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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BoldItalic" data-source="post: 7122044" data-attributes="member: 6777052">"Solong, thank you for coming all this way. I'll be blunt. We have a problem," said Clone Fu after the intrepid travelers had returned and partaken of light refreshments and a Short Rest."I hope it's not the Golden Tripod," replied Solong. "If it is, just throw it back in the sea where it came from.""Hey, that was my Mum's," objected Hermione, "You had no right to do that!""No, it's not that," explained Clone Fu hurriedly before things got out of hand, "But you are half right. It's gold. There's too much of it. It's making people unhappy.""Go on. It is more important to be happy than to be rich. I've always said that. It really winds people up.""We have these adventurers who keep finding hoards of lost gold and then realising there's nothing to spend it on. We've tried taxing them, but they just pay the taxes and then go out and get more gold. The city coffers are full and we can't keep up. The merchants are grumbling because when they charge ridiculous prices the adventurers just laugh and pay anyway, and that takes all the fun out of haggling with customers. Artisans are making so much money that they are buying up farms and retiring and now you can't get anything fixed. We've got alchemists working round the clock trying to turn gold into lead but they are next to useless. We've got blacksmiths trying to melt the stuff down but it just turns into more lumps of gold. You can't get rid of the stuff. We're at our wits' end.""Hmm," said Solong wisely. "What you need is more laws. As it happens, you've come to the right man. But you have to make laws that everybody will agree to keep. That's the tricky part.""So, what do you suggest?""A while back, there was this king of Lydia called Croesus. I met him once. Total idiot, but he kept a good table. He invented the whole idea of gold coins. Before him, there just weren't any. There's your problem."Throg, who had until now kept quiet, spoke up. "So if we deal with this Croesus guy, as in terminate, it will solve the whole problem?""Alas, no," replied Solong sagely. "For one thing he is already dead. Came to a bad end, by all accounts, and all his gold did him no good at all. I tried to warn him, but he wouldn't listen. But that's by-the-bye. It doesn't make the coinage go away. It's still around, as you have discovered. No, we need a more Attic solution.""We hide it in the roof? But that's what people do anyway, when we send the tax-collectors round.""Not that kind of attic! What you need to do is ...</blockquote>

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