"I did come to that conclusion, yes. The cultural argument eventually came down on the side of voluntary transactions being fine, incidentally, but that was after no one really needed the money to eat."

"I think faeries might be importantly different from humans in some ways."

"I have not actually gone on a rampage about any faery-on-faery treatment."

"Wasn't sure if that was just because you hadn't seen any. Okay. Having sex with humans when they don't want it is very wrong as humans think about wrongness. - is the touching thing related to that?"

"Yup. It's okay to like, tap people on the shoulder to get their attention, but being all over somebody like that is basically Rape Lite. To be clear I'm sure there are ways faeries can treat each other that I also hate but I'd be way less quick to jump to conclusions about it."

"There are kinds of sexual interactions that faeries consider unethical but it's not 'most of them'."

"If the sexual interactions faeries are having where at least one party does not like that it is happening is 'most of them' that seems like it sucks for a lot of people a lot of the time but maybe for you it is the equivalent of someone taking your parking space or asking if you have a moment to discuss the environment."

"I don't know what a parking space is but I think I would be very distressed if I had one and someone took it, considerably more distressed than I can imagine being if they had sex with me. The environment seems like a fine topic of conversation."

"A parking space is a location in which one stores a vehicle; taking it is pretty impermanent since the offending vehicle will eventually leave even if you don't get into a confrontation about it. The people who ask others if they have a moment to discuss the environment are not making conversation, they're rallying support behind their favored policy proposals. I am using references you will not get as a replacement for sarcasm."

"Sex settles a lot of debt. I think probably people have more sex to settle debt or in the context of a relationship with debt than they have sex with people they were previously even with, with the intent of staying at even, and it sounds like with humans not even all of the latter category would be all right but it's the only kind that might be."

"I don't actually think your concept of being even maps usefully onto anything humans do, even though it can make use of some vocabulary humans use to talk about finances and revenge and stuff. Maybe lots of sex in the context of a relationship with debt is fine, because debt is not the thing I'm gating on, the thing I'm gating on is a mental state of interest or disinterest. Maybe even a lot of the first kind is fine, it just relies somewhat more heavily on you being psychologically inhuman."

- nod. "Well, I think it's fine? If we get another human we'll be careful with them, now that we know."

"I'd recommend seriously considering just getting them all sent home earliest feasible, since apparently they're still going to be in trouble for having nonmagical metabolisms if they stick around."

"Most humans know what faery rings are. They usually only show up if things are pretty bad at home. There's a war and the winning army's slaughtering all the men taller than this, say -" he gestures around chest height - "or they're dying of some sickness or they're to be hanged for poaching or their husband killed one of the children and they're scared for the others..."

"- do you have reason to believe it's really height and not that they're sparing little children? But yes, there are certainly also very bad situations humans can be in among humans. It would probably be hard for you to unambiguously improve on them especially the one where they show up with their remaining children all of whom also have nonmagical metabolisms but maybe you can figure it out."

Nod. "I realize there's still a lot here I don't understand but - it seems odd, if someone comes to us because they'll otherwise die, to turn them away because without sex they can't manage the debt for food. Instead of asking them."

"I mean, if you talked to the sort of human I'm accustomed to and you were like 'this gig involves the following sexual services on thus and such a schedule', that'd probably turn out okay - I expect people around here to be more fragile in ways they don't know as much about, but it could maybe still work."

He frowns. "That makes sense. I think."

"Hm?"

"There's kind of a lot to figure out here and one of those things is how someone could be wrong about whether they want to have sex regularly rather than die in a war, but I can think of some ways they might."

"There are various ways."

"They can have not tried it before and not know what it's like or be one of those people who gets morose at night and finds it harder to make themself do things or they could have been unimaginative about what people'd want or they could actually like dying and just not have realized that they would."

"By the way, some of the people who get morose at night are probably deficient in a vitamin which can be acquired in the diet by eating egg yolks, fish, and certain fungi. I do not think the liking dying one is a major factor."

"Huh! We can look into that. Mostly fungi, it's hard to interact with slow animals."

"I don't remember which fungi and am currently impaired at looking things up since electricity seemingly doesn't work while I'm fast or while I'm tiny, one or the other. Or both."