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—
- Promise calls.
"Promise?"
"It's me, all's well."
"I rescind all your orders."
(Because if Promise was captured, this is an emergency, and she'd thank her for it. Probably.)
"Uh, everything is actually fine, but thank you."
And she hangs up, gets up from her chair, goes to the unremarkable spot where her gate is, goes to fairyland, walks a bit towards where the gate that leads to London is, and is in the alley again.
There's Promise. "My new tree's still a little cramped but it will fit all three of us and some stuff."
She nods, trying not to let it show. "I should probably show you our safe houses so you can gate there?"
Nod.
So she ducks back to fairyland through the original gate, and starts leading the way to the gate to HQ.
Follow follow.
is apparently empty.
It's a small room, with a door over there across it. But instead of making for the door, Mortal makes for an arbitrary location on a wall. There, she presses her hand on an arbitrary spot, revealing a little compartment containing a black plastic box with a couple of buttons, two little lights (one green and one red, the red currently on), and a glass screen. She presses her right index, middle, and ring fingers against the screen, and it beeps, turning the green light on and the red one off.
"Later we should register your fingerprints here so you can disable the security system yourself."
"...Okay..."
"If anyone spends more than fifteen seconds in this room or tries to open that door without disabling the system first, they are shot full of bullets. I can also deactivate it with my voice, but I wanted to demonstrate the other way to you because apparently fairy voices make sound analysing software go crazy so you'll need that if you ever come here without me."
"Uh, thanks for the warning."
"Of course. Is this enough for you to gate here, or should I give you a tour?"
"Should I gate into this room in particular? If so this is enough."
"Yeah, 'cause of the traps. The other four places have similar rooms, though."
"I might as well see it all, s'pose."
This level has windows, which reveal a woods surrounding the place, and they all have reinforced metal shutters, not to mention being bulletproof, Mortal explains. This has all made quite a dent on her savings, but that's not a problem at the time.
"Money is impressive stuff," Promise remarks.
"Money is pretty impressive," she agrees, "but my mother and I cheated. Very different things are scarce here than in fairyland, with sorcery around."
"Oh?"
"The Earth is finite, and raw material goods come in limited supply. People value things like gold or diamonds or precious stones and transmuting them with sorcery is fairly easy."
"Oh. Yeah."
"There's other stuff that could get us even more money like oil, but that's harder to cover and anyway bringing more oil to Earth is a somewhat undesirable solution," she says, as she leads the way back upstairs. "System inactive," she says out loud before she opens the door to the empty room.
"Oil?" Promise says. "Is saying 'system inactive' functional?"
"Dead matter under incredible pressures in the Earth's crust over millions of years becomes an oil that can be used for manufacturing many things or as fuel. And what do you mean by functional?" she asks as she makes her way to the undistinguished spot where her gate is.
"I mean did it do something, or were you just telling me."
"Oh, it did a thing, I was deactivating the system while we're here." Into fairyland! Close the gate once Promise's through. "It reactivates whenever it has spent more than fifteen seconds detecting no activity."
"Gotcha."
Next location! Another ten minutes of walking, and then a room very similar to the one they arrived in, and Mortal says "System inactive" again once they walk in instead of doing the handprint thing.
"Is the inactivation procedure the same for all of them?"
"It's customisable but I currently have them all set up the same way."
Nod.
Tour of the second place! It's very similar to the first but only has one floor. "We're in a different continent, here," she says, gesturing at the window to indicate the snow piling outside.
"Ooh, snow. Is it a whole snow continent?"
"No, that one would be Antarctica and there are basically no people there. It could be a good idea to make a base there except transporting anything would be impossible. Antarctica is at the extreme south, we're at the very north—do cardinal directions even exist in fairyland?"
"Yeah."
Back to fairyland, close the gate after Promise, next place.
"...Directions? The part of Fairyland you've been is south of the Queenscourt."
"It's just that, on Earth, there's a north pole and a south pole, which are the points the Earth's axis of rotation intersects with its surface more or less, and the east and west directions which are defined with respect to those."
"Well, in Fairyland they're just directions, I think. ...If a sun is going to rise, it does it in the east?"
"It does that on Earth too but that's because there's only one Sun, which is a giant ball of plasma around which the Earth revolves, and the east is the direction from which it rises from the perspective of someone there."
"Okay, so 'suns rise in the east' is consistent."
"Apparently, yeah. Or perhaps this translation thing is just picking the direction in which suns rise and calling it east for me, that actually is probably what's going on here."
"Sure."
"It is interesting though that there is a single direction in which all suns rise in fairyland."
"I'm not actually positive about that; it's a little hard to compare while being certain you weren't turned around."
"Well, it's at least consistent enough that people presumably don't get lost when they think 'south of Queenscourt'?"
"Yeah."
"Which means we must be going northwest right now, annnnd... here's the gate." Into it she goes!
Follow.
Same schtick as before, now with a grassy field outside.
"Mortal world plants always look just slightly incorrect."
"Incorrect how?"
"I'm not sure. Too - drab?"
"Well, there isn't all the ambient magic going around, that's for sure."
"Yeah."
Tour, back again to fairyland.
"I'm glad Fairyland doesn't have that problem, I'd never have been able to grow my tree that fast."
"Yeah, magic is pretty great, it'd be much better for everyone if mortals could have access to it and share their technological advances and general discovery mindset with fairies. After the whole vassal system had been disabled, somehow."
"Yep, optimistic and idealistic, that's me."
"Yep."
"Still, it's a goal worth aiming for." Pause. "By the way, do you know enough sorcery to heal and perhaps de-age mortals?"
"Heal yes, de-age I'd have to look up."
"But it's something you could theoretically learn to do within, say, my lifetime? ...and more to the point, if I asked would you be willing to do it, occasionally?"
"I could learn it in your lifetime unless I am very confused about your lifespan and am not opposed in principle."
"I expect, should I survive Thorn, to live for at least another fifty years."
"Yeah, it wouldn't take that long."
"...what are years for fairies, by the way? Fairyland doesn't really have, like, seasons, and such. Is this just another example of plain speak translating an amount of time or do fairies actually measure time in discrete intervals of that at least approximate length?"
"Plain speak, I think. There is a length that days are when a place has a continuous day cycle instead of pausing, though, there might be places with season cycles and if those are continuous they'd maybe last a year."
"Plain speak is fascinating and confusing and I want to run experiments on it."
"...Okay."
"I have spent the past fifteen years thinking about all the things I'd want to run experiments on and figure out if I ever had a nice, willing, cooperative fairy to help me. I... had sort of been expecting to either have succeeded at figuring out how to hack fairyland or died trying before that happened, though."
"'Hack' Fairyland?"
"My fairly extensive list of impossible prosocial goals."
"Which you were planning to implement while considering all fairies at least probably evil."
"...well, 'evil' is a shorthand. The way your vassal magic works creates some very, erm, unappealing incentives, from the point of view of a human. I don't expect we'd be any better as a species, did we have the same kinds of incentives."
"But you don't, so you don't assume that humans are all evil by default."
"No, but I... sort of assume all humans are... 'stupid' may be too strong a word, but they certainly lack a certain thing fairies tend to have, that they need to navigate this order-be-ordered situation. And even then saying 'I assume fairies are evil' or 'I assume humans are stupid' is a gross simplification that may convey the general tone of the thought but not the nuances."
"Ah."
"So what I really mean when I say this is I expect the average fairy I run into to care very little about an arbitrary mortal's—or even arbitrary other fairy's—wellbeing compared to the baseline I'm used to, and to in fact want and have the power to do things to said mortal-or-fairy that they would vastly disprefer."
"I'd tend to put that as 'fairies are dangerous'.
"The dangerousness is in the fact that they have the power to cause harm. The evil is in the fact that they want to, or rather that the things they tend to want to do are harmful and they don't tend to care enough about causing harm that this stops them. Like I said, 'evil' is a simplification of a thing that in practice is different from 'dangerous' because it includes details of their values and motivations which need to be taken into account when dealing with them." They reach the third gate, another safe house very similar to the previous ones, this one in a mountainous area.
Promise doesn't say anything.
"It may not be the optimal way to think about it, given the emotional reaction it has actually caused." Pause. "And, er, for what it's worth I do know not all fairies are like that. It's just, for me a false negative is much costlier than a false positive." Back to fairyland, close gate, make way to the last place in the circuit.
Promise still doesn't say anything.
Walk walk walk.
Vaguely awkward walk walk walk.
"...I'm sorry if I hurt you?" she tries.
"That's not the word I'd use."
"What word would you use?"
"I have mixed feelings about someone planning to take over Fairyland for the benefit of high-minded ideals while predisposed to even summarize all of its inhabitants with a term like 'evil', however that unpacks."
She scratches her head. "Okay, I see your point, but I also have empirically demonstrated I do care about individual fairies' wellbeing, on a gut level, no matter what twisted lies I tell myself to cope. I wouldn't be nearly as committed to this if I didn't. So I don't want to take over fairyland for the benefit of a high-minded ideal, I want to take over fairyland because the way it's currently run causes lots of suffering and suffering is bad. And anyway why would the way it unpacks not matter?"
"Because I don't think you'll unpack it every time you're presented with a decision."
She blinks and turns to stare ahead, looking somewhat thoughtful.
Promise does not interrupt her thoughts.
"Okay, so, I want to start off by saying you're right, and the following is not meant to excuse or justify anything."
"...Okay?"
"The other thing is that, erm, well a few things. The 'evil' thing is, like I said, mostly something of a, a shield. Because I'm in general terrified of fairies, which is perhaps not an entirely reasonable feeling but." Shrug. "Dangerous may well have been enough to produce the relevant emotions, however. And the other thing is that I—didn't have much of a plan, yet, but I expected I'd remove this from my brain when I needed to, once I started formulating said plan. So, I don't want you to have the impression that I didn't know this would have to go sooner or later. And anyway, all that said, you're still right, and I'll—excise this from my mind."
She shakes her head. "I might need to reexamine other parts of my brain."
"Like what?"
Shrug. "My interactions with fairies for the past fifteen years have been limited to books I got and what my mother told happened every time she visited the library. Being insistently offered food or asked for her name were pretty common themes."
"The fairies who didn't want to catch her would have much less reason to talk to her."
"Yeah, but fairy fiction was a thing, too, though, when shaping how I thought about fairies. It's... I don't know, a bit... sad, to me, the way fairy relationships must work, with the prospect of being taken as someone's vassal kinda looming in the background of every interaction. Or maybe I was just projecting a lot onto what I was reading."
"No, that's a thing. A lot of us just live alone. Some people find someone they like and just give up their name so they can stop worrying. Some people get a thrill out of playing with it."
She sighs. "This is one of the things I'd like to fix. There are—so many ways to interact with people. But I also don't really think it'd be fair to take the thrill from those who enjoy it, ideally I'd find some solution to make everyone happy..."
"I think the ones who gamble with it are ultimately rationalizing, I don't think they'd seek out that kind of danger if it didn't exist to start out."
Last safe house! Another one with two stories, a road is visible in the distance but most of the surroundings are steppes.
"Mortals do that?"
"Seeking thrills because or while they know they're safe, yeah, sure. Remind me to take you to an amusement park sometime."
"Oh."
"But I'm not really sure it'll possible to simulate that thrill safely. I might have to actually introduce amusement parks to fairyland. Roller coasters probably aren't as thrilling when you can fly, though..."
"If they simulate flight for mortals, I don't imagine they're as good as the real thing, no."
"No, not flight, they're... basically very twisty rails and there's a car on them and mortals ride that car and the car typically goes very fast along those twisty, loopy rails," she says, drawing an imaginary roller-coaster's path in the air with a finger.
