"You have to trade for babies but I know some courts do it."

"...why do you have to trade for them if you find one abandoned somewhere? Decent birth control isn't going to be invented for hundreds of years, sometimes people leave babies lying around."

"Babies belong to their mothers. Even human babies. They'd still be entangled if you took the baby without giving the mother something of comparable value. And separately, you can't speed up a baby without transferring their motherdebt because they can't accumulate entanglement from any other sources, they're not people yet."

"It would probably be a bad idea to raise a human baby in a faery court anyway, they'd show up in Limbo and tell Limboites things that I do not understand Limboites of the future to know. You could still do some trades with a daeva on this basis, they'd just stay slowed down."

"And you'd trust them to stay out of human affairs?"

"I'm assuming they'd come from this time. Not literally everything downstream of me can be a problem - like, I'm breathing - and I can't immediately think of anything you need an angel or a fairy or an extra demon for enough, but I'm hoping I can somehow come by more information about what's going on, you know?"

"Yeah, that makes sense."

Sigh.

"I guess we should arrange to introduce you to more people, since you'll be sticking around. And maybe your human too?"

"If she's up for it. She isn't super fond of faeries."

"Will she want to witness the handling of the other court, do you think?"

"...I would guess no but I'd really have to ask to be sure."

Nod. 

"She hasn't mentioned anyone in particular I'd expect her to ask after but, like, you avoid using names whenever possible so it might be legitimately inconvenient to keep track of who was significant, and also she doesn't know me all that well and does not have a strong reason to list lots of details."

"She seems very fond of you. But I guess not, yeah."

"She's easily impressed and may be attributing my magical powers to my moral character, and liking me isn't the same as having known me for a long time."

"The powers come with the whole range of personalities?"

"A pretty much human range, with I think a little skew in which personalities get which powers but there's only three kinds and most traits don't map onto that division. Like, I think she's way too impressed that I'm feeding her. It's not hard."

"It would be for everyone she's ever met, though. Also it is possible that your society has innovated at food and everything is tastier."

"Yes, but neither of those are facts about how cool I am as a person! Neither is the fact that she's recovering from malnutrition."

"I see what you mean but - making value for other people feels like a lot of what character is, or should be, to me."

"And I appreciate this about you but, mmm. I feel sort of the way I imagine I'd feel if I showed up someplace where there was not any air, such as the Moon, and most people spent twelve hours a day manufacturing air, and people who couldn't do that survived on charity till it ran out and then asphyxiated, and then I showed up and made a day's worth of air for everybody in thirty seconds - which I can do not because I worked very hard in the air factory and got really good at it, or because I thought really hard about air and figured out a cool trick that makes it more efficiently! I can do that because I got lucky after I died! - and then everybody's like, acting like I somehow sank many dozens of person-hours into this when it was thirty seconds? But air should be free and for me it's close enough that I can give it out like that. Even faeries have air be free."

" - I realize I'm getting distracted from the main point but do you mean that it's possible to have an absence of the thing we breathe? Because that's very contentious, as I recall the last time I acquired a science lesson."

"Oh, yeah, that's possible and is true most places by an overwhelming margin, but air has a mass and approximately falls to earth the same way everything else does. It gets thinner if you go up, to the point that you can notice just on the altitude variance natural terrain gets you, and if you keep going up it gets thinner than that and then no more air."

"Huh! I am going to use this information to win lots of bets."