a city and a mint who sleep very little between them

[self_composed]

Bella bikes to the airport on Friday. She gets a little reading done on her flight, then sleeps-on-purpose through the remainder of the trip, waking up precisely when the plane touches down. One nice bonus that she didn't even explicitly build into the power is that she can sleep at will in virtually any position; she doesn't have to get comfy if that's not convenient.

She steps off the plane, backpack full of her things over her shoulders, and stalks into the halls of LaGuardia, eyes peeled for Libby.

Comments

[prima_sequentem]

"Comes with the job," she says, unapologetically. "Someone has to make sure nobody destroys the world."

[self_composed]

"How did you get this job?" Bella asks.

[prima_sequentem]

"I figured out that nobody else was doing it."

[self_composed]

"And prior to that time, the world remained undestroyed," Bella points out.

[prima_sequentem]

"Lucky world," says Libby. "I'd rather not leave it to luck anymore."

[self_composed]

"Have you averted many near-apocalypses, then?"

[prima_sequentem]

"You say that like you think it's funny," she observes.

[self_composed]

"Even if I assume you began doing what you do sometime during elementary school, you've had two decades tops working on it. Did you take over from someone else? Has there been maybe one, more likely zero, arguable potential apocalypse you've been in a position to intervene with over that entire period? Are you operating in ignorance of other persons, forces, or organizations with the same goal who've been around longer than you? Are you using this as a cover to make yourself sound altruistic while you mostly work on something else? Is the world in negligible danger and you're paranoid? All of those possibilities are more likely than the world having always needed someone doing what you do and only having just recently gotten it, previously persisting only by luck."

[prima_sequentem]

"Anyone with the powers you or I have could easily cause massive widespread destruction if they happened to feel like it and no one was around to stop them," says Libby. "Are you going to argue with that?"

[self_composed]

"I could destroy stuff, if I wanted to," Bella says. "Sure. But the history of the world does not look like one in which mints and the natively empowered routinely decide to destroy lots of stuff. Magic can accomplish extremely precise, unnatural, abrupt effects, and will by default unless people are trying to hide, and the widest-scale disasters have been none of those. People willing to destroy lots of of stuff and kill lots of people and who have magic to burn on that project have little, if any, reason to deliberately cover their tracks."

Like, for example, if Alice had gotten minting powers without her around - the results would not look like "volcano erupts" or "tsunami hits". It would look like "suffocating rain of jellybeans".

[prima_sequentem]

"So... because it's obvious that it hasn't happened yet, it's probably not going to happen in the future? I'm having trouble following your logic here."

[self_composed]

"Mints could decide to do all kinds of things," Bella says. "The evidence suggests that the regularity of mint behavior doesn't involve rendering humans extinct - or screwing with the orbits of neighboring planets, or creating brand new species of megafauna with no evolutionary relation to other animals, or spelling their names in volcanic eruptions across the surface of Asia, or any number of other things that we could certainly notice now if they'd been done in the past. Because these don't seem to be things that are done despite however many thousands of years of opportunity, I do not expect them. Because I do not expect these events, a desire to prevent them does not mean I ought to take ethical shortcuts and spy on innocent people whose only feature of note is being a mint. I also wouldn't put a keylogger on my roommate's computer if I discovered she owned a pocketknife, just because she could decide to stab me with it overnight. The regularity of human behavior is that it doesn't usually involve stabbing." Bella shrugs. "Given the stakes at hand, I might see where you were coming from if you looked just hard enough to see if I had a history of psychiatric problems, or made a habit of distributing extremist manifestos on campus, or something, but you looked longer and harder than that even after finding no such thing."

Bella pauses, steepling her fingers.

"How'd you know to look in the first place?"

[prima_sequentem]

"I arranged to find out when there are new mints," she says. "It was the obvious thing to do. By the way, counting you and your friend, and assuming there aren't any more that managed to hide from me, there are currently five."

[self_composed]

"My friend?" Bella asks. That has to be Alice, but she doesn't want to give away anything about him right now. He is her secret weapon. "And - what, only five? In the world? Are you one yourself - are you any sort of magic yourself?"

[prima_sequentem]

"I'm a mint, yes, although I don't use it very often. If there are any more, they are either very well hidden or not on this planet at all."

[self_composed]

Bella had been expecting so many more mints than that.

"Five," she says.

Elias knew a lot of mints. What happened to them? (Maybe Libby wiped them out.)

"How does your mint-detector work?"

[prima_sequentem]

"Why do you want to know?"

[self_composed]

"Five is fewer than I expected. Maybe there's something the matter with your detector."

[prima_sequentem]

Interesting.

"Why did you expect more than five?"

[self_composed]

Bella half-lies. "Because it's so straightforward to make more mints. Anyone who wants anything even relatively pedestrian would have a motive to divvy up the minting between themselves and a reasonably trustworthy apprentice or three, who get the power in exchange for some fraction of the coins they generate. Mints should also live longer - curing diseases and so on, even if nothing else. Five. That's almost none. That's mints almost died out levels."

[prima_sequentem]

"True," says Libby. "And before you ask, it was like that when I got here."

[self_composed]

"And you haven't made more yourself because you think they'd destroy the world?"

[prima_sequentem]

"I haven't made more myself because I want to be very, very careful about who I give that power to. I don't necessarily think they'd destroy the world, but the intersection of people who want to be mints with people I trust to be mints is not as large as you seem to think."

[self_composed]

"If anyone has the wherewithal to sort through a lot of people I'd expect it to be you," Bella says.

[prima_sequentem]

"Of course I do," she says. "But on the other hand, I don't consider replenishing the world mint population—if it was ever more than five to begin with—very urgent."