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The plan is refined and strengthened, contingencies are set to deal with various ways Thorn could've strengthened his defences, Mortal receives a very interesting email concerning one of their mother's contingency plans—namely that her assets have all been either frozen or transferred to Mortal themself, so Thorn doesn't have access to them -, and when Mortal and Promise judge there's nothing more to be gained from further planning they (eat dinner, sleep again, have breakfast, go over the plan once more when it's not completely fresh in their minds so they see if they come up with anything new, purchase Promise a mobile phone and a power generator to charge its battery in fairyland, eat lunch while Mortal teaches Promise how to use that, and) part ways.
On this side of the veil, Mortal gets to work. The first step: getting at least two safe houses, one for their HQ and the other for contact with the place near Thorn's court. They end up getting five, for redundancy's sake. The main HQ is near Seattle, the other four safe houses are in Greece, Russia, Japan, and Argentina. That, and getting the necessary existing equipment, is the easy part—you end up with contacts of the relevant sort when the bulk of your wealth comes from the kind of thing you can get with sorcery. The hard part is getting the various specific bits of technology that don't exist yet, including the the many types of trap and ammunition they'll need. Processing fairy voices with software turns out to be a dead end—apparently they're weird magical superpositions of sounds that make software go ?!?!?!?!?—but everything else, as agreed upon, can be made to spec nicely enough.
It'll take a couple of weeks beyond the one month for everything to be ready. Mortal hires someone who talks very fast.
And after the ball's going, there's not actually much for them to do with their time. They fret about details of the plan, order more redundant pieces of stuff (especially the to-spec stuff, not being mass-produced means they'd better have a lot of it to start with in case anything goes wrong), and have various antsy and anxious and calm and relaxed and terrified and panicked moods. A month is a long time...
At one point it occurs to Mortal that Promise might've decided to run away and not help, and then they'd never see her again and that would be terrible, and why would it be terrible anyway? It's just some fairy, fairies are evil, one must remember that. Even though she wasn't, of course, she was smart and resourceful and moral and ridiculously hot, and if they never see her again she'll never order them again and the tingly feelings won't ever happen again. Except what the heck, what are they even thinking? The answer, of course, is that they want to see Promise again. Why? To save their mother, of course. The only reason being ordered like that felt good was because Science. Of course. Of course.
The month passes—
Good thing the batteries in those traps and devices last a long time, and Mortal packed spares if need be. They ought to be covered for as long as it takes.
Thorn takes a long time to show up.
But two months after they caught Verve, in he comes.
He's made sure his mortal hireling has been called upon somewhat unpredictably so they wouldn't grow lazy, and now they're there, ready and waiting to say the words and mean them. Mortal and both fairies are awake, him on coffee to make sure he'll lose nothing.
The trap is ready—bullets and darts will stream at him until a dart penetrates, but it will only start doing so once Promise releases a button, to make sure they won't accidentally capture the wrong vassal. Mortal himself has his hand on another button, one which will send his hireling a buzzer to indicate he ought to start ordering.
Their attention on the screens showing the views of Thorn's room, they wait for him to walk in.
- and eventually, Blossom on his arm, he goes to his room.
...yeah, they said they'd wait until Thorn was Blossomless to do this, so no activating traps for now. "Verve said he spends around a month in a court or something, didn't she?"
"About. Maybe less because your mother's not here and she's probably still his project and might be inconvenient to move."
Yeah, probably not a good question to ask an ex-project. Besides, he mostly has an idea. "I'm... very sorry you had to go through that."
Back to watching, then. The cameras have different angles of the bedroom in sight, and the speakers are in different locations, though deactivated for now. The traps themselves are in yet other locations, not moving, enchanted to be soundless and invisible.
Given Thorn's proclivities, probably more awkward than Sand and Eveningstar. But them Mortal doesn't dare blur.
"I'm going to go wake Yellow early," Promise says after a moment, and she goes and does that and takes her sleep shift.
He nods in acquiescence but doesn't say anything. This... is probably pretty triggering, considering. Yeah.
It's really hard to tell if Blossom's having a good time or not.
(And yeah this one's full awkward with none of the other thing.)
Eventually he's done with her for the time being. They leave his room.
Sand annoys Thorn in some unrelated, trivial way and earns himself half an hour with the torturers. If all the torturers' orders are belayed it will be pretty obvious that he's not holding still when told and such. Pick and choose.
On the way to the torturers Mortal tells Sand to act exactly as if he were obeying their orders, except in such a way that minimises risk of discovery of them, this device, etc etc like they phrased before. He'll also order Sand to, at his earliest convenience while still minimising risk of discovery, attempt to retrieve another device such as this one from the invisible bag that's still stashed in the corner. He can rescind that order if the half-hour of torture doesn't destroy the one Sand's wearing, but better to have this precaution just in case.
They don't pay attention to Sand's ears. Stroke of luck.
Is Verve doing anything attention-worthy or can he ask Yellow to take a twenty-second break to go wake Promise up?
Verve is in another court listening to someone sing.
Then can Yellow please wake Promise up and inform her about the orders Mortal gave Sand and see if she has anything to say about them?