Tianjie Singles Living and neighboring Postham Confessionals get burned down by an errant explosion!! Some drunk was trying to cook a chicken with a fireball wand (super not recommended*).
No biggie - average WF emergency response time? Two minutes, and that's including the time it takes to undo the structural damage and rez the victims. Thirty-six people died in this accident, including the one who started the fire, burning, choking, crushing -- but when they woke up they didn't even remember it, like a surgery or a dream. That's all death needs to be. The cause was determined in another five minutes. The crime being a typical 2 minutes of forgotten inconvenience forced upon what was potentially several hundred people, had all the rooms been reasonably filled, it was deemed Minimal Consequence, pure negligence -- the best kind -- and the instigator's identity was not revealed. But because he began attending thirty six weeks of safety training, when he had previously barely left his flat, it was pretty easy for his neighbors to ascertain it was him. These kinds of things happen every day.
Every day?! Wouldn't harsher consequences keep people more serious? No. Statistically, Wavefronters do not so much as observe a single tragedy at this scale. It's just a really big city. There's always someone. Once-twice a day is great. In Selbsediee shit this bad or worse is always happening on every street and everyone just acts like it's normal. (That's why they have so many endeavorists. Wilderness and dungeons are nicer than civilization.)
There is one huge knock-on effect for this level of safety: in a disaster situation, a lot of people who would panic instead welcome death merrily, because they're expecting to be resurrected. So the people who have the hardest time are not the ones who die, but the ones who narrowly escape or witness the disaster, since they are at highest risk of being missed by consequence scans, and the most likely to be left with disturbing memories. The guy swimming away from the buildings ended up deliberately keeping his memories even though they scared him, since he valued the experience -- but his friends elected to have the specifics knocked out. So this freedom lost him a cool story that he would've shared with those people. Now he is the only one who knows how it really happened. (Emergency Services is constantly forgetting their own accomplishments.) This kind of thing is one of the biggest social problems in the city and there are always discussions about how far is too far, should we maybe just shut down elective memory mods entirely? but what about... etc. etc.
Major legal punishments in Wavefront are based on intent and most importantly the time it takes to undo. In spectacular cases of ill intent -- fullwill indefinite-scope murder, without sociopathy, ignorance, or consent -- the victim count (i.e. undo scale) doesn't matter; it's just an automatic banishment to the nasty monster-infested parts of Utrolige, where they become a monster too. Probably to die there, no one will know. Ugly business. That's not as bad as it can be. All things are secondary to undo time. The worst case is irrevocability. If someone is killed or imprisoned so long they lose their era and acquaintances, there is no time travel to fix it. And the instigator can never be adequately punished. Resurrection tech has been strengthening for centuries; murder tech's only advantage lies in obscurity. Of course, dear prospective murderers, merely obliterating a body without trace is not nearly enough to escape evidential identification. Everything you do leaves a mark in the ley. Only a high level wizard could possibly pull off a lasting murder. People who, anyway, could not be stopped.
More common than real murder attempts is long-term harassment, which magic doesn't distinguish or revert as easily. If someone makes your life hell in the right plausibly deniable ways, magic might end up indicating that you're the jerk. There are hardships that regular people don't have the resources to overcome even despite assistance. Thankfully, most people who live here are way too nice to even think of something like that.
Yes, death has been knocked to its knees, for the most part. Aging is still a reality -- why, you'll actually feel the effects here and need to have them reverted, unlike in Zeo where you just don't change while you're there. Of course Zeo is FILTHY and they sure aren't rezzing you for free. It's spillover from all the richy rich immortals (struldbrugs) with leaky estates. You tell me which is better!!
* Trade it in for a chicken cooking wand. You've got the time!
