"It seems like a dumb thing to have wars over."

"So, they sort of use the book as the basis for a lot of cultural scaffolding to underly a lot of social technology they don't have good replacements for yet, and find threats to the belief system accordingly disproportionately horrendous. Plus - I'm basing all this on extremely vague memories of history information which was mostly not about this century in particular so it's imprecise and will not be perfectly accurate, but there's also a thing where they are mistaken about the afterlife and think it is good for people who believe their thing and do their stuff and bad for people who do not, and given certain assumptions about how much you can bully others into believing your thing and doing your stuff this makes it arguably humanitarian to attempt to do so."

"Huh, okay. - I should stop asking questions." He sounds very sad about this.

"I'm sorry! I keep trying to ask you things as stuff comes up but I have no sense of what's worth how much and I'm not used to trying to balance things. Do I get to decide how much I value the service of wheeling me back to my room, or anything -"

"No. For most services, there's a fixed value. There are some where it matters how much you want it and some where it matters what your alternatives are but realistically if I don't wheel you back someone else will come do it so that's not working for us here."

"Well. It probably still helps at all, right? - anybody ever quantify these values? It'd be interesting if they changed over time or varied culturally at all!"

"There are a couple different scales that have been put out in different places. Most things are the same across cultures compared to the other things in the scales that were published, but I haven't actually travelled very far and can only guess as to whether they're the same in absolute amounts. Some acts of service and some sex acts vary in value by which cultural associations they have. Theft costs more in societies that consider it a particularly grave matter, no idea which way the causality goes there as those tend to also be societies where courts have more people in an area and theft is much socially costlier."

"Why's theft socially costlier in crowded places?"

"Nontrivial to figure out who did it and more separate debts incurred - theft from community stores is debt to everyone - which has more overhead to manage. Also some courts in the Misty Isles are more or less limited in population by how much dew they'll reliably have and when they're low on dew, stealing means someone could starve."

Cam makes a little globe and points at Ireland. "This the Misty Isles here?"

"Yes, how'd you guess?"

"My timeline's got faery stories. We wound up pasting the word for faeries in several languages onto the mover kind of daeva though."

"How accurate are the stories?"

"...mostly not but enough that I got really suspicious when the first court I met wanted me to eat some food."

"If your world did not have faeries how would it have gotten faery stories?"

"I'm not sure. It could be an alternate universe that just in fact also has faeries, the stories could be a coincidence, I could not be the only person traveling between the universes..."

Nod.

"Hey, does my theoretical ability to counterfeit affect the value of your money?"

"I don't know! We should check after I've given it all to you and not before, because if it makes it worthless I will be in trouble."

"I said theoretical, I can't stop having the theoretical ability! I am interested in checking whether the actual practice changes the results though."

"Okay! We will find out if the theoretical ability affects the results when I give you the coins, and we should check whether the actual practice does some time after that."

"Okay."

He wheels him back to his room.

"Hey Auda," Cam says, "do you want any things from faeries? It would be convenient to have a human participating in some economic experiments."

"Uh," she says, looking back and forth between them.