Econ Faery pulls out a certificate, writes a very large number on it, hands it to Cam. "Hey, guess what? We just generated a lot of excess value for me."

These are primarily backed by things I make, you could hang on to that if you wanted.

"Yes, but now we're settled and if you'd like you can read me another story."

Oh, I see. Cam tucks it away and moves on to the next section. This setting has people in open rebellion against their parents, which the narrative considers unremarkable, though it is later revealed that in one case the parent is adoptive.

"Huh, I didn't even think about that. - that humans could ignore or fight their parents, I thought about how they could run off."

Oh, yes, rebellion in adolescents in particular is a trope. Usually pettier than this business, things like sneaking out at night without permission or whatever.

"It's interesting that humans have kids at a rate high enough to keep up their population at all. Faeries average less than two and would average even less if you didn't get to own them. - of course the pregnancy is also a bigger cost for us."

Yours take less subjective time but the unanaesthetized surgical delivery would... be a serious deterrent for a human but I don't actually know how large it looms for faeries, what with the not caring as much as I'd expect about violence? Is it all about the lost time?

"Almost entirely? I've heard people complain about the delivery but not in a way where it was decisive about whether they'd do it again, just, you know, 'also delivery is incredibly unpleasant! this kid had better be good'."

I wonder if not thinking of babies as people and also not getting to interact with them right away is a factor. Human parents are often pretty enthralled with their new babies.

"Oooh, that might be it. The baby comes so much later, and the person even later than that."

People report that their first kid gets to be a few years old and they miss the having a little baby experience in particular. My mom has claimed this happened to her but her second husband didn't want kids and she met him a little late to have more anyway.

"A little late?"

Humans, especially women, have limited windows of fertility sans magical assistance. My parents were pretty young when they had me but my mother didn't marry her second husband till I was seventeen; she probably could have had another kid but it would have been a bit more difficult and a bit more dangerous.

" - that's so little time, oh no."

Oh no? - you know how long humans live, right? They're dying in childhood a lot in this era but even now the old ones are fairly old.

"We actually don't know very precisely! Because even our oldest records don't stretch back nearly to when currently-old humans were children."

...but people could have... asked... humans?

"I'm sure someone has done that but Auda's the first human any of us met in this court."

Wow. Well, human women can't nonmagically have any more kids past about age... sixty or so, sometimes earlier or later. As of 2179 the oldest living human is 141.

"Sixty's not so bad. By sixty faeries are pretty much grownups. But at Auda's age they'd have no business having children."

Human conceptions of how old someone has to be to be a full-fledged adult vary but do not range that high. Is this a matter of actual delayed physical maturity or just life experience and stuff you can afford to accumulate for a long time because you're unaging? - how old are you, I'm 172.

"I have three winters? So, subjectively, a couple thousand years? I think it's mostly that we have to accumulate a lot more experience at talking before we can go out among others, we physically mature at about the same rate."

Don't people get sick of being treated like children at some point in there?

"Yes, they do."