Snort. "Thank you."

She glances at the door and goes back to her room.

Cam tapes his mouth shut again and organizes and studies his notes on what constitutes a lie.

He drops by a while later with the next batch of certificates.

Hi. What are these for?

"I've got a list." It's of various requested foods; a lot of people wanted to be surprised.

Is there a way to charge extra for surprises? It's more work. People who want surprises get crackerjacks and assorted breakfast cereals.

"Hmmm. There's not a straightforward one, the debt value of the food doesn't change ...maybe it would, actually, if 'surprise me' had to be written as 'as a favor, select some foods for me'..."

Perhaps that will be my policy going forward. What would happen if I screwed up an order?

"Then the debt won't be quite even and presumably they'll complain, no one wants to be entangled with you - no offense -"

Makes sense. Should I be coming up with ways to square up with you?

"I should probably be more attentive to not letting it run up very far in either direction - you could add some snacks or a book or something to that," he nods at the pile of packages.

Machine translation isn't at a very high standard yet. Chocolate coins, why not.

"That'll be close enough. I'm sorry for not paying it more attention earlier."

You're the one who got hurt.

"And a bunch of other people." Sigh. "If I keep a closer eye on it the risk'll be much smaller - you'd still hurt your summoner, but not the whole court."

Which should at least prevent it from snowballing, if I understand right?

"Snowballing?"

I keep translating idioms, I think I do it because this language doesn't have enough of its own for what I guess are obvious reasons. Snowballing means continuing to accumulate more of a thing than the original input as a result of that original input like if you roll a ball of snow downhill.

"It shouldn't do that either way but not affecting the court means there's a lot less likelihood of misfortune affecting everything we're doing."

Does the subsequent slipups are worse thing only apply to the person who makes the mistake in the first place?

How "smart" is the misfortune in targeting complex projects?

"We're really not sure, to both questions. You're right that us being unentangled from you should protect us from the worse consequences of followup slipups if there are any. People have hypothesized that complex failures are down to misfortune but it's hard to test. Machinery failing is the kind of thing it'll do; all the foods going to people who don't particularly like them is the kind of thing it'll do; it probably wouldn't do something like ensuring that specifically influential people have a bad experience or hear about it in a bad mood or something, but some people claim it does do stuff like that, so I can't say for sure."

Cam nods. He realizes he has been asking questions and adds another chocolate coin, letting it fall so Econ Faery can hear it.

"Thank you." Sigh.

You're welcome. I assume you'd tell me if that was the wrong amount.