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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—
They're converging on Sand now. They find his bugs. The bugs are removed.
"And now we're blind," he sighs, pulling up the window with the transmission from the radar near the court, much less interesting to watch.
"Alright, so, in the meantime we should probably strengthen the plan. Sand will reveal Verve's involvement but by the time Thorn can do anything about it Verve will be gone and effectively impossible to find without resources Thorn does not currently have, but the obvious way this still fails is if Thorn leaves to some other court and we don't know which. How do we deal with that?"
"We know Blossom isn't in the same court Verve's in or Sand's. That narrows it down but not enough..."
"Yellow. He may not have Yellow's name and has no way or reason to have recently obtained it if he didn't get it centuries ago."
"Yes, good idea, so we make him invisible, then he hangs around the court—" He turns to Yellow. "Maybe catch a wink before? And you might be around a while, we'll need to think of something with respect to food." He turns back to Promise. "Verve shows up here, we send her to whichever court Thorn is in, then... what? Do we besiege him? He probably has enough sorceren that we'd need to bear quite a lot of force for anything like that to work... If the court Blossom's in isn't the one my mother's in he might yet leave it, though."
"It's possible that he will threaten your mother to get you to go away."
"I won't go away if he threatens my mother. She is not the only person being tortured there."
"Besides, it's not like it's a very meaningful threat, when otherwise he's just going to keep her for much longer than a human lifespan being tortured and then kill her."
"I... have kinda given up hope on getting her back. Two months watching Thorn, I—" He falls silent.
"Verve shows up here. We send her to camp out near whichever court Thorn chases Blossom to, with Yellow along as a scout, he's fast in the air and Verve isn't really. When Thorn comes out, and he will eventually, she attacks him with the large phone thing to stop him and get his name."
"Yeah," he shakes his head and sighs, then focuses on the task at hand. "How will they deal with food? Foraging? Is there a reason why Yellow himself can't also use the large phone thing, as added precaution?"
"Yellow should also have a large phone thing, good idea. We could rotate them."
"And I'm thinking of different, faster ways to video orders than sign language. I'm not sure how they'll interact with plain speak, but..."
"Writing only works if you see the writing process. It's slower than sign."
"Yeah but I'm thinking about ways to fiddle with the writing process, like, does typing count? What about stamping the words on paper? If typing works, would copy-pasting it work? What if I wrote separate letters on paper and then organised them as words afterwards? Stuff like that."
"I'm betting typing doesn't count but we can check. Stamping - maybe. Word assembling maybe."
"Stamping would be really cheating, I'm not sure you can sign faster than you can hit paper with a thing full of ink."
(And being filled with some trepidation.)
"I don't know how to type," she says.