of a few pockets, a ready market for weather control, intriguing but not immediately blatantly exploitable local magic. I think you'd get placed... Priority three, maybe priority two. Which would be maybe ten to twenty years and two to five, respectively."

"Yeah, just one planet so far. People've been to the moon though."