...she nods along, apparently having to figure out half of what he's describing a priori but managing.

"Does your world have currency?"

"Uh, not like ni seem to be - do the ni represent anything or are they just numbers? - but you can buy most things in salt or shells. It used to be metal but it's too easy to do metal with magic, now."

"Ni don't represent anything, they're just - an agreement. Everyone knows that everyone else will take them as payment, so they work. It used to be you could trade ni for metals, but eventually we wanted more control over the ni supply than we could reasonably have over the metal supply."

"That's good, otherwise I could just magic up some gold, ruin your day. Well, I'd have a hard time, I'm not great with adamant."

"It would rather undermine the financial system! Controlling how many ni are in circulation lets us keep prices stable, which is important so people can save."

"Why's that important?"

"People save for children, and for grandchildren, and for retirement. If we're careless about the money supply then they can't know how much they'll need to save and plan accordingly."

"How does there being a certain number of ni make prices stable?"

"I might need someone with more vocabulary to translate -"

"Sure." And a minute later he translates - "Imagine if we handed everybody an extra ten thousand ni. Would they all be ten thousand ni richer? Not really, because there's still only so much food and so many apartments and so many child credits. Those things would just get more expensive. The only way to make people richer is to produce more value, printing more money doesn't do it. Now, usually when a government prints money they don't send everybody their share, they use it to pay government debts. But the principle is the same. If you print more money, there's still the same amount of real wealth, and so prices go up."

"...huh."

Smile. "Running a big country is very complicated. There is lots and lots of history to learn from, I can't imagine doing it from a standing start."

"We're - newer, I guess."

"Yes! And you'll make different mistakes than us and get different things right. You don't have castes, that's interesting. There are no countries here without castes."

"I think I remember there used to be?"

"Very long ago, no surviving writing. And it is not clear if they had no castes or just different castes. But yes."

"We don't have them and I'm not sure they'd do anybody any good."

"Imposing them does not sound good, no. Are there differences in jobs humans tend to do and jobs elementals tend to do?"

"Yeah. There are a lot more humans, and all elementals are magic but some humans aren't or aren't very."

"And elementals live forever, I would expect that to change what interests them and what they like."

"It does."

"One might worry about getting a - caste system by species, but maybe you can avoid that."

"It is kinda happening already. Although human mages can do things elementals can't."

"Every caste on Amenta can do things the others can't. That can be - insurance against one group of people deciding they don't need the others, but not against mistreating them necessarily."