"I am the designated looker-afterer of the whole nation, and the oldest of my brothers, and without me everyone sort of does all right but they are not their best selves."

"Aww."

"Anyway they'd want me for a family effort to end mortality - I'm no good at science but I imagine the cooperation of the local governors would help a lot and navigating social impacts of various baby distributions would be a mess and my father is not well-suited to that kind of problems."

"Oh, yeah, there'd be loads of politics to wade through."

"With real stakes! I would have entirely too much fun. Hopefully the Valar are helpful and it does not come to that."

"Are there a lot of politics with fake stakes to be had?"

"Everyone in Tirion will lead happy lives even if I badly mismanage their taxes and infrastructure, truth be told, so all the stakes are arguably fake. But we play games of politics with even more fake stakes."

"You have taxes? You don't have money but you have taxes?"

"It doesn't make sense to run the country off 'the King asks for things needed to build the roads' so everyone's supposed to contribute a certain amount of their effort and talent to public works things every year, unless they have a good reason not to. That is one of the things money would be very suited to but I can't think how to introduce it."

"I can't either, you can't exactly peg it to the gold supply..."

"You can make it known that these pretty trinkets are worth so much of the Crown's time and can be redeemed with us at will and traded among one another, but our time is a very limited resource and there's not enough of it to be the backbone of a money system. And I haven't thought of a better idea yet."

"Yeah, and only one of me, and until more people know how to program, pets are the only transferable servants that don't take forever to make..."

"I can force everyone to start using some kind of trinket for transactions but they'll be annoyed about it and I don't know that it'd have the desired effects."

"I don't think it works if they don't want the trinkets."

"Well, you can artificially create demand in horrible coercive ways like demanding everyone bring me so many trinkets at the end of the day, but I can't think of a useful way to do it."

"Maybe some kind of game with a prize? Most trinkets gets - some scarce desirable thing."

"Our time, probably. Nothing but time and original art is scarce. Letting people buy power seems like it would at least have interesting failure modes."

"...It does. I can also raffle off some golems if that would be helpful."

"That would be tremendously helpful. Hmm - now to design the currency - it will have to be very pretty -"

"Of course it will. Can't have ugly currency, no sir."

"I gather it doesn't matter as much to you, but it matters a great deal to us."

"I understand, it's just kinda, I dunno, cute."

"Since it's your idea we could have the design of your House - well, I guess you don't have one - on them. Do you have a symbol that's associated with you?"

"Not really. Sometimes coins have faces on them but it would be really weird to have my face on the currency here, it'd usually be the governor or a past governor's face."

"We can do the King's face," he says, and starts sketching. "Are they typically round?"