I will also still be around after that, hopefully.

"But the universe will no longer annihilate you and, who knows, possibly end if your summoner dies so I'll feel a lot less obliged to be extraordinarily cautious."

Nod.

"Why don't you sit down?"

Plop.

"I don't know if you made the connection but this is the mechanism by which you were expected and intended to harm us, when you arrived."

Hadn't, actually, I thought they expected me to do magic. I showed up in a gag and stuff.

"Not by talking. Hurting someone you're indebted to counts the same way as lies. More strongly, typically."

Your brother told me that doesn't usually work though?

"When there's fighting within a court the fighting won't kill anyone and the misfortune frequently will."

Oh.

"It's very common for there to be mistakes when people are learning, though, and a couple of them won't sink us. Are you all right? Did it hit you?"

We checked my luck and that seemed to hit me normally but I didn't get a noticeable headache.

"Huh. Well, that's better than not-that, I guess. The luck should be mostly back to normal after a couple of sleeps, it's probably worth checking if it lasts longer than that. Do you think there's something we could have thought of or warned you about to prevent the problem -"

I'd probably benefit from just all the information you have on what does and doesn't count. I didn't even just forget, it just turned out that air quotes don't work - there's a punctuation mark that marks the use-mention distinction in writing and a gesture that mimics the shape of the punctuation mark and I don't know if it didn't work because gestures don't - but nodding does, doesn't it? - or because air quotes in particular are not valid for some reason, or because your brother didn't happen to understand them, or what. So if I knew more about the edge cases I might have been able to notice it was going to be an edge case and marked the sentence more explicitly.

"Gestures work. Gestures work even when someone misunderstands them if they're the sort of gesture almost everyone would understand. I don't know if it's going off '80% of people around today understand the gesture' -- maybe of all people or those speaking the language or those in the vicinity or something else -- or 'the magic's ideal of an informed person understands the gesture' or 'some gestures are objectively correct and most faeries know them through some process of cultural osmosis', or maybe none of those. In general you want to disclaim out loud before starting anything that's quoting someone or retelling or paraphrasing them or otherwise a representation of some words that aren't yours. You don't need to be very specific, 'as they say' works if someone actually does say that and 'I heard once' works most of the time. 

Gestures work if the other party understands them even if they're not common or universal but you don't want to count on that."

Is having conversations in writing like this dangerous, if a statement I write is true in context but then someone picks up the paper later?

"No, unless you're deliberately leaving the paper for someone else to mislead them in which case probably still no but I wouldn't bet on it. Similarly if someone overhears part of a conversation and hears a statement without disclaimers and what they hear is false, you're fine unless you were engineering the conversation such that they'd overhear something false -- say, by saying those parts much louder when you knew they were at the door -"

Cam takes notes on all this. I was able to read him an entire fictional story and hypothesized that opening it with the descriptor 'a fable of economics' sufficed even though he didn't quite get till afterwards that it had been fictional.

"'I'm reading you the words on this paper' is a context where you're reasonably safe if you haven't represented yourself as confident in the truth of the words on the paper, too, if you didn't write them. Even if it weren't, 'a fable' is probably enough disclaimer."

That's good, I don't think a million years' worth of things I want to read have been written and I'm kind of hoping I can inspire faeries to generate more things to read which aren't exclusively factual because that's a very limiting constraint.

"If you get very bored we can always slow you down."

There are probably a thousand years of things to read if I deliberately develop some tastes I don't currently have but I'm worried about being findable or having causally significant interactions if I'm slowed down.

"That makes sense. It is possible to get slowed down while small and remain in the court but I don't know if this solves your problem, I don't know what makes people findable."

I don't either.