Sarun, Appointee of Rixo, is pacing back and forth in his garden, lost in thought. Around him, the serfs are working the estate; inside, the servants are keeping up the house; his wife is around here somewhere, sitting outside in the cool of the evening with the kids, but he can't hear them, they probably went down to the stream. He is thinking about currency issues; they just keep coming up.
The economist looks around in circles! She seems very very surprised to Sarun! She appears to be staring at empty air as if she expected to see something other than empty air there!
She says something in a language he doesn't understand!
(It is "hi!")
She says something else, much longer!
(It is "excuse me, do you know what's going on, because I don't.")
(Maybe they're looking for a linguist? But the odds that any linguist will speak English on a low-tech planet like this are... not actually terrible but they could be worse.)
The economist points at herself. "Silda."
(She is breaking character over being TRANSPORTED TO ANOTHER PLANET, because Lila Banerjee would probably be panicking and Silda does not think this is an effective strategy.)
He seems to find her default behavior unobjectionable. Here is a chair. Here is a glass of water. The glass is actually quite prettily designed - the whole house, actually, is a strange mixture of barebones adequacy (rough-spun linen and wool clothes, less than innovative leather slippers for shoes), surprisingly high quality objects (seamless solid wood furniture, glass dinnerware, metal farming implements of precise manufacture), and literal magic objects, such as a little twist of metal he taps to light up the room.
This is REALLY REALLY COOL. She is in the PAST in an ALTERNATE UNIVERSE with MAGIC and she doesn't need to murder ANY of her schoolmates! If she doesn't wake up this will be the best thing ever!
Can he explain how the glass happened? And the metal? And those amazing lights?
"Shine," he points at the metal, "glass," the glass, "wood, like the wood elemental, adamant," he indicates both the metal and a coin in his pocket, "water," inside the glass, "fire," in the kitchen, "earth," he gestures vaguely outside, "ice, lightning, shadow -" the dark places under the furniture, "stone," the hearth, "air," he blows a puff of it.
She is in a world with MAGIC! This is the BEST!
(Now, now, don't get ahead of yourself, Silda, the likely explanation is not that you are in a world with magic it is that you are in a world with SCIENCE that people don't understand. Actually it is that you are in a VR experience one of your rivals set up to extract information to you / distract you, which, uh, if so, kind of sucks? But it's nicer than murdering her, so, thanks.)
She is VERY ENTHUSED about this. What does he do? Is he a mage?
He's not a mage but his kids are! They come home for dinner around this time and he has them show off bits of magic for her - they can't do that much yet since the oldest one is seven but one shows off how he can squash a pebble in his hands, and one girl demonstrates freezing the water in Silda's glass. "Ice," Sarun says helpfully when she does that.
She will praise it and not tell them that she can make even tastier food, because, let us be frank, she can't. A civilization in which she was born can.
Silda thinks that learning as much of the language as she can is very, very important! So she's going to work on that.
Silda thinks this is kind of bizarre.
... Do they know what concepts mean? If they have the concept "calculus -" wait no that didn't translate. If the have the concept "writing", does that mean they're automatically literate? If they have the concept "leatherworking" can they recognize - leatherworking tools?
(Does "writing" translate?)
... Silda speaks six, and many dialects.
She guesses that many of these languages have ideas that, um, did not exist until she came here.
He, uh... depending on just what different kinds of elementals can do, and how smart they are, and much comes with the language, this might be no problem at all or might destroy all life. She doesn't want him to panic - please don't actually panic - but, uh, she might need to know a lot more so she can fix things?
- well, she doesn't need to panic, elementals don't appear that frequently, and wild ones usually just act like wild animals till they've been civilized a little by their masters so they aren't like to do anything that complicated just because of knowing some words. Words definitely don't translate to a lot of knowledge - like, they act like wild animals in spite of not acting like the word 'polite' or 'privacy' or 'clothes' are totally meaningless sets of noises when they hear someone say them.
She's very grateful for all he's doing for her! She'll want to talk to the elementals when she has a chance.
