"Trivially? What would they do?"

"Overwhelm them with thousands of trained mortals, remotely controlled vehicles, perhaps automated ones if the state of the art has reached that far. They might even do the thing I want to do and do sorcery research for a few decades before that, a lot of technological and scientific advances happen for military purposes."

"They do? Like what?"

"Well, all the things we used here to get Thorn's court were either invented or significantly improved by the military: detectors, sensors, the internet... Rockets that can take people to the Moon are another cool example even if they're not strictly military in the strongest sense—there was this hilarious-except-terrifying time when two countries were trying to one-up the other so they kept making bigger and bigger bombs and the world almost ended and eventually the idea of going to the Moon was raised and they were all like 'let's see who can do that first' so they did that."

"Your moon is a go-to-able thing?"

"Yeah—have I never shown you a picture?" She looks a couple of pictures up: people landing on it, the Earth as seen from it, a to-scale representation of Moon-and-Earth.

"It's so round," she says of the Earth.

...she dissolves into a fit of giggles.

"It is! It's so round!"

"Yes, it is," she says between giggles.

Promise is so cute.

"That is almost the only thing I know about planets."

She finally stops giggling. "There isn't a whole lot other than that to know about most of them anyway."

"No?"

"Size, composition, star they rotate around, distance from it... most planets are pretty but also pretty boring."

"What a waste."

"Well, most transhumanists dream that humanity will eventually colonise other stars and planets."

"What's a transhumanist?"

"Loosely, everyone who thinks dying isn't all that much fun and being limited by designs of nature kinda annoying and wouldn't it be grand if we could all live in utopias with full control over our bodies and minds and activities?"

"...do some mortals think dying is fun?"

"No but they think it's 'part of the natural order' or something. Like that thing we talked about, on how some people wouldn't like deaging sorcery even though they'd like healing sorcery?"

"Still kind of weird."

"No 'kind of' there, in my opinion. Anyway, most transhumanists don't know about the infinite habitable plane that is fairyland."

"Of course they don't."

"They'd probably want to do the same thing, if they did," she shrugs. "But then we're back to the problem of letting mortals in general know about it, which I think is clear would probably be unpleasant."

"But they're dying."