Snort. "I guess so."

"There's no real rush because the difference in tech between now and three hundred years from now is not significant but at some point I'm going to need a sidereal itinerary, like, 'if anyone wants to go to space, do it before this date or somebody'll see you'."

"How many certificates will you trade for a ride into space?"

"Good question - unlike you I don't really have an intuition for their buying power, that'll take me a while and I can't even just convert them into a familiar currency in my head."

"Yeah, that's reasonable. I can get you a list of values all assigned numbers for convenience but I don't know how close that gets you to the cost of a ride to space, intuitions aren't very good outside the domains we've seen before."

"I don't actually know how future humans calculate exchange rates under normal circumstances. There'll be news like 'the euro is falling against the loonie' but I'm not sure what goes into that and would have to look it up. And I haven't operated in currency much since I died so even knowing things like 'wow, bananas are thirty dollars a pound, inflation is crazy' doesn't quite substitute for routinely participating in transactions."

"What do people do in your world? If they don't use currency?"

"In Hell? Hell's an anarchy, the closest thing demons have to an organizational structure is like, neighborhood associations and club charters. In theory since the invention of demonproof cryptography we could do cryptocurrency but while there have been some attempts they haven't taken off - it's not like you can pass out hors d'oeuvres and get demons super excited, they'll just go 'cool idea, I will make some of those for myself whenever I want for all eternity now'. There's not really enough stuff we can't get any way other than by buying it."

"Huh."

"You can list things we could allocate that way. Like spots at live concerts. My - friend, acquaintance, not sure where she falls - this person I know through music stuff could sell tickets to her concerts. But she'd be giving up at least some of the ability to curate the audience, which she values, and maybe under this condition she'd have to pay the person who was managing her auditorium half her ticket money instead of coasting on personal connections for that, and then - what's she gonna spend the rest on? Tickets to other people's concerts? She can already get those for free unless there's personal drama and the personal drama wouldn't go away if she waved a few bucks under somebody's nose. She has no reason to think any of that's appealing."

"And there's just not that many of you? So the personal-connections thing doesn't fail?"

"Oh, there's billions, in my time, but the subcultures get insular. And she's friendly enough to new people showing up being 'hi I'm five years old and can play the recorder kind of but really like your recordings, can I come to your next performance', or letting people she knows who are friendly to those give spare seats to them."

"Huh."

"And if she actively didn't like strangers, then selling the tickets would hardly improve matters, you know? I'm not really some kind of hardcore devotee of currency. It's way way better than the thing faeries are doing by default and I am delighted to enable it, I don't think it's bad, but demons don't really seem to need it. Angels and fairies do use it and it seems to help them, there's more skill-based limitations on what they can get access to on their own since they can't copy everything it pops into their head to want."

"What are the abilities of angels and fairies?"

"Angels change things, but need to do more of their own detail work. Also don't have as good a range. So in some ways they're effectively equivalent to demons but they can get much better at healing and can get rid of things they don't want any more. Fairies can move stuff - their kind of wings don't actually work, but they can fly anyway, and travel incredibly quickly, and do all kinds of fun things with sound and temperature and manufacturing that way."

"Huh. And none of them have debt and none of them ever die -"

"Yup."

"Well, whatever works for them, I guess."

"Hell's natively just nothing in all directions forever, not even air or a direction designated as down. Demons have put stuff in it, obviously, which installs down as a consequence. Heaven's this cloud fluff stuff, slightly glowy, kind of squashy, a bit less dense than water but you can walk on it, with a down, and they live in caves of fluff they hollow out. Fairyland's the interesting one, it's flat in all directions like Limbo but it has an ecosystem and, like, purely cosmetic pretend celestial objects."

"A normal ecosystem in which things grow and die? Are there animals?"

"Yes and yes."

"Like our plants and animals? Does anything but the fairies have magic?"

"They're different species but not too alien. And there's some minor things that are a little magic but nothing major apart from the berries that can let them grow new fairy wings if they want."

"Huh. 

That feels like - the same kind of odd handling of a situation as debts coming in when a child becomes a person, somehow."