"How fast?"
"I think the fastest one around might get to over one hundred miles per hour? But fifty might be a more typical number."
"I can fly faster than fifty miles an hour."
"Yeah, humans can't. The fun part of roller coasters is supposed to be not just the speed, though, there's also the loops and falls and twists which are typically not part of our day-to-day life even in faster vehicles."
"One can do those flying if one wants. I don't think you're going to sell many fairies on amusement parks."
"That's not all amusement parks have, though! And I'm sure the concept can be imported and adapted to the kinds of things fairies would like."
"If you say so."
"Might give fairies who are sad about the abolition of slavery some new way to entertain themselves."
"I'm not sure it'd satisfy the same impulses."
"Prrrrrobably not, but impulses that require nonconsensual suffering aren't ones I'm very inclined to allow people to indulge in, I think."
"Yeah."
"Alright, so, do I go with you to your tree or should I wait for you to gate to the mortal world?"
"Do you want to come see the tree?"
"Yeah, I kinda do."
The gate is a ways away from the tree; the tree isn't visible as one emerges. It's walkable, though. Promise leads Mortal to it.
It is huge and shady and beautiful and the trunk opens when Promise approaches.
"Your tree is very beautiful," she says, following Promise in.
It is not very lived-in yet, but the wood itself is shaped furnitureishly. Yellow's in it, perched in the bottom of three bed-nooks around the wall up high on the trunk. There is fairy food around.
"This is a really nice place. What kind of control do you have over the shape and growth? Is the food yours, or Yellow's, or should I worry about claims?"
"I can make it be shaped however I want. It grows at normal tree speed, unless I do sorcery to it, but I can move what wood is there as I like. The food's foraged, except for the haws, which are fully mine. If you want any non-haw fairy food one of us should feed you."
She nods. "Can you make new rooms? It might be useful to have an extension of HQ here."
"Yeah. It's just not very big in here yet so I didn't subdivide the space. I can grow it more."
"It's really nice, how you can do this. Feels—cosy."
"I love my tree."
"It's a very nice tree. Is your original tree still standing where you left it? I don't know if it can be used as any sort of leverage against you, I'm not very clear on your relationship with it..."
"It's still there. I don't need that individual tree, but I was worried about it when it was the only one."
"What do you need it for?"
"I can only do my-tree stuff with descendants of the original tree, and I didn't think to plant any extras before Thorn got me." She strokes the wood wall.
"Right, I mean, what's the your-tree stuff you can do with it? Shape it however you want, I expect you have pretty strong claim over food generated by it..."
"And nobody can get in if I don't let them."
"Oh, right, I remember you telling me that. Very useful."
"Yeah."
"Anyway, where are we gonna have the gates?"
"I was thinking inside the tree, in case my ability to hedge people out extends to people entering through gates."
"...we should test that. Can you rescind someone's permission to get in?"
"Yeah."
"So that's easy to test. Do you have anywhere in specific in mind to make the gates?"
"To one of the safehouses, presumably? Did you have something in mind?"
"No, I mean, where in the tree, some other as-yet-to-be-built room or what."
"Oh, I was thinking just against a wall on the ground floor. Not too wide, just enough to walk through. Over there maybe." She outlines a box with fairylight lines.
She nods. "So you could make them and if one of them settles quickly enough we can verify."
"Yeah, I can make a whole stack right up against each other if the first doesn't go. Where do you want me to aim exactly on the other end?"
"Somewhere in the respective empty rooms of each place, far from the respective doors if possible."
"Do you think I should make a separate gate for each one? I don't have enough room to have them all up against walls where it won't be inconvenient to have them stand open and they won't interfere with each other, in here."
"What do you mean by separate?"
"As opposed to one gate into the whole complex. I can make a bunch of gates right on top of each other to destinations also right on top of each other, and then whichever settles first I have a functional gate where I wanted it; if I make them to separate destinations then for them all to be useful they need to not be right up against each other."
She blinks. "I'd—been under the impression that how long it took to settle was a somewhat deterministic function of origin and destination and making many gates from the same point to the same point would just mean they'd all settle at the same time."
"I'd expect it to be possible for small functionally-unimportant differences in location to affect settling."
"Well. The five safe houses are in different continents so we'll need at least five different gates, but they could all be on top of each other anyway and only one open at a time. Gate away."
But as it turns out the first settles instantly.
Well then! "Okay, lemme deactivate security, don't wanna waste bullets on a twig." She sticks a head into the gate, says the phrase, then is back. "How long do you need to rescind my permission?"
"I can do it pretty much instantly."
She does so.
"Huh. Looks like I can't keep you out if the entrance is a gate."
"Hmm. Well, then you might want to make the gates outside? Also, it occurs to me that at least one gate must be open all the time if we want to be able to access our surveillance equipment from here."
Promise shuts the gate. "Travel gates outside, a little one for transmitting signal inside?"
"Works. Or, if we have a little one for transmitting signal, we can just keep the travel gates shut whenever we're not actively using them. They don't need to be open all the time anyway, do they? So they're not that much of a liability."
"If I'm here all the time, that works; otherwise not so much."
"Hmm... I'm thinking that I could also make gates and at any one time at least one of us would stay here, but honestly it's not that big an inconvenience to have gates outside."
"Yeah. Although I'd have to leave a real door for you to use if you want to get into the tree when I'm not home."
"I assume this real door would also have the same keeping-people-out properties that just opening the tree trunk does?"
"Yeah, it just makes it more obvious from the outside that the tree is inhabited."
"Is there a way to make the tree open up instead when I in particular show up, or maybe create a more hidden kind of entrance? Also, just how far are we from—everything?"
"I can make the door unobtrusive, but not invisible or contingent. And it's a long inconvenient flight with a winter area and a mountain range between here and Thorn."
She nods. "Good. And any other courts or settlements nearby?"
"Some individuals, a few small clusters, about six hours' flight southeast there's a glowgold colony, nobody big or liable to have capture on their minds first thing upon meeting an arbitrary fairy - you're another matter, but you would be no matter what."
"I guess I'll try to avoid going exploring, then. Nothing new there."
"Yeah."
"Alright. We still have a couple of things to do, then. There are a few tests I want to run, like seeing how well wards hold up against bullets, and I need to register your fingerprints in my security system so you can disable it without being shot. And it will take another couple of weeks for everything to be ready on my side of the veil."
"Okay. What should I ward? Are you sure fairies have the right kind of fingerprints?"
"I don't need a kind, per see, as long as your hand has a pattern that isn't likely to change and isn't some weird magical superposition of possible fingerprints it should be fine. As for what to ward, you probably have a better idea about what an appropriate target would be than I do."
"I don't think my fingerprints are magical. I'll go find a rock or something."
"And I'll go find a few guns. And actually, it occurs to me that a rock may not be the best subject because it's liable to blow into pieces if hit by a bullet, something that could absorb the impact better like a fairy body would would be better."
"I do not have any fairy bodies I want you to shoot at handy. I could get you a piece of wood."
"Oh, no, I meant, absorb the impact like a fairy body would, not, like—I wasn't suggesting you get a fairy body for me to test this. Yes, wood works."
Promise knits some branches together and detaches them from the tree. They fall to the ground with a thunk.
Into the gate she goes.
Nothing catastrophic happens in her absence.
"Okay, starting with a simple handgun, if this is enough I shouldn't worry about wards in general, I think."
"Block is warded up to the best of my ability. Casting on my own tree gives me some homefield advantage that may shrink the gap between me and better sorcerers."
"Is it gonna do anything other than make the bullet bounce off? We might want to not be too close to it, too, if it bounces off in our direction. Oh, also, it's pretty loud," she says, reaching into the bag for earmuffs.
"...I could make it inaudible if I had a bit to look at it. And it'd slow down first, then bounce off, if the ward holds."
"Oh, inaudible's pretty good, yeah. Er, the loud part is the explosion that happens inside the gun, but it's the bullet that explodes, I'm not sure which of them you'd need to look at?" She hands Promise a handgun separated from the cartridge.
Promise looks at them both for several minutes.
(For a value of patiently that gets bored pretty easily but can stand it.)
And then Promise says, "All done."
Position, point, aim, fire.
The bullet hits the wood, but not really hard.
"Well, didn't get deflected, and this was only a handgun. Let's bring the big gun," she says, and the next one is a sniper rifle with a telescopic sight.
"Should I re-ward it?"
"Probably. This one is likely to send the thing flying, too, and we should probably be much farther away from it."
"Okay." Promise re-wards the block and flies well back.
Bang.
The block is struck, hard but not as hard as it should have been, and tips over.
"Hmm. Well, that might be enough for our purposes, we just need to be able to appropriately transmit the food item. I'd still need to think on what bullet design would work best..."
"Can't help you there."
"Might be you can. How indestructible can you sorcer something to be?"
"Me, or somebody else?"
"Well, unless you have another sorcerer at hand, you."
"That's the limits of my wards. I could transmute it into a harder wood..."
"No, I mean the bullets. If I could make bullets hardier that'd give me more leeway on how to design them."
"Oh. I could transmute those too, or do you mean warding them?"
"I don't exactly know what I mean because I have less theoretical knowledge of what sorcery in general can do and less practical knowledge of what you in particular can do that would help me find the appropriate bullet design that fits the criteria 'survives being shot from a sniper rifle into a fairy' and 'releases food into their body on impact.'"
"...I don't think releasing food into their body on impact is something I can do with any combination of transmutation and warding. Are you sure you don't want to do a few bullets followed by darts?"
"That... could actually work pretty well, yeah. And it occurs to me that some bullets shatter on impact, and I'm wondering what'd happen if you transmuted mortal food into one of those."
"I'm not really good enough to transmute between metal and food."
"Oh, well. I suppose your idea is good, anyway, and I don't need to rely on human—or fairy—accuracy, anyway."
"Okay, that's out of the way, then, next up is—" Pause. "Eating and sleeping, actually, I ought to go do that, it's getting fairly late for my bio clock even though I'm still pumped."
"Do you want to have some fairy food or go back to the mortal world?"
"Back to the mortal world, and might be a good time to register your fingerprints, too."
Back they go.
"Safety inactive," she calls when they're in, and she leads Promise downstairs to one of the computers, opens a certain program, and offers her a hand scanner. "Put your hand here, please."
Promise palms it.
"Scans fine. Other hand?"
Other hand.
"Alright, you're registered. Tomorrow I'll show you the places where the scanner's hidden in the other four houses, but you're good here for now."
"Okay."
"Oh, and also I got places here for you and Yellow to sleep if you want or need, though I expect you to want to sleep in your tree."
"I want to sleep in my tree. By all means take Yellow back with you."
Up she leads Promise, showing her the appropriate place to scan her palm and deactivate the security system again, and then back to fairyland to fetch Yellow.
Yellow comes along quite docilely. He's really very boring when he doesn't have the upper hand.
"Want anything to eat in particular?"
"Bananas were nice," he says.
So she fetches two sandwiches for herself to eat and a couple of bananas for Yellow and goes feed him while she reviews some stuff on her computer.
He eats the bananas happily enough and peers over her shoulder.
Right now she's looking at delivery times for various pieces of equipment and sending someone an email (using Tor) clarifying some things about the design of something.
Yellow decides that's less interesting than wandering curiously around the room peering at mortal objects.
"Careful not to break anything," she says, not taking her eyes off the screen.
"I'm not even touching anything," says Yellow.
"I know, just in general. It shouldn't be easily breakable, anyway, and everything here's redundant ten times over, but." Shrug.
Yellow continues not touching anything.
