"...I don't see a very strong resemblance between Fairyland having magic berries and baby faeries not counting for debt except for their creation retroactively."

"Both of them make perfect sense to me if I reason backwards from how I'd expect the world to look and don't make much sense if I reason forward from the other traits it has."

"Why would you expect the world to look like faery babies suddenly 'becoming people'? I wouldn't expect that."

"What would you expect, that they were people all along?"

"No, I'd expect it to be gradual."

"Huh. Personhood's a sharp line; so is death."

"Do you know what exactly constitutes death?"

"We consider the moment of death to be the moment all someone's debts evaporate, but I think you mean something else?"

"Yes, I mean, do you know if the debts evaporate when the heart stops, or when the brain stops doing stuff, or what?"

"It's after the heart stops. I don't know how we'd measure the thing about brains."

"Fancy equipment. Or, if you'd ever beheaded anyone it'd be a couple seconds after that, for instance."

"I have never beheaded someone. I would say that maybe my brother can try that next time he has to kill someone but he's trying not to kill people at all, so."

"For which I am glad. Perhaps we can eventually turn up a story of somebody being beheaded, this information doesn't seem to me worth anyone's life especially since you have no obvious afterlife situation."

"Yes, I'm sure someone'll know."

"You could have a non-obvious one. Faeries yourselves are surprisingly non-obvious, nobody finds out about you for more than a thousand years and then I expect it to become known via, uh, me telling them."

"I've been wondering if that's a consequence of your presence. We're - I don't know that I'd say 'reasonably well known' but near circles humans have a fair bit of precedent to work from."

"Humans sort of... believe in things less, over time? This mostly makes them more accurate. And if faery circles get less common because of more development and interference that'd contribute too. But it does seem suspicious that nobody's been like 'hi humans, I exist, look at me' credibly and it could be me telling them 'don't do that you'll annihilate the universe maybe'."

"That or something that makes slowing down become impossible are my two leading guesses."

"Even if slowing down became impossible someone could pull a reveal. They'd just have to do it in writing or something."

"Most people don't live a million years. If slowing down became impossible, it wouldn't surprise me if the only ones who did were too conservative to pull things like that."

"...that might be it. And if you can't slow down you can't have more babies."

"Yes."

"Which still leaves about twenty billion people, even if they gradually fall to various attrition, whose decision to remain secret must be explained, but at least it's not a high-turnover population... and it could still be something else."

"It could, yeah. Maybe faeries speed up relative to humans over time, or slow down relative to humans, or just all die randomly of some faery plague in fifty thousand years."

"Oh, hell, please don't die of some faery plague randomly, I would be so lonely, I'm an introvert but I'm not a fifty thousand years with nobody at all to interact with in any way introvert."