"I've seen no particular signs they exist, but yes. Seven, or in some tellings, fifteen; they made the world, or the mortal world, or magic, or the seasons; someone else made the world but they brought people into it; someone else made people but they made us able to know our debt; those are the stories I've heard, and I don't seek them out particularly."

"Huh. How'd you know netting me wouldn't also be mysteriously expensive?"

"It very well might have. But, you see, the net was expensive."

"...I don't see, actually."

"Uh, you were in our debt, by a lot, for stealing. If you experienced captivity normally, we'd be even. If you experienced it being abnormally expensive, you were currently draped in something expensive of ours, and we could even up just by letting you fly off at the right time."

"...I think it might have been too heavy for me to fly with."

"If it actually succeeded at containing you then we'd have had lots more options. I was just assuming it might not."

"No, I was going to wreck it if I decided I needed to leave. I suppose that might have counted too?"

"The same as taking it, yes."

"Even if you could have fixed it for less trouble than making a new one?"

"There's an extra penalty associated with actually destroying things. Some people think that it reflects the loss of value from the thing now existing for no one - compared to if you steal it, where you at least get to enjoy it - and some people think it's about the odds you can recover stolen property."

"...well, does it change with the odds that you can recover it? Or with how enjoyable it is to the thief?"

"Nope! But maybe the fact that stolen things can in principle be recovered is still factored in somehow. I honestly don't put a lot of store in efforts to understand why debt assignments are what they are."

"But what if it somehow all makes actual sense and there's a way to cheat it?"

"There are lots of ways to use it to get the things I want, so this isn't a problem I think about much."

"Did you factor in the possibility that I'd take netting much more amiss than I had people jostling me awake and might have attacked your guards?"

"Have you tried attacking people you're indebted to?"

"No, it's not my first resort."

"It's extraordinarily painful and almost always debilitating in a variety of mysterious ways."

"Be that as it may, I didn't know that."

"The girl you were entangled with really should've told you, that's one of the easiest ways you could kill her."

"She did a lot of dumb things."

"It really really sounds like that."

"So you were assuming I'd been told?"

"Or that you'd try and have a bad time."