Grey bits

Grey bits are coins not backed by any of the institutions of the Eleven Cities surrounding the Sea of Jars, yet consistent and persistent enough in their appearance to become sought-after currency among the marginal and criminal elements of several of the cities.

Description

Grey bits are rectangular coins measuring one inch by 0.6 inches, with rounded corners. They bear no recognisable pictorial seal or device but have been stamped with a blank stamp which creates a smooth depression covering most of the surface area on each side, with rounded edges raised a fraction of an inch around it.
The coins are named for their structural material, a dark grey metal of unknown composition. Of a very dark grey colour (roughly that of slate) the metal sheds dirt with preternatural ease, never discernibly wears, scratches or tarnishes and exhibits a slight sheen, often said to reflect faint lights not actually present in their vicinity. This metal baffles both the Minters of Metal and the Alchemist's Guild of Dypholyos, operatives of whom have been able to determine that it has a very high melting point and does not appear to be any sort of alloy, but have not been able to learn much else about it.

History

The Grey bits began appearing in the city of Loros in the last years of the first century AWR. This was an unpleasant time to live in Loros as the city was one of the few places in which the Wesmodian Reformation had led to the widespread anarchy which popular folklore holds it guilty of producing. The structure of ecumenical compacts which had served as the community's essential government had completely broken down for over a generation, the popular assault on the local temple of Ajqyod had created a fire which had levelled much of The Left Bank and the power vacuum had only recently been re-established by the Commercial Guilds. Among their reforms was the promotion of the use of the Guild honour as coinage, replacing the very worn and decreasingly trustworthy coinage of the Chogyan Hegemony which was still in use in the city from two centuries in the past.
The matter of coinage was of particular urgency as in the 90s AWR the Grey bits had begun circulating in the city's port district. Nobody had any particularly credible theories as to who was minting these tokens, or indeed where they came from at all, but they were small, portable, imperishable, scarce and had a feel of worth about them, making them ideal for use as coins. Officers of the ascendant Commercial Guilds explicitly sought to clamp down on this practice, observing - quite credibly - that the bits had no provenance, no stated material worth, and thus no real basis for use as a currency, and promoted Guild coinage instead. Among legitimate merchants and the wealthy, this policy was broadly effective, and to this day the Guild honour remains the only currency that carries any institutional backing in Loros. Despite official opprobrium, however, the Grey bits have continued to circulate in Loros and occasionally find their way to other cities.

Use

Spurned by the powers that be, the Grey bits have acquired something of an air of counter-cultural credibility. A commercial transaction conducted with the bits as a medium of exchange is thought to carry a sort of outlaw authority, taking place outside any official channels and yet definitive in its self-supporting finality. To conduct a criminal transaction in Grey bits is therefore considered a statement of anti-authoritarian principle by pirates, desperadoes and black marketeers. Popularity does not connote commonality, however; the bits are in short supply, with possibly as few as a thousand ever minted, and even those who want them seldom get their hands on them.
Those who investigate the matter point out a practical consideration that may account for the popularity of the bits among such individuals; they are seemingly impossible to counterfeit. Although lead and some forms of iron are of similar colour, anyone with a little gumption and some basic hand tools has the wherewithal to scratch metal, and the fact that the bits are apparently impervious to such violence makes it easy for either side of a transaction to test their genuineness. Given that trust is often in short supply among those who might use such coins, this is an important point.
The question naturally arises of where these odd tokens come from. Some argue that their use as currency is entirely accidental, that they essentially metal slugs, components from some incomplete manufacturing process which somehow left their place of manufacture and were mistaken for coins by uneducated members of the criminal demi-monde of Loros. Others, perhaps predictably, cite them as material evidence for the existence of the Shadow Men, who purportedly made the coins to pass amongst themselves; carelessness within this organisation led to some of the coins finding their way into general use. Proponents of this theory use it to explain the instinctive affinity that the criminal element of the Eleven Cities has for the coins.
Those of slightly more level-headed disposition propose an alternative explanation - that the bits are in fact tokens or amulets of some description connected with the cult of Maryas, the pre-Wesmodian goddess of deception and secrets. Very little is known for sure about the worship of Maryas, but her cult is known to have undertaken lengthy private ceremonies, which may have incorporated some sort of ritualistic representation of the concept of gift exchange prominent in Maryan apocrypha. Given that this cult is known to have been highly active in Loros right up to the Wesmodian Reformation, it would be plausible that some cache of these tokens was somehow overlooked in their apparent evacuation, discovered in some cellar, and absorbed into the city's demi-monde as a surrogate means of exchange. Little can be said for certain about this but those few thaumatologists who go in for Maryan lore are keen to get their hands on some of the bits in order to study them. Proponents of the Shadow Men explanation argue that the Maryan theory is by no means incompatible with their own.