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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.
"Hmm, okay, but you said Thorn collects sorcerers? Maybe one of them can. Are there any ways we're not thinking of of introducing foreign materials into fairies' bodies? Grenades, guns, darts, force-feeding, needles..."
"Snuck food, yeah, after we have some moles that might work. Not so sure about juice over the crops, wouldn't people notice? And wouldn't that take a bit too long? Although I suppose it wouldn't hurt if we did it and I got some unwitting vassals in case everything else goes wrong..."
"I don't know his food-checking procedures but it's possible anything could be noticed. What were you going to do with his court if you succeeded in taking it?"
"Save my Mum, rescue anyone currently being tortured in it, figure out a way to make him never torture anyone anymore, figure out what his vassals actually want out of life, I'd probably not be fit to actually rule a court and I'd be feeling absurdly terrible all the time, but on the other hand if I don't torture people and don't make them do things they would very strongly object to having a court is a good resource when it comes to getting rid of the Queen."
"I didn't, yet. My mother and I made a point of not actually making any plans before we knew a lot more so that if we got captured we wouldn't immediately make their defences that much stronger. That said, I have entertained the idea of a mind virus for a while."
"Some order phrased in such a way that people who heard it would feel compelled to make more people hear it and such that new fairies without it wouldn't be able to exploit their lack of masters, and whose content went something like 'don't order anyone who doesn't want to be ordered.'"
"That wouldn't do anything about the Queen unless you vassalized her."
"Right, that would be after I vassalised her. As for how to vassalise her, I don't know nearly enough about her defences and how her court's set up. The subversion from the inside thing still sounds like a solid meta-strategy, though."
"Maybe. Taking over Queenscourt is probably harder than taking Thorn's but might have less horrifying consequences for failure."
"Yes, but contingency plans are useful, he probably has lots of safeguards and the more alternatives we have the less likely we are to actually fail. Put another way, we don't actually know which one will work, and no plan survives contact with the enemy."
"All of these ideas will require prep, keeping things straight in our heads, and sneaking further equipment and supplies into the monitored areas."
"I'm not saying we should actually implement them all, but if we know what's at our disposal we'll be able to better choose what to actually deploy. For instance, I think we should probably if possible try to do the juice on crops thing regardless of what else we do because it passively gives us more resources."
"It's hard to verify, there's a lot of turnaround time, and if it's noticed he'll have his guard up. If he's nervous he's more than smart enough to switch to eating only berries straight off Sugar's antlers and stop personally going outside until he's found us."
"...point, so it's not an immediate yes. But still, my point is just, we gather the ideas we have until they stop coming easy and then only revisit them if it turns out the ones we do have can't make a workable plan."
"There are a few fairies in the court who will also have names, so if we get them we don't have to feed as many others. The torturers between them probably know almost everyone apart from Blossom and a couple of the other higher-ups who invariably get Thorn's personal attention if they make mistakes."
"Oh, yes, of course. If we could map out a web of master-vassal relationships we could use that to get all the way up to Thorn minimising the number of actual moles we need to manage..."
She flips a page on the notepad. "I don't know all of it, and some of this is guesswork, and it's been a while." Scribble scribble.
"Ideally we'd capture someone high enough that they'd have a more thorough view of that and who could disappear for long enough to give it to us. ...also wards and physical disposition of the court is a good idea, perhaps a logistical disposition as well, who usually goes where when and stuff."
"I don't have much about schedules and they'll have changed in twenty years. Nobody can disappear without being noticed within a few hours, though."