You don't have chicken and baked goods? asks Bella.

Chickens wouldn't live in a forested area like Doriath, I don't think. We bake things for special occasions but they don't look much like this.

Huh. Anyway, I've got a ton of food in my shield but it's not that good at keeping hot stuff hot, so when I go to Seattle first thing I usually stop here.

Cinnabons are kind of great. I'll suggest them back home.

Cinnabon is a brand name. The generic is 'cinnamon bun'.

Okay. Brand name?

There's an organization of people who manage cinnamon bun shops and all their shops make the buns the same way. Buns made that way by these people are Cinnabons.

Okay. That is another difference between our worlds. I don't think anyone does it that way back home.

The advantage is that I could fly a thousand miles away and find another Cinnabon and know exactly what I was getting, Bella says. But there's also non-chain restaurants where there's only one of them.

And restaurants are places that give away food?

...they sell it.

And that is?

So, I gave the cashiers some of these green papers. These are issued by the government and made so they're very hard to duplicate unless, unbeknownst to the government, one is magic. They represent quantities of money; it can also be represented other ways. You acquire money by charging for goods or services, and then you spend it on other people's goods and services.

Weird. We just take things if we want them.

What if more people want things than there are of the thing?

Then it'd be a good thing to make more of!

Sure, but what if whoever made it is sick of making the thing?

They could teach someone, or people could give them gifts, or everyone can just wait a while, or trade with people who already have it.

So, we basically work on the bribe-them-with-gifts model, but instead of 'here, I got you this gift', it's 'here, I got you this amount of numerically represented value you can use to buy whatever you most want'. Nobody's life ambition is cashiering at a Cinnabon, but if people want Cinnabons, somebody's gotta do it.

I think I get what you mean. Sounds like it adds a lot of intermediate steps, but I guess your world has an awful lot more stuff in it.

Sounds like, yeah, if you were impressed with the food selection at a highway rest stop.

Well, Doriath's spent the last two hundred years under siege.

That'd definitely cut into your variety of consumer goods, yep.

And we trade with the Dwarves and with the Noldor but only a little because the Noldor are Doomed and Dwarves want a lot in exchange, more than we have.

Doomed?