"Under this system, I know how people behave. Under a new system I don't."

I don't think anyone should be betting on things remaining recognizable over the next million years.

"If you want us to be reliably five percent nicer and gentler than anyone else around I don't mind that. And if they all get better, we'll get better. The problem is being unilaterally better."

You don't think having a good example would be useful to the project of everyone getting better?

"It might. If you want referrals to courts that might be well-positioned to be good examples then I'd be happy to offer those. If we fuck up everything collapses, this tradeoff looks much worse for the court holding your summoner than for any other one."

I see your point, but I'm not sure you're devoting the creativity to this problem that you would if you actually saw it as a problem instead of my personal quirk.

"I don't suppose it's helpful to observe that I really do care very deeply about accommodating you and making you happy here."

Yes, but you can hope to make progress on that by arguing cleverly about how little anything needs to be done, whereas if you saw the problem itself as troubling you would have to do something about it directly for your goals to be satisfied.

"A lot needs to be done! Faeries do not normally live a million years and if we want to we'll have to be significantly more cautious and significantly smarter than most faeries who were doing about as well as us! I'm thinking about cutting out half the court once I can get them set up somewhere else and prohibiting children and cutting back our territory or paying our neighbors to keep an eye on it for us. I'm not trying to keep living in the world the way it used to be. But all the other things I'm doing are about minimizing already-small risks that'll nonetheless get you in less than a million years."

That's kind of missing my point.

"It's important to me. Worrying about a risk this small would be unreasonable if we weren't worrying about other risks that small. If we weren't, generally, acting like we'll make most possible sacrifices to stick around for a million years then of course you'd conclude we find this particular sacrifice easy to make."

I'm mostly concluding you find it easy to make because it's what you already found convenient to do before I came along.

"It's actually much more convenient to kill people. We were doing the right thing, as we understood it, and now with the prisoners from the court that summoned you we are doing an awkward hybrid between what we think is the right thing and what your world thinks is the right thing, and it might kill everyone I care about, I don't know, I'd want to wait a while and see how they react and correct course if it looks likely to."

What sort of observations would lead you to respond in what ways?

"If people go 'oh, seems reasonable' then we can do more. If they go "oh, the strange apsel's running that court now, I guess he wanted everyone taken alive for mysterious apsel reasons, better not mess with him', then we can do some more but cautiously. If they go "oh, the strange apsel's running that court now, I guess he'll make a lot of mistakes because he's new", we shouldn't change anything for a long while. If they go 'okay, look, the strange apsel won't kill you if you're caught doing this plan and I'll absolutely kill you if you don't do it', we - kill the people attempting that, and then people stop saying that."

Do you have reason to think highly of your intel on what rumors are floating around?

"It's a priority. I think most rumors will reach us eventually, with so many people coming to trade."

It seems likely to me that reactions will be mixed rather than any uniform attitude.

"I'm concerned with whatever the most worrying reaction we encounter is, since it only takes one person to give us trouble."

Sigh.

"Can you alter the temperature of a room?"

Not directly but there are ways, why?

"We could figure out what the most comfortable temperature is and keep the dungeons that temperature without that changing the hospitality debts, I suspect."

Climate control doesn't really directly trade off against them being indefinitely vulnerable to assorted maltreatment from whoever feels like dropping in but sure, I can add making air conditioning work small to the to-do list.

"There's probably a lot like that. Small and not visible to observers, or not very visible, but an improvement."