... Writing was invented forty years ago? She thinks that's really amazing. She hopes the inventor of writing (!!!) is still around. Where she's from they invented it... six tens of tens of tens of years ago? Something like that.
(Does he have the word for thousand for her?)
Well, they can make one out of 'ten hundreds', or they can borrow her word 'thousand', or the word in one of the other languages she knows, like 'sen' or 'qian'?
Either way, yes. Her people know a lot, since they've written down most of the good ideas in the last six thousand years.
Well, if her world doesn't have magic she probably doesn't have a solution to Sarun's biggest problem, which is how to manage the fact that mages are more common every year and anyone with Adamant can make their own indistinguishable coins - some places are moving to currency standards based on salt or seashells but these would really disadvantage Rixo, since it's not on the shore and can't independently source those things, so he's trying to do some protectionism of metal coinage around here and regulate Adamant use, but it doesn't seem like that'll work forever.
... Hmm. What precisely is his problem? Was he artificially maintaining the value of the coins above the value of the metals and now anyone with the metals can make the coin, or is the problem is just that the value of the coins is dropping because the metal is becoming less expensive, which is symmetrical to a rise in price, or are they counterfeiting using thin layers of valuable-metals on top of cheap-metal coins... she was actually trained as a person-who-makes-countries-rich, this sort of problem was covered.
The coins are worth the value of the metal, which is dropping outside of Rixo; some of the independently minted ones have cheap centers of whatever else, some don't. Rixo has mines and doesn't have coast, and the coastal areas are already benefiting enormously from everyone wanting seaweed to have magic babies and then on top of that they're "mining" all the currency.
Yeah, that's just 'your comparative advantage against other countries has suddenly become less valuable'. Hopefully everybody-becoming-richer because of cheap metals is helping, but even if it isn't helping enough he has a new comparative advantage: Her. And all the useful things-she-knows.
Yes! Yes it is her deal! She was doing that for her country before and now she would love to do it for his country!
You can distinguish real-metal coins from fake-metal coins by weighing them on a scale, which she expects he knows, and of course if the fake-metal floats you can use water as a test. She non-confidently expects that real-metal coins will end rising in value from their present point long-term as the economy gets revolutionized because long-term other sectors will grow faster than mining-plus-metalworking if Adamant mages already have very-cheap-metalworking, but she could be wrong. In his position she might buy up metal on the expectation that the price will shortly rise, but it depends on what other uses he has for his funds because she has SO MANY MORE IDEAS for things he can do to fix EVERY PART of his economy and those are going to take money, though he can freely broadcast or auction off the ideas once they're proved good depending on his ability and desire to capture-resources-for-his-government as opposed to his ability and desire to capture-resources-for-his-country as opposed to his baseline desire to increase-total-resources-available-to-everyone.
First, though, she should learn everything magic can do so that she doesn't end up duplicating anything.
Well, you can get de novo metal off of an Adamant elemental and then transmute it into other kinds of metals with magic, so mining (for metal, at least) is rapidly becoming a less important sector. Same goes for rocks, since there are Stone elementals. What would be really convenient would be finding a salt mine.
He can call in a mage who is able to list the elements and what they do (the obvious, plus their less obvious healing and sensory applications).
She is going to spend the next while asking for lots of cool things you can do. So you can turn things-in-a-category (and she's still not sure just what the natural categories are, what's included in 'adamant' or 'shine', say) into other things in the category, or make them out of nowhere (!!!), or teleport (!!!!!)...
That is exactly what she plans on doing. She just needs to find out which of her ingenious ideas still work in a world of elementals, and which don't work otherwise.
Right now she's wondering if she can set up a fiat currency. Probably not? How much do people trust the government to keep its word when it can profit by breaking it, and how stable is government policy? - Actually, how does the government work?
Ah, that makes sense, perfectly reasonable. Her city was a republic, too, but a different kind of republic; every district elected its own representative and then the representatives all got together to decide how to handle things like tax collection and law enforcement and famine preparation, with them choosing specialists instead of the people choosing the specialists immediately. (Though she'd been elected to a different job, where she was in charge of representing Sanand in a larger entity that was trying to get standardized trade rules and low tariffs and handle things that affected lots and lots of different cities, like the alien invasion. But that's kind of a side note.)
