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She's a four-year-old girl, and people (especially her Dad) insist she's a boy.
Not that she isn't sometimes. She is. But not today! Today she's a girl. And Dad keeps saying that's not true, that God made her body perfect and she shouldn't second-guess God's plan for her. God made her a boy, so she's supposed to be a boy. And on the one hand that kinda makes sense. God doesn't make mistakes, right? So if she were really a girl sometimes, then she'd... what? Her body would change, she guesses. But on the other hand, she knows she's a girl. She's a girl with a peepee, that's obvious. She'd prefer not having a peepee when she's a girl, but it's not the worst thing ever. And if God doesn't make mistakes, God also didn't make her feel like a girl sometimes on accident, right? It must be part of His (because God is always a He, even though God made everyone, boys and girls, in His image, he's always a He, Dad says) plan.
She tells Dad that, today, and Dad gets angry, and yells at her, and she doesn't know why he's yelling. It makes sense to her! But he won't explain why she's wrong, he's just yelling, Dad's so mean, she hates him, and she's not crying, shut up, you're crying!
And now Mum's coming and she's talking to Dad, and that usually makes Dad stop yelling and go away but he won't stop now and Sadde's angry and afraid and hurt and she's running away. A part of her thinks that it doesn't make much sense to run away, the park is pretty open and she can't really hide anywhere, and she'll have to go back because she'll get hungry (not now, though, she just ate a sandwich).
So she runs until she finds some bushes where she can hide, and she hides there, and she doesn't cry, and she spends a long time not crying. Mum and Dad don't come after her, though, and after she's done not crying she doesn't wipe her eyes and her nose, and she comes out the other way of the bushes she was hiding in.
And she's pretty sure that's not the park.
"Okay." She sighs. "I'm not seeing an obvious Thorn-proof plan with the described resources, which at least means whatever we come up with we'll have a decent chance of it being unexpected."
"Yeah. Okay, so, basic skeleton, we capture one of his vassals to get a first look at a web of master-vassal relationships, physical layout of his courts, wards, schedules, etc, then use that to get to Thorn?"
"One vassal won't know that much unless we get really lucky. I didn't know much even when I was actually in the court and even someone who's less of an attitude problem than me will know at most one site."
"That's why first look, so we'll know more about who to vassalise next..." Thoughtful pause. "I wonder if hypnosis works on fairies. And more importantly, if it's possible to order someone well enough that they can be suggestible to it."
"Nnnnoooot exactly. It's regular psychology, er, at least mortal psychology. A therapist or someone with appropriate training can make someone become very strongly suggestible, to the point that they can hallucinate vividly or believe something is hot that isn't or, relevantly, completely block off certain memories and believe other things instead."
"No. I don't know how much training's necessary, even, maybe not a lot but. What I know of it, though, is that it requires, or at least is vastly easier, with... trust? It's usually used for mental illness treatment, and the patient's supposed to want to be hypnotised, or at least be able to just let themself be guided by the hypnotist, and I'm not sure how much ordering someone can overcome their internal resistance to it."
"Orders cannot generate trust, or mental relaxation, although they can force people to attempt techniques that can generate those things."
"There are books about it, and perhaps better a Wikipedia page about it that might give us enough information on whether it's worth pursuing or not. Wikipedia is a sort of encyclopedia you can access using a computer."
"Very! And it's—" Pause. "I can nerd about Wikipedia and how great it is later. If we could make a Thorn vassal forget..." he trails off, reaching inside his backpack for a mortal contraption with a screen and various buttons.
"I'm not sure how much of what I heard is true or fiction, but supposedly you can make someone completely block off a memory until a certain condition is met, like a word spoken or something. It's also supposed to be powerful enough to give the hypnotist master-like ordering abilities with absolutely zero magic." He starts typing into his contraption.
He looks distracted by whatever's on his contraption, and takes a second to answer: "By fairy standards, maybe. Humans discovered it about a hundred years ago, apparently, and humans have more standardised ways of discovering things than fairies do."
"Yeah, that might be new enough, especially if it's rare and difficult. If it does rely on subject cooperation, though, we shouldn't count on it helping at all."
"It..." He reads some more. "May not rely on intrinsic subject cooperation? The techniques described here speak of focusing on stuff, relaxing muscles, paying strict attention to what someone's saying, stuff that's at least theoretically orderable?"
"Those things are orderable as long as the muscles are ones people have volitional control over."
"Yeah, it does say here one needs to be, like, relaxed and completely focused on the task at hand and not thinking about anything else... Which may not be a state of mind we could induce with orders."
"But if they're ordered to focus exclusively on something? Or, suppose they were ordered to try to, to the best of their ability, cooperate with the hypnosis? Even in very stressful situations spending a while breathing deeply and such ought to calm people down, no?"
"Yeah, that might work, I don't know if it would work well enough. Thorn was good at filling up somebody's mind with only one thing, he liked to make us brute-force cube roots of large numbers, but there was usually a little ability to think around it... Most people can't actually volitionally concentrate wholly on a single thing very well."