It seems that faeries do like this.

Oh good. Cam waves and goes back to his room to work on the screen flicker issue some more. Continuous output light projection has been done, it's just hard to make it work with the chiplock mechanism which requires very frequent refreshing to serve its crytographic purpose...

He interrupts him eventually with yet more certificates. 

"Lots from courts we didn't visit this time! They mostly did it right and had heard the whole explanation already!"

Oh, cool! Mostly? Are there any tricky messes to sort out?

"One or two." Bounce bounce. "These people didn't understand the concept of writing down excess value generated and instead just wrote down all of the value generated, and the certificates were still worth something, probably because everyone in their court was willing to trade with them as normal, but now we have them and they're done wrong and I'm not sure if we should just reject them or try to calculate the excess value generated, which should be possible though not to a high degree of accuracy because they also wrote down what the transactions were for. Then some people miscounted their own certificates but I straightened that out. Then some other people wanted to know if we'll buy a human they raised from early childhood but the human doesn't want to be bought."

I am disinclined to buy a human who doesn't want to be bought but I'm really curious to meet them, and maybe find out exactly why they don't want to be bought. I think probably we should refuse the incorrect certificates but I don't feel very strongly about it.

"I think we should refuse them. It'll annoy some people but they'll learn to be more discriminating, and they will still get a lot of goodies so they shouldn't lose faith in the whole system. The human for sale is regrettably not here but we can go out and meet him."

Next time we go on a trip, perhaps. Poor human, depending on why they don't want to be sold that could be a terrifying thing to even have brought up.

"I'd be pretty nervous if some court announced they were collecting people like me. Maybe Auda can come and vouch for you."

I don't know if she'd be up for that but I can ask!

Do you think you'd get sold if you didn't want it? What's even the going rate?

"Not right now, no, the court's stable. But there's no reason to think it'll be stable forever and if we can't hold it together it's better not to all die. You sell people by transferring their debts to their court - mostly my parentdebts, everything else is trivial next to that. So people're worth about as much as their parentdebts, which is a lot."

What about humans, are those about the same?

"Nah, you can transfer a human for just the amount they're in debt to you - which often isn't very much - and the complication around humans is mostly feeding them, sometimes they're effectively free and in good times lots of courts aren't willing to trade them at their debt-price at all."

If it would only happen during an unstable time is there a reason you'd be specifically nervous if somebody was collecting, uh, economists? Are there nefarious reasons to want economists?

"Not that I can think of but maybe that just means I haven't thought of it!"

I guess that's fair! Cam starts filling orders, tail awag.

Bounce bounce bounce. "I'm collecting data on what transactions people made certificates off because I'm curious which are the things that have the biggest gap between their debt value and their actual value."

Ooh, what've you got?

"Musicians and storytellers who derive value from performing! Travel! Lots of sex that's debt-neutral but in fact a good experience on both sides, and same with long conversations that ended with no debt but with everyone lots happier. I'm so pleased we're incentivizing that."

Wagwagwag. Travel?

"Doesn't create any debt, but people value it a lot! Usually courts don't have a lot of reason to enable tourism but now they're figuring it out!" Bounce bounce.

Brilliant.

Food food food food do any of these people want anything besides food?

There is one request for a metal knife and one request for an animal if he can make them fast and one request for a book that was damaged in a flood (the book is enclosed).

...gosh, can he make a fast animal? Fast butterfly?

The butterfly flutters about.