"Does it come into play with your power, or is whether you own something either-or?"

"Whether I own something is a binary yes or no, yeah, although I can co-own something with someone else and it still counts as yes--no, it's important because I was born a--you don't have the relevant cultural category or anything comparable that I've found but my ancestors were slaves and we sorta never caught up--in a poor neighborhood and had to watch out for myself and then when I got my powers I had to be super careful to not take advantage of anyone." 

"I guess they'd make it pretty easy to take advantage."

"Do they ever. Not to mention that I ended up slotting into some pre-existing power structures that were created by people who were very much the taking-advantage type and had to manually dismantle a whole buncha pieces that enabled that without tearing the whole thing down around me." 

"Hm?"

"A lot of the historical context doesn't exist on Amenta, how thorough an explanation do you want?" 

"Oh, I suppose it doesn't matter practically, it just sounded interesting."

"I think it's pretty interesting but only if it makes sense, which it sorta doesn't without the background." 

"There's lots of city to see yet, if you don't mind giving context."

"I don't mind! So about a hundred years ago, some people did research and discovered that alcohol use correlated strongly with spousal abuse, and started a movement to get people to stop drinking alcohol. Eventually that movement acquired enough political power that they managed to make alcohol illegal. Alcohol being an extremely popular drug, this did not especially work. Huge black market organizations sprang up around making, buying and selling various alcoholic beverages. Eventually the government noticed that this law was extremely not working and reversed it, but by then the criminal organizations were large and powerful enough to be a separate problem. They ended up branching out into other crime, like other illegal drugs and paid violence and coerced sex work, and the demand for any one of these things was much much smaller than the demand for alcohol but they had managed to get into so many things that it was all but impossible to stamp them out. 

"I got my powers when I was four-equivalent, and I didn't have a lot of ways to apply them, but one thing I could do was create safe, non-addictive drugs and personally administer them. This was not strictly legal but mostly because the law had not been written to take powers like mine into account. Well, the local organized crime group found out, and decided to recruit me by force. I declined to allow this, mostly by being very hard to kill or keep captive--I have carbon nanofiber mesh under my epidermis, and I can turn my fingers into bolt cutters if I want. It's not especially comfortable, but needs must. Once it became clear they couldn't keep me, they tried to kill me. After the first failed attempt on my life it became clear that I couldn't just wait for this problem to go away, so I found the apartment of a guy in the gang, broke in, sedated him when he got home, tied him up, and injected him with inhibition-lowering drugs until I could get him to give me the name and location of the guy next up the ladder from him, went there, and did the same to him. Rinse and repeat until I had the location of the guy who was ultimately in charge. He was trickier--he had much better security, for one thing--but they didn't know I could change as comprehensively as I could, so I found out what the guy's girlfriend looked like, turned into a perfect copy of her, and managed to get through the guards that way. I...killed him. I'm not proud of that part, but he had been trying to have me killed for weeks, so I'm not especially ashamed of it either. I left a message making it very clear what had happened and who was responsible. 

"I thought that was going to be the end of it, but...well, I had sorta incidentally terrified the hell out of these people, and there was a power vacuum, and...they...sorta put me in charge. At which point I threw up my hands and went 'fine' and made them cut it out with the coerced prostitution and violence and the predatory marketing tactics on the drugs." 

"That's a really strange way to wind up in charge of something!"

"It was not standard there either." 

"If we wanted to make alcohol illegal we'd start by taxing it into the ground, first of all, and - well, it'd take some coordinating to get everyone to refuse permissions to people who drank, but if even five percent of granting blues did that and nobody would only give drinkers permissions that'd make a dent - and then make it an exacerbating factor in any arrest - and then it wouldn't be so popular by the time it was illegal."

"We don't have anything convenient to restrict like babies that absolutely everyone wants and can only get legally, it makes it harder for us to enforce laws." 

"That must make things so hard."

"Well, I have unfair advantages." 

"You do! I meant for the blues - or whatever you have instead of blues -"

"We elect people. Anyone can run for office, although some of the higher offices have age restrictions." 

"Oh, we're a democracy too, but only the Senate has an age restriction. And only blues run."

"Our government is divided into three parts--Congress, the President, and the judiciary. Each of the three of them operates--interconnected but not under the others, so that if one of the branches fucks up the other two can keep things going until things are unfucked. Congress and the President have age restrictions, and the President has term limits." 

"The senate doesn't have term limits, most senators get reelected at least a few times."

"Yeah, Congress works like that too. But the President is basically an entire branch of government by himself, him and his advisers and support staff, so it's more important to not hand one person that job forever." 

"We don't have one of those, the Senate winds up working at cross purposes a lot."

"I think the Vice President--that's the guy who becomes President if the President dies--has the ability to vote in Congress if and only if there's otherwise a tie." 

"Oh, a lot of the cross purposes isn't about the votes themselves."