That too.

"I can mention the possibility next time we get a big stack of questions about what you sell."

If I'm going to recklessly pharmacologically experiment on people I'd be slightly less uncomfortable about doing it to people who will get murdered if they can't behave.

"Some bad incentives to publicizing that but we can try to filter for it."

Is there a way to filter for 'more severe cases' and not 'more asshole families'?

"Maybe? I'd expect how resourced the parents are and how strict the court to matter more than how severe the problems or how unpleasant anyone involved is on a personal level, for whether someone gets killed."

I think I was implicitly lumping 'asshole families' in with 'strict court' but perhaps this was unfair of me.

"Some people are very nice and very ruthless at need. And - you can hold it against them if you want but they live longer, their families live longer, 's not a stupid tradeoff to make even if you really care about lots of people."

Cam nods.

Sigh.

Sigh!

Telling stories with all the cultural translation necessary in these cases is time consuming. I should probably feed Auda.

"Okay. Should I head out? I get the sense she doesn't find faeries being around very reassuring."

She's actually hoping to be able to socialize with more faeries gradually so she isn't totally isolated when I go on a business trip or whatever... He gets up and knocks on her door.

She opens it. "Hi?"

Breakfast?

She takes a minute to read this. "Yes, thank you."

She can have eggs Benedict. Some of the covered dishes from when he was away seem to be washed and back so he fills up a few of those too for the rest of the day's meals.

She smiles at him and glances suspiciously at Econ Faery and then withdraws to eat.

I guess she's not in the mood to say hi right this minute. Oh, so you're aware, she can hear some through the door.

"We could get you separate rooms but maybe that'd be frightening for her?"

Probably. But if we're doing a lot of story swapping you might need to check her for spillover debt I should be paying for in case she hears much of yours, and if anything requiring genuine privacy comes up we should go somewhere else.

Nod. "She's not in my debt right now."

She may've been asleep. I will try to think of a way to not wake her up whenever it occurs to me that it might be breakfast time on her sleep cycle, I guess. I miss my computer not being annoying to look at and mute.

"What would it take to design one that didn't have those problems?"

The screen flicker is probably fixable, and probably even fixable with expertise I already mostly have; it flickers because that was a convenient design under the constraints which didn't include people being sped up by a thousandfold. I'm incredibly confused about how sound works sped up, though, and don't know if that's solvable in principle or not.