Leaving the house of Cass Ration Jr. Sr., which I will eventually return to spend the night over, I walked. Eventually, I noticed.
Someone had been eyeing my pencil for the last two minutes.
I knew because they kept walking past me and slowing down, with the specific casualness of someone trying not to look like they were doing exactly what they were doing.
On the third pass, they stopped.
"That pencil," the man said. "Where did you get it?"
"Someone gave it to me."
He looked at it the way people looked at things they wanted but weren't sure they could have. "Would you trade it?"
"For what?"
He reached into his coat and produced a bar of something heavy and yellow. He held it out with the expression of someone making an offer they expected to be declined—a generous gesture performed for the record rather than with genuine hope.
I looked at the bar.
Holy shit. Is that the real gold? I've never seen one before.
I looked at the pencil in my hand.
My math brain, economic brain, number brain—all of them rolled like they never did. They all answered simultaneously,
Scam the hell outta this idiot.
Heavy. Yellow. Dense. The specific weight of something that had value written into its physical properties.
"Sure," I said, keeping my composure to the best of my ability.
The man's expression shifted—something moving through it too quickly for me to read. He took the pencil. He placed the gold bar in my hand. He nodded once with the efficiency of someone completing a transaction before conditions changed.
Then he walked away at a pace that was almost but not quite running.
I looked at the gold bar. It was heavy. It was gold. I had traded a pencil for it.
"Fuck yeah."
I grinned from ear to ear, feeling as if I had the world.
LETSGOOO!
"Ey man likes gold?" Crow asked, clearly confused.
"Ey man likes gold." Fish nodded.
"Why?"
"Because Ey man likes gold?"
"I see."
I put it in my pocket with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had finally made a good decision.
Things were looking up.
...
Fesceland in the morning was the same as Fesceland in the afternoon, which was the same as Fesceland at any hour—loud, directionless, and completely unbothered about both.
I walked through it with the freaking gold bar in my pocket, baby. The Chimera walked beside me. The lion was somewhere to my left, making observations about things it passed. The crow had found a windowsill and was on its wings. The fish was managing cobblestones with the focused determination it brought to all land-based locomotion.
I had a gold bar. I had found a glitch in this world's economy. I was rich, and was going to be even richer.
Millionaire! Billionaire! Trillionaire! That's my Ey!
I couldn't help but let out a short, victorious laugh.
"Ey man smiling. Ey man likes gold." Chimera nodded.
Just then,
"Louder! LOUDER!"
The sound hit me before I found the source—a crowd gathered in a wide section of the street where two men faced each other with the committed energy of people who had moved past the preliminary stages of a disagreement.
I stopped to watch. In Fesceland, this was apparently the correct response. The crowd had the relaxed appreciation of people attending an event.
One man pointed at the other. "You ate my poop! I saved that up for days!"
"That's not my fault! You dumped it in my stall!"
"PAY UP!"
"SHUT! UP!"
The crowd murmured with the assessment of judges considering a technical point. Louder seemed to be winning, but the margin was close.
To my right, slightly apart from the main crowd, a separate proceeding was underway.
Three beetles in small wigs stood on an upturned crate. They were arguing a case with considerable volume and no apparent structure. One beetle was gesturing at another with the passion of someone making a closing argument. The other beetle was simply louder. The third beetle, apparently presiding, was the loudest of all three.
"What are they doing?" I asked the lion.
"Law," the lion said.
"How does it work?"
"Whoever is loudest is correct."
"That's the legal system."
"Legal system? Ey man knows something I don't," the lion said. "Law is loud."
Back in the main argument, one of the men had produced a knife. Not threateningly—or not only threateningly. More in the way of someone introducing a new piece of evidence.
The crowd's murmur shifted. Several people leaned forward.
The other man looked at the knife. He looked at the crowd. He took a breath.
"Your mother," he said, at a volume that silenced everything within a ten-meter radius, "gave her shit to me."
OHHHHHHH!
The crowd erupted.
The man with the knife lowered it slowly. The other man stood with his arms open, receiving the crowd's verdict.
"This isn't good." I said, concerned.
"Why?" The fish asked.
"The man is holding the knife. Based on the foulness of their dictions, this feud can become physical."
"What do you mean?"
"The knife is a weapon."
"Weapon? As in, the tool to hunt for nuts?"
