"We don't know where to find it or have the territory rights to wherever it is or have the means to get it out or have the means to shape it."

"But you got the coins? What do you do, collect them off humans who enter circles?" He examines the coins.

"Mostly other courts do that and then we trade for them. It was an interest of my father's before I was even around, but he didn't know what the humans used them for."

"Huh, I wouldn't think that would be especially hard to figure out as things you can learn by watching very slow humans go about their business go but I'm probably overestimating how often they come into play in this century or something like that." Are these all of one denomination?

They are not. They're not even all from the same system of coinage. Lots of different faces.

"We know they traded them. We thought they might be magic, or useful for the metal and stamped only to indicate weight."

"I don't happen to know the relative value of these but I'd be astonished if they were all the same and in particular the type of metal probably makes a big difference."

"I can order them by how much the debt system thinks they're worth."

He does this. It mostly tracks how precious humans would consider the metals, though it also seems relevant how pretty the coin is and there's at least one other factor that's harder to guess from looking - maybe something to do with which of these are currently in circulation among humans in this area?

"That's close to what I'd guess but not exact -" Cam looks up what he can find about the relative values of all the materials he can identify.

Yep, close but slightly different.

"In particular -" He moves coins that should rightly be a bit to the left in the line down a bit.

He frowns. "Huh. I wonder if the magic is taking into account what the humans think or mostly agrees with the humans about some other property of the universe. Or if the humans are noticing the magic, I guess, though they don't think they are."

"Doubt it," Cam agrees. "Are the proportions about right, I wonder -" He makes a little balance and starts weighing coins of like metal.

Again, clearly correlated with the debt system's opinions but imperfectly.

Cam reports on this to see if that has any effect.

It does not. "The information I'd expect to affect how much it's worth is anything that changes how much one of us wants it, or information about the ease of getting a replacement."

"Are we out of things that should be checked before I start counterfeiting?"

"I'd be curious whether anything happens if you promised not to counterfeit one in particular until sunset, or something. But you don't want to do that if there's any chance you'll forget you said so."

"There's any chance."

"It's not that important. I think it'd work but I wouldn't learn that much either way."

Cam picks up a little copper one. "How about I make a this and we see what happens?"

"Sounds good!"

Now there are two.

The debt system believes this makes both of them considerably less valuable.

"But it didn't affect the other denominations?"