Giggle.

"Hello," he says cheerfully and runs off with his books.

"How many instruments are we looking at and does it count any which way if I hang on to one that I play and play it?"

"That puts listeners in your debt, if you're good, but as long as you're willing to let them pay you back that's fine. And - I think four, or three if they're all very distinct sorts of thing."

"Assuming I'm not in the market for sexual favors from random strangers who - do they even have to like my music or is there some objective standard of being good at it? - what kind of repayment are we looking at there?"

"It just matters if you're good at it, not if they like it. They could run errands for you, or answer questions for you. They could bring you things, except you can make things you want anyway. If you want sexual favors from some people but not all of them you could transfer the debts and then just accept payment from whoever you actually liked, and leave them to settle things internally."

"I'm not actually asexual but it's a whole metaphorical can of worms for the time being. One popular instrument is in non-electric form kind of annoying to tune, is that a problem?"

"Not at all."

Baby grand piano! And a flute and a hang and on his own lap a violin.

"Thank you! In exchange for the gifts which you have given us, I offer you the debts of my human, holding back only enough that she'll remain entangled with us, and with the understanding that you can request I transfer those to you as well at some future date."

"She needs to stay entangled to - not slow down, is the idea?"

"Yes."

"Okay. I accept? Do I need to do something specific to accept?"

"No. Three-way trades are complicated and people need to hold and refer to identifying crystals but two-way it just needs to be clear you agree."

"There are crystals involved? Wow."

"You kind of need a lot of crystals to have a tolerable court. Next to the need to patrol your borders it's one of the biggest barriers to people starting new ones."

"For three way debt and slow-cooking meat and what else?"

"Slowing people down, if they want to do magic or have children, and lighting, which is particularly important at night."

"Why do you need to patrol your borders?"

"It is otherwise easy for people to trespass and incur debt without you noticing."

"Humans? Or do other faeries do that?"

"Other faeries do it rarely but that's because people patrol. Humans aren't much of a concern for us, we don't have a faery ring."

"What would the faery motive be? They're entangled too after they do that, right?"

"Our court has good fortune. Being entangled with us is beneficial. Or if you wanted to change that, a good way to start would be getting someone to run up debt we didn't know about, and then forcing them into mistakes or misconduct."

"And this isn't prohibitively difficult to get someone trapped into?"