"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."

"Your tech sounds fairly advanced compared to the universe at large if virtualization is a thing. Tech exchange between connected worlds seems to move a little slowly. Importing tech and teachers is expensive. So being well-established with it on your own and having a strong economy to buy imports will help."

"There was a huge push to develop virtualization once we noticed it was possible for a psion to handle one or a small group in a similar way manually - as long as the psion doesn't need to sleep, which is doable, and can do shared dreams and some other moderately invasive stuff. Because almost nobody wanted to starve in the wilderness for two years but having a supply of magic people is really important - mostly psions, because if we run out of trained psions we won't be able to lock down new or criminal eclipsed. So now the population of magic people is booming and it's really exciting."

"Should I arrange for someone to discover your world in few years, connect you to MTU-and-related-companies' sphere of influence?"

"Any secret catches?"

"Not from me. MTU can lean exploitative on worlds that are easy to exploit, but yours has psions and mages. There are other companies that will probably follow suit after MTU starts integrating, and I don't know as much about them, but it seems to work out well almost all of the time. MTU doesn't stage coups on local governments, there is a multiversal code of human rights, and so on."

"What's the multiversal code of human rights?"

"That sounds... like it was developed in many stages."