And after only a few more minutes Mortal announces she's going to brush her teeth, take a shower, and retire to bed.
Yellow adopts her sleep cycle.
And then he's awake, dressed, and preparing some breakfast for himself.
Yellow wakes up when Mortal is clattering around.
"Want some breakfast?" He's making eggs and sausages for himself.
"Yeah."
"Preferences? Wanna try any animal products or gonna stick to the plant diet?"
"Plants," says Yellow, looking dubiously at Mortal's breakfast.
"Okay, lemme just finish this up and I'll feed you."
Yellow waits.
He finishes his breakfast up! And gets fruits and starts feeding him with one hand and eating with the other.
Nom.
Then teeth brushing then back to fairyland with a few more nifty gadgets and walking to the tree.
"Am I coming with you or staying here?"
"Coming, I suppose?"
So Yellow follows along.
And presently Sadde's at the tree. Does it have a door yet?
Yep! It's kind of hidey but there it is.
Knock knock!
The door swings open of its own accord. Promise is in there eating a bowl of fairy food.
"Hello. I bring gifts!"
"Ooh, gifts."
"I have a camera, an infrared camera, a motion detector, an X-ray scanner, a radar, a sonar, and a lidar, and want to see which of these pick you out when you're invisible."
"...What even are these things, you haven't mentioned them all?"
"Camera just records things. Infrared is a light wavelength humans can't see with the naked eye and maybe fairies can't either so it's not implausible that invisibility doesn't cover that. Especially because heat—I also have a heat detector, forgot to mention—is more or less the same thing as light and I think invisibility doesn't turn heat off by default? X-ray is another light wavelenth people can't see, radar detects yet another, sonar works with sound, and lidar light too but in a different way."
And she turns invisible.
So, first apparatus: infrared camera.
Promise: is warm.
Out with those!
"Should I turn inaudible for the sound one?"
"Yeah. It's technically supposed to detect changes in the acoustic field, so I think even the air you displace when you move should be enough?"
She doesn't answer because she is inaudible.
"Okay, so, er, they're supposed to beep when you move."
She flaps her wings, lifts off a bit.
"Perfect, these are almost toy models compared to the beauties I have in HQ. The others feel almost redundant now," he says, but reaches for the X-ray thing. It's bigger than the other devices, and makes a humming noise when he points it at her.
Is that everything?
"Okay, we shouldn't have trouble detecting any fairies that might want to hide."
She turns visible again. "Good."
"...actually, I wonder how the devices themselves behave if you turn them invisible and inaudible. Presumably you can still see and hear things when you turn yourself so I don't expect them not to, but..."
"I can still see and hear things," she confirms. "I don't know if the devices will be able to. Let me have a look at them and we can try it."
So he lays them all out for her to have a look at them.
And she looks at them and then turns them invisible and inaudible, one at a time.
Mortal sets them to record things or activate where appropriate, and walks in front of the motion detectors.
They can still "see and hear".
"Okay! This is great, I love technology."
"It seems neat."
He shakes his head, grinning. "Okay, I think that was all the experiments, then."
"So next we rig up the ambush, I guess."
"Yeah. Well, we ought to get the fairyland half of HQ set up. Also, how far is Thorn's nearest court to the London gate, and how much farther is the next nearest court?"
"I think it's about five and eight hours at my flight speed, a little closer at Yellow's."
"It'll probably have to be you, Yellow can't open gates, but I meant in actual distance. This stuff has a maximum range, sort of."
"I fly sixtyish miles an hour, a bit faster if I push it."
"So around three and five hundred miles respectively... Yeah probably be best to open at least a small gate near each site."
"Why near each site and not just between them?"
"I mean, to transmit the signal to the surveillance equipment."
"How far can it go? Getting close is..."
"That depends on a lot of factors including terrain details but with anything less than a fifteen-feet antenna we won't be able to get much more than about fifty to a hundred miles. Might be ideal to ask our first vassal to open very small gates tucked away somewhere just for signal propagation."
"They won't all know how to do gates, it's an obscure skill even among advanced sorcerers - it's not that hard but there's so seldom a reason to do it."
"Hmm, yeah, then it might be best for us to create one gate near each site, for the aforementioned value of 'near.'"
Shiver.
"Is, erm, fifty miles too close? Is he likely to have someone patrolling there, or...?"
"Not likely, no."
"So that should probably be enough, then. You can go the longest and safest way, so you don't get closer than that at any point."
"I don't have a - a really exact map."
"A radar ought to be able to detect the structures at more than that distance, you could be informed of where it is long before you reach that radius."
"Oh, that would help."
"Yeah, I want to keep educated guesses to a minimum here."
"How do I use the radar?"
"It's, er, yours will need to be slightly bigger than this, these are all cheap short-range versions, but here," he shows her it, "an active radar has a screen like this and as you move it'll show you relevant terrain features within range. Artificial structures ought to stand out."
"Okay. He prefers buildings to being dug in underground, so that should do it."
"Yeah, dug in underground... I suppose I'd be able to get a seismograph that could detect it? But that might take a bit longer."
"Well, he's not an underground sort of fairy so his court sites should all have buildings and there shouldn't be anybody else that close."
"Should be fairly easy, then. I'll also be keeping an eye and ear on you?"
"You will?"
"Yeah, camera and mic. You might want to keep a dart gun with you in case you need it."
"That's probably a good idea. I can juice some haws - mix it with some mortal food of yours in case it's somebody from Thorn's court who has my name."
"Could be someone who has my name as well."
"Yellow doesn't have any sufficiently reliable claims to catch a fairy, and your name may not have propagated to all the same people as mine."
"Yeah, I know, but that's part of the reason why I hired another mortal to say things into a microphone when I ask them to."
"Well, I can mix in something from them too."
"Yup, that's what I've been thinking. And also I asked them to tend to a little bean and take care of it and make sure it doesn't die."
"A bean? That doesn't sound very juiceable."
"Does it need to be juice? I figured they'd provide regular juice and blend bits of the bean or beanstalk or whatever with the juice."
"It doesn't have to be juice but if it's not a thin liquid it might not inject right."
"If they cook it in water the resulting soup should work, though, presumably? This was just an idea I had to give them more of a claim on the food, since beans grow pretty fast, I don't expect it to make much of a difference anyhow."
"Yeah, something leached out of the bean into water should do it."
"So... I guess we should go do that, then."
"Yeah. Guess so."
"Okay. But, er, there's still some stuff I don't have. Specifically the more sensitive various detectors with the shooting rig. They'll take a week or two to arrive."
"And gate placement has to wait for the better radar. Okay."
"No, the better radar I already have, what I don't have is long-distance infrared, long-distance motion detectors, and some custom stuff that will use the combined information from all of those detectors to acquire a target and shoot it."
"But I should place the gates now to give them time to settle?"
"Yeah, and so we have time to make sure there won't be any problems like weird fairyland interference with signal or what-have-you. And leaving cameras, radars, and sonars there, as well, to see what information we can get from the comings-and-goings between courts."
Nod. "Let's write it all up so I don't forget what I'm doing and have no reference -" She has paper; here it is.
The setup of the surveillance part of the plan, then, goes thusly:
Step zero: make juice and mix it all up, and put it in dart guns. Promise will be equipped with at least one of those, as well as an actual gun, plus the radar.
Step one: Promise goes through the gates to the spot where the original gate to London was. Using the radar, she finds the closest location to the closest court she's comfortable with, with as few obstacles between that location and the court as she can get. Up in the air is probably ideal.
Step two: she opens a gate from there to safe house 1 (the one in Greece).
Step three: she finds the second court, and does the same to safe house 2 (the one in Russia).
Step four: she finds a point between those two courts and creates a gate there.
Step five: she goes through one of the gates, and returns to her tree.
Step six: after the gates have settled, Mortal sets their equipment up to be partially through each gate, monitoring the locations.
Step seven: monitoring! Specifically, monitoring routes between the two courts, collecting information on any patterns in message delivery, and any other precautions Thorn may have taken they haven't thought of.
And most of the two following weeks will be spent on step seven, as Mortal continues to receive various delivered bits, and they watch and watch and watch.
Fairies travel in one direction or the other between the courts every couple of days.
And did Thorn, in fact, make them start going invisible? In groups? With any degree of unpredictability?
Well, the radar can't tell whether they're invisible; it'd see them either way. They are mostly in pairs, but apparently some of them are still trusted to go alone.
And eventually Mortal arrives at Promise's tree smiling and says, "We got everything."
"Good."
"So, should we try to capture one of the probably-better-sorcerer-and-better-ward
"The pairs might be warded by someone else," Promise points out.
"Yeah, true. So, probably one of the singles. Any last requests, cold feet, insanely obvious ideas we somehow missed, not-so-obvious ideas we may be excused from having missed?"
"Nothing leaps to mind."
"Good luck to us all, then. I'm gonna go set up the traps."
Nod.
And then: they watch and wait.
And eventually, a sole fairy departs the cliff court and heads for the other.
The computer calculates the fairy's velocity to estimate when they will be passing somewhere the trap can reach them. Mortal activates the automatic trap, so it'll shoot as soon as a fairy flies within range. He restricts the time window where it's active to the ninety-five percent credibility interval to minimise the risk of capturing some other unlucky fairy that may pass through (even though that's pretty unlikely), and then the trap is ready.
She's warded. She's not warded enough. A bullet clips her through the metal-lace wing and a dart gets her in the cheek and she tumbles to the ground, suddenly bleeding from the ears.
And should that not be enough, a tranquiliser dart will be shot at that fairy, and an invisible, inaudible, and warded-to-the-best-of-Promise's-skill Yellow should be heading that way to collect her.
Yellow drags her off.
Promise fixes her ears.
Mortal injects her with something meant to wake her up, and that same first someone's voice comes from a speaker, still repeatedly saying "stop."
The fairy doesn't open her eyes, but she does stop breathing. Must be awake.
Mortal sends a message on the computer and the speakers says "Say your name."
"Canamirana," says the fairy softly.
"You may breathe. Answer all my questions truthfully and completely, using your sincere best up-to-date model of what I will find most relevant to prioritise. If you ever find any loopholes in my orders, inform me of them at once and do not attempt to exploit them."
No response.
"Except for genuinely personal information, what are you hoping I won't ask or think about?"
"Security procedures, names, patterns of movement, contingency plans."
"How long would it take you to explain to me everything you think I would want to know about those things, and when are you expected at your destination?"
"Forty-five minutes. In two hours."
"How long would you normally take to arrive there from the spot where I captured you?"
"Two hours." Fairies: not known for really precise timekeeping.
Sigh. "Make yourself deaf again."
Her ears bleed.
"We'll probably have to get the info while she's on her way back."
"We could let her out of the gate at the destination end."
"Do you think they wouldn't notice? I suppose the gate's far enough and we can release her early enough that she could detour and make it look like she came from the right place..."
"Yeah. We'd be cutting it a little close but she travels invisible anyway."
"Fair enough. We can move her to another room and interrogate her remotely so we can talk while we do it."
"And we'll need to clean the blood out of her ears."
So they move her somewhere in the mortal world after Promise has healed her and Yellow has cleaned her ears, then set their conversation rig up.
"Was the list you gave me in order of relevance? If so, ascending or descending?"
"No."
"Repeat the items of that list in descending order of relevance."
"Contingencies, names, security procedures, patterns of movement."
"What can you tell me about the contingencies?"
"There are some of them that I don't know about. I'll be ordered to say if anything happened on my trip by someone who can incapacitate me if you make me fight them. I don't know of everyone in the court who has my name. I have a distress code."
