Economy of Joy

With this gwome’s robust Economy of Joy, counterfeiting joy was, quite naturally, a serious crime, but few could be happy all the time. This led to the use of certain pleasure stones which outsiders often call coins, but were more like bank accounts or batteries in which happiness could be stored, allowing a more textured life. This also permitted economic exchange between the three major types of conversation-capable creatures living here in those times: people, tlapaks (the silliest creatures in Kcymaerxthaere and thus generally quite well off) and the wisest of all, the arbnrogio, half-tissue and half-dream, hanging casually from a floating armature, and possessed of a special brand of dry wit.

Every gwome — a Cognate word meaning “footprint of the nation” — in Kcymaerxthaere had a distinctive texture flag woven in multiple dimensions. The making of these flags was highly skilled, but often underpaid, work — and the most talented were often begrudged any praise. Inevitably, this area drew such artisans, particularly a vast extended family called the මelkමenne (ම is pronounced as a brief pause), transported here through certain dimensions woven intricately into their most exquisite flags. The beauty of their craft — and the passion to make each one with care — soon earned them countless of the pleasure stones, which they stockpiled here — and whose joys in turn funded a murmuration of flags on the landscape, dancing in every kind of wind, yielding further wealth and an insistence on further joy.