"Okay. ...I am willing to break this law if there is ever a more immediate danger than you being worried or not liking the trend of your thoughts. I will give you my phone number," Promise writes it down, "and you can call me if you're freaking out, or show up to one of my rooftops, or eventually perhaps run into me at the hospital, okay? But nothing today. I'm sorry. The only person you are now truly incapable of harming is me."

"I don't have any etiquette norms around what it is or is not polite to say about my moderate planthood; you're fine."

"I'm still not sure how you're even possible. Do plants—regular plants, I guess—ever have muscles and organs and all that in Fairyland? Let alone brains."

"I am possible because magic. Except to the extent that fairies are plants - and this is a limited extent; I'm very much on the plantier end - no. Non-fairy plants do not have those things. I'm sure I'm more similar to other fairies than to local plants, anyway, it's just you've only met one fairy."

"Can't comment on the physics. And, you can't get it too badly wrong, if you do have to try. Can't make anything worse. If you get me conscious and in less than completely incapacitating pain I should be able to finish the job, anyway."

"There's always a worse. But I'll keep that in mind if it ever comes up."

"Oh, I thought you just meant nothing unrecoverable would happen. That's much better."

"Well, nothing unrecoverable will happen either, but that's for totally unrelated reasons having to do with me being extremely immortal, and 'not unrecoverable' can be very different from 'anywhere within five hundred million years of recoverable'."

"Five hundred, wow. Are there fairies who have lived that long?"

"I just made up a large number, but I assume so. Certainly there are fairies who have lived so long that there is no record or memory of when they were new."

"With humans, that would happen at much smaller numbers. Our entire history is a few thousand."

"Well, according to the Internet, you had to invent writing, which probably didn't help. That and the sometimes dying."

"Even so, our whole world has only been around a few times that. I'd have to look it up, but it wouldn't surprise me if five hundred million years ago there were no such thing as trees."

"Aren't there lots of mortal worlds? Maybe some of them are older."

"Maybe. The only one anyone here knows of was completely identical up to about thirty years ago. There are people with duplicates. If they're all the same up to some point they'd have to be the same age, but I don't really know."

"Maybe I'll go check them out sometime."

"Good luck. There are plenty of people who'll be curious about what you find."

"It'll go on my blog."

"I'll watch for it."

"Anyway. I'm sorry I can't help you yet. Whenever you're 18, or if you change your mind about asking your parents, or if you get different parents, let me know. And I'll ask my lawyer about jurisdictions but I don't expect it to pan out because human legal systems are inconvenient like that."