So, if she's correct... if someone else gets elected next time (which hopefully won't happen!) and wants to handle the treasury a different way, he can change all his predecessor's rules? Are there any things-the-government-isn't-allowed-to-do?
... So, a lot of countries in her part of the world have rules they make in advance defining what their governments are and aren't allowed to do, and they write those down and the people need to support it overwhelmingly to change it, and since the government and the army and the people all respect these rules, if the government broke the rules, the people and the army would replace them with a different government.
Silda just wanted to check if you had rules like that. That's all.
The idea that those places follow is that the government does what the people want and the people choose the government, and also make up the army, and the people and the army don't really have different interests, except that the army has a little more training.
Right, no, understood. It just makes it harder for the government to give its word and keep it, is all. And the best way to have a currency depends on the government - or some other entity, but it's better if it's the government - being able to give its word and keep it.
... Right, this is kind of complicated and there's lots of preliminary topics.
So, consider the case of borrowing money. Maybe the government is fighting a war and wants to hire mercenaries, but doesn't have enough money for it? Or there's a famine and they want to buy food so the people don't starve? Then the government might try to get a loan, from their own people or from other countries. And if you're considering lending money to a government like that, Silda thinks that your main question is going to be, will the government you're lending money to pay the money back. If, after the war or the famine is over, they say "well, it's our money now" and refuse to repay it, everyone who lent them money is going to be very unhappy. So the people considering lending them money will, themselves, care a lot about whether the government is going to repay them. If they think that there's equal odds it will repay them and that it won't repay them, they'll want to be repaid at least twice as much as they lent, because otherwise they expect lending the money will be a bad idea. Does this make sense so far?
So, setting optimal tax policy is actually a really difficult and complicated question, because the more you tax people, the more they try to hide the money they're making so they're hard to tax, or the more they avoid doing whatever you're taxing and do substitutes instead, or just the less they work? And precise level aside it's important that taxes be consistent over time, because people will often say, "well, we have a clever idea for something a little risky to do that would make us better off, but if the harvest is bad or there's a war or the government raises taxes we might starve, so we won't -" and the more crises you can mean they don't need to consider, the more likely they are to do good-but-risky things, and the more people do good-but-risky things, the richer the people are and the better the state is. So there's also a reason to have a stable tax rate that usually gets you more than you spend but occasionally you need to borrow more briefly and then pay it back, even in normal times.
(Silda is not even going to mention anything more complicated about slight government debts being good at the moment. If she does these people will borrow ALL THE MONEY and go into hyperinflation and then their economy will collapse and they will be a very valuable object lesson for future generations.)
And also government sometimes borrow from people from other countries that aren't their own... sorry this was a digression she thinks trying to manage a state's finances is really interesting and important.
Yeah, she's going to need to go back to really basic levels for this. She definitely thinks famine relief is important and good, and of course states should collect taxes, they need to in order to do good things.
... Uh... wait one moment. What are they taxing and how?
... Right, this seems reasonable but she's going to want to get into the weeds of exact methods later.
So. Currency.
So Sarun knows how the reason people take payment in salt or gold or seashells isn't just that it's valuable, it's that it's the thing everyone else acknowledges as currency? They'll store lots more salt or gold or seashells than they need right now, because they know they can trade it for whatever they like later? Seashells are pretty, but what makes them good as currency is that other people will accept them as currency?
Yes! That salt is useful and important is good, because it means that even if everyone suddenly stops using it as currency tomorrow, it will still keep being worth having. And being difficult to counterfeit is also important! If people can make fakes than they do that and the value goes down to the cost of making fakes, which is usually very low.
The problem with salt is that carrying around little bags of salt everywhere is annoying, and salt melts in the rain, and it isn't convenient to trade with at all. So, let's imagine that you adopt salt as your currency, but you also set up a "bank", an organization which issues little bronze coins. If you give them a [unit] of salt, they'll give you a little coin saying they owe you a [unit] of salt, and they can give you back the coin any time and you'll give them the salt.
