View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
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.
"Unfortunately, he collects sorcerers, and skill is correlated with how high up they are."
"Are the master-vassal relationships acyclic, do you think? That would make this severely harder."
"Like, if you start out with someone, then find out who their vassals are, and then who their vassals' vassals are, etc, you never get back to the person you started with. Or, if all people of a given rank know the names of some people of ranks below theirs but no people of ranks above theirs."
"The second thing is trivially true - nobody has Thorn's name, I am almost certain he doesn't even trust a backup somewhere for rescue orders; I think only he has Blossom; the other tiers have small cycles but probably nothing big, at least not that I know about."
"I mean, I don't need all people of a given rank to know some name from a rank above theirs, as long as some do, otherwise there'll have to be a lot more forceful vassalisation to do. The less force-feeding and darting and what-have-you we need to do, the better."
"The ranks aren't quite neat. There's Thorn, there's Blossom, there's a handful of best sorcerers, there's people with a lot of control over their site but none over other sites and people who move around..."
"So it may not be as hopeless, then." He stands up, stretches, and walks over to the window. "This plan, whatever-it-is, will need a lot of thinking on our feet and reacting to unexpected things so let's make sure to expect them as hard as we can." He turns around and leans against the all. "I think there are two questions we need to answer: how will we capture our first vassal, and once we've got moles high enough in his power structure how will we deal with Blossom and Thorn themselves?"
"Getting a name is ruled out both by court standard orders and by the fact that it normally requires already having someone's master or torture. So, food, delivered ideally to someone alone, vassalizing them to you and then promptly turned into a name for me and if we're using him Yellow. Because Thorn doesn't keep a backup to rescind his orders, as soon as we have him Blossom shouldn't present any further problem. Blossom will be incredibly difficult to control; if I'm good because I had fifty years in his court, she's had centuries as his most favored, and she adores him. We shouldn't try to go through her if we can possibly get him direct."
"...adores him. How does he even inspire loyalty? Is torturing everyone who works for you a very effective strategy for getting love amongst fairies?"
"Well, I don't adore him, but he makes it work a surprising fraction of the time. He can make you tell him how you feel, and he can make hating him hurt. ...It's also possible Blossom in particular's just a masochist."
A plan starts to slowly take shape. If no one has Thorn's name, the only avenue for vassalasing him is force-feeding, and given the sheer numbers and power on his side, that won't be happening easily. Which leaves them two avenues: overpowering him, or attacking him from an oblique angle. Overpowering him... is possible, but would require quite a lot of bootstrapping and more than anything quite a lot of time. So oblique angle it is. In practice, that means a trap.
(Mortal orders lunch and feeds Yellow and Promise.)
Thorn never leaves his court unescorted—that much Promise knows. And escorted, it's much harder to actually reach him and do anything, especially if he's on his guard, which he probably is. The situation his guard'll be lowest will be, in all likelihood, inside his courts, where his various wards and vassals would cause him to believe himself safe. No one can get in without his permission, so the basic skeleton of the plan will be to coordinate enough vassals that they'll be able to plant a trap somewhere Thorn won't be expecting. And this will all, naturally, have to be done remotely.
"...that raises an interesting few questions, I think."
"Well the main one is 'how to avoid being ordered if someone finds out what we're up to' but what branches off from that is figuring out how exactly ordering interacts with technology. And not even just technology, what if an order is written or mimed or mouthed?"
"Written works if you watch it being written, right then, but not afterwards even if you saw it when it was. You can order people to respond to gestures or their best guess at what you're not quite saying, but that counts as enacting the order to interpret that way, not as being newly enforced when you mime something."
"Hmm, what about sign language? Do you know sign language? Does sign language work with plain speak? I don't know sign language, this is probably not relevant..."
"We can understand sign but producing plain sign is - awkward, and uncommon even when it would be a good idea to be quiet and you have line of sight, it feels weird."
"Is it something Thorn might think of, to order us while we're monitoring?"
"Okay. Okay. Erm. We need to figure out ways in which this interacts with our monitoring equipment. First of all, can you plain sign at me? Or better, plain sign order me, two birds with one stone."
(Also feeling ~something~ at one other thing. He shouldn't be feeling that at one other thing. That other thing is not a thing he should be feeling things about. He would quite like his body to stop that, thank you very much.)
"Okay. It works," he says, keeping his voice steady. "Now..." He grabs his phone again, points its camera at Promise, then closes his eyes. "Can you sign-order me again? Or, sign-order my phone, I want to see if video recordings work."
Clap your hands once.
(Is Mortal starting to get a bit less glum and worried? He certainly seems to be enjoying this more than the previous twenty-four hours...)