"If any people from your world came to live in a place I was running I would aim for a much more - navigable government, one that works even if no one has any idea what they're allowed to have. But this works for people here, who do know it."

"How would you design the navigable government?"

"I'd have to give it some thought, I don't know much about humans and elementals. How would you do it?"

"I'd have to know what resources I was doing it with."

"WIth a small enough population you can just have very simple laws - no hurting people, no stealing from people - and then let the community vote in new ones, which means they only happen after community debate. There's a problem with that, though, which is that if you have a majority in favor of unjust laws then they can pass - that's why Anitam isn't a direct democracy -"

"Yeah. What kind of things would Anitam vote for -"

"People are not great about sticking with treaties and trade agreements, even though they understand there are lots of advantages to being the kind of country that does - people tend to vote to be tougher on crime, even when there's evidence it wouldn't have much of a deterrent effect - confiscating rich peoples' money is always popular even though it's hard to do in a way that doesn't discourage people from starting businesses..."

...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."