"Whenever you hear the word 'mom,' you are to do your sincere best to not let anyone suspect anything unusual happened on your trip." He looks at Promise, releasing the button that relays his voice to the other room so the fairy won't hear them. "Good enough?"
"That's not going to override her order to talk about the trip."
"Yeah, I know, it's just good to have it set up in advance for the more common case. Would 'divert suspicion' work as an extra order itself or would I need qualifiers for it to do its job?"
"I don't like 'divert', it'd tend to wind up with her having the option to accuse someone else."
"Minimise? Kind of a mouthful. Reduce? Evade? Avoid? Depending on how she's ordered I could just say 'lie'..."
"Don't say 'lie', she can say any false thing she wants if she gets 'lie', it wouldn't even have to respond to the question. We could say 'I belay that', and have her revert to our orders in lieu of following theirs."
He presses the button: "What's the phrasing of the order about anything having happened during the trip likely to be?"
"I don't know, they change it," says the fairy.
"Can you give me a few examples?"
"Yes."
"Do your sincere best to cooperate with me and obey what you believe to be the spirit of all orders I have given or may give you according to your sincere best up-to-date model of me and what you expect me to have meant." He tries again, seeing just how far that order can get him: "Can you give me a few examples of phrasings of the order to tell about anything that may have happened on your trip?"
"'Describe your trip here, omitting no salient detail'. 'Tell me what I want to know.' 'Answer honestly, did anything happen?' 'When I order you "talk" tell me if you have anything of interest to me to share. Talk.' 'I renew your court orders.'"
"So we order her right now to pretend to obey this kind of order in a way that won't bring attention to us, and then when we belay the order she'll revert to that?" he asks Promise.
"That's the idea. It's very timing-delicate but not as much as a longer sentence."
And if there are any loopholes in that...
The fairy doesn't say anything.
"I'm kinda worried that she hasn't pointed out any loopholes yet and am not sure whether I should take that as meaning the orders are good or she's just doing her best not to think very hard of them right now."
"Or she's not very smart. It could be all three."
"Are you avoiding thinking of loopholes?" he presses the button to ask.
"Yes."
"There we have it," he sighs to Promise. "In general, try to think of loopholes in my orders. Are there any in the orders I've given you so far?"
"I haven't thought of any."
"Okay. Next, what's a distress code?"
"If I say it it's a signal that I'm compromised."
"What is it?"
"'Creek'."
"Under your current orders, and assuming we find a way to prevent another fairy's order from taking, would you be able to use this distress signal?"
"I don't think so."
"Are there any more contingencies you know about or whose existence you suspect?"
"I suspect there are more but I don't know what they are."
"Can you think of any other questions about that or ought we move on?" he asks Promise.
"I think this is as solid as we're going to get."
"Next is names, particularly in the court you were going to. How's it set up, and whose names do you know?" Pause. "And by the way, what do you prefer to be called?"
"Mirror is the site coordinator and the place often has Rainfall there for major sorcery. Patch runs torture and Treecreeper helps, Mesmer runs the library, Harp and Songstress and Delight are midlevel incidentals, Awesome, Windy, Poplar, Deciduous, Eveningstar, Trance, Endpaper, Scribe, Enlightenment, and Sand are low-level post-project fairies permanently assigned to the site. Others of about my description may be there at any given time. I know names for Delight, Awesome, and Sand. I'm Verve."
He writes it down on a separate text file. "Tell me their names and describe me them in sufficient detail for me to recognise them if I see them."
"Delight is a moonbeam dancer, only one in the court. Her name's Rithamu. Awesome is a mushroom hopper the size of my hand, bright red wings, Ereastarning. Sand is a shrubly, all over beige, Tsewimmetho."
He writes the names down but not the descriptions, because it'd be rude, but the conversation is being recorded anyway so that's more-or-less moot. "What can you tell me about the security procedures?"
"Mirror has all the names except Treecreeper's and Rainfall's, Patch has all the names except Mirror's and Rainfall's, Harp and Songstress and Delight all have different sets of names but I don't know whose because I've received identical orders regarding obeying them and they wouldn't be allowed to enforce on me outside an emergency. Rainfall has Mirror and Treecreeper's names but not Patch's and probably not all the others but likely some of them. It's routine to be commanded to produce truth about the circumstances of one's loyalty and uncompromised status, especially when Thorn's around, and our self-incapacitating contingency orders are renewed regularly. There may be fairies I don't know about stationed in the site for surveillance."
"And the last thing was patterns of movement, what can you tell me about those?"
"There's a lot of time spent on garden maintenance and that accounts for most time spent outdoors by court members. Deciduous and Trance sometimes go out foraging and Songstress is occasionally a scout, solo, she's very fast. Rainfall monopolizes a lot of Windy's time when he can get away with it, which is usually."
And now, for the million-dollar questions: "Does Thorn have a room for himself there, and if so who else has access to it or uses it?"
"He has a room for himself and Blossom, and no else one goes in there except Sand or Trance to clean it, or if he asks for someone when he's there."
"Jackpot," he whispers to Promise. "How often do they clean it? How often does Thorn visit? Can you get away with spending some time alone with Sand without drawing suspicion?"
"Once a week and whenever Thorn's expected. About one month in eight. Only if I make it look like I'm planning to have sex with him."
"Would it be too out-of-character for you to make it look like that?"
"I've never done it before and don't know how likely people would be to think it was strange."
"Would you need that even to spend, say, five minutes with him? Does he spend any time unsupervised? Can you make gates?"
"He's usually with Eveningstar if they can manage it and never unsupervised outside. I can't make gates."
"You can turn things invisible, right?" Then he turns to Promise. "I'm thinking we use Sand to trap Thorn's room. Verve doing something unprecedented would be a security hazard, but I'm not sure there's any way to do this that isn't one..."
"Do you actually think you can tell Sand what you have to tell him in five minutes?" Promise asks.
"No, I'd just need him to grab one of the invisible earbuds and cameras so I could tell him everything while he did whatever else he'd need to do."
"Realistically you'll need some feedback from Sand to confirm details, hard to do if he's simultaneously gardening with someone."
"Yeah, but I was thinking it might be easier to get that feedback during the in-between moments when he's not supervised rather than all at once. Except if he spends most of his time with Eveningstar..."
"Why does he spend most of his time with Eveningstar, ask her that."
"Why does he spend most of his time with Eveningstar?"
"Well, then Eveningstar will definitely be alarmed and probably report it if Sand gets called away and acts at all off even if she's imagining it," Promise says, "especially if she thinks Verve's stealing him."
"Does Sand have Eveningstar's name?"
"I don't think so," says Verve, "but they might not tell me."
"It seems... like the best way to deal might still be to get Sand the invisible earbuds and then not order him at all until Thorn's about to come and then have him set up the traps then."
"Then he'll report the earbuds," Promise says.
"We'll order him about them, of course. I just mean, in addition to just covering for the existence of the earbuds, he doesn't need to strictly know anything about the plan until he actually has to set the traps. An alternative is, of course, finding a way to trap the entire court and capturing everyone in it. Or capturing Mirror and Rainfall, that should be enough."
"Rainfall - I wouldn't want his attention until we've won. He's good, he's really good. Mirror I don't know."
"The problem is that the more vassals we get, the harder it is to keep the lid on, and we need to be very careful here." Button. "If you wanted to give Sand an invisible object about the size of a marble that he had to insert into his ear as well as instruct him to act in such a way as to minimise the possibility that anyone would find out about this object, what would you do?"
"I might just stick it in his ear and threaten him."
"And could you arrange to do that quickly and stealthily enough that no one else would be likely to notice?"
"Maybe."
"What factors affect your likelihood of success?"
"What orders he's under, what he thought I was doing and what his opinion of it was, whether anybody saw me."
"Assuming I can order him once he has the object in his ear, do you believe you'd be able to pull this off without being seen by anyone else?"
"Unless there's surveillance fairies I don't know about."
"Suppose I could inform you of the locations of any surveillance fairies you don't know about?"
"How are you going to find the surveillance fairies? They're probably tucked away, not jut invisible," says Promise.
"Hmm, good point, I was thinking of an infrared camera noticing invisible fairies... Well, presumably any surveillance fairy would have to poke their head out to actually surveil? Unless you mean something else by tucked away?"
"Behind glass, maybe, would it see through that? Or an invisible piece of wall?"
"Glass has its own thermal signature, actually, it's not transparent to infrared, and presumably an invisible wall would be as visible in infrared as invisible fairies are. They would be transparent to radio waves but no one's managed to make radars sensitive enough for that yet, and fairies are invisible to ultraviolet. Why would they use an invisible wall, though?"
"If glass were hard to come by."
"But I mean, why use a transparent barrier like that at all? Expectation that we'd use something like an infrared camera? We can certainly detect invisible walls by just comparing the infrared image with the visible light image, and just avoid suspiciously positioned glass locations in general."
"...because the surveillance fairy is indoors intended to supervise the outdoors," says Promise, "they don't need a more complicated reason."
"Do we need to worry about a fairy supervising the outdoors, though? Presumably Verve wouldn't need to do anything noteworthy outdoors."
"We don't know how many surveillance fairies they might be or what they'd be monitoring."
"Right, yeah, I just mean, we won't necessarily need to worry about all possible surveillance fairies. And given that Verve doesn't actually know whether they're even there, they'll have to be unobtrusive enough to not be noticed."
"Most people don't have infrared detectors."
"Yeah, but they do walk around, any invisible walls will need to be positioned in out-of-the-way places, and conversely invisible walls in out-of-the-way places are likely to contain surveillance fairies."
"I'd imagine tucking them under an eave or something - you know fairies can be very small, right?"
"Yeah, Verve did mention one the size of her hand. In infrared, anything that emits heat really stands out, though." He opens a feed from one of the infrared cameras looking into the room they're in. He presses the button: "How long do you usually stay around in any one court site?"
"One to ten days."
"What determines how long you stay?"
"How soon I'm needed to go somewhere else. Sometimes I can decide my comings and goings a little but I don't expect a reward this time."
"Okay so... Any ideas on how to deal with potential surveillance fairies other than using infrared cameras to notice inconsistencies and invisible fairies and crossing our fingers?" he asks Promise.
"Ask her if she knows any names of fairies who used to be in the court but haven't been seen in a while."
He relays the question, furrowing his eyebrows, then raising them in comprehension halfway through.
Verve has some of those!
...or his mother?
Nope, Verve does not list either name.
"Why'd you ask this?"
"That's the sort of fairy I'd expect to be on surveillance duty. If she can catch one before they report in and it's one of the ones she's got a name for that's that solved. It doesn't cover all the bases but it's better than nothing."
"Oh. That's fair. I mean, I wouldn't call being able to see invisible things nothing but yeah. I wonder if we should provide Verve with some invisible dart things like maybe that glove or something."
"Shouldn't count on her having enough personal space for a glove to go unnoticed. Earbud's another matter, it isn't likely that anyone's going to fondle her ears."
Probably not.
He turns back to Verve: "How much weight can you carry flying? Can you sneak a bag or backpack into the court site without being noticed, assuming there are no surveillance fairies?"
"Forty-five pounds maybe but I'd be slow. It would be awkward to carry without having to hold my arms in a noticeably strange way even if it was invisible."
"Even if it were securely attached to your torso?"
"That would be noticed if someone touched me."
"...securely attached to your legs? And perhaps to your back, between your wings?"
"People don't usually touch me on the back."
"Do any more questions spring to mind?" he asks Promise. "I think I'm all out."
"Can you pack all the stuff onto her back compactly?"
