"I'm tech support, and I was heading to work on something when Milliways found me. And besides, good techs always carry around any tools they might need. Big waste of time to get somewhere, start working on the problem, and then have to take half an hour to run to the store for phase crystals or something."

"Okay. So... what do I do? The only magic I already know that operates outside myself is talking to my brother and it's not my brother."

"The best way I've heard it described is 'want at it, but magically'. If it's getting anything at all the crystal will change color, if it's getting anything useful the metal will react." He hands off the thing and watches curiously.

"I'm not sure how I would have done that if all I'd picked up were internal magic," she says. "I was pretending I'd generalized the talking to my brother thing. I guess if I'd been working from lucid dreaming I could've pretended this was a dream, but I don't see an avenue if all I had were the groundwork for eidetic memory."

"I wonder if you'd benefit from a little Clarity."

"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."