"Pretty much! As opposed to this magic thing which behaves a bit like it once had a dream about what people actually want. I wanna think of a way to convince the debt thing to accept money as a substrate."

Sigh. "I've tried. It does think money is worth something but the part where money is worth whatever people will trade for it is important and debt just doesn't track that."

"That reminds me of a story - I'm not sure I'm good enough at translation to do it justice or how," sigh, "expensive it would be -"

Sad faery.

"I would love to just accept some faery currency for it but I have no idea how to predict how much it would even be!"

"It would be pretty surprising for a story to be worth more money than I have but stories from another world have a lot of potential to be more."

"I also think you'd really like the story, does that matter or does it matter how objectively well written it originally was or how objectively good I am at translating it or at reading aloud -"

"All of those kind of matter - not exactly how much I like it but how much I want it -"

"Well that's just fucking perverse."

Sad faery.

"It's -" He looks it up. "It's less than thirty pages long in the original, with a page having yea much text -" He turns the computer.

"We'll figure something out."

"Does that mean I should go ahead now or circle back to it when we do figure something out?"

"You should tell me the story and then later we'll figure something out."

Cam makes a hard copy of The Cambist and Lord Iron and picks his way through it, translating the language and where essential to the story the cultural references.

Enraptured faery.

Wag wag wag. "- he named his protagonist Lord Iron," Cam concludes at the end.

He has been listening the entire time with utter fascination and at several points bounced with glee. "...but I thought Lord Iron had abandoned his ways and become a moneychanger? How could he have been in all those places?"

"- Olaf wrote fiction. This story, also, is fiction, which I... seem to have adequately disclaimed by identifying it as a 'fable of economics'? Or something would have happened? Non-faeries write a lot of fiction."

"Huh. - you can retell stories you heard somewhere even if you're not persuaded they really happened. I've never heard of people using that to tell interesting stories that definitely didn't, though. 

The effect is very wonderful."

"So I couldn't have read you this if I'd written it myself?"

"...I mean maybe you could say, 'the following did not happen but is illustrative of a point:'. Feels like that'd work but I wouldn't personally try it."

"I'd probably just be like, 'imagine that thus and such'?"

"That's fine. Humans do it recreationally?"

"As an overwhelmingly popular form of entertainment."