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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.
"You should close that gate and any others that have settled," Promise says. It's not enforced.
Both are about equally close to small hotels, so she closes that and says, "Let's go to the mortal world, then?"
Yellow comes forward for the other.
"I should probably go first and book a room somewhere before coming to get you. ...I wonder if the walkie-talkie works through the gate."
"No, no one to test it with, the walkie-talkie has a maximum range and my mother's not supposed to know where my gate is and this'd be relevant information."
She rescues the walkie-talkies from her backpack again, puts one on the floor, goes through the gate—no one there, dark and late, good—and tries speaking through it: "One two three testing." Then back again to fairyland.
"Good, that's even better than I'd expected, here, you speak to it by holding this button down and talking into these holes," she says, demonstrating as she speaks. "I'm gonna go through the gate, holding mine with my right hand, can you try to order me through it to come back holding it with my left hand?"
And once Mortal is through, "With the walkie-talkie in your left hand, return here."
"This is the best possible result," she says, waking up a little bit in excitement.
"It's encouraging," Promise agrees. "How long will it take you to get a hotel?"
"No more than another hour, probably more like half, I picked an alley reasonably close to this small cosy one near a park."
"Good, I'll be right back." Off she goes, and she's back in less than forty minutes. "We're good to go, I got us two rooms with two beds each for a week."
So she does. She closes any of the other two gates that may have settled and goes through the one. On the other side there's a not particularly clean alley that would be dark during the day—at three in the AM it's almost pitch black.
She looks exhausted, frazzled, timid, and like if any of those things try to interfere with her she will bite them.
(Yellow follows.)
She leads them to a small five-story building with for rooms per floor and a bored and sleepy receptionist on the ground floor.