Perfidia - Wish power

"Wishes," Perfidia continued, "the kind I grant, don't happen out of the aether. Can't get something for nothing, that's a fundamental law. How it works is, I take your Humanity, use some of it to make your wish come true, and pocket the rest as a fee for my services. Because of that, the exact nature of your wish is limited by how much Humanity you have."

***

"Wishes require more Humanity the more they change the world. Say you've got terminal cancer and wish to be cured. Easy. Zap some bad cells and presto change-o. Minimal impact on the world at large, 1 Humanity is more than enough to cover it. Now say instead you want a lot of money. Hundred million dollars. Well, to get a hundred million dollars I'd either have to steal the money from someone who already has it—bad idea—or make it myself, which requires fabricating a bunch of bills, altering national record-keeping systems to recognize those bills as real, plus other technical details like that. There's impact on the world, because I have to change stuff outside the domain of a single human. Might cost, say, 10 Humanity. Get it?"

(But she could do it cheaper by just giving someone winning lottery numbers so they won already legal money via an already legal method. That way she wasn't changing anything in the world, so the wish became cheap again—1 Humanity tops. Methods like that let her game the system and snag a higher profit margin for herself. She withheld him that info.)

***

"You can speak freely," she said. "I'm not a genie. I'm not gonna make the first thing you say your wish whether you want it or not. Devils work with contracts. Nothing's final till you sign a dotted line."

***

The kind of people who specified they wanted a billion dollars in USD, thinking if they didn't a devil would hand them a billion Zimbabwean dollars instead. Devils got a terrible shake in human media, but the depiction of such faulty wishes rankled Perfidia's Pride. She might overcharge, yes. She might push people to make a decision more quickly than they liked, yes. But if they wished for something, she gave them that wish.

***

[1] Spirit of Eternal Negation