Anonymous asked: How does currency work? Do they use human money, fey money or both?
What a fun question! Thank you! Time for another “innocent question gets way more information than bargained for!”
So, originally, the fey had a reciprocity gift economy. To explain, consider the barter system: barter has the trouble of not only having a surplus to exchange but also finding someone to exchange with who has something you equally value—which proved difficult. So what began happening is you would gift your surplus to someone, with the idea that there would be reciprocity in the future, and that was based on trust.
The problem with that, of course, is if the trust is faulty or if there’s an indeterminate time delay. And so credits were created in exchange, specific copper tokens representing value that could be ‘cashed in’ at a later point, whenever the redeemer (you) saw something desired from the person you originally gifted your surplus to. It was a placeholder for a gift or a favour—and that’s why favours are still very important currency among the fey.
A token was called an aicsu, which translates to something like “a gifting, a wishing, a choosing.” Some of these tokens are around and still in use today, though normally fey just say “you owe me a favour” as the modern derivative. Both have magical connotations that form a sort of contract.
As humans developed coinage, the fey began adapting to Irish money and its fluctuations to accommodate human interaction in the human realm, from the silver penny of 997 AD through to copper coinage and then the British sterling, but moved to the dollar with the move to Manhattan, and so the Irish Saorstát pound was never in true use with the fey.
Due to their lifespan, wealth conservation was a matter of time, and so money does not have quite the same importance among the fey in the feyry realm. Human money still has value and may still exchange hands in the feyry realm, but it’s more likely to exchange information, goods, services, aicsus, and other things that have more immediate personal value.