I guess it would be. Did that tangent of questioning buy you a few kanji or what, I can't tell.

"We could do a couple more, yeah."

Here are a couple kanji.

And then he will reluctantly head out.

Cam picks up the screen flicker problem for a bit. Plays some violin. Writes up a proposal for the more humane treatment of prisoners, as long as he's doing everything in writing anyway. Goes for a walk.

No one seems to be recovering from pain anymore; they've gone back to their normal games and conversations and so on. A couple still regard him warily.

He has the apology on him too, if they haven't seen it yet.

When he locates Lohte he hands him the prisoner treatment writeup, including a section about recidivism and mental health in humans.

"I think this might be another difference between humans and faeries. We've taken in people who were poorly treated at their previous court and many of them experience intense fear at weak signs that something similar could be planned for them but none of them have a marked inclination to commit more crimes. I guess it's possible there's a very small effect, too small for us to have noticed."

Yeah, I can't guarantee it's the same. It's just what I have.

"This is important to you even if there's not a noticeable difference there?"

Yes, my interest in prisons being as humane as is feasible doesn't actually have much to do with recidivism except insofar as that statistic informs feasibility.

"I really don't want you to be unhappy here. I remain very concerned that most ways to make the prison nicer either aren't debt-neutral or are very visible to other courts, the way banning many visitors would be."

They're a tourist attraction?

"We're holding one person on behalf of his court, which didn't have space. We're holding others who we took from the court that summoned you, and people from their court visit. And people have friends, rivals, family in other courts, or courts think that visiting disgruntled prisoners is a good way to hear rumors they might not hear otherwise. It's not rare for prisoners to get out-of-court visitors and it'd be notable to ban them."

I don't want you to ban people they do want to see.

"Right, but banning just people they don't want to see is even more notable. I can do it, I just expect that everyone around will know that I did it and - you want a million years, you don't want a reputation for being very unwilling to hurt people, even if you in fact want to not hurt people ever."

That seems really hard to reconcile with everyone around me being able to detect lies. And lies hurting people.

"I think the thing you should do is go on having your principles except about anything that endangers you or the people entangled with you, and be noticeably not inclined to be gentle, there."

I'm indestructible. And trying to avoid being entangled with people.

"If you accumulate enough misfortune it'll kill your summoner even if it does nothing else."

By what mechanism are you imagining forbidding nonconsensual visitors gets there?

"People notice that you care a lot about prisoners being treated nicely, between that and how gently we handled your summoners' court. That makes them more daring, directly, or more able to demand favors from other people who'd normally be deterred by the prospect of being caught and punished, or more able to outright threaten people into acting against you, knowing that their threat is more credibly terrible than any plausible punishment. Then anyone with a grievance or a competing interest or a issue with societal change can do that, and some of them will, and some of those succeed, and people start getting hurt."

Succeed at what?

"Taking your summoner away from here, or tripping him up, or entangling someone with him who they can subsequently force to make mistakes, or convincing him to invite misfortune on himself, or getting him to share the details of how he got you and doing it themselves and doing dangerous things with the product of that, or something more complicated than that."

Well, now it's occurred to me that in the early 2000s it's liable to become impossible to keep it secret from faeries in general how to perform summonses even if infosec is perfect until then, but I suppose there's a while to consider ways to handle that yet.

I'm not actually sure a deterrence-based policy buys me enough added confidence to be worth the compromises involved in having one.