"The surveillance stuff is relatively small. The traps less so, but they should probably fit in a bag if the straps are long enough and I can secure it behind her lower back, where the wings won't get in the way. It doesn't need to be as big and clunky as what we used to capture Verve was, since it'll be much lower range."
"Okay. So load her up, send her to approach the court from the right angle via the gate there, have her find a good opportunity to suborn Sand and stash the things in case somebody - picks her up or something, notices she's too heavy - yeah, this could work."
"Keep an eye on her—and Sand—constantly, I think. We can sleep in shifts, you, Yellow, and I, so there's always two of us up and the third can be woken up if anything comes up. Signal from the camera and mic will be delayed by half-a-second whenever we don't strictly need that extra half second, and when we do one of us can rescind any orders that might accidentally slip by."
Nod, nod. "Do you have orders drafted for Sand?"
"Nnnot yet. 'Stop, you may breathe, once your stop order is rescinded act in such a way as to minimise or if possible eliminate the risk of anyone finding out about me, this device, or anything else you sincerely judge could be related to your up-to-date best model of my plans, your stop order is rescinded.'"
"Minimise or if possible eliminate isn't great. Elimination, if possible, is minimization; distinguishing the two might let him get creative somehow - going for a long shot on elimination rather than a conservative minimization. And lots of things could be related to his model of your plans."
"Just minimise, then," he agrees. "As for the plans... Remove the 'could,' say 'is' instead?"
"Sand's existence," says Promise, "is, obviously, related to your plans. The problem is 'related', not 'could'."
"Oh, right, hmm. Just the plan's existence, then? I don't want to just make a list of all the things the plan involves."
"Maybe something like 'minimize risk of discovery of me, this device, and irregular behavior you or Verve take at my direction'. And maybe 'our' not 'my' so they can't defect if another voice takes over."
He nods, and furrows his brows. "I've been using 'I' and 'my plan' to Verve throughout, I should probably revise her orders to include anyone whose voice she hears through the earbud."
"Yeah."
Then, with both Mortal and Promise safely away from her, the stop order is rescinded.
And Verve travels to her destination.
They keep eyes and ears on her, with a half-second time lag, having her arrive there from the right direction, and when she does, they look around with infrared for any hidden fairies.
This may be complicated by the sorcerous climate control.
...sorcerous climate control?
Yup. Places kept a pleasant uniform temperature. Fairies are warmer than the pleasant uniform temperature, but not by as much as they would be against a background of unaltered temperature.
And in any case they should probably worry about the fairy who's going to question Verve about her trip before they start worrying about invisible surveillance fairies.
A fairy does indeed question Verve about her trip.
Mortal belays the order and hopes the ones he and Promise layered on Verve before are good enough to hold up to scrutiny.
Verve lies reasonably fluidly. The interrogating fairy seems satisfied.
Well, terrific, then. As soon as they deem it safe enough, they'll order her to put down her larger invisible packages in a corner, and try to aim for the best moment to get Sand alone.
So Verve stalks Sand. And eventually manages to corner him while he's eating.
Then one of them orders Sand as planned, while the other gets Verve to attach the extra, invisible cameras in addition to the earbuds.
Sand seems unhappy but not so unhappy that anybody notices.
And then, once again, they wait, keeping a remote eye on both vassals.
...Surveilling this part is awkward!
...yyyyeah it kinda is. But it'd also be exactly the part where any halfway smart surveillance fairy would want to catch them unawares so they surveil.
This part gets steadily more awkward to surveil!
(Also. Awkward is. Not the only thing this part is.)
Blurs it is.
Blurs it is. The audio's still awkward, and it turns out audio distortion doesn't really work on fairy voices until the point where they're completely incomprehensible—plain speech is just understood—and that's a step too far in Mortal's opinion, they do need to detect if anything weird and not related to the awkward happens..
Well, Sand and Eveningstar are mercifully not actually talking very much? Or being loud?
Okay, not too bad, then.
And it doesn't go on forever; they're interrupted and sent off to do things.
And they're watched in secret as they do that.
Sand goes about his chores. He is occasionally checked for tampering.
Man, Thorn is really paranoid, isn't he. Mortal could almost admire him if he wasn't terrible. Orders are belayed as appropriate, and every now and then renewed just to be sure.
Eventually, he cleans Thorn's room.
"Are you ready? And in the end should we do stopthensayyourname or sayyournamethenstop, do you think? I hope there are enough bullets there... I hope he hasn't thought of a way to circumvent this. Could he have created wards specifically for darts? Could he have found us out?"
"Hasn't had enough time to develop, let alone opportunity to test, novel ward forms. - I think, I think something would have been different by now if he noticed... and I'm leaning stop first, you don't need the 'then' that way."
"Yeah, not to mention that if he has anything he can activate he won't be able to. Stopsayyourname, okay, good, this will have to be our mortal hireling 'cause he has our names but yes okay."
"Yeah." Deep breaths.
And then, once again, they wait.
Thorn doesn't show up for a long time.
"He's onto us. Is he onto us? Verve and Sand aren't acting weird, they've evaded questioning. He's not onto us. Is he?"
"I don't think so. He may take months to show up at this specific court," Promise says levelly. "Especially since your mother isn't at it."
"...right. Right. This doesn't mean anything. Okay." She sighs.
She shakes her head a bit to clear it. "This is nerve-wracking."
"I know."
"The worst part is that we can't really—stop. We can't slip, we can barely talk because something might be going on that needs our attention, and this. Is. Booooooring."
"Yep."
Sigh. Watch the screen, because they must.
Watch watch.
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."
"What does he even do with his—no, sorry, ignore what I said."
Promise doesn't answer.
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."
"Mm-hm."
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.
Thorn and Blossom: also awkward to watch.
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.
And now, more waiting until Thorn is alone. And keeping an eye on Sand.
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?
Promise shuffles in, rubbing her eyes. "Mm?"
"Sorry to wake you up. Sand annoyed Thorn and was sent to torturers and I ordered him to act exactly as if he were obeying their orders except while simultaneously minimising risk with the same phrasing we used before, and I also ordered him to go fetch more surveillance stuff while still minimising risk after it in case the stuff was destroyed but it turns out to have been unnecessary so I rescinded that order, and I thought you'd want to be informed of this and could potentially have something to say about it."
"- sounds snug enough. He didn't give us away?"
"Not unless the wordless moaning was code."
"Probably not."
"Then yeah we're probably good."
"If Sand were higher-up I'd think it might be but it's not a real risk with him, I think."
"Really? Grunts as code?"
"Thorn's smart enough to think of it. But not everyone would have it."
"Mmhm. And hopefully the 'minimise risk of discovery' order would cause very uninformative grunts. 'All's clear.' 'Nothing weird tonight.' 'Everything cool.'"
"Yeah."
"Anyway, uh... If you want to go back to sleep..."
"You likely to need me for anything in the next couple hours?"
"Not unless anything differently unexpected happens, I don't think so."
So she goes back to bed and Yellow returns.
And there'll be more watching fairies.
By turns dull, awkward, and heartwrenching.
Gods, Thorn is terrible.
He is! He is gratuitously and shamelessly terrible. Mortal doesn't have a perfect window into all of his terrible, since Thorn himself isn't bugged, but there's lots.
And of course, under Mortal's anger and resolution there's—simple fear. Because. His mother is being tortured by this person. He needs to take him down. Is it so hard for him to just walk into his room alone?
He usually has Blossom with him. Sometimes he takes other fairies into his room instead?
Are any of them very low-level non-sorcerous fairies?
It's sort of hard to tell whether they're sorcerers or not. Some of them don't seem to do any sorcery, but that could be for any number of reasons.
Well, presumably Eveningstar was a nonsorcerous one, Sand is, too, and there were the others Verve mentioned... What does Promise think?
"There are some people who genuinely aren't sorcerers but there are probably also some who know sorcery and aren't allowed to use it, outside extreme circumstances or when expressly permitted or something. We don't actually know if Eveningstar or Sand can cast, just that they don't."
"So, basically, wait 'til he's genuinely alone?" Pause. She presses Verve's button and says, "As soon as you believe you can do that without anyone noticing it or finding it strange, bob your head a little bit twice if Thorn ever goes into his room alone, thrice if only rarely or almost never, and shake it a little bit once if never."
Verve bobs her head twice.
"Then we wait," she sighs.
"Yep."
"...how're you holding up?"
"I'm managing."
"Is there, erm, anything I can do to help?"
"...like what?"
"I don't know," she sighs. "The mortal world has 'therapists' which are people whose job is helping other people deal with trauma and stuff, after this is done I could maybe hire one for you... Or, I dunno, talk, or maybe I could get you chocolate. I mean, I suppose talk isn't very feasible while we have to keep our eyes glued to the screen, but..."
"What do therapists do? What's chocolate for?"
"Well, they mostly talk to you about stuff and see how you're doing and help you develop healthy ways of dealing with trauma or some mental illnesses like depression—I'm not sure if plain speak translates the nuances of that word. As for chocolate, it's a type of food made from a seed that—how much do you know about mortal biology?"
"Almost nothing. Healthy ways as opposed to?"
"As opposed to bottling it up or having post-traumatic stress disorder or something. Which I don't think you'll do, but, like, sometimes it helps to just talk about the thing and stuff, to make it feel less bad. They spend, like, years studying this kind of thing, how people's psyches are affected by different things and how they deal and how to guide people towards good ways of not letting trauma affect their lives more than they want to."
"I don't see how talking about it would help."
"Well, I'm not a therapist, I don't know exactly what they do, but as far as I can tell fairy psychology isn't on the whole different than mortal psychology, so I don't expect therapy not to work."
"Well, I do not prefer to work through my distresses in public."
"It's not in public, it's only with the one therapist, and they are legally prohibited from sharing any information about the patient with anyone else. They also take an oath to that effect. But anyway, yeah, I'm not gonna push it, just, you know, a thing I wanted you to be aware of if you wanted it."
"The quantity of supervising strangers isn't the meaningful difference between public and private."
"Fair enough," she nods. "Anyway, er, about chocolate, basically it makes mortals produce certain chemicals in our bodies that tend to help with feeling bad. Erm, it's a lot more complicated than that, and I'm pretty sure fairy biology works differently enough that it might not change anything."
Shrug. "If it's a plant I might as well try it."
"Well, it's... Not wholly a plant. It's made by mixing a seed and, usually, sugar, but often also milk. Shouldn't be hard to find chocolate without any milk in it, though."
"That sounds nicer."
"Are fairies unable to eat non-plant food, or just unwilling...?"
"I imagine I could swallow it. It certainly wouldn't kill me. It might make me sick, I don't know, but it just seems really gross."
"Huh. ...I wonder if after this is done I'll be able to find amongst Thorn's ex-vassals someone who'd want to help me run experiments."
"Can't guess."
"We'll see, I suppose."
"I might try a little of something nonplant and see how awful it was."
"...I could start with chocolate, it's really good. After you try the non-milk chocolate, that is. And, like, later."
"Yeah."
(The next time she orders groceries to be delivered to the main HQ she'll get some chocolate.)
Watching. Shift-taking.
Watching watching is he never going to his room alone?
Why would he, with such a selection of lovely companions bound to obey his every whim?
In the meantime: chocolate arrives!
Promise says aaaah.
First the chocolate with sugar but no milk.
"Ooh that's really nice."
"It really is! There are lots of kinds, too."
"Kinds? How are they different?"
"Ratio of sugar to cocoa, ratio of milk to those in the kinds that have milk, some kinds have other ingredients like mint or nuts, the way they're prepared, the consistency..."
"Neat. There's not that much fine gradation in most fairy food, we usually just eat things however they come off the plant."
