"I can let you know when we find out."

"For whatever it's worth I didn't hurt anybody there, either, they didn't have some kind of firsthand knowledge of my willingness to draw blood or anything."

"If they were genuinely just being idiots and didn't want anyone to get hurt then that'll matter. I - still don't super want them around making simllarly idiotic choices but I don't want to hurt people who weren't trying to kill my family."

"Oh good."

"Anything else we should know?"

"Electronics do work, they just work in real time. Since electronics can do things very fast, this means I will find them mildly annoying and you will probably be super impressed unless screen flicker bothers you a whole lot." He brandishes his computer. "This has more books in it than you have probably seen in your life. I was going to go for some more emphatic statement of how many books it is but I couldn't come up with anything both literally true and appropriately grandiose. It's a lot of books."

"That sounds really really cool. - I'm not sure we could afford it."

"See, this is the kind of problem people who do not have to track debt constantly do not have."

"That's true but also, at least here, they routinely slaughter each other for no reason. I admit your society seems to have managed the best of both worlds there."

"They have reasons. Different reasons, but reasons."

"I guess that's not surprising but the accounts that make it to us are notably reason-free. Nothing that would've caused any debt had happened."

"You seem weirdly convinced that this metaphysical fact about your species tracks something that is, separately from its consequent effect on your risk management policies, interesting or important in any way."

"It's hard to imagine what would happen if the universe stopped punishing entangled people but I think debt would still characterize most of what's important to us."

"I suppose it makes sense that your underlying psychology would have evolved to reflect it. Assuming you evolved, which I guess I don't know."

"The term's familiar but not applied in that way."

"- you can't really breed animals, can you - do you cultivate plants on purpose at all -"

"There are a very few plants that grow fast enough to be worth the effort but there are a few, yes."

"Do you preferentially grow seeds or cuttings from the ones that are the best for whatever you're doing with them?"

"Yeah. Fastest-growing or tastiest."

"Okay! And then they have relatively fast-growing or tasty baby plants, and you can keep doing that, over and over, and while I'm not sure about faeries because you're weird, this is actually how ever other single living thing on the entire planet has come to be how it is in every particular except that instead of agricultural faeries it's whatever the heck they find themselves near and instead of fast-growing or tasty in particular it's 'literally anything that makes them more viable and more capable of producing offspring', and sometimes this is normal stuff like a bear that can catch a lot of salmon getting really fat and lasting through the winter more effectively and sometimes this is weird stuff like human intelligence running away at maximum acceleration to track social games and cultural knowledge and shit. Metaphorically running. Does that make sense?"

He considers it for a second. "You'd have to start with something that could have varied offspring."

"Yes. Guy who really wants to learn German is your brother, right? He doesn't look like you and you don't seem to really want to learn German. Living things are all like that - some a lot, because they reproduce sexually and mix up traits every generation in fun combinations, and some just a little, like bacteria, which I don't know come to think of it if you know they exist because maybe being teeny lets you see them with fairly primitive lenses? Anyway those sort of try to reproduce exactly but sometimes they make mistakes and sometimes the mistakes are good."

He seems to spend another moment thinking it over. "Okay. 

There are faeries who claim to be the first faery but none very credibly I think, and lots of origin stories that seem likely to have been distorted in the retelling."

"You might have evolved but you have no obvious relatives. I mean, you look a lot like humans but you have all this extra stuff tacked on that does not appear even in attenuated form as human variation as far as I know."

"But even without it explaining everything about us, it would make sense for faeries who have natural inclinations in line with the debt system to be successful and have more children."