"But mortals in general are pretty easily coordinated, I gather."

"I suppose. To me it always seemed normal."

"How many people live in this city?"

"About three hundred fifty thousand. Brockton Bay is larger than most cities, but there are fifty or so larger in this country alone."

"You'd need to assemble continentsful of fairies to get that many together."

"For us it was mostly made possible by the industrial and agricultural revolutions. It sounds like Fairyland never had those. But the causes are ancient history now; large cities are just taken for granted."

"Fairies do some agriculture, but not in a particularly revolutionary way."

"I'll dig up some information on how it happened and add it to the list, if you're interested. History in general probably wouldn't even need to be redacted, the owners of any names being safely dead."

"...I have heard that humans re-use names a lot."

"You need to avoid hearing names even if there's no one attached? That sounds more dangerous than before."

"It wouldn't do anything by itself, but if I think of a name in connection with another mortal later and it happens to be right that works just as well as being told about someone's name in particular."

Piggot frowns. "If it's that easy, I may have to reconsider the suggestion about telling you some names. Any criminal who isn't too dangerous to get you close to might not be worth the risk to everyone who happens to share their name."

"If names are reused that often, yeah."

"Few names are unique, and some are common. I'll make sure everything is as redacted as possible."

"Okay. I really don't have any plans to mistreat any vassals I acquire here but I understand the desire for caution."

"You did accrue quite a bit of credibility by warning us in the first place. But people are justifiably terrified of Masters, and if it were to come out that we had potentially put random people under the complete control of a previously unknown hero, public opinion would turn against everyone involved in a heartbeat."

"I'd hesitate to describe the control as 'complete'. Vassals can escape sometimes. But yeah."

"Anything else before I arrange for what we've talked about so far?"

"Can these... machine lights be moved out of the way? I'd prefer to do my own lighting."

"They can be turned off easily like this." She flicks the switch on the nearest one, and it winks out. "If you want them moved physically too, I can send someone."

"Yes please. They're... not exactly decorative."

This is true. "All right. None of this should take very long."

"Thank you." Pause. "Oh, there is one thing fairies can do you might find useful that I don't mind doing. Mortals have a lot of different languages, right? I should be able to translate between them very easily and can't think of a good reason not to, if you need that done."

The Director pauses for a bit, then says "We do have translators for the languages that come up, but I'll keep it in mind. Thank you."

"You're welcome."