"- who-all's in there?"

"Four people. Two of them are in trouble for an elaborate scheme to skip their patrols and hide it; one of them is a prisoner of an attack on an allied court who they felt shouldn't be held with his compatriots, and one of them tried to arrange someone's death over a romantic jealousy."

"Why shouldn't he be held with his compatriots?"

"Kept organizing prisoner revolts. Most places would've killed him but his mother runs the court."

"Do I wanna know how much I should be reading into 'a romantic jealousy'?"

"I have no idea if there's a human or whatever-you-are equivalent. Sometimes people get very attached to the idea of other people being in a close intimate usually-sexual relationship with them and get upset about competitors for this role, which many people prefer to be occupied by a single party?"

"It kind of surprises me you have that, considering! Humans have lots of that but don't try to combine it with... sex as a convenient unit of liquidity."

"Childbearing requires the pregnant woman to trust someone else a lot, to wait a long time for her and then come and get her and have a stable situation arranged afterwards. So lots of people have - that, or things that seem to be shaped from the impulse to have that. Sex is usually part of it but not usually the most important part of it; I mostly mentioned it because it matters to you."

"I don't meant to give the impression that I'm fixated, it just seems like one of the most obvious and troubling points of difference."

"About three in ten faeries I know have a single person who is the most important person in their life and protective of that status, and it's more among people who are older."

Cam nods. "The summary of the situation with the party in the dungeon just didn't make it clear to me if this was somebody who was anxious about another person borrowing their slave or somebody who was mad that somebody else got with their crush."

"The latter. I think. Definitely not the former and probably the latter maps closely enough to what happened."

"Okay. I do not feel very urgent at this moment about personally inspecting their conditions but perhaps you could summarize them."

"Unless we're planning to execute them it's very boring in there. They're in separate cages but they can talk to each other; people can visit them as long as the visit doesn't cause debt in either direction; they often weave things, or polish things, or draw things, to trade for entertainment but they don't have to. We move the lights around so they can track the passage of time."

"Why would going in scare them?"

"Lot of ways to not cause debt in either direction."

"Ah. How commonly is that the visitors' interest?"

"The majority of visitors are friends or family. The majority of strangers are probably unfriendly."

"Ah, okay, and they have no idea who this guy with wings in a wheelchair is."

"Yes. If you want to tag along with someone when they're visiting their brother I can set that up and then you'll be less alarming."

"I still do not feel urgent about that but am now randomly curious if you guys's family relationships are anything like what I'm accustomed to."

"People care about and get along with their siblings at higher than the rate they care about and get along with unrelated court members but this might just be because people with the same parents tend more similar. Parents usually are fond of their children to a degree they'll admit is irrational. Parents who have a child who is an incredible and incorrigible danger to the whole family often have a very hard time acknowledging this and killing them, even if they're ruthless in other contexts."

"Grandparents? Cousins?"

"Grandparents also tend quite fond of their grandchildren. I think people like their cousins more than they like unrelated persons but my sample there contains...mostly my own very likeable cousins so I don't know how confident to be that that generalizes."

"I suppose any non-liking-based loyalty would get kind of eaten by the debt system?"