Editing Genius The Transgression/Chapter Four:Special Rules and Systems (section)

=== The Cost of Making Changes: ===

"The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Whether it was the work of the Terminals in creating a "causality trench," as many temporal scholars say, or whether time is just naturally inelastic and inertial, causing changes is exhausting. To cause a change, a genius must "fuel" it with his own Inspiration.

Making most minor changes that affect a single person (rescuing your grandfather, fixing your friend up with that pretty blond) costs one point of Willpower and ten points of Mania. If the subject to be manipulated is metanormal in any way, it costs one point of Willpower, as well as ten points of Mania per dot of the relevant Metanormal Advantage.

More significant changes, from "family line" up to "village" requires an expenditure of one dot of Willpower, and ten points of Mania. If anyone in the affected area is metanormal, this costs ten points of Mania per dot of Metanormal Advantage of the creature with the highest Advantage, plus 20 points of Mania and a Willpower dot.

"Village" or "off-world colony" is about as large an area as the Guardians of Forever will tolerate before they go back and fix things (and possibly kick your ass). Sometimes exceptions are made if the area has no longterm viability (if you want to transport a whole doomed planet into the past, the Guardians won't care if the planet burns up in the supernova or disappears five minutes beforehand, as long as the survivors don't affect the timeline as they live out their lives). If permitted, these larger changes, up to redirecting the timeline of a whole world, cost one dot of Inspiration, one dot of Willpower, and 100 points of Mania.

Failure to pay this cost to the timeline in short order will result in the regular timeline reasserting itself: "rescued" people get killed off, relationships that the genius built that weren't there to begin with fall apart, and generally things slide back to the way they were. 

Alternatively, sometimes Guardians will crawl all over a site because of minor changes that might "jump the trench" and produce significant future deviations. What triggers a butterfly effect in the timeline is never clear, but occasionally a seemingly minor change will result in a lot of pissed Guardians popping out of the temporal stream to stop a genius' plan.