"I am confused by your magic system but deeply grateful for the aid to our world in any event."

"There's a lot of magic systems interacting with each other here but wishcoins are pretty simple, if sometimes awkward to explain." She pokes her head into Arda. The evil disappears. "Eos - the same world ingot powers like Keziah and Céleste's are native to - also has 'mints', who can make coins. Coins are made out of pain, so we spend a lot of time exploiting masochists. It's a triangle to do something little like flick a switch or braid your hair or iron a shirt, a square to conjure most smallish nonmagical objects, a pentagon to learn a language or apply most traits that can reasonably apply within nonmagical species variation for the target, a hex for a single issuing of a magical superpower, star if you want to terraform a whole planet, it takes an evil to apply magical traits that will persist through torching, a niner will impose stable magical conditions across an entire subworld, a tenner's enough to create a new subworld in a sheaf or affect many subworlds or do something that just requires a ridiculous amount of oomph. Haven't had anyone try for the level past that so far; they go up exponentially. The most common sapient species can't actually make anything bigger than a star without being magically augmented."

"I wonder what a Maia could do. Don't happen to know any masochistic Maiar, though, and they presumably wouldn't become mints even if they went to Eos. Maiar have about a hundred times as much attentional capacity as us."

"Minting is generally wished on. There must have been an original ingot mint, but since then it's a hex per. We require a fairly high standard of trust to give it out, though, and the problems tenners can't solve are generally ones where wishchoins categorically do not work for some reason."

"And I suppose oaths are no longer stunningly perfect for trust because you can wipe them off. Well, if you don't need it badly I suppose it can certainly wait."

"It's generally a more interpersonal sort of trust than that. Helps when we get to know many versions of people and have their perspectives on each other. Some templates just automatically get whatever of the transmissible powers package they'd like."

"I have to admit to finding it strange that a personality type would be so trustworthy you'd trust any instances of them; most people I know are capable of being worthy of trust but wouldn't be under literally all possible environments they could have been raised in. No one'd be a trustworthy orc."

"I'm not sure that's actually true. Some of the stronger templates - 'stronger' here means 'commoner and not a followon to another template' but we also seem to have more standout personality traits - violate otherwise overwhelming regularities in our reference classes in order to be consistent with ourselves. It also might just be that we couldn't be born as orcs in the first place. You'd want to talk to Glass about this if the subject interests you, although she finds her inability to pin down much useful detail with her metacausality-vision frustrating after a while."

"Fair enough. I'm sure someone's appropriately catalogued the consequences for nature versus nurture debates. Or my species could have different psychology."

"We're definitely keeping an eye on template regularities and how they work. 'Metacausality' is our word for whatever it is that causes things to line up in such a way as to causally produce the results we see - parallelism in worlds that have more than enough reason to diverge, matching templates from wildly disparate backgrounds, that sort of thing. We only have observational work on that. Except Harley, I suppose Harley's experimental data."

"I do not think Pen told us that story."

"My husband's template has invariably abusive childhood situations. There's multiple sets of parent and non-parent sources but it's very consistent. And then we found one while he was still a baby, with one of the abusive parent sets - so my nieceoid Elspeth kidnapped him and brought him up herself only to discover that as far as Glass can tell the template is guaranteed to get through a certain minimum quota of suffering and Elspeth could only delay it. So when Harley was an adolescent he spontaneously developed the power to interdimensionally teleport, landed in a world we hadn't put a Janepoint in yet, and found the situation he landed in so unpleasant that he spent most of his time stuck in that world repeatedly torching in the middle of the sun as soon as he managed to control his teleportation power well enough to get there instead of somewhere it would be easier for his captors to retrieve him from."

"Oh," he says knowingly. "Torching?"

"Most of the people in routine in-the-know contact with the peal are torchable. It's an admin-conferred ability and means that if we manage to get into a lethal situation we reset to a healthy state on the spot instead of actually dying. It's usually handy but combines best with better freedom of movement than Harley had mastered at the time."

"I would say."

"We normally have excellent freedom of movement; but handing it out to the kids has its own hazards - Pen could have had a Janegem on her person, but if she had then walked into a world that, unlike Arda, was hazardous to Jane, Jane would have broken and most of the worlds would have gone into temporal de-sync and most of our people would be stuck where they were whether that was their original world or not. Harley could have had a standard teleportation power but it's hard to know exactly when to wish that on while someone's growing up and Glass is convinced that he would have managed to find something awful to get stuck in anyway."

"You have a standard teleportation power?"

"Yes. It doesn't go interdimensionally, though, that's beyond wishcoins - all of our interdimensionality options are ultimately Milliways- or Downside-based one way or another."

"That might be better; could give it to more people if there's less disastrous outcomes should they abuse it."

"We don't usually hand out even the hex powers casually, spending a few large coins on a new world is par for the course but vetting people for and then spending hexes - or, if they torch and need the powers to stick through torching, evils - on everyone who asks would be pushing it if we adopted the habit."

"We could try to work out a system of payment, see if there's anything this world's native magic does as well as hexes. What kind of coin is irrevocable suicide going to take, or is that not something you're willing to hand out?"

"...I don't have a way to guarantee genuine irrevocability. It might be conceptually impossible to do with coins because coins can themselves pull information out of the past."

"Okay. That's a magic that'll be asked for more than anything else, I expect, and I think everyone who'd want it would settle for teleportation, though perhaps I should survey them all first."

"It'd be pretty safe to give out teleportation powers on a ground-rulesed world - it'd be better if I installed the complete set and not just the violence one, but not essential - and if it's batched it's not too coin-inefficient."

"I think given what I understand of your goals that'd be a good use of coins. What are the other rules?"