He reads that and makes a puzzled face. Shrugs. "I'm appreciating the distraction. And when i leave everyone else will want to know what happened, which can wait."

I am entirely willing to serve as a delaying tactic.

Usually idiomatically I'd say 'happy to' but I'm being careful and don't know how emotional about it I'd have to be for that to be true.

"'s generally fine so long as your emotions about it are positive but better to be safer, right now especially - subsequent lies are worse -"

Shudder. How long does that last?

"None of this has been measured very carefully, mind, it's too risky to too many people to do any interesting experiments. But what I've heard is that the effect is most significant the same hour and might persist through the night."

I need to get my error rate down, I can't tolerate a mistake on even like an annual basis, are there established techniques that aren't putting duct tape over my mouth?

"With kids, their parents interrupt them really aggressively when they might be making a mistake and are with them every time they're talking to another person, until they stop making mistakes or even near-mistakes. And there're drills - my mother liked drills where we had to come up with ten true things to say in response to something someone said, and my father liked asking for how confident we were in everything we said - but I think that's an easier task than what you're trying to do, because kids wouldn't be trying to avoid using unmarked metaphors, they just wouldn't know any -"

I'm managing surprisingly well on cutting out sarcasm but that's one that might get me, and the metaphor wasn't even unmarked just not marked in a suitable way but those could get me too.

This sounds like a tedious way to talk for a million years but maybe I'll just get used to it.

"We can't even just get you unentangled from all faeries because there's some ongoing entanglement between you and your summoner. I assume it's a consequence of the fact you'd go home if he died."

Probably. I should apologize to him too and anybody else I hit.

" - that'd be the whole court, courts're entangled. You really don't have to, we - knowingly made decisions that caused us to be entangled with you because we liked the balance of the effects that'd have."

It's customary when I'm from to apologize for hurting people even if they decided to be around you. Also that isn't true of my summoner, is it?

" - yeah, fair, he probably signed up for none of this and regrets it all immensely."

So I would like to apologize to him and I'm curious if there's anything to be done to make it up to him that doesn't do Debt Things. Like, I don't know, maybe I can make myself more convenient to perform transactions with to his friends or something.

"You could have him moved somewhere if he wants, or get some guests prohibited or something."

Is he currently obliged to receive guests he doesn't want?

"Unless my brother told you otherwise recently, that's how the dungeons work."

"Within-court everyone's clear on which things will get you arrested. Between-court I guess it's more complicated than that but it's still very rare to arrest anyone who didn't know perfectly well you'd do that if you learned of the situation."

Well, I suppose if I have the leverage to make that stop I can apply it in an apologetic fashion but I'm not sure it should count since I would have done that anyway.

"I mean, 'I want him treated differently, as a favor" requires much less leverage than 'change how you treat all the prisoners'. Though you probably have enough for the latter, you kind of have a lot."

I've noticed and it's really weird and frequently uncomfortable.

" - why? It's because you have things people want."

Yes, but I only want some of the things that gets me.

"And you can't just specify those things and let people figure out how to offer them because that's rude?"