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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.
"Cars can get as fast as... I think three hundred kilometres per hour? Maybe more? They're usually not built for uneven terrain like fairyland's, cars built for that might not be very fast. Planes can fly at thousands of kilometres per hour but they can't actually stay still in the air, the have to be moving all the time. Helicopters can but they're conversely not very fast, not sure how fast exactly but I can look it up. Computers are machines that store and process information much better and faster than people do, if not as autonomously or complicatedly, and they can also be connected to each other and be used to communicate or share knowledge."
"Are mortals good at selectively destroying things? I assume you wouldn't have needed help - at least not from multiple fairies - if you could just obliterate everything but her. Maybe you'd need help finding her, and you'd need her orders rescinded."
"Selectively destroying, kinda, selectively not destroying, not very. Sniper rifles, for example, are a kind of incredibly precise gun with an incredibly long range. And people are working on computers and artificial intelligence that can do that better autonomously, like drones, but it'll still be a while before there's anything really useful. For that matter, drones, even non-autonomous ones, are a thing. They're machines that can be remotely controlled and fly and have cameras and microphones and sometimes speakers and could also be used to shoot things."
"No. Guns require very good aim and training to use, especially specialised guns like sniper rifles, and those are also hard to get legally. Remotely controlled robots... are varyingly complex, the more things it can do and the better it can do them the harder and fiddlier they are to operate. But not necessarily too hard to learn fairly quickly, especially if we don't want military-grade stuff. Er, military's the branch of the government that deals with warfare."
"Yes, but once again that's a problem that goes away if I throw enough money at it. I'd need some time to figure out just where to throw that money, though."
"Should I be assuming here money is an unlimited resource or just an abundant one?"
"...abundant. Let's go with abundant. Normally I'd say unlimited but we might be getting several things that start pushing said limit depending on what the plan turns out to be."
"Okay. The mole plan is not bad but I don't want to rely on extended inattention from Thorn, and any mole who is suspected of erratic behavior can be taken down even if we're constantly chanting in their ears - it takes a while to utter a sentence, whereas someone can burst their eardrums and convey written orders if they guess anything approaching the truth... Moles will not be able to deploy any destructive power up-hierarchy..."
"Ah, right. Well, we don't need to rely on any mole extensively, we could keep one only until they gave us access to the next one on the web up to Thorn. Ideally we'd do this in the least pattern-changing way possible."
"What do you mean to do when you cease to 'keep one'? I don't even know mental sorcery, let alone know anybody there well enough to make them forget things."
"I mean, cease to actually order them to do things. We keep track of them, but if they're ordered well enough they can just return to their previous activities without any problems. Unless Thorn or someone else routinely orders them to tell if they've been vassalised by other people recently."
"Not in those words, no, but everyone's asked if there's anything he'd want to know and a lot of his vassals are psychologically loyal and would just tell."
"'Ordered well enough' ought to include 'do not tell Thorn,' but hmm, if he asks this all the time, whatever plan we come up with might need to itself succeed very fast once it starts."
"What? What'd I do?" asks Yellow.
"I'm not going to tell you."
"Designed a hybrid plant," Yellow says.
"A hybrid plant."
"It took Thorn something like fifty years to be tired of trying to get me to cooperate with him. And he doesn't have that problem often."