"It's pretty useful! But I think humans have to work pretty hard to preserve enough food for the winter and sped-up humans eat a thousand times as often as slowed-down humans and don't eat a thousandth as much, so even if we could grow and preserve everything while big and eat it while small I think we'd be out of luck."

"What happened to the human?"

"They told him they didn't have food. Then I guess he probably starved. But there wasn't - we don't have feasts for sunrises and sunsets in the winter."

"Well, if I'm still here then maybe you can."

"Kind of surprised you don't want to slow down and help the humans."

"I might. I am not doing it at this time because complicated reasons."

Nod.

"Where are you going to want the medicines?"

There's a place across from the storage rooms in this lower level which is cool and dry.

Cam picks through his med school notes till he has found a good selection of things, translates administration instructions for all of them, and fills it up with assorted pills and rehydration salts and such.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. What's in there?" he asks, pointing at another door down the corridor.

"Dungeons. I don't especially want to take you in, it'll scare them without much reason, but we can go in if you'd like."

"- who-all's in there?"

"Four people. Two of them are in trouble for an elaborate scheme to skip their patrols and hide it; one of them is a prisoner of an attack on an allied court who they felt shouldn't be held with his compatriots, and one of them tried to arrange someone's death over a romantic jealousy."

"Why shouldn't he be held with his compatriots?"

"Kept organizing prisoner revolts. Most places would've killed him but his mother runs the court."

"Do I wanna know how much I should be reading into 'a romantic jealousy'?"

"I have no idea if there's a human or whatever-you-are equivalent. Sometimes people get very attached to the idea of other people being in a close intimate usually-sexual relationship with them and get upset about competitors for this role, which many people prefer to be occupied by a single party?"

"It kind of surprises me you have that, considering! Humans have lots of that but don't try to combine it with... sex as a convenient unit of liquidity."

"Childbearing requires the pregnant woman to trust someone else a lot, to wait a long time for her and then come and get her and have a stable situation arranged afterwards. So lots of people have - that, or things that seem to be shaped from the impulse to have that. Sex is usually part of it but not usually the most important part of it; I mostly mentioned it because it matters to you."

"I don't meant to give the impression that I'm fixated, it just seems like one of the most obvious and troubling points of difference."

"About three in ten faeries I know have a single person who is the most important person in their life and protective of that status, and it's more among people who are older."

Cam nods. "The summary of the situation with the party in the dungeon just didn't make it clear to me if this was somebody who was anxious about another person borrowing their slave or somebody who was mad that somebody else got with their crush."

"The latter. I think. Definitely not the former and probably the latter maps closely enough to what happened."