With every wrong password he entered into the stolen phone, the thief forgot a cherished or important memory.
have I mentioned how much I am into magic systems that require you to pay in happy memories
partly because there’s not an easy way to game them. it’s not like ‘extracts a price in pain’ (which is still fun too!), or even ‘damages you in some way’, because with those you can ‘cheat’ the system by using a payment option that you find disproportionately unobjectionable
if you’re paying in happy memories, you’re never going to have an easy decision to make, never going to be able to use magic without it being a wrenching necessity – because by definition the price depends on how good, how cherished, the memory is for you, how much you want to keep it
[cut for length]
I guess, but while I see the ability to bring about pain in the story, I can’t say it appeals to me, and I find myself thinking more in terms of “game balance”, I suppose. But I have a very technological orientation, one about human strength, human power, the capabilities of companies and states and continents. But these things are paid in mundane prices, mundane misery, mundane blood. A collapse here, a fire there, a polluted river, the hours of the lives of our brightest and the hours of the lives of pur most mundane. But all along, the goal is to ‘cheat’ as one would cheat at magic, to profit, and to profit off of that profit, in a self-reinforcing cycle as we ascend towards the skies and gain entire worlds. If a magic is a spiral that only ever leads downwards, then what use is it, except for the benefit that only be gained through immorality(/amorality)?