"Hunt for nuts—yes, I mean, yes and no—what do you mean?"
"What do you mean?" Instead of answering, the fish asked back, just as confused as me.
"You can kill someone with a weapon like that!"
"Weapon kills others? Why?"
"They are dangerous! That man might attack the other man with the knife!"
"Attack? Why?"
"Because—"
I couldn't answer. I was left speechless as the fish stared at me, looking innocent.
"Attacking is useless. We can talk. Fight with words, not with weapons."
I realized, once again, that this world was fundamentally different. I looked at the man holding the knife again. Suddenly, the knife didn't look as dangerous as it did before.
"Ey man learned something new." The fish nodded upon seeing my reaction.
"Why are you holding gold?"
I turned. A stranger had stopped beside me—a woman, looking at my hand, where I was apparently still holding the gold bar.
"Is something wrong with this?" I said. "I exchanged fairly."
Her eyes narrowed. "Fairly. With what?"
I ran the calculation quickly. A gold bar in exchange for a pencil. By any standard I had ever used, that was not a fair exchange—it was an excellent one, heavily in my favor. The stranger was looking at me like she suspected I had taken something I shouldn't have. Which was technically accurate. I had received significantly more value than I gave.
I opened my mouth to construct a response that didn't sound like a confession.
"Gold for pencil," the Chimera said helpfully, from beside my knee. "Ey man pencil gone."
The woman looked at the Chimera.
She looked at me.
"Gold," she said slowly, "for pencil."
"The pencil was—" I started.
"Gold. For a pencil."
"From an economic standpoint—"
She turned to the crowd. I saw it happening and could not stop it.
"THIS MAN," she announced, at a volume that the beetle lawyers would have respected professionally, "TRADED A PENCIL FOR GOLD."
The argument in the street stopped.
Both men turned.
The beetle lawyers stopped whatever they were doing. All three of them looked over, wigs tilting.
The crowd, the arguers, the lawyers, the spectators, the man who had been losing on volume, the man who had won with his mother—everyone looked at me.
The silence lasted approximately one second.
Then the laughter arrived.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA—
Not scattered—simultaneous, the way laughter arrived when an entire crowd received the same information at the same moment and reached the same conclusion without discussion. The beetle lawyers appeared to be laughing as well, which produced a sound I had no prior reference for.
I stood in the middle of it and tried to locate the error in my logic.
Gold bar. Pencil. Gold was heavier, denser, universally recognized as—
"That's a dumb trade," the woman said.
"The gold is worth more," I said.
"Worth more than what?"
"Than a pencil. By any—"
"Gold is worth nothing," she said. "You can find it anywhere. It's just a rock."
I looked at the gold bar.
"The pencil," she continued, with the patience of someone explaining something to someone who should already know it, "is rare. You can write with it. Where do you even find pencils?"
I thought about the tamer. His dramatic speech. The solemnity with which he had placed it in my hand. The speed at which he had walked away.
"Never mind," I said.
I put the gold bar back in my pocket. The laughter continued around me, warm and unhelpful. The beetle lawyers returned to their case, slightly louder than before, apparently reinvigorated by the interruption.
The argument resumed.
"Two days!"
"THREE!"
The crowd redistributed its attention between the argument and me with the easy flexibility of people who had two sources of entertainment and saw no reason to choose.
The Chimera patted my leg. "Ey man good try," it said.
"Thank you," I said.
The lion exhaled with the slow gravity of something that had formed an opinion. "The search for Ey produces unexpected lessons," it said.
"Today you learned the value of pencils."
"I learned that pencils are valuable here."
"That is what I said."
I looked at the gold bar's outline in my pocket. I looked at the street around me—still laughing, still arguing, still conducting legal proceedings by volume in a city with no government and an economy that had decided pencils outranked gold.
I had been here less than two days.
I had no pencil. I had a gold bar worth nothing, four animals of unclear loyalty, a letter delivered, a Chimera who called me its owner, and somewhere in my memory the sensation of concrete tea licked off a table.
The search for Ey was not going well.
Or it was going exactly as it was supposed to.
I genuinely could not tell the difference.
I walked. The laughter followed me down the street and eventually faded into Fesceland's general noise, which swallowed everything eventually.
The beetle lawyers were still going.
The louder one was winning.