"Gosh." He sighs. "It was lovely."

Wag wag wag.

"I don't really wish I were human because then I would have spent my life on a farm and died but -"

"Yeah, this is not peak human, what you've got going on next d- next meta-fucking-phorical door."

"They have so much potential."

"Especially with us helping. Yeah."

"I think I might have time traveled," Cam says.

" - huh. How far?"

"Little over a thousand years."

"They were approximately as impressive a thousand years ago, as far as I can determine. Maybe moreso."

"Oh, yeah, thousand years ago they were I believe still doing the Roman Empire, that was pretty cool, but they get industrialized some several hundred years from now and then stuff gets cooler fast. Compared to progress rates among humans now. And there are so, so, so fucking many things I could be doing out there to make it better faster and I have no idea if doing that would prevent my own fucking existence thereby possibly destroying the entire universe in a paradox!

But in my time nobody knows faeries exist. So I think doing stuff among faeries is - safer - if I can figure out why nobody in my time knows you exist even under the condition that I spend a subjective million years among you doing stuff."

"Does 'industrialized' by chance involve there being not much wilderness and lots of human-made places."

"Yes, but there's still some, and if I am among you for a million years doing stuff I do not like to think I would let you go extinct!"

"If there weren't faery rings then there might be no way for humans to discover us, and we don't know what causes faery rings. We should still exist as long as there are plants that dew gathers on, but we might be much harder to detect."

"You don't think in a million years subjective any faeries will go poke humans? I guess maybe not if I'm sufficiently apocalyptic about the risk of doom."

"If no one slows down then they can't have children. You could make them make some promises before they slowed down, though, if you had all the slowing crystals - or trusted all the people who did - or if there's some place where there aren't humans, where faeries could be -"

"Underwater?"

"Do you have some way we wouldn't drown?"

"That's doable for humans at full size, I can't guarantee all the gas exchange works at speed or at shrink. Might also be detectable to future human instruments."

"You couldn't really get everyone to go along with it anyway."

"Not if there's twenty billion of you, not really."

"It's good to know it gets better for them."

"This could be an alternate universe instead. That would be much better. I won't know for sure till enough real time has passed that I can verify something to have changed where I'm from."

"You'll want to figure it out before nightfall, if you can."