"I mean, yes? They expected you to try to attack us, which could have killed everyone here."

"I'd like to register my disapproval for starting wars in general, and also more particularly, if you kill my summoner, I will disappear home, where I will probably resume my sarcastic ways even if I try for a while not to do that."

"I don't start wars. - and that's good to know. Thank you."

"Okay, I also register my disapproval of construing wars to have been started when you could choose not to do that and not have a war instead."

"Among humans when someone tries to murder a lot of people what do they do with the person who tried that?"

"Where I'm from they typically lock the human up. As an individual. I think that your whole - shtick - makes it really hard to treat people as individuals, which I expect to mean that responding that way even to murder attempts results in outright war."

"Not responding to murder attempts results in more murder attempts, and eventually one of them will succeed."

"Is there some reason why someone may have attempted to murder you?"

"I have guesses but none seem likely. We don't have any declared enemies."

"This wasn't a competent murder attempt. They didn't take any steps to stop us from spilling the beans about the intermediate court, they didn't assess my actual inclination to attack people with anything resembling due diligence..."

"Yes, I agree with that assessment. A panicked spur-of-the-moment murder attempt which still could've killed us all."

"Which was prompted by finding themselves in possession of a me they didn't know how to handle and not by a premeditated desire to get you dead."

"They chose me. They must have expected I wouldn't retaliate. That's not a reputation I can afford to have, much less afford to reinforce."

"And your magical debt system doesn't let you go 'ah, one murder attempt, that will be five thousand hamburgers please'?"

"I don't want to be entangled with people that stupid for one second longer than I need to and I doubt they have the resources on hand to pay me off. There'd still be reputation concerns but if they can actually afford it - I'd consider it."

"Can I pay for them if they can handle the appropriate reassurances on how likely they are to repeat the attempt?"

"If you want them in your debt, I guess."

"- god but this is stupid. Can I then assign arbitrary value to something stupid so they can get out of that after the ten seconds it will take for me to stop enjoying the role reversal."

"Not really, no. I'm confused about why you object to us settling this among ourselves."

"They are stupid! They are assholes! I do not think people should die for being stupid assholes and you've really failed to reassure me that actually you aren't going to kill them just make them do an embarrassing dance of shame or something!"

"Mortal, you said you were with them for more than a year, subjectively?"

            She jumps at being addressed. "Yes, sir."

"That's pretty long. They must have had mortals before."

           "Yes, sir."

"Did they say how often they got them?"

          "I don't know. There'd been another one in the winter who didn't live long, I think. Sir."

"Yeah I'm not convinced that's actually exceptional misbehavior for a faery court."

"It's not. But if we stopped them then it'd stop."

"This would be a pleasant side effect of your extremely unspecified revenge plan."

"I would need to know more about what exactly happened and the structure of their court but I think probably I would execute about three people and keep another dozen in the dungeons for a while and slow a dozen more to weave some things for us until they'd paid their debts and trade out or reassign everyone else."