"Maybe them not telling you was a more deliberate decision than I thought."

"But I found out anyway. Now. It is not a first or even a second resort to have them all assassinated. But I might just stand here and brute-force all their names, the ones you can't tell me. Any good reason from my own perspective I shouldn't do that?"

"If you do that you'll have to assume Contessa knows you did. As long as we know you never use the names, nobody retaliates, but no precog is perfect."

"So they'd still be able to order me if I didn't order them not to, which is really the problem here, I am not so much concerned that they will decide to physically injure me. And you all know that there are billions of fairies, some very vulnerable, who could just rescind any such order; so it would have to be tighter; so it would look more hostile still... Are you a valuable hostage against their cooperation? I don't particularly like this plan but I'm a little short on ideas and apparently your ideas include 'go to Fairyland to fight sorcerers'..."

"I'm valuable to the Protectorate, certainly. Whether I'm valuable to the others as a hostage depends on what you have in mind. Threatening not to release me wouldn't carry much weight."

"...Can you think of any safe way to deliver all of the people in your group who know my name the instruction 'never give me an order that I do not expressly request of my own uncommanded will, or that you do not sincerely without mental contortion believe to be in my best interest as you genuinely understand it, except the reciprocal of this one if you so desire'? It's a little wordy but the first part is the important bit."

"As long as you aren't planning any other orders, Contessa might not even object. As far as I know none of her current plans rely on giving you orders. Everyone else would object, but if Contessa says it's the safest way to deal with you with the fewest casualties, they'd go along with it. You might not need any plots for that."

"You say 'might'. What happens if she does object?"

"What's her overarching goal?"

"Save the world. There's a, a threat coming. We're trying to build up as much of a defense as we can, and hoping for a weapon that will work. Most orders from you would interfere with the number of capes available to fight; this one wouldn't."

"...What would possibly make her or anyone think I would object to saving the world and issue orders to prevent it?"

"Not with the purpose of preventing it, just the effect. If you had ordered our group to do everything in our power to stop the Endbringers while they were still active, to take something completely unobjectionable, it would have decreased our ability to prepare for the worse threat. Even this one is saying protect against the end of the world as effectively as possible unless it involves ordering Promise and gambling that the current most effective plan doesn't. It's probably a safe bet, but any given order could cause that problem."

"This is the same plan-generating power that thought producing my name was a great idea and didn't have anyone intercept you before you broke into my house to do stupid things in Fairyland," Promise points out. "Which means that Contessa is bad at compensating for her gaps or it is for some reason extremely useful for me to hate her personally in spite of the fact that I have every sympathy with her cause. I am not in the least sure I trust this power."

"You're a gap; I, I assume, am not; if she doesn't want your cabal ordered you will turn up to find them all deaf. Am I wrong?"

"She can know almost anything about Earths, but her power hasn't been giving her information about Fairyland. It's not a block on it the way her blind spots are, but it doesn't seem to be able to reach across to here. You can plan anything you like from here and she won't react until you gate back."

"Phone won't work, though, unless I do come through. I have service in Hawthorn but not Fairyland. What even is going to destroy the world? I talked Scion into killing the Endbringers, maybe I should just talk to him again."

"Scion destroys the world. There are survivors if he isn't stopped, but he's what we've got to fight."

"Has Contessa re-checked the prediction since plain speaking proved to get unusual reactions out of him?"

"It didn't help. She can't model him directly, any more than she can model me. She has to fill in what we know about him, and it's little enough that the ability to get his attention doesn't give an actionable path."

"So you're just accumulating power in the hopes that if you fling enough of it at him whenever he snaps, he'll die?"

"Also creating power. Making the Protectorate and its counterparts. Planning evacuation to other worlds in case we lose; he's likely to focus his destruction on Bet. Mostly, we're accumulating power hoping for the ability to kill him."