"Oh, there is so much food I need to show you!" She takes a look at the screen to make sure nothing interesting's going on then grabs some of the milk chocolate. Just a little square. "Wanna see if this one agrees with you? It has milk."
Nibble.
"It's all right I guess but the other one is better."
(This is not going to be a date. Just so everyone's clear on that. Not a date. She does not want to ask Promise out, it would not be nice.)
"Thanks."
She offers Promise more of the milkless chocolate and gets back to watching.
Watching watching.
Watching watching. Hopefully Sand and Verve aren't getting tortured by anyone.
Not right now!
Then: watching watching.
Whoops, now Verve has pissed someone off.
Of course she has. Is she gonna get tortured for it?
No shit she's gonna get tortured for it. Standard procedure.
(Thorn needs to go into his room alone already, this needs to stop. Why is he terrible. Why is he so terrible.)
'Cause he gets off on it, probably.
That's actually a good question. For now, paying attention, but later, she'll ask.
And then Blossom leaves before he does
and in he goes.
As soon as his door is closed and he's a few feet away from it: bullets. Lots of them, in a very short span of time. Invisible and soundless. The darts start darting at the same time, also invisible but not soundless, so as soon as they stop being deflected by the wards and clattering to the ground the mortal can stop chanting 'stop' and say 'sayyourname.'
As soon as the trap goes off, a horrendous noise floods the entire court.
No. Bad reaction. Not useful.
Second reaction: lower the bloody volume, he doesn't want to go deaf.
Third reaction: check that the traps are still trying to turn Thorn into Swiss cheese.
Fourth reaction: check resources. What are Verve and Sand doing? How are Promise and Yellow coping?
Sand is holding perfectly still, not even covering his ears, paused mid-step.
Yellow's covering his ears. Promise was on her sleep shift and is waking up now.
"Trapped Thorn, there's a ward on him that made a huge noise and apparently stopped Sand. Still trying to fill him with holes and juice."
The court's top-tier sorcerers burst into Thorn's room and find the trap and get to work destroying it.
"Okay, so not all is lost," he says, releasing a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding.
"If we had his name I could go in deaf and write fairylight orders, or you could..."
"But we don't, and I hesitate to send in Yellow or the person I hired" whose name has not been disclosed, of course "to do something like that. Yellow's as immortal as you are but there's a chance Thorn does have his name, and while he certainly doesn't have my employee's they're very mortal and very magicless..." He sighs, his eyes glued on the monitor.
Thorn has been healed. The room is being minutely searched.
The surveillance devices and speakers are quite small, and tucked away, but will of course on a thorough enough search be found. Both traps have run out of ammo by now and are inactive. Not much to be done about it.
"Sand doesn't have Thorn's name and he won't be able to hear you over the noise in the first place."
"I mean, after the noise stops. ...it'll have to stop, eventually, right? Or will he just plain sign everyone all the time or something?"
"It might continue until he knows how this happened. And has decided what to do about it."
"...okay, so, idea one is using Sand, unlikely to work. Then there's Verve, also a possibility. And then there's using the gate between the two courts, having a speaker somewhere there to yell at Thorn when he's passing through."
"Verve and Sand don't have Thorn's name and neither do we."
"But both of them have earbuds that can be much louder than they currently are and transmit messages from the mortal who is now Thorn's master! Maybe not loud enough they'd be able to be heard from farther than, like, a metre away if that, but it's still a resource at our disposal."
"Over the noise?"
"Not over the noise, no, which is why I said Sand would probably not work. ...it's possible Sand can still hear us over the noise, though, with the earbud."
"If Sand even twitches now they know who the mole is. Maybe when someone comes to check him..."
"Yeah, we don't say anything to him until he's no longer stop-ordered. I'm not sure we can come up with a game plan here before... more things happen. And we should think of contingencies that don't depend on these moles, probably."
"Yeah."
"If he discovers Sand, he'll probably discover Verve... And in that case I think it's best if we have her get the heck away so he won't know how we actually captured her."
"Yes."
"And actually, should we do that before Thorn actually learns of her involvement?"
"...If at all possible we should disappear Verve next time she's between courts. She's moving again tomorrow, right? He might not have his checks out to where she is now by then."
"Yeah, fair enough, if he finds out about her we can have her try to flee then. Now, hmm, assuming it all goes to heck..."
"Might be able to send Verve on a surgical mission to find your mother if we knew where she was, that would be something at least. But we don't know where she is except by process of elimination."
"Might Verve herself know where Thorn's latest project is? Or where 'the mortal woman' is? Or something?"
"Probably not."
And what are Thorn and his sorcerers up to?
They're tearing the place apart, patting down everyone, putting out ears and delivering orders in lights. They'll be at Sand any moment. They're going to find the bugs.
"I don't think we'll be able to wait until tomorrow to get Verve out of there, Sand's gonna be found. Any last orders we could give him?"
"He won't get away if he makes a break for it, they can heal him if you have him bite his tongue off, they'll find the earbud even if he flings it away - no, I don't think he's salvageable or usable anymore." Hmm. "Could your hireling learn a little bit of sign language? We could have Verve sneak out now and go in later with - is there something bigger, more eyecatching than a phone, that'd transmit sign? That she could present to Thorn?"
"A phone wouldn't work in fairyland anyway, no satellites for signal, but yeah I did get something like that, to transmit video, I used it in the little RC vehicle to catch Verve. And it shouldn't be hard to get my hireling to learn how to make the signs necessary to neutralise Thorn."
"We can make Verve turn it invisible herself so she can drop the invisibility on it at the right moment."
"Yes. How long would it take the other fairies to key Verve out of the wards?"
"...to the limited extent that's how wards work, not long, but that just means she has to catch Thorn outdoors."
"Will she be able to? If I were Thorn I probably wouldn't leave that court for... a while."
"He's got to go after Blossom personally, bare minimum, in case she's compromised."
"...hmm. That's a nice window of opportunity, there. Do we know where Blossom is?"
"I don't remember Sand overhearing where she was headed next."
"Hrrm... We're going to lose contact with this court soon, but we still have the radar near it to detect who comes and goes."
"Unless they find that. But yes."
"If they get near enough we can just pull it back into the mortal world, they'll have to go through the gate and then their sorcerous protections will be gone."
"Them finding the gate would be really bad."
"It wouldn't be ideal but I'm not sure what they'd be able to do with the information, especially when they wouldn't necessarily even be able to actually return to fairyland to spread it."
"If they go missing as soon as they find it that narrows down where it can be."
"No, I mean, in general, I'm not sure that them knowing where the gate is changes much of anything, their sorcery doesn't work at all in the mortal realm and we have terrain advantage here with all the security systems I got installed. We could pile up unconscious fairy bodies."
"We don't have a noise trap."
"...I think we're talking about different things. What I expect to happen, if a fairy finds one of our gates and goes through it, is that the security system I have installed in the empty rooms will neutralise them because all their wards and invisibility and whatnot will go away as soon as they step through."
"If they find it they can yell through it without stepping completely through, or guard it so we can't go out that way."
"Well, none of the three gates open to here, but hmm I should deactivate microphone relay from those rooms..." He starts doing that on the computer. "But yeah guarding is a problem. But... in any case, an unlikely one, it's still an invisible spot in the middle of the air fifty miles away from the court."
"Yeah. I know."
"Anyway, is that the plan, then? Get Verve out, invisible her, have her trap him between courts?"
"I don't think we'll come up with a better plan in time."
"Not before Thorn ensconces himself somewhere and stays there, and that place will probably be wherever my mother is so just destroying it won't work," he sighs. "Anyway. I'll defer to your expertise, get Verve now or see if the secret can hold up 'til tomorrow?" he asks, gesturing at the screen with (what's left of) the court's feed.
"...Now, I think. Or, not this very minute but as soon as nobody with her name is paying attention."
"How about 'as soon as you sincerely believe you can do this without being stopped or followed, leave the court and travel towards the spot where I left you, then wait there for further orders'?
"Lets her potentially make detours, doesn't oblige her to hide from and avoid anyone she meets on the way."
"Wouldn't the 'being stopped or followed' take care of anyone she meets on the way? 'Being stopped or followed by anyone at any point in your journey,' maybe? As for detours... 'travel with maximum haste under these constraints'?"
"No, you said she should leave when she believes she can do it without being stopped or followed; she could encounter someone mid-journey that way. And can't ever be in a state to reasonably expect that's out of the question. Haste doesn't guarantee directness."
"Alright, so, 'as soon as you sincerely believe you can do this without being stopped or followed, and taking the fastest route to your destination while avoiding being detected, leave the court and travel towards the spot where I left you, then wait there for further orders'?"
"Avoid being detected while otherwise prioritizing taking the fastest route to your destination," amends Promise.
Button-press: "As soon as you sincerely believe you can do this without being stopped or followed, and avoiding being detected while otherwise prioritising taking the fastest route to your destination, leave the court and travel towards the spot where I left you, then wait there for further orders."
Verve, obviously, doesn't react right away. There are other fairies around.
And the other court?
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.
The radar shows fairies in indistinct motion.
"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..."
"...we could have you or Yellow follow their entourage invisibly."
"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."
"Okay."
"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."
"We don't actually know what he's planning to do with 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."
"Can't."
(And being filled with some trepidation.)
"I don't know how to type," she says.
"...oh. Right." Slight disappointment? Surely not. "Can I try it on you, then?"
"You may type an order to unroll my wings."
Unroll your wings.
Typing doesn't work; her wings stay rolled up.
He sighs. "Well, was worth a try."
"The other two might still work. I think mortal language might be more consistently legible in stamped or assembled form."
"Yeah. I don't have a stamp on me, but—" He grabs a phone, dials a number. "I want stamps, those kinds you can change letters around, and ink. Yes. Yeah. No, no—yes. I also want five stamps saying stop, yell, your, name, say—yes, five of each. One second—" He looks at Promise. "Any other good words?"
"Maybe 'order them to stop'."
"Order, them, to, don't, no, not, do—make it ten of each, yes, and twenty of the kind that you can change. Yes, as soon as possible. Thank you." He puts down his phone. "We'll get stamps in about an hour."
"Okay."
"Sorcery and mortal scarcity combine so well."
"Because you have so much money now?"
"Yep. I mean, the final utopic plan is moving humanity to a post-scarce society and fairyland to a post-vassalisation society and I'm not above cheating my way there."
"Sounds good to me."
"Yup. Anyway, let's see, any other obvious ways to fiddle with writing or signs or transmitting orders visually?"
"Nothing springs to mind."
"...mortal language is just like speaking in code to fairies, isn't it."
"Yep."
"So what exactly counts as code? Like, say, what if I invented code that meant a dash is a certain word or something? What would it take for it to... work?"
"...I can't decide that a sound 'means stop' or some longer sentence. You probably can't either but it's maybe worth a try."
"I mean, something decides that a sound humans use means stop. There are languages with only a handful of speakers alive on Earth, there are languages with no native speakers, whose real pronunciation isn't even certain, and I'm wondering where the boundary is."
"Making something up and agreeing on it with your employee is worth testing."
"My thoughts exactly." He opens an image editor and draws a slash, then starts composing an email to his employee with it attached.
He sends a couple more images with meanings such as 'order' and 'them' and 'to' (even though that's quite anglocentric), and then a little star thing is supposed to mean "unfold your wings." After a little bit of back-and-forth, he turns back to Promise. "Let's see if this was enough to take?"
"Okay. You may write test orders for me."
He writes the little star that's supposed to mean 'unfold your wings' on a piece of paper in front of her.
No dice.
"Was a long shot," he sighs. "If I were to try to extrapolate from this, I'd expect it has something to do with the number or proportion of people who actually used and understood the language at some point in history."
