"Yeah should be enough."

"All right. So you want something like money but not exactly. He'll know what I do and will probably give at least a bit of a reply."

"Perfect."

"So what do you have in mind?"

"—oh am I not supposed to tell the Lord directly?"

"You more or less are. Short of going into the sanctum, he's here as much as anywhere."

"Oh, alright. Okay so what I'm thinking here is that non-practitioners have shifted from bartering systems to currency for a good reason, and especially for practitioners I think it might be useful to have an agreed-upon unit of power rather than having to rely on how other people perceive you and how local you are."

"I completely agree! Barter is inexact; there's bound to be a lot of opportunity for arbitrage. But no one's doing this, and it's probably not coincidence.

Part of it's probably that economics is a newcomer's idea; when the Lord was human the unit of trade around here was the beaver pelt. Favor trading...it has its downsides. But it encourages people to put down roots, build reputations. Non-practitioners don't have to worry about picking a system that matches well with how the spirits see things."

"Yeah, but... well, even though the Lord is most powerful here, he would still be very powerful elsewhere. The spirits may be somewhat local, but they're not completely, and the way they work, if a basic unit of 'power currency' was agreed-upon and started being used, it would probably become power currency by that alone."

"The Lord is... he's listening. My guess at why he's apprehensive is that there isn't much of anything that can be standardized. Amounts of power aren't so measurable. It'll be more effective when used for symbolically relevant goals, or you can't be sure whatever's backing the currency will put exactly the same amount of effort into redeeming it each time it's used, or something. Like trading in pelts or numbers of cigarettes; you need it interchangeable and a given two aren't always."

"Well, fiat currency would be ideal. And, this is why I wanted to present the idea to the Lord; he would have enough pull to at least do an experiment and see if we can't get this ball rolling."

"Skipping straight to fiat currency sounds harder. It works for nations because people want the money, and that stuck around from before it was fiat.

We could just say all exchanges must accept some amount of the new currency. But with no baseline for how much it's worth we could end up with the magic equivalent of wagons full of iron coins. And if we order people to accept payment they think is worthless too often, they could always just leave."

"Oh I wasn't suggesting skipping straight to it, that'd be an end goal. And something that already has intrinsic value could be used at first, like gold was."

Nod. "So the trick is finding something with a fixed enough value that any two units of it are interchangeable, and that a lot of practitioners want. Probably not impossible, but it sounds a bit...mechanistic."

"What do you mean?"

"The practice is more art than science. It's not like a battery; it'd be hard to standardize the amount of power backing the currency."

"People do sell art for money."

"Inconveniently, the better analogy might be using art as money. We don't want the currency to be valuable only because we say it is, so it has to be good art, so to speak. Which we could do. The hard part is making each certificate equally valuable.

This probably isn't an insurmountable barrier. It just means that unlike with regular money we'd be trying to force something that doesn't happen naturally."

"Yeah. What does the Lord think?"

"He's...open to the idea but skeptical. Probably more of us will discuss it before deciding, and keep you in the loop if we go forward with it."

He nods. "Thank you very much."

"You're welcome. If it can be made to work, there's a lot of upside potential."

"Yeah. I guess I should get going, then. Bye!"

Oh right, there's still the minor detail of someone ambiguously trying to get him killed.

Yes there is. He... doesn't want to go ask the Behaims, though, he already asked them about Rose and doesn't want them to put two and two together. What other practitioners are there in town?