Supplemental worldbuilding questions

[DanielH]

I couldn’t really find a good place to ask this, so I’m putting it here.

Bells are against nonconsensual mind or memory alteration, including memory charms which “just” remove memories. Based on the way Phoenix behaves around them, this isn’t just a practical concern of “having those memories will tell me more about the world”, but also possessiveness of “those memories are mine”.

So what’s the difference between erasing somebody’s memory with Obliviate and erasing it with time travel? If you take away a month with the former then obviously the victim will be confused by the date, will have forgotten appointments they made, etc., but those don’t seem to be Bells’ main concerns with memory removal. How is the time Charlie spent telling Gem how to get at his gun without his approval any less Charlie’s than the few seconds spent reading are Sherlock’s?

I don’t expect the answer is just that the Bells think of time-travelled-away histories as having never happened, both based on the way Gem talks and based on how Cam reacted to Contessa’s power.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

IIRC the justification is something like "Saving all those people from being dead is more important than not messing with their memories via time travel." But I'm not Alicorn, so.

[DanielH]

Which I could understand, but IIRC Gem doesn’t act even slightly worried about keeping her iteration count down. If she thought that what she was doing had serious negative consequences but was worth it, I would expect her to at least try harder on that.

[Ezra]

Gem went into this in some detail in one box, IIRC one of the ones with Edie. I think she had decided that all those months were lost to the enemy anyhow, and her job was to optimize the one eventually-surviving timeline?

[Alicorn]

Yeah. She didn't decide to loop; it is her only weapon v. end of world; and as far as she knows nobody but her can possibly come out of the looping with more than one total set of memories, so given what she has to work with they should be a set of memories where the world doesn't end. She doesn't like it but she can't afford to be squeamish about using her principal weapon so she suppresses active squeam.

[Ezra]

Bar doesn't ordinarily do menus and catalogs. I don't remember if this has come up, but how willing is she to provide specific published catalogs, as publications? Like "a 1995 IKEA catalog" sort of thing. I assume this is not difficult in a technical way.

[Alicorn]

She'll do those.

[DanielH]

In League, Linya supplied pens to everybody. Did she get a discount from Bar to the wholesale price or anything like that, like I assume she would have back home?

[Alicorn]

Nah, pretty much counts as buying retail, same as if J.K. Rowling is traveling and wants to look up what she said in Prisoner of Azkaban she goes and buys one.

[DanielH]

Does Materia care if you do science to something which is not the Universe? For example, if you assign a small group of people to try fiat currency while everybody else sticks to the gold standard, or if you spin a wheel with numbers on it before asking people what percent of the Imperium is Khersian and record the results, would it interfere?