"What if you pull something that's stuck to something on the environment and it tears?"

"Haven't tried finding objects described by that either."

"Does this make it hard to take care of your mouse or is it fine since you just have to move food and water to bring it to the mouse?"

"We built the cage around it and I bring it food twice every night and twice every day."

"And it has no idea what's going on!"

"Probably not! I don't think mice are very smart. If you caged a slow human like that I think they'd guess there were invisible captors, at some point."

"And you could pass them notes, and read things they wrote back to you but... not move their notes?"

"That's right. You'd have to get a literate one, most humans can't read."

"What if they walled themselves in with notes stuck to the cage?"

"Then I guess they'd starve."

"Yes, but like, that would prevent you from interacting with the cage, too, wouldn't it?"

"I think so, yeah."

"So if a human walked by and... spilled something they'd cooked all over the court... we'd be in trouble."

"We'd have weeks and weeks to plan in advance. But yes."

"Maybe it wouldn't look like it was going to spill! Maybe they could set a bowl of soup on top of the log, and only later would we discover that it had a crack and so did the log and a bunch of rooms were already souped!"

"I don't know many details but people do enlist humans to destroy enemy courts occasionally."

"I suppose it would have been silly if I were the first person to think of that."

"People get very creative in warring with other courts."

"What starts the wars?"

"Depends. Personal animosity. Territory disputes. Entanglement bad enough they should merge and conflict about how to go about it."

"I'd been led to understand that starting a war with someone entangled was all but unthinkable."

"It depends what you mean, I think? You can't do violence to people you're indebted to, and you'll steer your own fortune right off a cliff if you trip up people you're badly entangled with. But - one story I heard from France last winter was about a court that split in two due to a bad disagreement, with lots of entanglement they hadn't resolved, and one tried to trap the other in their court with an engineered explosion."

"Doesn't count as violence?"

"They were assuming not. I think they'd added several layers of indirection."

"Were they right?"