Libby, before Stella appears on the scene, has enough magic for her purposes. She is personally acquainted with all of the mints in the world; she is one of a very small number of people who know how to safely use stars; she has mechanisms in place to alert her if either of those things changes; her personal coin stash is enough to accomplish everything she wants to accomplish, plus a generous pile left over for emergencies, and is verifiably more coins than are concentrated in the possession of any other mint.
She doesn't want to take over the world. She wants her network to thrive and expand. It's doing both of those things.
If she had some reason to want to accumulate massive piles of hexes, she would start looking for ways to do that. But there is nothing she wants to do that massive piles of hexes would be enough of a help with to justify extreme measures.
When Aelise signs on Chelsa, she is making a sacrifice to prevent imminent global thermonuclear war with bonus Gifts. The equivalent threat in Libby's world is a rogue mint, and it is best avoided by controlling the mint population as closely as possible. Which she is already doing.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "a decent chance at literal immortality". What's the connection, sight unseen, between immortality and large numbers of coins? Libby and Chris are already protected against all the dangers that (respectively) Chris's power and a star can ward off; the only major remaining threat to either of them is old age, which is not that urgent given that Chris is IIRC about forty, and they have plenty of time to carefully consider solutions. (They could just stop aging, but that would be noticeable and they don't want to be noticeable in that way.)
Another way to say what I'm trying to get at here might be: Libbies are not infinitely ambitious. When presented with urgent problems, they come up with effective immediate solutions, but they aren't inclined to take risks without a clear goal in mind. In fact, the calculation going on is almost the opposite of what your Wiki link describes: she doesn't think the value of maybe-possibly acquiring an easy route to fountains of hexes now is worth performing the experiment as it stands rather than wait and see if a better way to achieve the same non-urgent thing drops into her lap later. (It's not as though she expects the opportunity to spend a pentagon on a somewhat distasteful experiment to someday vanish.)
It might also be relevant to note that (IIRC - there's some chance I might have contradicted this when the original Eos threads were going down, and it's been long enough that I don't remember for sure) Libby is capable of generating everything up to stars by herself. She doesn't consider it fun, but she can do it. (It's definitely the case that she can come up with stars when she wants stars, if not by herself then via her minty acquaintances.) If she couldn't generate stars where necessary, she would want to fix that. But since she can, and she has as many stars as she needs to do the things she wants to do, she doesn't consider it urgent to increase her available coin production.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2014-01-09 11:28 pm (UTC)Libby, before Stella appears on the scene, has enough magic for her purposes. She is personally acquainted with all of the mints in the world; she is one of a very small number of people who know how to safely use stars; she has mechanisms in place to alert her if either of those things changes; her personal coin stash is enough to accomplish everything she wants to accomplish, plus a generous pile left over for emergencies, and is verifiably more coins than are concentrated in the possession of any other mint.
She doesn't want to take over the world. She wants her network to thrive and expand. It's doing both of those things.
If she had some reason to want to accumulate massive piles of hexes, she would start looking for ways to do that. But there is nothing she wants to do that massive piles of hexes would be enough of a help with to justify extreme measures.
When Aelise signs on Chelsa, she is making a sacrifice to prevent imminent global thermonuclear war with bonus Gifts. The equivalent threat in Libby's world is a rogue mint, and it is best avoided by controlling the mint population as closely as possible. Which she is already doing.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "a decent chance at literal immortality". What's the connection, sight unseen, between immortality and large numbers of coins? Libby and Chris are already protected against all the dangers that (respectively) Chris's power and a star can ward off; the only major remaining threat to either of them is old age, which is not that urgent given that Chris is IIRC about forty, and they have plenty of time to carefully consider solutions. (They could just stop aging, but that would be noticeable and they don't want to be noticeable in that way.)
Another way to say what I'm trying to get at here might be: Libbies are not infinitely ambitious. When presented with urgent problems, they come up with effective immediate solutions, but they aren't inclined to take risks without a clear goal in mind. In fact, the calculation going on is almost the opposite of what your Wiki link describes: she doesn't think the value of maybe-possibly acquiring an easy route to fountains of hexes now is worth performing the experiment as it stands rather than wait and see if a better way to achieve the same non-urgent thing drops into her lap later. (It's not as though she expects the opportunity to spend a pentagon on a somewhat distasteful experiment to someday vanish.)
It might also be relevant to note that (IIRC - there's some chance I might have contradicted this when the original Eos threads were going down, and it's been long enough that I don't remember for sure) Libby is capable of generating everything up to stars by herself. She doesn't consider it fun, but she can do it. (It's definitely the case that she can come up with stars when she wants stars, if not by herself then via her minty acquaintances.) If she couldn't generate stars where necessary, she would want to fix that. But since she can, and she has as many stars as she needs to do the things she wants to do, she doesn't consider it urgent to increase her available coin production.