"I wonder if there's some way - but I think whoever collected payments would just end up entangled with lots of irresponsible people and die -"

"Yes! It's very frustrating! - What would happen if you sold the debt to a human who was dying?"

"It'd go away when they died."

"Maybe if we wind up with a ton of humans around enough that one's going to die soon at any given time we can work with that."

"Hmm. With you providing that humans with the resources to buy off the debt, and then the debt vanishing shortly after that? I think that'd work."

"It'd have to be a lot of humans though."

"Even if the human was too sensible or too incapacitated by dying to do anything unfortunate it'd be risky to have more than a couple people from different courts entangled with them, too."

"I was imagining consolidating all the debt first?"

"That's safer."

"And nothing like, backfires on whoever the human's entangled with?"

"It shouldn't. Nothing bad happens to you if someone you're entangled with dies, or having humans would be much less popular."

"It could have been like a game of hot potato, it wouldn't be that weird compared to everything else. Good to know."

"There's some logistics involved in consolidating debts but I wouldn't expect them to make it impossible."

"What are those like?"

"You have to get the people whose debt you're transferring all in the same room - not a problem within a court but inconvenient between them - and do a ritual with crystals. It's not very complicated, the hassle is mostly getting everyone in one place."

"Is the constraint literally 'same room'?"

"No, they touch the same crystal during the ritual."

"I don't suppose you could make it really big or something."

"It'd take much longer to make. Crystals are made by - spinning them out of thin air, kind of, and you keep going until you have the size you want so people usually make them just big enough to successfully handle."

"And you'd have to find someone who didn't mind taking on a lot of risk to shuttle the debt between courts messenger-style..."

"If you had enough humans it'd really be best to have a cohort of them for each court, or each few courts. But you'd need so many humans."

"Well, they'll live longer if they're being fed well and given adequate medical care, but I don't know how much that closes the gap."

"I think all the humans in the world would be enough but obviously most of them aren't going to want to come live in faeryland no matter how comfy it is. And that'd mess up the timeline."

"It would quite, yes."

"Well, I'll keep thinking about it, maybe there's a good way to do it."