"...yeah. I know. If you have a shorter-term solution I'm all ears, I don't claim to be all-knowing or especially fit to represent humanity's interests here. But I think bringing mortals without any power here would attract the wrong kinds of attention from fairies and be terrible for the mortals, and conversely bringing powerful mortals would be terrible for the fairies."

"And your long-term solution involves experimenting with gates?"

"...it involves waiting long enough for you to decompress, and becoming better at sorcery, and being done with the turn-evil-fairies-into-sparrows part of taking over Thorn's court."

"I'm functional."

"Well, yeah, you are, but do you want to take on the Queen—this soon?"

"We don't have a way to do it yet."

"We don't. Part of it is figuring that out, as well, and I want to—make sure you're okay with that. And this will require a lot of planning. And, well, probably being much better at sorcery. Ergo not implementing any plans the day after we take over Thorn's court."

"Is there specific sorcery you think will be useful? It mostly just seems like you're investigating out of curiosity."

"Right now I am, 'cause still waiting for Yellow, but I'm also trying to... I dunno, get a more well-rounded education, so to speak. Understand sorcery better in theory so I'll know what to actually do."

"...established sorcery theory and cutting edge experiments are very different things."

"I don't, er... necessarily want either, in particular. I want to see whether I can do sorcery more efficiently, is I guess what I'm getting at. Figure out if there are any underlying rules I can exploit, which are revealed either by learning what other people already know or by exploring things they don't. I don't know enough to even know what questions to ask."

"Well," says Promise, "that will make it hard for me to answer them for you."

"Well, if you have any specific suggestions about what you think I should know or look at that would be useful when making any plans involving the Queen, I'm all ears, too."

"If I had a Queen-related plan you would know it already."

"...thank you," she says, sounding a little bit surprised.

"...hm?"

"For—trusting me I guess, I don't know."

"As far as Queen-related plans go, to even begin formulating one we need significantly more information than we currently have, or enough resources otherwise that we can deal with many different possible scenarios."

"Yeah, that's a fair summary."

"And without completely losing control of the situation, my first idea to get said resources would be to actually create a secret colony of mortals here."

"How would you do that?"

"Slowly," she sighs. "Probably starting with the poor and disenfranchised, people living in extreme need or in warzones, who wouldn't immediately be missed and who might be able to build an actual life here."

"How would you introduce the idea...? I imagine you're not going to kidnap them so you'd have to explain before getting them somewhere they couldn't explain to other mortals."

"That really depends. Bringing a fairy with me, maybe ordering someone to prove orders work so people will believe it when I ask them to order me to speak the truth. If we offer this idea to people desperate enough to want to leave everything they have behind and risk their lives to cross borders and sometimes oceans, or people sick enough mortal medicine can do nothing for them, I'm pretty sure they'd take it in a heartbeat."