"- I'm not sure I follow -"

"Uh, so you'd expect a functioning legal system to punish people enough to deter crimes, and you'd expect there to be a tradeoff between false convictions and false acquittals, so if there's lots of punishment and it's very easy to end up convicted, then you'd expect that at least you could expect there wouldn't be much crime there. And - of course it's not just that they had a murder once, it's other things, but the murder is a really egregious example, right? Or maybe your kind of people aren't as hard to kill."

"We're... hard to kill."

"Then you see how it'd be rare and, you could say, impressive, for a place to be so dangerous someone died of it."

"And the centuries in a dungeon would be..."

"...Really unpleasant? I don't know, maybe they sell your kidneys to the humans a few times each, I haven't been there and I really hope I never go."

"- what do humans want with kidneys?"

"Not sure. I think it's good for their health somehow. We could look it up."

"I suppose. What do you pay in to visit the one that wants collateral?"

"Uh, I think they can accept a lot of local currencies, and it comes out to about five thousand crowns."

"Does one need money for a lot of things around here?"

"Yeah, lots."

"- like what?"

"You usually use it to pay taxes or pay your employees or buy a house or really most things that involve more than one person on either end of the transaction. Stores like cash because then every employee can charge the same amount of it instead of them all having to be able to appraise everything someone might want to trade."

"- huh. Does... everyone need to pay taxes?"

"Most people do, yeah. It's probably possible to avoid it forever if you're trying for that at the expense of everything else."

"I don't have any money on me."

"Traditionally what people do about that is get a job, which I guess is hard with no references. What are your skills?"

"Sorcery."

Blink blink. "...You can do that professionally?"

"I've never tried to do it professionally."

"I wouldn't expect it to work but you might be different."

"What wouldn't you expect to work about it?"

"You'd try to fix chestnut blight and the trees would stop having that and mysteriously fall over or turn into walnut trees or maybe end up perfectly healthy and grow three percent faster and produce extra nuts, but you'd never be able to quite tell why it went either way."

"I've... never had that problem before, what causes it?"