"Anyway, some humans turn into daeva when we die." Cam waves.

"That sounds like more fun?"

"It is! We get powers. Fairyland's a lot more interesting than Limbo; Heaven and Hell aren't especially but the magic lets us spruce them up to taste."

"I'd ask what they're like but your story was in fact very expensive."

"Sorry. Does it have a knowable monetary value or do you just keep handing me coins or whatever you've got till it seems like we're done?"

"We haven't been thinking of the coins as having a fixed value but if I give you all but one of them we'll be even."

"- all but one is an interesting number."

"I stopped asking questions when we got to 'all of them' and then you asked me how much the debt was."

"Oh."

"Within a court you can sometimes run a balance without it causing problems but my brother doesn't want us to run a balance with you right now."

"Well, I suppose you could tell me a story. Oh, I also want to know about what experiments with money you've thus far performed, I have a really abbreviated version of that."

"I mostly checked whether you could influence the innate value-for-debt of an object by establishing peoples' willingness to use it as a medium of exchange. You can, but it doesn't adopt the new value, it lands somewhere in between."

"Well, yeah, but what did you do, exactly?"

"I had someone sit there being willing to accept the coins in exchange for favors worth more than the coins. I had someone else hand a third person the coins. I checked how much debt was involved in the transfer. I did that when the third person knew about the exchange and when they didn't, and with varying levels of difference between the value of the favors and the value of the coins. Everyone involved knew I'd make them even at the end of the experiment, which might've affected it.

I was going to try it again with a human if we ever got one and see if that changed anything."

"I can ask the human if she'll play. I probably count as human for the purpose but I've got more going on."

"She'd be really useful and I'll come up with some more stories for you for it."

"Do I have to accept things on her behalf in general? She might want something."

"I mean you're welcome to pass things along to her but I think if I borrow your, uh, person the debt'll accumulate to you even if you're doing a human thing where she gets to decide things. Maybe not, I haven't encountered that before."

"Why would it accumulate to me? Neither she nor I is a faery, shouldn't the system not really be tracking stuff between us?"

"You bought her from my brother. We'd be thinking of it as a favor from you - I guess we could not think of it that way and see if that works."

"Seems like the obvious thing to try - does it often matter how people think about things -"

"There are plenty of things you can reasonably think of as a favor to one of two different people and it'll count as the one everyone agrees on."

"What if everyone doesn't agree?"

"There are defaults. By default if I borrow your - someone of yours with your leave that'd be a favor from you if we're both faeries. By default if you answer my question that's a favor for me, but I could specify that I'm asking for my brother and then it can count for him."

"Are you avoiding the word 'slave'?"