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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.
Mortal accepts, thanking the person, and pulls up a chair, putting the food on the desk.
There's a knock on the door.
It's Promise, in her coat, looking freshly showered and quite alert. "Hello. Oh, there's food."
He hadn't noticed she was hot. And of course that matters not at all, she's still a fairy and potentially made of evil, but. She's hot.
(And he knows a bit more about yesterday's feeling. He's not entirely sure he likes it.)
"So," she says, "now that I can run on something other than stress, do you want my help or do you want me to command you to give me a head start and then you can go back to doing whatever you were going to do sans me or Yellow?"
She bites a cherry tomato out of his hand neatly; no lip-to-finger contact. Chews. Does not seem impressed with the tomato's quality. Finds a hotel notepad and a pen on the nightstand, flutters over to it, picks them up. "So you have - walkie-talkies, needle gloves. Do you have or would you need to obtain microphones, earbuds, and cameras? What am I forgetting?"
"I have none of those in appropriately small, wireless, and discreet versions, I'd need to buy them. Darts, other ways of injecting fairies with fruit juice? Do sprays or gases work? Custom-design bullets with embedded food, or made of food, though that'd be lower distance. Er, bullets are these," he says, reaching inside his backpack for a handgun and removing its cartridge. "D'you know how guns work?"
"Inhalations mostly don't work. You would need to worry around a pollencloud; I'm not aware of any gases mortals produce that are sufficient. I do not know how guns work."
"They're like crossbows, only a hundred, maybe a thousand times faster, and they shoot these little metal things. Pretty guaranteed to disable a fairy for a while, I'm certain, depending on where it lands, and with the right design of gun and bullet it could inject them with food by splintering on contact. Bit flashy, though, I'm not sure sorcery could make them not hurt and the fairy'd notice the sheer momentum."
"Doesn't seem to offer much advantage over an invisible dart, does it?"
"Range and speed. It's a possible way to pick up a Thorn vassal, shoot them from enough of a distance that they can't notice it or react, then order them. Although I'm not sure how to order them, could sorcery make a speaker harder to destroy?"
"Probably, but I'm only a good sorcerer for my age, not particularly in general."
"And I'm nineteen. Still, if not for vassalisation, it's a pretty sure-fire way to disable a fairy for a few days, if shot through the head, probably. Grenades are a possibility, too, they're generally-short-range explosives, can provoke quite a lot of area of effect damage and also possibly vassalise multiple people at a time."
"Earlier it sounded like you were planning on infiltration, not a shooting war."
"I am, but I'm listing everything we have that might be relevant. The way this might be relevant would be if we already had enough moles that we only needed Thorn himself, that's a way to get him."
"Of the three of us the only one who can injure Thorn is Yellow, maybe."
"Yeah, I know." Pause. "How many levels of remove would it take to count as injuring Thorn, though? Would we be unable to leave or order someone to leave a hidden time bomb, or remote-activated bomb? Could one of those work if Yellow was the one activating it? Or some random mortal we asked?"
"As long as there's someone who isn't Thorn's vassal, or the vassal of anyone else in the line of fire, taking the last active step, it will work."
"Probably not, but if I hire someone to press a button somewhere without telling them what it does, maybe. And for more money I could do it even telling them what it does. And fifteen years with access to even very basic sorcery is enough to get a fair amount of money."
"When it comes to darts, I think humans have made blowers that are much faster and more precise than fairies have. And it's possible to order some custom ones, though that might take time. Can sorcery make them not hurt? And more specifically, can you?"