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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.
"I'm not doing magic to your ears," she says. "I'm just talking and you understand me. The phone transmits sound, so you can hear me talking through it, and you can understand me."
"...that's. That's pretty much magic. It's not the same magic as sorcery or the ordering business, but being automatically understood by whoever hears you is not a thing the regular laws of physics really allow."
"I didn't say it wasn't magic, I said I'm not doing anything to your ears."
"I don't know. I just talk. It works in writing too, though, even if all there is is paper and ink, you'd be able to read what I wrote."
"Okay, I'll need to run your voice through software and hire someone who knows more about this in case the software can't do it automatically. And it might be best to record Yellow, as well, to see if your plain speeches are similar and what can be derived from that."
"I'll record it now with my phone, and run it through stuff while you're doing that and I'm setting the mortal side of things up."
"Okay. So I need a phone, and then Yellow and I will go take a cutting of my tree and assuming we don't get caught doing that I'll find a new place to put it and grow it until we can all fit inside and gate from the interior of the tree to the same place the gate that got us here is."
"Yeah. Might be ideal for you to come back here and tell me once you got the cutting so I know you're alright?"
"My tree's not very near the place. I could send you Yellow then, maybe."
"You could make another gate here? By the way, how long do you expect to take to get there?"
"I can get to the tree in a few days - are you expecting to need to physically transport any mortals to Thorn's court? If you don't I want to put it well away from there, within day trip distance but not so close he could notice easily."
"I don't expect to physically transport any mortals to Thorn's court, but we'll need to transport trap materials. And, why day trip distance?"
"Someone may notice I've moved in, he might hear about it. Less likely to happen in the relevant time frame the farther away I am. Are the materials going to be too heavy to fly with?"
"No, not that heavy, but I mean, why not like a week trip distance? Or half a month?"
"So I don't have to sleep on the way, delivering things, and spend time asleep, outside my tree, without a gate ready, near the court."
"...I'm confused about the logistics and I think we're miscommunicating. What I'm picturing here is we'll make a gate somewhere near Thorn's court to a safe place here, which will be how we'll transport our gear, and then there'll be another gate very far away from Thorn's court, in your new tree, that opens to a different safe place here, one that'll be our proper HQ, and a third gate from your new tree or somewhere around it to the first safe place so we can go there if we need to."
"Oh, I see. Yeah, that works. Then I can put my tree really far away."
"Yup, really far away from Thorn is the best idea. And the gate near Thorn's court doesn't need to be made now, either, we already have the one we came through that's a few hours from him and we can use that once stuff on my end's done."