"What the hell is this?" the shopkeeper asked, putting up a coin under close inspection. "I seen a lot of sketch currencies, but never anything like this before."
The shopkeeper held up the obverse then flipped to the reverse of the coin, which depicted persons or places that he never heard of, yet seemed similiar to UPM coinage, all the while written in everything Sketch.
The customer simply shrugged. "I need money, not fake currencies."
"Where did you get it?"
"I got paid in it." The shopkeeper eyed the customer with suspicion.
"Really? With money that couldn't possibly be accepted anywhere in the world?"
"It's the truth. You could at least pay me in the value of the melted content."
The pawnshop owner sighed. If his customer is a criminal, he was a really a bad one. Even so, he couldn't tell if his customer was lying or not, and normally he was really good at sniffing out liars. You kinda have to be, lest you see what you thought was your goods returned to their rightful owners.
Something, however, moved him to keep buying strange but familiar artifacts from this man. He couldn't say exactly why. Perhaps it was the way it was made, or that the size was slightly off, or maybe the way it smelled?
It was as if he was buying objects from a different version of Sketch. When the customer was done, the customer promptly asked for a laptop with all the money he had in this hand.
Clearly, something was off about this man.
I blinked at the movie.
"Well, who the hell made it?"
"I don't know," my friend admitted. "I don't recognize anybody in this film."
"But you watch films right?"
"I watched Bollywood, Nollywood, Hollywood, you named it. These people? I have no fucking ideas where they originated, the mythology, even the very language that they speak."