"I think I can do most work I do at all for eight hours. I haven't measured."

I suppose it's possible there are conditions under which humans can too. I think some of them can. This wound up not being a frontier of research because it became way less necessary for everyone to put up with eight hour workdays if they would prefer to do something else.

"Thanks to you."

Yep! Wag wag.

"Maybe we can read some news investigations at some point, I'd be interested in how they do it."

Sure. You wanna read some of Ironclad's actual work?

"How sure are you that she wasn't lying about anything -"

...Not, I guess. Does that mean you have to wait till she's dead? That's going to impose a heck of a constraint on what interesting reading orders we can test.

"Or go through a secondary layer, you saying 'this is the article she wrote' - but yeah, human writing that's not fiction might be more of a problem than human writing that is, if some of them embellish."

Some of them do and I do not know her particular habits, though there might be forensics on it. On the factual matters, not on her judgments, no way to forensic that.

"We can do it! But not advisedly."

A disentangled faery in the future prepared to endure some misfortune and headaches could do a business as a lie detector!

"Oooh! Future humans would value that?"

Oh yes, by a lot. You could probably get most of the value just by making it a theoretically available option and seeing what people do when somebody says "we have a faery on retainer".

Bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce, "I'll certainly have paid off my parents by then."

If that's something you're aiming at, should be. Do you want to be a lie detector?

"I mean it sounds kind of unpleasant but - I was assuming that there wouldn't be that much potential to trade with the future humans. And if there is then I want it."

...why wouldn't there be much potential?

"We can't straightforwardly interact with most currency systems without adding our own bizarre layer on top and I don't know how well the bizarre layer will work for most currencies, and we're still going to overwhelmingly want to be fast and they, I assume, slow, and they find lots of things about how we pay for things internally upsetting -"

Oh, they might want to speed up, I can actually see that being really popular at least on a temporary basis especially once they know to expect an afterlife. I'm really optimistic that we can get the other stuff smoothed out to 'interesting fantasy creature' levels of complication and culture shock in that time.

"I really hope so. That'd be wonderful."

I'm excited!

"Shall we read another?"

Sure. Depressing or cheerful?

"Cheerful!"