Alicornutopia

on the "order" one: in theory if the person already knows your name saying that the name is 'Bob' won't be lying to them. It would be saying incorrect information that you are mutually aware to be incorrect and that is intended to trick other people.

Possibly, or maybe the master fed “Bob” and forgot to ask for his name until later.

Does the in-thread answer to the recent questions suffice or is there remaining confusion?

It answers all the questions I asked, but I'm now wondering a related thing: could a master order their vassal to harm the master? What if it's the first step in somwthing helpful (like cutting somebody open to perfrom surgery)?

Not even an order from the master can cause a vassal to harm them, but the definition of harm has a little flex around things like removing an arrow from their flesh or whatever (but not a lot).

Alicorn wrote:IFairies cannot interbreed with mortals per se, but some breeding kinds do not strictly speaking breed by having sex, and there could be breeding kinds whose child-arranging rituals could involve help from humans. The kids would still be fairies of the relevant kind though.

So there could be fairies that need the laughter of children https://what-if.xkcd.com/123/ ? xD

There are no fairies that require the laughter of mortal children, at least, and I'm very disinclined to have any require the laughter of fairy children, because that implies a much sharper curve of population growth than I had intended.

Couldn't it be something that isn't the limiting component? Like, if it required a ritual with one of the necessary steps being the first unforced laugh of an unvassaled present mortal child, that would happen relatively rarely because the limiting component is getting the child there and laughing without being a vassal, not the actual number of laughing children.

The reason they don't require mortal children is different from the population reason.

You could have it need the first laugh of a particular kind of fairy, as long as it's some kind other than its own. Then it just means those two kinds have exactly the same population.

(But I kind of hope this isn't the case, just because it subjectively feels out of place to me.)