This is of particular interest to Eric. You're always coming up with strange world ideas. How about this one? Things which are normally worthless and unwanted to a human having an insanely high value in some universe? I'm talking about human bodily waste. For some reason, pimple pus is what comes to mind immediately (I've always had an acne problem) It's composed mostly of dead white blood cells. I could imagine that being invaluable to medical research in some worlds. They reactivate the cells and use them to boost the indig's immune system. You, the verser, live a plush and extravagant lifestyle, and all you have to do is let them harvest your acne. Strange, gross and sickening I know, but this is the place for that. What do you think, Eric?
The Republic of Baldur Station and Belt Area is a happily provincial, and self-absorbed nation nearly twenty thousand lightyears above the galactic elliptic plane. Freya, its sun, is a red supergiant with nothing but a singleton gas giant with a ring of twenty mile at most radius moons and plenty of ice chunks and smaller bits. The space station, and capital, orbits the gas giant Baldur (so named for its whiteness), but the majority of the population lives in small asteroid 'outholdings' of one to a dozen families in size.
Their ancestors, two hundred years past, chose this location because the galaxy was swept by barbarian hordes in the wake of the Fall of the Human Imperium. Best guess had these hordes running things into the ground for the next thousand years before things got so bad that even the very durable Imperium ships got broken and could not fix themselves (the barbarians certainly couldn't, and one of the first things that happened in the Fall was educated engineers were shot or lynched by rioting taxeaters who blamed the engineers for not making more money for the taxeaters to use up. The Imperium had created their own barbarians by not giving a chance for ambitious colonials to rise, and at the same time trying to appease those colonials with free bread and circuses.)
The advantage of Freya System was that the nearest star was a thousand lightyears away, and Freya had no habitable planets. It had no good reason for a barbarian horde to sack it, and any that tried would be spotted ten thousand lightyears away, and the hyperspace mines would start to be shot out by the massive robotic banks of hyper generator pushers at system edge....The closest any of the various Hordes and their ships had gotten to Freya in two hundred years was five thousand lightyears away.
To put it in medieval terms...Freya was a castle with a thousand foot tall wall, and it kept pots of oil on low boil at the edge of the wall top at all times.
So they were happy, and inward turning because of the Hordes, and because the Great Dark reminded them of loneliness.
But, in order for things to work well, in the asteroids, it required a great deal of humidity for the airlocks and other machines to work at optimal levels. The richer females lived in the space station at a more moderate humidity.
Thus one could tell at first glance who was rich, and who was middle class. The poor girl had large amounts of acne from her humid environment.
And then one day, a very bright guy invented 'Acnezap'. It was very safe, a bit expensive, and lifetime permanent. At age five, or older, one got a few minutes of Acnezap treatment, and from then on, there was no Acne.
It was a chance for the poor girls to look 'classy', and so it got seized upon with fervor.
Only about one in a thousand unfortunates were immune to the treatment. It didn't do anything to them, good or bad.
Five years later, another very bright guy discovered that T-cells, preferably from acne for certain specialized reasons, were the basis for a genetic engineering broad-based cure to auto-immune disorders.
But almost no one had acne. And of those who did, some were not suitable. Also, the sought transformation did not occur in the first few years of acne formation. So, one could not get acne for a few years, sell the pus, and then get zapped. It had to be at least seven years.
But for those few who met the qualifications, they soon found a new job...popping zits for lots of moolah.
Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking. I know it's a gross idea, but it was one I was kicking around in the back of my mind for a long time. I mean having that problem sucks. At least finally it could profit me hahaha.
I had one on my shoulder yesterday that I couldn't reach. Had to use a pair of needle nose pliers to pop the damn thing. Just felt like sharing that.