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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.
And after about twenty minutes the thing Mortal said would appear on the phone does, in fact, appear.
"Hi! First test, not routing through anything, just regular millisecond transmission delay, let's try?"
"Erm, anything that doesn't involve me leaving a two square metres cubicle and doesn't cause too much noise or destruction of property should be fine."
"Okay, lemme see, I'll route this through Egypt, should give us something between a point one and point three seconds delay."
"Okay, let's try it now?"
"Alright... Half a second, gonna route through Brazil."
He hangs up once more, then about two minutes later calls again.
"Okay, half a second seems to do it."
"Okay. So we can route our incoming transmissions through... Brazil... and they'll come slow enough that orders won't affect us and we won't have to cross our fingers and use Yellow for all of that."
"At the worst case yes, but this was a quick-and-dirty proof-of-concept, I can get order transmission artificially delayed using software once we've set up our headquarters with the monitoring equipment."
"We are, I don't want to half-butt this. Also, talking with a half-second delay is annoying, I'm coming back to the hotel."
"Okay, so, headquarters, yes, we'll need a private place for the surveillance equipment, we don't know how many people we'll be vassalising and might need several monitors at the same time, though we should work to minimise this. I'm not sure whether it's best to headquarter in fairyland or here, though..."
"In fairyland we can use sorcery, but here we won't be bothered by extraneous fairies and you can - buy - things. Saves foraging time, probably also other time expenditures."
"Buying things is pretty good, yep, not to mention having internet access. But we'll also need to have gates open to a couple of points within fairyland, and if anyone finds these gates and decides to come after us, it might be best if we're in fairyland so we can close them instead of sitting ducks here. Maybe we could have a bidimensional HQ."
"That helps if we're found on the mortal world side but not if we're found on the Fairyland side, and we have much more limited mobility there than here because we have to travel through all the intervening space and you have to walk. Likely easier to track down if they're looking hard."
"Actually I'm thinking our fairyland version of HQ should be far, far away. I'm not going to be able to have everything we need for this plan for at least another month, and I think you could probably cover a lot of ground in that time, and it'd be very unlikely for them to find us then."
"Oh, if I'm going off to scout a Fairyland site and we have a month maybe I can get a cutting of my tree, that would be pretty safe."