It really varies by the territory.  The people in Doctor Disaster's territory don't have the highest mean wealth around, but their median is pretty good because of how Doctor Disaster's more politically powerful minions don't just take away stuff from anyone who seems to have it, and Doctor Disaster himself doesn't take "people aren't starving" as an automatic cue to raise taxes and spend more money on Spark-things.

...Queen Albia probably has a wealthier territory, though.  She doesn't tolerate much of that sort of thing either.

In a town like Little Damar built into the mountains, housing happens when the castle's construction-related minions make it happen, on a break from reconstructing the castle.  They run behind of newlywed couples needing housing, rather than getting out in front of them, and if Opalyn had enough pull to fix that, she'd probably earn herself some noticeable helping of goodwill from newlywed couples and the relatives who'd otherwise need to house them for a few months.  At least, until people forgot that life had ever gone any other way or that Opalyn deserved credit for it.  A newlywed couple with well-to-do parents can afford to sleep in separate bedrooms, have separate bedrooms for younger or older kids, have steam-lighting in a clank-kitchen.

Doctor Disaster is not as naive as people think; he doesn't accept more immigrants to Little Damar than Little Damar has contracts to import food and food reserves to feed for a month if the blimps stopped arriving.  People here don't starve because Doctor Disaster made dumb decisions, only because they made dumb decisions of their own; and even then, there's dangerous work you can sign up for rather than die of starvation directly.  Mercenary companies are always recruiting.  People here don't starve to death, but they might die rather than starve, if they've made the wrong decisions leading up to that point.

Wise masters know that their apprentices will not output linearly more work if forced to work linearly more hours.  Not all masters in Little Damar are wise.

Is the economy growing, globally and/or locally?

Or to use more words to explain the question: are most people of this generation more economically secure than their grandparents were? Are they more likely to have housing with multiple bedrooms, to have enough slack to avoid dangerous jobs without starving, and so on?

And if so, does Twoodle have any idea how the economy grows?

Opalyn can provide helpful suggestions of how she thinks an economy might grow, if he seems lost, but wants not to lead him prematurely.

...nnnooo?  People in Little Damar have better opportunities because Doctor Disaster is an unusually non-destructive Spark.  In time, he'll die, and then a lot of people will be sad; they won't keep the improved conditions past however long it takes the next Disaster heir to start running things their own way.

Sooo that sort of seems to imply that the economy would be growing, if only Sparks would stop destroying the natural growth? Like, Sparks as a rule just consume any wealth that's generated above some baseline, so everything always stays the same. Does that sound right?

Yep.  Sometimes people break through as Sparks and go on a crusade to kill as many other Sparks as they can, for the good of the rest of the world. In his own opinion, it doesn't really help much on the margin to only kill some of the Sparks, because it just means the remaining Sparks rule larger territories; if people like that were smart enough to target the worst Sparks and competent enough to take them out, maybe that'd help.

Cynic that he is, he suspects that absent any Sparks, you'd just have some other kind of people who pushed themselves up into power and stole everything that wasn't nailed down.

Why do most Sparks destroy value? Does Twoodle really believe in his own cynicism? People in power can't help but take, take, take, at the expense of everyone else? And it's completely independent of the fact that they're Sparks?

Or is there some sort of congenital sociopathy that goes along with the ability to go into a fugue state and invent weird mechanical contraptions?

Perhaps it would be better to ask this inside out.

What explains that Doctor Disaster is not, apparently, an asshole?

He doesn't know.  It's actually sort of never occurred to him to wonder.  Josephus Twoodle is not a hereditary Disaster minion -- Twoodle showed up on purpose to work for that one Spark who was rumored to not usually kill his own people for dumb reasons.  It made sense to him that there'd be some Sparks like that.

His theory of human nature is that people usually do again what they perceive themselves as having been rewarded for previously doing.  Sparks tell their clank to shove somebody around, it works, they feel themselves to have been rewarded, they do it again.  Maybe one time as a little boy Doctor Disaster tried to shove somebody else and that didn't work for him...

Twoodle doesn't know, really.  Just.  His own father, when he was alive, would've absolutely told him off, for shoving another boy.  And maybe Sparks' parents don't get around to it, or the nannies they hire don't dare, so their children grow up to -- think it's okay.

...this is maybe the sort of thing where if you could get a mad social scientist to figure it out, it would help the world a lot, now that Twoodle thinks of it?  Except that actually the research would be used to build an army of obedient Spark slaves instead.

Opalyn suddenly feels crushing, bone-deep fatigue.