If we can somehow make these coins too expensive to counterfeit to be worth making fakes of, and if people trust that the bank will still be around and keeping deals, this seems much more practical than everyone carrying around salt everywhere. But those two conditions are important, and if you can't do that, this currency doesn't work. Does this make sense?
Yes, that happens. You hear about bank robberies sometimes, though they're mostly built like fortresses to be very hard to rob.
Anyway, the other really weird thing is... You know the salt-backed currency?
If everyone expects a currency to be used by everyone, it does not, technically, need the backing. It just needs the belief. People will want it because they know other people will want it in the future; 'that you can buy stuff with this' is sufficient reason. This is not a state she thinks that Rixo is in right now, to be clear, where she could have a non-backed, a 'fiat', currency. But it is how most states where she's from work, and they all work very very hard to make sure that everyone believes they will keep their word and never default or do anything to make the currency worth too much less, so that people will keep using it.
The main advantage is that countries don't want to have to spend lots of resources collecting salt. It's cheaper for them to just issue easy-to-make coins than to collect huge quantities of salt and guard it behind fortress walls.
They've also noticed, in all their history-learning, that it's mostly good for a country if the amount of money it has is growing at a steady rate, very slightly faster than the rate at which production of goods is growing? And that's easy to control with a fiat currency? But explaining why would be kind of complicated.
Yeah, she's not sure they have the tools to measure the amount of money in circulation precisely enough for her to try to manage that? It's very tricky to track it precisely, and it's... really not good... when there's a breakdown enough that you can see very high prices in the market, though everyone having a lot more stuff because of all the mages will make the bad effects much less bad, because it is good when everyone has a lot more stuff.
... So, that's somewhat complicated, but rich people have more to lose if things go very badly? If people are starving they rebel very easily; if people are happy they consider what they'd lose before rebelling. And since they had enough to eat growing up they're often smarter and have better self-control? And you can tax them more, because they have more stuff, and this added wealth makes you much better at fighting off enemies? But it's also true that they are usually much better at finding ways to oppose governments they dislike. Personally, Silda mostly tries to solve this by being good at running governments so people don't dislike her, but other people have tried other solutions.
Oh yes! People need lots of food and lots of different kinds of food. Your body is building itself bigger with the food it eats, and it needs specific things in order to build itself as well as it wants to, and if it doesn't have those you'll be less strong and smart and healthy and tall.
(Silda is very obviously extremely healthy, and is, indeed, much taller than the average woman.)
Nutrition is a whole complicated field, but it's generally a good idea to eat a lot of different things, including meat and grains and vegetables. Some people don't eat meat (Silda usually doesn't) (purely to stay in character of course), but in that case you want to eat lots of eggs and beans and other [untranslatable]-containing food.
Oh, it's a tool for making lots of copies of books very quickly. Her people have lots of tools, and at some point she should get a room full of smiths and metal-mages and explain how to make all sorts of advanced tools. She's not sure how to best trade off between government-resource-generation as opposed to world-resource-generation; how does Rixo organize its crafts?
... So, if everyone grows twice as much food, there's twice as much food, and the world is twice as well off in food. But if the government keeps taxes at exactly the same level, the government isn't better off. On the other hand, if the government comes up with a brilliant way to make one tax collector do the work of ten, the government can afford to hire only one-tenth as many tax collectors, which saves it nine-tenths of what it was spending on tax collectors' salaries. So that would help the government's resources without making people better off, except indirectly as having the government have lots of money makes the citizenry better off.
So, some places have rules that say that you need to pass a test to be allowed to be, say, a smith, because smiths who aren't licensed might end up burning down their smithies. Or say that all the smiths are supposed to organize themselves into a specific organization that should make sure no incompetent people become smiths. A lot of these rules tend to be worse than doing nothing unless you're really, really good at it, because most good-sounding ideas turn out not to work out. Silda thought you might have laws like that?
