"Not really. If you actually deeply cared about the answer then it might but not as - filler. You could ask faery sociology questions, they don't have to be about the currency."

"Ooh, faery sociology questions. I wanna know stuff about how faeries raise kids. And if there are dialects of the language."

"My father has really thorough notes on that second thing. You could ask how they'd spell a couple of different words where there's regional variance in how people say them. And whether they've had kids or want them, and...what else would you want to know about childrearing?"

"How... you... parent them? I assume you don't just sort of leave them in a box and give them a cup of dew once a day."

"Only when they're very small."

"Are you telling me you literally leave babies in boxes and give them a cup of dew once a day. ...Should I save this question for somebody we're trying to trade."

"Probably. Uh, you could ask on the survey how much time people spent with their children at what ages, and what were some typical activities, and at what age they considered their children competent."

"I would sure like to know all those things as of now. Poor baby faeries!"

"I mean, they're not people yet at that age."

"Things that happen to pre-sapient babies or even embryos can affect them as adults in, like, every species of animal I can think of including humans!"

"Huh. I mean obviously if you neglect them horrendously they'll never turn into a person at all?"

"Like if they die or do you mean you are aware of intermediate forms of damage?"

"They can die or if you never expose them to language they will never become people as far as the debt system is concerned."

"When does the debt system usually think they're people, about?"

"Once they're talking. Really talking, not just 'mama' and 'dada' and a name for a favorite toy."

"Oh, they bother saying 'mama' and 'dada', I was concerned there for a bit! Has anyone tried, uh, not neglecting babies."

"I mean if you tried carrying them around you'd probably kill them? I suppose some people sing to them or talk to them or are confined to a room with them for unrelated reasons or something."

"...why would you kill them?"

"New babies are very small and very fragile. If they get too warm or too cold they die, and if they're jostled they can die, and you'd be putting them at a lot of risk if you just carried them around. After about six months of development, subjectively, they're stable enough this isn't a risk anymore and you can carry them around at that stage, which many people do."

"...are they unlike human babies in some obvious way?"

"I think human pregnancies go significantly longer but I don't know all that much about humans. I know that sometimes humans carry babies that resemble a faery baby of the age where you'd carry them."

"Human babies can be carried immediately. And should be. If you don't touch a human baby, like, kind of a lot, they tend to die or at least have serious problems."

"Huh. Maybe human pregnancies are long enough that they're born already carrying-sized."

"Premature human babies can also be carried - how long are faery pregnancies?"

"Three slow months. At that point it is safe to remove the baby, but not required; you have to remove them at some point, though, and it only gets more difficult past that point, so most people remove the baby right at the third month."