This is a strange world in multiple senses, it's going to take her a long time to make sense of it, and it's probably going to turn out to be in stable equilibrium. Not just stable, but nigh immovable. Worlds are big and have a lot of interlocking parts. It's hard to shift even tiny systems with a few parts.

Maybe she doesn't need to do all that.

Maybe she just needs to find Doctor Disaster and keep him safe, because apparently he's an extremely bright and rare resource: a Spark powerful enough to hold some territory who is also at least somewhat good and wise at the same time.

She probably shouldn't just take Twoodle's word for it, about how this world is. He's just one person, and not a very well-traveled or introspective one at that. She'll try to remember not to overindex on what he's saying.

But still, she's not happy about how things are here, and how unlikely it is that she'll be able to shift them.

She takes a deep breath and another sip of her chai.

"So. You mentioned earlier that you were interested in news of Doctor Disaster's kidnapping."

"I have my own teams working on that, but let me get your perspective too. How serious is it, in your opinion? What would you be doing about it if you were in my place? How have you already been involved so far? And are you grumpy that I've commandeered your time this morning, because otherwise you'd be directly doing something about the kidnapping?"

"No, that's definitely not my job and I'm a great believer in people who do actually and only what their job is supposed to be."

"How serious... I think this has happened, if I'm remembering right, three times since I started working here?  It's just, every one of those times actually is an emergency because it would be very very bad if Doctor Disaster didn't come back even one single time."

"In your place -- I guess I'd start with asking if I could go steal him back from wherever he is, Professor Predicament according to the rumors, and if I thought I couldn't do that then things would get complicated.  Where the basic reason we might succeed, at that, is that they think it's fun to hold him, and for us, it's life and death to get him back."

"Do you think it really was Professor Predicament?"

"I think you hear about a lot more clever masquerade plots than actually happen, because the clever mistaken identity conspiracies are more fun to retell about in taverns.  Most crimes that were obviously, blatantly committed by somebody were actually commited by them.  So probably it was Professor Predicament, but if there's any clues hinting otherwise I wouldn't look away, and if there were places I could look for more clues I wouldn't be too sure to bother."

Cool. That's what Opalyn is doing already, though there's really no need to say that out loud. It's not that she doesn't trust Twoodle and the half-dozen people within earshot, it's just that... well, no, it's exactly that.

Anyway, she's learned a lot from this conversation and is kind of starting to think about maybe going back to the castle and taking a nap, given 1) she was woken up very early, 2) she has crushing fatigue as sequela to dawning comprehension of intractability of world optimization.

What if anything does Twoodle think she should really see about the town first, if she only has a little energy left at the moment?

Town Hall, maybe?  Even if just to see it from the outside, and know where it is?

If Twoodle was setting out to straighten out Little Damar, he'd sure want to know where to locate the Town Hall so he could start firing missiles.

You can't fight Town Hall though

No but seriously, what's Twoodle's beef with Town Hall?

Doctor Disaster doesn't usually force people to do jobs they don't want to do.

This means that the people running the city government actually want to do that.

They have goals.  They have hopes.

They have good ideas.

How DARE they.

What kind of goals and hopes and good ideas offend Sergeant Twoodle so?

As of literally last week, to have everyone in town answer a survey and then recalculate who ought to be married to who else for maximum economic productivity and childbearing optimization purposes.

Huh. And how has that gone over with non-Twoodle residents of Little Damar? Any takers for the program? Or is it mandatory?

They made the classic error of also applying their mandate to the castle residents too; which caused Dame Fleur -- she runs the castle laundry, which gives her a lot of de-facto power inside the castle -- to object to their requirement that she divorce her current husband so he could marry the Disastrous Hatter instead; which, in turn, led Dame Fleur to issue a ruling that the mandate would be non-mandatory.

While some townsfolk did declare that they were happy to marry their new designated targets, for some odd reason, in all such cases, those designated targets did not want to countermarry their new designated spouses.

Opalyn wonders if some particular bureaucrat had their eye on some particular alternate spouse? Or maybe they're just crazy enough to want to do this in the abstract, without any specific personal gain.

"For increased economic productivity" sure does seem like a fishy reason in a world where no one expects the economy to grow, though!

Anyway, sure, she'd like to see Town Hall. And maybe meet the mastermind behind the failed remarriage program!

He's at her service, of course.

Then she'll pop the rest of the muffin into her mouth and off they'll go.

What does a Town Hall look like around here, anyway?

Sergeant Twoodle will lead her there.  The Town Hall is more toward the edge of Little Damar than the dense city center, interestingly.  Probably somebody demanded a big building with lots of space to house the appropriately dignified majesty of the Town Hall, and the city center was too crowded for that.