Mortal and Promise in fairyland
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"He plays things pretty conservatively on an intercourt level and doesn't have a history of operating in the mortal world. I can't think of any square kilometers he'd want to obliterate."

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"I was just trying to give you a sense of scale. It's a treasure trove for any fairy that knows how to use it, even if somehow no fairy figured it out so far. Not to mention that the element of surprise would be completely gone, he'd become immune to what's basically the only shot I have at making this world a little bit less horrible."

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Promise sighs.

"Did you do anything smart like, oh, have places to go set up in several distant locations in the mortal world that your mother doesn't know about?"
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"Depends on how many you'd call 'several.' I have two."

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"I was thinking, enough to spam gates so at least one of them will settle quick. Two is not that."

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"No. Not that. Although, I mean, I could just pick a lot of places I don't personally own, the Earth is pretty big and has lots of those."

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"Though then you've got gates standing open to a bunch of places..."

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"Yes. But in any case the biggest hazard is informational, not material."

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"Explain?"

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"All the stuff we know about technology, the little things we developed or use like that and other traps or the dart blowers or guns or motion detectors or heat detectors, trackers and small cameras and earbuds and microphones, and we went out of our way not to actually plan anything yet with exactly this eventuality in mind but we weren't—paranoid—enough."

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"I assure you fairies have heard of darts. The other things may be more of a factor."

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"Not motion—and heat-activated dart-blowing traps they haven't, at least not as far as I've been able to determine. Which may admittedly not have been much."

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"It seems disingenuous to call a thing motion-activated if it is in fact activated by only the sight of motion. I think Thorn has automatic dart traps but that's not how he got me, I'm piecing things together."

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"Humans can't become invisible, normally. And does invisibility even hold up in the mortal realm? It might also be possible to use radars, can sorcery make one transparent to air?"

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"Sorcery in general shreds in the mortal realm. And that sounds like it would make it hard to breathe."

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"Then radars would probably work." She tries to raise her hand to wipe her eyes and realises she can only do that slowly, then asks, "Can you relax my orders a bit?"

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"You may, in ways I am unlikely to find surprising or inconvenient, minding that I would find being touched inconvenient, move."

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"I wouldn't," she says, wiping her face with her shirt (her gloves still containing hidden sharp bits). "I've—I'm not running on sheer panic anymore. Maybe I'm too tired for or of panic, or you served as an effective enough way to arrest my ill-advised momentum. Probably both."

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"You wouldn't what?"

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"Try to surprise or inconvenience you. For whatever unfathomable fairy reasons you're actually helping me instead of doing—whatever it is non-Thorn fairies do to their mortal vassals."

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"Thorn's definitely worse than average but it is usually not very nice. And you had a lapse of judgment that lasted a few hours, it's not like Yellow who's had me, what, twenty years, and who if necessary I will handle much less politely than you."

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"...thanks, I guess. What will you do with me? Not that there's even much point in my asking, I suppose."

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"I'm trying to figure out how costly it is to help you."

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"Why?"

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"What do you mean, why? If it's just going to wind up with all of us in Thorn's court biting through our tongues and brute-forcing cube routes in our heads every time we have a disloyal thought I'm not going to do it, it's worth the risk assessment."
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