"That seems like a weird thing for it to hinge on."
"Well, it hinges on something... I wonder if simple ciphers work. Actually I wonder if dead languages do work, even. And if I have to even know what I'm saying."
"No idea."
"Hmmm... I'm gonna ask my employee to find the words 'wave' and 'hand' in Japanese and send them to me without telling me which is which then see if I can use one of them to order you." He emails something to that effect. And then he grabs two different ciphers. "I have an idea about a possible way to test the thing about number of users."
"Oh?"
"A few ideas, actually. One is conlangs—that's invented languages -, the other is languages spoken by only a handful of people alive, and the other is using common and uncommon ciphers. More specifically, there is for example this one cipher invented for a game a few years ago and some people sort of speak it, but not, like, a countryful of them, and it's technically just English with the letters changed around. And then there's a cipher I can make up right now, which will still be just English with the letters changed around but in a way no one uses."
"Okay. ...I'm not totally clear on what letters are but okay."
"...oh, erm. Mortals need to encode their speech because of lack of magic and we encode it in stable sounds and there are minimal bits of those sounds that get combined in different ways to form words. It's actually a bit more complicated than that because sometimes a single letter can represent more than one sound at the same time and even sometimes different sounds in different places, and it's pretty fascinating and I could tell you a lot about it if you want, but the only relevant part in all of that is that if plain speak works with the cipher lots of people know and not with the cipher no one does then that's pretty conclusive evidence about at least some parts of what it cares about when it comes to communicating with humans."
"Okay."
"Anyway! I got two words, one for 'hand' and one for 'wave' and I don't know which is which, can I try using one and the other? This one has the most practical relevance, I think."
"You may do that."
The first word he says in Japanese turns out to be 'wave.'
She waves.
"Okay, this is good, means it doesn't rely on my understanding of the words, or at least not exclusively, there might be languages and alphabets where writing these orders out is faster than sign language. Probably not faster than stamping, though, so if that works then best possible thing." Beat. "I'd still want to figure these things out for the sake of science, though..."
"What does science need with the information?"
"I was using 'science' here as a shorthand for 'the drive to figure out how things work and why.'"
"Oh."
"Okay, so, ciphers. This one was used by the game and bunches of people know it—it's called Al Bhed, if you're curious. Fyja," he tries to order her to wave, pronouncing it 'feae-jaeah' according to the guide he found online.
She does not wave.
"Okay, cipher doesn't work, now..." He emails an employee and gets the word 'wave' in a conlang, a nearly extinct language, and Latin. He tries the conlang first.
Esperanto works.
And Latin?
Also works.
How about Eyak? There is only one person alive who currently speaks it, apparently. His employee also helpfully suggested Osage as a recently extinct language (as of last year), so Mortal asked them to figure out how to say 'wave' in that language, too, under the reasoning that enough people kinda more-or-less speak Latin but that one is really unknown other than an apparently doomed project to keep it alive with a very incomplete dictionary.
Eyak works. So does Osage.
...what about Tolkien's elvish?
Elvish works.
"It seems to be related to usage somehow, but I'm not sure how to easily distinguish between hypotheses..." He shakes his head quickly. "And anyway this isn't very relevant right now, I'm sure amongst plain speak recognised languages we can find ones with shorter words and sentences and symbols for the relevant orders if we need to."
"If that's easier than just talking faster, sure."
"It can often be, some sounds are just naturally easier to cram together and say faster in a human mouth than others, and some words are just shorter in some languages than others, too."
"Okay."
"The stamps should arrive soon, anyway," he says, and checks the feed for Verve's activity.
Verve hasn't gotten a moment unsupervised yet.
The radar?
Fairies moving around.
So they can wait a few more minutes until Mortal receives a text and a motorcycle pulls up and he goes to the door and the person who arrived does not go to the door and he meets them and gets a bag with stamps and returns inside.
"I have stamps! I'm also a bit peckish, want food?"
"Yes please."
He leaves the bag on the table and goes fetch some fruits for Promise and makes himself a sandwich, then goes back to the operations room—for lack of a better word—to feed her.
Mm, fruit.
Then: stamps! Do they work?
Stamps don't work.
How about using separate pieces of papers with letters to form words?
Also doesn't work.
"Well that's disappointing."
"Assembling the papers looked like something you could do incorrectly under stress anyway, but the stamp's a pity, yes."
"Yeah, I was hoping at least the ones whose letters I choose would..."
"It's probably too theoretically possible that someone could have reshaped the stamp between you assembling it and stamping it."
"And what's the explanation for the other stamps, then? That it wasn't technically me who picked the words?" He sighs.
"Those could've been reshaped too."
"I suppose. Guess sign language's still the best way to do it, then."
Nod.
And more waiting.
Verve finds an opening and makes a break for it.
Invisibly, hopefully, otherwise they might need to add something like that to the order right now.
Yep.
The radar?
Nothing new yet.
Well, they might just be able to pull this off? And that'd be great? Mortal won't hold out too much hope, though. He emails his employee with instructions about learning bits of sign language.
Waaaaaiting.
He's gotten quite used to waiting. That does not translate to having learnt to enjoy it.
Eventually Verve arrives, unmolested.
And Thorn still hasn't left?
Nn - yes, there he goes.
Then Verve can follow after him invisibly, yes? As can Yellow, at an angle, and both of them not terribly close to the entourage.
Promise supplies stealth for Yellow, who can't do it himself and hasn't been around Verve enough for her to do it in a hurry.
Stealth! Small cameras! Not quite as small radars but still small enough to be carried! And following.
"The person knows sign?"
"Not everything there is to know, but a few basic words and sentences like 'stop' and 'order' and 'order everyone to stop' and stuff like that."
"And you're sure they'll do it correctly on the first try?"
"Pretty sure but you can verify if you want."
"Seems worth checking."
The video feed starts, and the employee turns out to be a fairly sharp-looking woman in her thirties.
Promise watches.
She demonstrates a few words and short sentences in sign language, which of course don't work on Promise since she doesn't have Promise's name. She even adds a few other words Mortal didn't instruct her to learn to the list, and Promise is able to understand them all.
"They're all right," Promise confirms.
He thanks the employee and hangs up. "She's very conscientious."
"Good. We won't get more than one chance at this angle."
"Yeah, I made sure to get someone good, cutting costs here would do us no favours."
And waiting until they can strike -
STOP ORDER EVERYONE STOP
(In sign language, of course, quite fast.)
Thorn's wings stop beating, for a moment, and then start long enough for him to turn to face his entourage and sign; one of them looks away in time and streaks ahead of the group, but the rest collapse to the ground, Thorn among them. Promise dives for the microphone and un-stops Verve and sends her after the fleeing fairy to heal her ears.
And Mortal's employee will sign WHISPER YOUR NAME TO YELLOW at the appropriate time.
And Promise and Mortal will, of course, hear it too.
Promise shivers when he whispers "Syracerix". "That's it," she confirms. "Get the fleeing fairy's name so Verve can stop her, she's getting away -"
"They're probably all deaf. Yellow, order him to give you the fleeing fairy's name, then tell him he may breathe and allow his vassals to breathe."
Promise is hyperventilating.
Mortal notices this. "Yellow, order him to, taking no extraneous actions, do exactly and only what he needs to do to get his own ears healed." Releasing the button, he turns to Promise. "Are you alright? Do you need—I don't know, do you prefer not to watch or something?"
Thorn orders one of his sorcerers to heal his ears. He does.
He nods, and reroutes his microphone to order Thorn himself. "Answer all our questions completely and truthfully, giving priority to information that in your sincere best up-to-date model of us we would find most relevant. Obey the spirit of every order as intended by its giver when its phrasing is ambiguous, again according to your sincere best up-to-date model of the order giver. Inform us of any loopholes you detect in any orders we give or have given you and do not exploit them."
"Amend that," Promise says sharply, "to mean that you are to obey the composer-intended spirit of orders enforced upon you, and directives conveyed as subcomponents of orders enforced upon you, where that enforcement is by myself, the person you just heard speaking, or anyone you sincerely according to your best up to date model of the world expect to be an agent for one of the two of us."
And now Thorn is silent.
"What are you hoping we won't ask you about?" he voices in lieu of commenting on Promise's hotness.
"What my vassals will do in response to my delayed arrival," Thorn says, "what I am hoping you will not do with me, Blossom's name, where your mother is."
"Please answer those questions as if I had asked them." The 'please' is merely Sadde's Britishness showing, the order's quite enforced.
"As the news percolates the unimportant will scatter and the important will piece together directions to a backup court site and develop plans to retrieve me. I hope you will not ignore Promise's likely advice in favor of more elaborate revenge. Arilahera." (Promise nods.) "In the court on the river, in the sub-basement."
"I," he tries to inject as much venom into that as he can, "would not be so stupid or small-minded as to seek revenge. Even if you had nothing I wanted I would still at worst turn you into a sparrow."
Thorn has no comment.
"What steps would you take in my position to prevent your successful rescue at the hands of your subordinates?"
Promise says, "What steps would accomplish that goal?"
"Collecting the names of my major vassals, having Rainfall deactivate the noise traps and me cut off interfering actions from the other top sorcerers, and not making any mistakes."
"Must whatever-it-is you need to do to cut off interfering actions from the other top sorcerers be done by you, personally?"
"They're probably authorized to interfere arbitrarily with anyone else who shows up and probably have deadman switch setups," mutters Promise.
"Yeah, I'd expected so, was just checking. Well, Thorn and his people are only a few minutes late, we should probably start taking those steps. I think micromanaging him isn't likely to be very helpful, though, we should probably give him a more general order like 'do whatever needs to be done in order to ensure Promise and I have full control et cetera et cetera'?"
"Pluses and minuses to micromanagement. Depends on how likely we are to make a mistake that matters."
"We could start with a blanket general order and abuse stuff like 'sincerely' and 'best up-to-date model' on it and then give other orders as needed?"
"I think if he gets half a chance he'll find a way to startle us and make you say something stupid."
"Is that an argument for or against micromanaging? And besides, you can man the console and give him orders, I am not about to let pride get in the way of actually succeeding."
"For, if you can do well enough when not startled to prevent him from startling you; against if you can't."
"I'm pretty sure I can, unless what you have in mind when you say 'startle' is significantly different than what I do. And maybe we should get Thorn's entourage moving again and discuss while they do it, there are still a few hours before they'd arrive, and as far as all other courts know everything's fine."
Promise nods. She speaks into the mic, crisp elaborately airtight sentences. The fairies get up into the air again.
"And while we're at it, please give us the names of all your major vassals." Once again, the 'please' is merely decorative. "And tell us where Rainfall is."
"Expand the definition of 'major'," Promise says, after counting them on her fingers.
Thorn grits out a few more names and Rainfall's location.
"What should our immediate next step be to accomplish our ostensive plan with respect to you, your court, and your vassals according to your sincere best up-to-date model of the world?"
Promise groans. "Describe a plan which you sincerely expect is the most likely of plans you might invent to be effective by our lights at our goals without inconvenience to us."
Thorn doesn't have a snappy comeback for that one.
"Always answer questions directed at you by Promise or me according to your sincere best up-to-date model of their spirit as intended by their composer. Never lie to us, mislead us, or omit facts which you sincerely according to your best up-to-date model of us believe we would find relevant when giving us any information, prioritising things by how urgent they are."
Thorn is silent. Promise barks back the orders outlined in his plan at him. Fairies fly on.
"This somehow fails to be reassuring, relieving, soothing, or in any way not nerve-wracking," he comments.
