"But what if they don't?"

"That's one of the downsides of the idea I haven't gotten around to trying to fix, yet. I genuinely believe the only thing that could get them to not would be strong religious convictions, like thinking fairies are unnatural temptations from the devil or some such."

"...we're what?"

"Some religions say magic is evil or that the devil can tempt people with promises of heaven, I can totally see a cancer patient who 'made peace' with death through religion not wanting to cheat it by postponing it, this kind of thing."

"What's the devil?"

"Some religions say the world was made by this one omnipotent omniscient benevolent deity and there's a non-benevolent subdeity that tries to subvert the benevolent one's plan. That's the devil."

"...if the benevolent one is omnipotent..."

"The usual explanation is that 'god doesn't interfere with free will' or some such. Don't expect it to make sense. It doesn't."

"Then why do people believe it?"

"The usual reason is that their parents or guardians believed it and taught them to believe it and they are emotionally invested in it and there are many stable social structures built around or for religion and religious institutes and religious people and it's just the default."

"How'd it start?"

"It's been thousands of years since humans started existing and we rarely live to see a hundred so this is mostly speculation and extrapolation, but first you get myths to explain why it rains, or the sun and the moon, and those are often spirits or gods because mortals are good at postulating conscious intent behind things and spotting patterns where there are none, and bad at ascribing things to chance or steady stable underlying laws. Then people invent rituals that supposedly appease these creatures and one of them by sheer chance coincides with appeasement. The ideas change over time and develop, and the ones that still exist are the ones that are good at being believed by people."

"...good at being believed by people."

"Yeah, appealing to fundamental stable structures in human psyches and entrenched in culture and society."

"Do you think humans are just basically psychologically different in this way or that it's something else?"

"I... don't know, honestly. The fact that we're even similar enough to fairies to be able to understand each other like this is surprising—human brains work the way they do because if lawful reasons involving how we evolved, biologically and culturally, while fairies just appear."

"And we should appear different somehow?"

"I mean, there are an infinity of ways you could appear and minds you could have, any particular way and mind design is surprising, without a compelling reason for why it's this way and not some other."

"A reason like what?"

"In our case, like the selective pressures present for millions of years that caused us to be like we currently are."

"But what sort of reason could apply to fairies?"

She shrugs. "I have no clue. If I were to speculate, just like mortals inventing languages causes fairy plain speak to understand them, mortals existing might influence the way fairies come to be."

"That would be interesting."

"Yeah. And if that's the case, it's probably likely that fairies have similar basic architectures."

"With the obvious differences that are direct consequences of being fairies."