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 the “mandria”: civilian, untutored collateral in the Great Financial War.
They are handsome creatures: delicate but fundamentally stupid, supine, herd-like and oddly elderly — many having lived since well before recorded time began.
They have the beauty and longevity of elves but the familial parochiality, and love of home and hearth of hobbits. Though naturally wild they thrive in captivity, are easily domesticated and form by themselves into peaceable communities stay passive 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. What is more, when riled, their herding instinct can take over. If allowed to run, the Children of the Woods can display apparently supernatural powers of collective intuition which can cause panic and have devastating and unexpected consequences on their surroundings it, even in the face of powerful military force. This collective power (the “emergentiæ” — it resembled the murmuration of starlings) did not manifest in the hands of single wood-children, but only amongst abnormally large groups of them, when concerted and concentrated. The emergentiæ was in fact not magical, but a function of the wood-child’s instinctive tendency to copy her immediate neighbours, even when apparently destructive to her own personal wellbeing.
Thus, amongst the Mohloki and, to a lesser extent, the Lanchmani, the Children of the Woods inspired a peculiar mixture of pity, reverence, fear and respect.
Diet and environs
Wood-children were basic, eschewing all financial technology, dealing only in the amount of individual stoki (small rabbit-like creatures they hunted in the Woods) they or their families could eat, but as they became domesticated they would supplementing their diet — in many cases abandoning their traditional diet altegether — with a manufactured puree the Mohloki made for them (called variously “etievs” or “etiens”) and the older specimens would eat a less-calorific preparation called “pensioni”.
Protection and separation
In light of their delicate but, when gathered, dangerous nature, by regal proclamation, the Children of the Woods were kept separated, confused, uneducated, and in a perpetual state of disarray and bafflement and conflict with each other. This ensured they would not gather, and if they did they would argue with each other on trifling matters. The Lanchmani invented games and pastimes for them the accentuate these affiliations.
By the same token they were protected and, above all other civil and military priorities, it was forbidden to hunt or exploit the Children of the Woods, except with the special permission and authorisation of the King, who set up a ministry for that 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.