Children of the Woods
The Synthæse, or Children of the Woods, were a prehistoric proto-civilisation of woodland sprites and hippies; a kind of peaceable pre-derivative, banking people, largely unconcerned with material wealth but blessed with a preternatural gift for option pricing. They roamed the moors and fens of England semi-naked in the time before the alliance of men and elves, eschewing all earthly rancour, regarding physical settlement of disputes as sinful and instead voluntarily exchanging their differences in a standardised, non-physical, “synthetic” terms[1] across a centralised marketplace.
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Alas, they modeled their delta by using profoundly flawed value-at-risk techniques and wildly miscalculated their exposure to the First Men, a marauding race of mercenary derivatives salesmen from the ancient doomed city of Salomoné, who it is said, wiped them out in the late 1980s in one big bang, but not before they left behind traces of their enlightened methods of exchange which the First Men hungrily adopted when, in the fires of the Iron Mountain, they forged the One Agreement out of the remnants of the 1985 ISDA Code and an old LMA template and the Cross Default clause, which still afflicts the ISDA Master Agreement to this day.
Backstory
The Children of the Woods are the prehistoric ancestors of what become known as “retail investors”. They are handsome creatures: delicate but fundamentally stupid, supine, herd-like and oddly elderly — many having lived since well before recorded time began.
They are a sort of hybrid, having a beauty and longevity of elves but the familial parochiality, and love of home, hearth of hobbits. Though naturally wild they thrive in captivity, are easily domesticated into peaceable communities that will live statically and passively for years, yielding an odd sort of emergent, but nonetheless tangible, benefit — known in Lanchmani as “rehnt” — to those who take care of them.
They remain stupid and delicate, however, and are easily crushed in the gears of progress if not properly protected. And, if riled, their herding instinct can take over allowed to run they can display seemingly magical powers of intuition, panic and destruction (these powers known as the “emergentiæ”). These powers are not present in the hands of a single wood-child, but amongst groups of them, when concerted and concentrated it can have devastating and unexpected consequences, even in the face of powerful military forces. Thus, the Children of the Woods inspire a peculiar mixture of pity, reverence, fear and respect.
They eschew all financial weaponry, dealing only in individual stoki (small rabbit-like creatures they hunt in the Woods), but they have since become somewhat domesticated, supplementing and in many cases abandoning their traditional diet for a manufactured puree called “etievs” and “pensioni”, foodstuffs comprised of real woodland harvest made for them by the Mohloki.
In light of their delicate but dangerous nature, by regal proclamation the Children of the Woods are to be kept separated, confused, uneducated, and in a perpetual state of disarray and bafflement and conflict with each other such that they do not coordinate. By the same token they are to be protected by royal decree, above all other civil and military priorities and may not be hunted or exploited, except be special kid glove ministeria set up for the sole purpose.
In the castle the Mohloki are fed an articulated slop comprising commercially harvested stocks and bonds, bones, brains, testicles, hallucinogenic juice of mushrooms which are designed to be, or at least give the impression of being, super nutritious — but periodically are riven with toxins and bacteria causing sudden, widespread bouts of dissentry, meningitis or even death. The Lanchmani — the ruling class, do not eat this slop but extract a creamy essence off the first batch - before it had a chance to go off - and eat that. It is a much prized delicacy.