"Yeah, what have we got? Filling orders will help in the short term anyway if people buy food from me instead of getting stuff from farms."

He has a huge stack of orders which are straightforward to fulfill and a small stack of edge cases that aren't. People want to claim credit for work that started before they heard about the certificates and came up with this odd set of agreements to try to do that, people want to claim credit for stopping a forest fire that would've affected neighboring courts too, people misunderstood the rules and did half a dozen different stupid things...

"I kind of want to credit the forest fire but I don't know if that'd fuck things up?"

"Yeah, I wasn't sure either. It seems that preventing forest fires creates value, and if they agree with the neighbors on how much value and stamp it then that seems fair enough. But I'm not sure you couldn't set fires to exploit it, or at least make it known you'd be really happy about them - or let them spread towards neighboring territory -"

"Insurance has this issue among humans. I guess we could make them assert that they did nothing to promote or encourage fires."

"Yeah. And both they and neighbors might be tempted to upwardly estimate the potential damage of a averted fire -"

"Can they do that?"

"Not very far. I can't do it at all but my friendly brother can do it by up to ten percent if it's in a domain he doesn't know much about."

"...'friendly brother' is the really tall redhead? Uh, I don't think I'd normally be very worried about up to ten percent estimate inflation but again don't know if it'll fuck things up."

"Yes, that's the one. My father can't do it at all either. I think it's something about analytical style. Ten percent doesn't sound to me like it'd cause any major problems, but I don't know if I have a strategy here that catches all of them -"

"- also flipping back into the ecological perspective for a moment some amount of forest fire can be important for some species and suppressing them as quickly as faeries probably can might be bad. I mean, people's livelihoods are more important than a few years' worth of fire management in a specific forest and also off the top of my head the species I can think of that have this trait grow in North America but there might be some here. - is it just livelihoods or is it also lives, can fire move fast enough to catch a fast faery? I guess you'd lose anyone pregnant or working on magic?"

"Yes, and people don't necessarily evacuate prisoners. Otherwise it mostly can't, though if it rings you from all directions - happens sometimes when there's a lot of wind - you can in theory be well aware of it for many sleeps and still not have a route out of it. I've never heard of that happening to any court that didn't already have a huge pile of misfortune but it's possible."

"You could dig underground to wait it out, maybe? I guess it'd make it really hard to get dew if you had to wait it out there and can't eat... worms or something to replace it? How often do you actually need dew?"

"About once a sunrise, though you'll feel all parched and lethargic before that. You could wait out a fire underground if you had dew saved, which smart courts do, and maybe even if you didn't, as long as you had somewhere you could go for it once the flames burned out."

"Oh, I didn't actually realize you could save dew, I think I was under the impression that it had to be collected fresh to work better than any random water source. I wonder if dew I make would count or if it has to have the actual causal history of being dew and if it does I wonder if making it really humid around something that could collect the moisture into dew would work."

"Both those are things we should check! You save dew by carefully taking some leaves underground, I don't think it'd work to put it in jars just itself. But it's all right if the leaf has been cut from the plant."

"Can you tell by tasting it or would you have to see if someone got parched and lethargic sticking to my dew?"

"I also have not checked whether I can tell from taste. I know from a jar doesn't work because people've tried that with prisoners."

"Of course they have."

"Personally I respect killing your prisoners for science lots more than killing your prisoners for no reason but I acknowledge that both of these things are bad and we should incentivize everyone to stop."

"Agreed. Uh, popping the stack from forthcoming dew science... fires. I'm still kinda - there are many easier less risky ways to get money than this but there are so many people so if any of them have a taste for setting fires..."

"Yeah. Maybe we can send them a nice card with some candy attached saying that we haven't come up with a way to sensibly credit people for fires yet so we're not doing it but they do receive our thanks for ideas for future changes to the system."

"Yeah." Cam pins a caramel to a postcard with a picture of a sunset on it.

"And maybe we should assemble a task force of people whose job it is to try to think of loopholes, paid for catching them."

"I like that one." Wag wag.