"New orders take precedence. If someone comes along who can enforce an order it doesn't matter what you're ordered to do before."

"Yeah, I know, but for them to be able to enforce an order they'd need to either get someone's name or feed them, and with a large enough group of people, plus accepting to be ordered such as a ticket of entry into said society, would make it really hard to take."

"You might be overestimating the appeal of joining a society in exchange for one's name to a new fairy."

"Maybe, but in theory it'd be no different than being in a court except better, and people would naturally have the option of just striking it on their own if they don't want restaurants and the internet. Plus, the content of the order would be publicly available for anyone to see so potential applicants would know that this power would not be abused."

"...it's not unheard of for fairies to volunteer to join courts but it's not commonplace. And you're expecting kind of a lot of trust from people who don't know you."

"Well, I'm expecting to gain momentum by importing a human society and having it be really awesome. Also it may be relevant that cities sometimes house hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions of people."

"I don't see how either of those things solves the problem."

"If it's a nice enough society that living as a regular fairy starts sounding bad by comparison people will be incentivised to join, and the millions thing means it's nowhere near as easy to take over this pseudo-court. None of that solves the problem, of course, and I'm not yet... sure what would, and be moral. It might be that we'd need to actually forcibly go around ordering fairies this very huge and nice order or something..."

"You're leaning pretty hard on incentives and not addressing - atavistic fears."

"Atavistic? How so?"

"You're imagining you can make something shiny enough that fairies will fly up and decide it looks lovely and tell you their names and - and we start knowing what our names mean."

"Oh. Hm. Yeah. I'm—not sure how to deal with that in a non-horrible way, yet."

"Yep."

"I mean, if we do get the Queen I think that might be the least horrible way, all things considered."

"Yeah, she features in my vague take-over-Fairyland plans pretty heavily."

"How vague are they?"

"Pretty vague."

"Do you have anything on what you'll do after you hypothetically get her?"

"Figure out her court structure and how she takes courts when she wants them, especially since I think she has a way to do it without being on site."

"Hmm... I'm not sure we'll be able to even get her in the first place without that information, unless we have some overwhelming advantage."

"Yep."

"Which, I mean, technology is if not an overwhelming advantage at least a pretty good one, plus surprise."

"If it is. If she's had a moment's curiosity about the mortal world..."

"Well, relative to how old she is, mortals have developed this kind of tech yesterday. Some of the stuff I used didn't exist ten years ago. Your e-reader was released last month."

"And there's already this many books made to go on it?"