"Not like right this second, just does it sound like something you might ever feel like doing."

"I'd be happy to. I would appreciate some time to think about what I might want in exchange."

"Take all the time you need and 'no, I require no faery services' is a completely fine answer," Cam assures her.

"It is! ...but they're really neat economics experiments and I think you'd have fun!"

"They sound lovely and I'll think about it as soon as I'm unoccupied."

"I'll go get the coins for you," he says to Cam.

"Thanks!"

He heads out.

"I should probably have waited for him to leave before asking that, sorry," Cam says.

"It's all right. 'm not going to fall apart if they want me to make myself useful here."

"It's not like that. You're covered. You don't have to do anything for them. There are just apparently things you could do if you wanted anything I can't supply or if you got bored with sewing."

"I'm also not going to fall apart if you want me to make myself useful here."

"Look, I'm currently very frustrated that I can't so much as answer most people's questions around here without having to find things they can do to pay me back. I have the opposite of a need to get people to make themselves useful here."

"Even when there aren't any faeries involved eventually most people want to be - able to count on the people they're stuck spending lots of time with to make themselves useful occasionally. Not any - particular thing necessarily but I think usually it's bad for everyone when there are no things."

"I can actually think of something I might need a human for in the future. But it is not this thing today, this thing today is optional, and even if I do need a human for something I would rather shop around for interested humans than stick you with stuff you'd sooner go 'nope' to. I guess it would seem sort of antagonistic if I ever, like, asked you to roll me across the room and you were like 'ahahaha no I don't have to do what you say'? If that's the kind of thing you mean? But like even if you did that I would feed you because pettily declining to perform a service would not deserve either of starvation or a return to faery slavery."

"Everyone starves if they don't work, that's - how food works."

"Not when I have anything to say about it it isn't."

"I also want to do favors for you. Because you've been good to me.

- that doesn't really apply to very many favors, the wanting to, because I think I'm kind of easily scared of everything right now but I think it does extend to helping your friend with money experiments."

"That seems like a valid reason to help with money experiments! I'm hoping if we learn enough about how faery debt interacts with money we can find a way to cheat outrageously at faery debt and just have money instead."

"That sounds neat."

"I think so too!"

He comes back with his coins.

"What do you call the unit of currency? Does it subdivide? Did you ever get as far as considering increasing the money supply and who should do that how much when? Am I correct in thinking that if you still own more than one coin it will be easier to perform experiments?"

"I've just been calling them coins. You can cut them up but I haven't, and I'm not sure I was ever relevantly intending to if it came up. Small debt overages in either direction aren't a big deal, they even out over time, below a certain threshold no one minds unless they're unusually particular. I can't increase the money supply very straightforwardly, these are human-made and we can't mine metal, but if it'd worked maybe I would've started using something we did have the power to make. 

- might help to keep more than one."

He keeps three.

"Why can't you mine metal?"