I should probably think about what I could do with the next charge of the coin, but opened lichess instead and started playing. I needed a break, this was already getting too intense. Music helped quite a bit too. After a few games the hunger surprised me, even when I had had some breakfast not too long ago. Or maybe I was just stressed out, it's hard to disambiguate between those. I wondered if I should go for a walk, but decided against it. Maybe the coin wouldn't be here when I got back? Or what if I took it with me and lost it? Or got robbed? I wasn't usually worried about such things, but the circumstances were admittedly exceptional. I would still have to leave the apartment at some point, but maybe I could use the coin to provide some security for that.
After heating up a frozen pizza and forcing it down despite the growing anxiety churning my stomach, the chess didn't feel that appetizing anymore either. I checked the timer. Only 40 minutes had passed, but waiting was already grating my nerves. Maybe I could come up with something actually smart to ask. The idea of reducing the time between questions seemed quite useful, but maybe doing some free-form brainstorming first would help me get some other ideas too. It would be easier to compare options when I would have a list of them.
So I opened my laptop and put on a timer for 10 minutes. The first minute was completely consumed by me just looking at the blank screen and trying to come up with anything. I started going through the thoughts that had led me here, and that brought up some things, at least.
The last note brought me back from my now-rather-enthusiastic scribbling. Thinking of the coin's potential to be as dangerous as The Whispering Earring was scary. While it wouldn't probably get that bad with the time limit, it could still make me never do any major decisions myself. Not that bad, considering how little decisions I typically make. But still unsettling. And maybe the time was reducible.
So far getting faster recharge intervals still felt like the best option. I should probably update my opinion based on this charge time, as if it was the same, it's less likely that any speedups could be done. But I didn't think that mattered enough to ask other questions. I started typing again:
The coin should land on the tree side if spending my next 100 questions and the time between them on getting the coin to be ready faster would make it at least 10% faster. Otherwise, it should land on the non-tree side.
Good enough, I guess. I was about to write something about "improving" the recharge time, but if the coin was dangerous, then perhaps improving it might be seen as the time getting longer instead. Hypotheticals still made me feel uneasy, but I had previously asked about it only giving correct answers and that had been confirmed. So if I were to believe it at all, this should be fine too.
I played a bit more chess, until the coin started glowing again. 2 hours and 42 minutes since I had last asked a question, and almost exactly fifteen more minutes for the time since the coin had last been ready. Almost the same time to recharge, and the rest could be measuring error. I tried to think if there was anything significant about it, but couldn't come up with anything. Had the hours and ten-minutes been otherwise around, it might at least have been funny. One point less for living-in-a-simulation hypothesis then, to balance the millions of points gained from getting the coin in the first place.
I quickly spoke my prepared lines, and after the familiar fizzle I was left looking at the side with random lines. For a while I thought I had seen a face there, but it disappeared quickly. Probably just the weird pattern-over-recognition thing brain do. Oh well, so much for the plan where I use it to write text.