Author's Note: I wrote this storybook for several reasons. First, I wanted to change the narrative around Lakshmi. Most people encounter her first through the Ramayana, where she is a very passive character. Indeed, Sita's story is the one that diverged most from the source material. But, I also wanted this to be a story about cycles, and about karma.
First, this is a story about cycles of lifetimes. The entire storybook is also a cycle, however. There are a lot of parallels between Lakshmi's story and Padmavati's. In both, she feels wronged and so she leaves. People miss her, and go to great lengths to bring her back, at which point she returns, arising from the water, standing on a lotus. Indeed, the picture at the top of Lakshmi's page is just a zoomed-in version of the one at the end of Padmavati's story, depicting her rising out of the river. This storybook essentially starts and ends in the same place, just as a circle does.
This is also a story of karma, though. Not karma in the westernized sense, where some vague cosmic force punishes wrongdoing and rewards good, but karma as it is traditionally understood. Traditional karma essentially means that our actions have consequences. In the sense of reincarnation and life cycles, the personality that we develop through our actions in one lifetime is the personality that we will be born with in the next. For example, the sage Bhrigu from Padmavati's story develops impatience in himself by just abandoning his goal and moving on every time he encounters an inconvenience. When he runs out of goals to move on to, he becomes frustrated. His broken foot when he kicks Vishnu is not a result of the universe trying to punish him, but rather the consequence of his actions, and his actions are the consequence of the mindset he has cultivated. This can similarly be seen with Indra in Lakshmi's story. He cultivated a mindset of pride, which led him to the action of wasting Lakshmi's gift, which led to the result of Lakshmi leaving, and him being overcome by the Asuras.