So there's various gods, and people who are specialized in carrying out the procedures that induce them to do various things. You go to them if you want an augury done or if you want to make a particular bid for godly intervention on something. Sarun puts in an appearance now and then, donates a goat or some money or whatever aimed at good harvests and peace and all that nice stuff.
(So, all wholly plausible coincidences.)
Makes sense. Silda isn't sure if her home has gods? People over there disagreed about whether or not they did, and if so, what they were like. Probably she should learn more about the gods here so she can know how to avoid offending them.
(Silda is thinking very very quickly.
From her selfish point of view, she wants to stay here. She can take over a world and fix everything right by herself and it will end up wonderful and amazing without introducing any of the things about the Attani empire she dislikes.
But, in actual fact, the ethically correct thing to do is to give the Attani Empire magic so it can make everyone immortal and take over the universe. She has no idea if magic even follows the laws of thermodynamics, but whether it does or doesn't, giving the most functional human state tremendously more resources would be worth her death, which would happen if her secret identity became known to the rest of her classmates. Which it almost certainly would.
So, is Silda an ethical person? At all? Even in the slightest?)
The obvious thing to expect is that lots of people will show up wanting to trade, and teach classes, and see about hiring mages to do things mages can do cheaply and that can't be done without magic. Some people will want to move in, either because they don't like living under the Attani or because they want to buy land or because they want to avoid high taxes or just because they think living in a world with magic is cool.
The Attani might want to take over but since they don't have any mages and they don't have any Shadows they would have some problems just getting here, let alone doing anything once they do.
There are individual techniques they have to make doing research better (she'll want to get into the math later, it can be tricky to follow,) but basically she'd want to try to sort mages by how much energy they can store or how quickly they refill it, then see what things mages with very high capacity or regeneration rate do, then see if, if other mages start doing them, they get more capacity or more regeneration rate.
Then in that case you could take all of an elemental's magic (she really needs to do the double-checking that elementals aren't people, at some point), wait one minute, take the magic again, and call that your unit of measure.
(Or one hour. Or one second. What precise unit they pick as a base doesn't matter much, though they probably want to decimalize their larger size-units.)
You know how some people have worms in their body that take blood from them and make them sick? There are lots of things much much smaller than worms all over that can get into cuts and things and make you sick, too, and she bets that glass mages can see them if they're good enough, or else she can show you how to make devices that can see them. Some of those do useful things inside your body instead of being parasites but have bad effects if they get in the wrong place, but others of them are just very bad and shouldn't get in you. You can kill them with heat, by baking or boiling food, which is one reason why cooked food is so much healthier than raw, or by using something poisonous to them, like alcohol.
... So, actually, alcohol is very mildly poisonous to people for the same reason it's actually meaningfully poisonous to the tiny horrible creatures.
(Also, the alcohol you have is kind of weak for the purpose, she knows how to make much stronger alcohol... oh no, this is going to go very badly, isn't it.) ((Too late, she already said it.))
She successfully tries not to laugh.
... No. They should use the very strong alcohol she will tell them how to make to sterilize cuts they get, and boil or alcohol-sterilize the bandages they put on them. (applying alcohol to open wounds hurts a lot, but they only need to do it until they devise a better substitute, which is on her list of goals.) They should make sure that their food - in particular meat - is cooked through. Doctors should wash their hands really very often. And they should encourage bathing with soap and clean water, to the extent people can afford it.
Use heat or cold to separate out the alcohol from regular wine or beer (by boiling or freezing it). If they boil it, they need to make sure to trap the alcohol instead of letting it escape. Silda will explain how to build some devices to this, it's really not that complicated...
(Though at some point she'll want to get to the state of the city vis-a-vis the international situation and whether there's any crises more urgent than that they're stuck in the Bronze Age.)
"I'm sorry to bother you," says Silda quietly, with a friendly and apologetic smile, "but I wanted to talk to you more about your situation, if you don't mind. I'm from somewhere very far away and I was hoping to learn more about elementals?" Silda will turn on the very-friendly-and-helpful-just-want-to-know-more as high as it can go.