Momo was happy to learn that Prince Arturo’s father, King Zaniddiate, was a very kind ruler who cared for all of his subjects as if they were his children. Unlike Momo’s father, the King of Marbella, the King of Beauteous Kingdom was always busy making decrees to improve the lives of his subjects.
Of course, the royal treasury needed to use a lot of gold and silver for all of this involvement in the needs of the people of Beauteous Kingdom. That was not a problem because King Zaniddiate was as wise as he was caring. Many years earlier, thirteen powerful magicians had come to Beauteous Kingdom and began working for the king.
These magicians had the power to create gold and silver out of thin air. Much of what they did and how they did it was a carefully guarded secret, but a few things about their methods were well known. The magicians would write magic words on slips of paper, and gold and silver would magically appear in the royal treasury. As long as no one actually looked into the royal treasury, the gold and silver would keep piling up. That was the only way the magic would work. King Zaniddiate and his ministers were enormously pleased with this arrangement because it means that they could spend as much as they wished, and the gold and silver would keep piling up.
Because King Zaniddiate was such a wise and caring person, no one in the land was poor. That doesn’t mean that no one ever complained about his lot in life. In every kingdom, you’ll find some people who complain that they don’t have enough money or that they have reason to be unhappy, even when everyone else is happy and prosperous.
You see, at the same time the thirteen powerful magicians came to Beauteous Kingdom, several lesser magicians arrived. These magicians spent all their time counting things and adding them up, and multiplying and dividing and all sorts of other magic that they did with numbers. They even had magical ways of counting things that no one else was able to count—things such as happiness and well being. For that reason, these magicians were called happiness counters.
In their wondrous prophesies, happiness counters were always using such magic words as Kurtosis and regression analysis. Because of the magical ways they worked with numbers, the happiness counters knew that you can’t always believe what you see.
They knew that there were deceivers known as outliars who were constantly trying to interfere with their work. An outliar was someone who was able to out lie anyone else. For example, whenever the happiness counters conducted a survey to prove that people were happy, the outliars would say the opposite. Since you can’t believe what an outliar tells you, their answers were always excluded from the survey.
Of all the magic words the happiness counters used, the most powerful was granger. The word was always in the comparative; nothing ever had grange or grangest, whatever that meant.
If the happiness counters said that pigs fly, of course everyone would doubt it. On the other hand, if the happiness counters said that flying pigs had granger, no one doubted it. In fact, if flying pigs were said to have granger, several former skeptics would tell you that they’d seen lots of flying pigs.
No matter how much certain people (the outliars, I mean) complained that the people were miserable and hungry, the happiness counters were able to use their numbers and something called a “like it scale” to prove that nine and seven eighths out of every ten people in Beauteous Kingdom were prosperous and deliriously happy, and that all the others were comfortable and moderately pleased.
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