"I mean, it's never killed anyone that I know of? It just makes them gloomy."

"Doesn't kill humans outright either unless their diets are real bad."

"Huh." Shrug. "Maybe we can try vitamin supplements for faeries and see if that does anything."

"Maybe! I can also do some medical research to see if there's a better drug for being strung out all night, if that doesn't help."

"If you could that'd be wonderful."

"What would?"

"Ways to make the night easier on people. Apparently it's a problem humans have too."

"It doesn't come up with humans unless they live really far north or south, but it does come up then. Electric lights can also help!"

"We've talked about getting enough magic lights to have a place that's lit like daytime, but it's hard to make that many. - for us."

"Hey, making magic lights is, technically, also hard for me. If I can do it at all."

"Probably at some point in the next million years you can give it a try."

"I expect I'll get around to it."

They glance at each other, for some reason.

"Hm?"

"A million years is a really astonishing length of time and it's interesting to be planning in those terms, even a little bit."

"I mean, ever since I died I've been expecting to be around forever, a million years is just the space in which I'm this, ah, interestingly constrained."

"Faeries mostly don't expect to live forever. We slip up eventually. We nearly did very recently. But it's not impossible in principle and knowing it's likely important -"

"Faeries aren't noticeably around in the future. The likeliest explanations are somehow dying out or some consequence of the apsel's presence, and I like the possibilities that are a consequence of the apsel's presence better, and I don't know if this line of logic quite makes sense but keeping him around successfully seems like it makes it likelier that our absence isn't explained by our extinction, even separately from how maybe he can help if there's a faery plague."

"I mean, I can't go off and interact with humans, trying to go back to Hell might disappear me from the timeline so my summoner at least had better live a million years, and I'm not quite introverted enough to hole up in some part of the ocean I expect to remain unexplored and run out of books to read, so I expect to be around faery in general. Ideas I've had in this vein are seeing if there are ways we can get you guys underwater or offplanet, finding some way to have live people travel to a daeva realm or Limbo and hole up there away from the known civilization, and figuring out how the paths work and getting smaller so there's still plenty of room for everyone even after humans settle and plow more space."

"All of those sound important."

"Mind, getting smaller might do even more egregiously odd things to physics."

"I do sort of wonder if the smallest paths get is the smallest people can safely go but I don't have any particular reason to think so, except that the largest paths get is conveniently the size of slow humans and maybe there's something convenient on the other end of the range."

"How many times smaller is that?"

"About a hundred twenty five times smaller."

"- by height or by volume or by mass?"