"How long will this take?"

"Depends what they have to offer us, but shouldn't be more than a few hours at each? There are twenty-three, here."

"You're the one who needs to sleep and cannot fly. I need to know how much food to make for Auda."

"Ten sleeps, maybe eleven."

"Longer than I guessed. That okay with you?" he asks Auda.

Nod.

Cam consults his meal plan for her, confirms with Econ Faery that he remembers right about food taking real and not subjective time to go off, does a little arithmetic, and makes her a dozen days' worth of food that will still be plenty good in... fifteen minutes, all in nice covered dishes so they can stack up against a wall. He provides her with books carefully marked as fiction and translated into faery.

Then he picks a new mail label so his past self won't be confused and so faeries won't learn his name (it's "dear 09913415" which he confirms has never been used as of his conjuration range), makes a couple preprinted copies of it for her, explains how his mail works and that she doesn't have to write coherently on it since she's new at it but if he gets so much as a scribble he will interrupt what he is doing and come back.

And then he asks Econ Faery, "Everybody knows not to touch her or hassle her?"

"Everyone knows. If she gets suddenly ill or something I have told them it's better to bring her water than to not but they should stay in court if they do so you can satisfy yourself they had a good reason and didn't do anything else."

"...as opposed to, what, bringing her water and fleeing for the hills?"

"As opposed to both that and not bringing her water. You make people nervous, you know."

"I haven't hurt anybody!"

"People are mostly not in the habit of being right about things."

"Bleah. Anyway, yes, I think if she suddenly gets sick - unlikely, I think, though I don't know exactly how infectious diseases may work while small and fast - bringing her water is better than not doing that and not fleeing for the hills is preferable to doing that. Auda, try to eat your food evenly spaced throughout the subjective days and in order, if you binge four meals all at once you will get sick and if you decide you've just gotta have the chicken parm before the bagel you probably won't but you might."

Nod.

"And write me if you need anything." He stretches out his wings. "Okay. Anything else before we go?"

"I think we're all set."

"Bye!" Cam says to Auda, and he follows Econ Faery out.

Bounce bounce bounce bounce. The nearest court is this one, some neighbors they get along with perfectly well. He explains some things about the neighbors on the way over.

"Can you explain more about the faery path thing, I want to try to figure out how it'll interact with flying."

"I have no idea how it'll interact with flying and it might do so in some distinctly odd way, honestly. The world expects fairies to be a particular size in particular places, for lack of a better explanation, and whenever the expected-fairy-sizes are continuous along some land, we see a fairy path. Wandering across a path at the wrong size for it sometimes messes it up. I would tentatively expect that when you fly you will stay the size you were when you left, but I'd be slightly worried about something odd happening to any paths you crossed."

"So I'd have to - stay really low? That's hard, takes a lot of flapping."

"Best thing to do might be to travel to some unclaimed territory where you can fly around and if you damage any paths no one'll be annoyed or trapped or anything."

"Do new paths ever appear?"

"Yeah. They just take a while. There are often paths climbing trees, things like that, and they emerge as the tree grows."

"Do natural disasters affect them?"