"Yep. It is possible you should not deliver him orders," Promise sighs. "You really aren't very good at it."
"Like I said, I will not let my pride stand in the way of this being successful, my comparative advantage is not rule-lawyering."
Nod. "You're better at it than Yellow and Verve's hostile, so if I wind up asleep or something while something urgent happens you should do it rather than delegating, but I'll handle it while I'm available."
"Well, given that when this started I was apparently worse at it than Yellow, I'll take that as a win."
"I didn't coach Yellow," Promise says.
"Yeah, you're a good coach."
"When do you expect to arrive at your destination?" he asks Thorn.
"In two and a half hours," Thorn says.
"Mmmm enough time for a power nap, I was next up in the sleeping schedule and would prefer it didn't bother me while in the thick of it, any objections to my doing that now?"
"Go ahead."
Ahead he goes, and he only tosses and turns in anxiety for about half an hour before falling asleep.
Promise doesn't wake him. Everything proceeds under control.
He sets an alarm to wake him up thirty minutes before Thorn's estimated time of arrival.
She wakes up, washes up, and is presently back at HQ.
"Hi."
"Hello. I expect nothing unexpected happened?"
"Nope."
"And how're you holding up?"
"I'm all right."
"Good. I'm—glad."
"It'll be over soon. Although we'll have to find an outside sorcerer to turn him into a sparrow."
"Turning him into a sparrow counts as harming him?"
"It might not if he really wanted to be a sparrow for some reason but he won't."
"Wait, a master's wants matters when it comes to defining 'harm'?"
"Only on edge cases like being a sparrow."
"Edge cases. I see. That's... interesting." She shakes her head. "Anyway, is there a particular reason why we'd need to turn him into a sparrow? Not that I'm feeling particularly merciful, but we could just store him away somewhere."
"If he's a sparrow he can't speak or do sorcery and he's more storeable."
"We could leave him in Jupiter," she suggests.
"...that being?"
"Another planet, like Earth but larger and made of gas, we should probably not actually drop him in Jupiter itself but one of its moons—" She opens a browser on a side window to get relevant pictures of the Solar System and Jupiter and its moons. "...that might be a bit evil to him though, there's no breathable air there and it's below-freezing cold and while I'm not feeling merciful I don't particularly want to torture him unless we have no other options. We could just store him somewhere on Earth itself if we can't find a willing sorcerer..."
"If we store him on Earth he can't be a sparrow and he will be able to talk, but it's a good backup if we can't turn him into a sparrow."
"He can talk to an empty room for all I care. We can have him tongueless and handless if he's still too dangerous and that would still be a better deal for him than being a sparrow. The important thing is that he's neutralised."
"I was planning to let Blossom stay with him."
"...ah, yes, Blossom. Well, keeping them together in the mortal world isn't particularly worse than keeping them together as birds."
"It makes them harder to feed."
"Yeah. Not an insoluble problem but yeah, feeding them becomes a bit of a hassle."
"I suppose they'd probably prefer it. If you think they can be securely held in the mortal world and nobody will find them and get co-opted and let them go..."
"That would not be beyond my means but it would require a reasonable amount of supervision. Less if we don't care about feeding them personally, although, if they got the food and then fed each other would that work?"
"Not if it's mortal food. They can feed themselves, if it's fairy food."
"Then giving them fairy food is a bit less work than feeding them personally and a bit more work than just giving them mortal food and not caring about unsuspecting humans suddenly getting new vassals."
"It would be nearly as easy for Thorn to use an unsuspecting master he had access to as an unsuspecting person he had no vassal relationship with."
"I don't mean to give him access to said unsuspecting masters, I mean to completely automate food delivery so he wouldn't actually interact with anyone."
"Then maybe it doesn't matter," shrugs Promise, "but only if you can actually isolate them that well."
"Shouldn't be very hard, if a little bit expensive and annoying. Sparrowing them is still strictly easier."
"Not strictly, but likely, yes."
"Why not?"
"Involves different prerequisites."
"Well, they could still be kept as sparrows in the mortal world—unless that'd be dispelled, as well?"
"I think it would, yeah."
"Okay, then yeah, not strictly easier. And I wanted to ask something and forgot." Button-press: "What's your kind magic, and how much sorcery do you know?"
"My claws go through anything I intend to cut and I know a considerable amount of theory but am not in practice."
"Evil McEvilperson, species: evildoer, powers: to do evil," she snorts disbelievingly.
"I'm sure it would be useful for other purposes if he had other purposes."
"It could be incredibly useful, especially if his cutting powers are as absolute as fairy immortality is. Is he a one-of-a-kind?"
"No."
"Then maybe I could find another one of his kind that isn't terrible and do science with them."
"Maybe."
"You don't sound as excited about science as I am."
"Finding another knifewing in particular doesn't seem particularly high-priority."
"Well, no, certainly not, it probably wouldn't be one of the top twenty items of my priority list, but there are so many ways to use fairy magic to improve everyone's lives."
"Maybe I'll be in more of a science mood when Thorn's entire court is good and locked down."
"Locked down? And actually, yeah, what are the plans once his court has been secured and neutralised?"
"I'm going to have to interview them all. See how deep their loyalties go."
"Yeah, that's along the lines of what I was thinking. Vassalhood may be terrible but it sure does make interrogation much easier, and is much better than some alternatives employed by mortals."
"Oh?"
"They try, erm. Torturing people. For. Information."
"It's not like fairies don't do that. That's how Thorn got my name."
"I suppose if you don't already have someone's name," she sighs. "All in all I prefer obtaining my answers in a non-coercive manner, but vassalhood is an acceptable alternative under the circumstances."
Nod.
And back to waiting, since Thorn should be arriving any minute now, if his prediction was accurate.
Thorn implements his plan.
Mortal tenses up like a violin string, and doesn't hover her hand over the button because, well, Promise's doing that. She merely watches.
Eventually he has the site sewn up, Blossom and all.
Promise sends him to get some sleep with an appropriately decorated order and relaxes when he goes as he's told. "Next site tomorrow."
Mortal stops fidgeting at about the same time. "I am very much not meant for this kind of waiting."
"Sorry."
"It's fine, we're doing a good thing and hopefully only the first of a long string of good things we'll be doing." Pause. Catch up with what she's said. "I mean, if you want to," she amends.
"We seem to have broadly compatible goals and complementary skills and work together okay when you're behaving reasonably."
"I am very sorry about that."
"It worked out. Just don't do it again."
"The exact conditions that led to it are unlikely to come up again, and even if they did I would act differently."
"Good."
"...I want to ask a question but I'm not sure how to phrase it tactfully."
"Hm?"
"It's... I mean... How'd you turn out you?"
"I was always me. I started this way."
"But—well, I suppose that's all there is to it, isn't it."
"And I decided I wanted to stay the way I was so I promised myself."
"And that's why—I see. Very admirable. It's a very good way to be."
"What knowledge do you start with?"
"We know what we are and what that means. Our names. The basic laws of the universe. Some fairies didn't start knowing about the Queen but I'm new enough to have done. How to move and forage and talk and write."
"Basic laws? And how long has the Queen been around?"
"We know how orders work, and such. Millennia."
"Millennia," she repeats in disbelief.
"She has an overwhelming advantage and has been very good at pressing it and she's old."
"...how far would we need to go to be effectively out of her reach?"
"Many continents."
"Hm."
"Why do you ask?"
"Half-formed plans and ideas. How many continents, ballpark? And how large are continents here? And how on fairyland does she have such ridiculous reach?"
"Continents vary in size. This is a big one. She has a couple fairies who can travel particularly fast, I think some with passengers. And she's rumored to have sleeper agents far away. I would not expect to encounter the Queen by doing relatively ordinary science and court-shuffling if we went, oh, out past the salt sea, but I don't think I have ever heard of a location far enough that she couldn't find us if she wanted us - books suffer strictly more inconvenience in getting around than her vassals do."
"Hmmmm. And what kinds of things are likely to attract her attention? I have the impression she likes having the best—things, and while she can be excused for not having noticed that mortals are on the cusp of having much better things than she does eventually she will."
"I don't know. I think she may like having it generally known that she can do whatever she likes more than she likes doing anything in particular."
"I'm not sure how far I trust that. And I'm not sure how ordinary science I want to do. And I'm pretty sure the kinds of things I want to do will eventually bother her a lot even if I don't include the part where I'd like to replace her with someone who will do her job better."
"Perhaps I should have said 'small-scale science'."
"I stand by what I said. Long-term goals involve 'utopia,' and this might just include importing humans here because it's probably way less likely that fairyland will someday end."
"Is the mortal world going to end?"
"Not anytime soon, the Sun should last another five billion years and by then humanity will have either wiped itself out or colonised other planets. The universe as a whole will also eventually end and that will take even longer. This isn't something I'm really worried about right now. It's just—also a consideration, plus colonising parts of the infinite plane that is fairyland is much more easily feasible than doing the same to the infinite three-dimensional expanse made mostly of uninhabitable emptiness that is the mortal universe, not to mention all the benefits mortals could reap from learning how to use sorcery in the systematic way they do and the benefits fairies could reap from the stuff mortals know how to do, and—" She cuts herself off. "Dreams of a perfect future aside, just from the resources and mortality points of view figuring out some arrangement where mortals would have access to fairyland and vice-versa sounds like something that ought to eventually happen."
"But first you need to deal with the thing where it's not really safe for mortals to live there without fairy protection and not that safe even with."
"That depends on how we go about it, large-scale security systems are a thing, even if mostly a thing only governments have access to, but I don't think it's conductive to the kind of environment I want to have to shoot fairies out of the air whenever they come too close."
"Not so much."
"And in any case this strikes me as the kind of thing the Queen would object to, even if we found a way to do it safely and spread that information in a controlled way. And using the resources at the Queen's disposal would only make this easier and less likely to fail horribly."
"If we did it right, yeah."
"On the other hand having a mortal country in fairyland would make storming Queenscourt easier. Which is why I asked how large her reach was, if we manage to get safely outside it and play this right it might actually be easier to do it that way around."
"How easily do you traverse continents?"
"I think it takes something like fifteen hours? Maybe twenty? To cross the globe with a plane, but planes need significant infrastructure, not to mention special training to be piloted. ...maybe not significant infrastructure, depending on the plane, private jets, hmm..." While she says this she looks up stuff like the circumference of the Earth to give a basis of comparison and shows it to Promise.
"We'd need to get farther away than that to be really sure of not being discovered," Promise says.
"Yeah, I expected so, the problem is just how much farther, and whether it's feasible to do it. Travelling in fits and leaving gates where we stop is an idea, but the unpredictability of fairyland terrain can be a problem when it comes to landing the plane."
"They're hard to land?"
More webpages to aid in explaining! "They need a fair distance of reasonably flat ground to take off and land, and they can't hover, they must be moving to stay in the air. Helicopters can hover and basically just land verticality but are much slower."
"Huh."
"I don't know how different types of planes deal with different types of terrain but I'm pretty sure fairyland varies enough to eventually outclass any plane I get my hands on if we fly far enough, so this would need to be played pretty smart if it were to work at all." Pause. "Like everything else here."
"Yep."
"That's for the future, anyway," she shrugs. "For now, we get to spend hours watching Thorn and Blossom sleep."
"I thought I should maybe rest while they do so I'm available while they're awake."
"Probably a good idea. I kinda want to, too, but I'm not sure I trust Yellow enough, and I did take a nap not too long ago."
And she goes to bed.
And Mortal boredly watches Thorn's sleep, and eventually confines that window to half of her screen and starts looking stuff up about planes and landing distance and conditions and fuel consumption.
Promise is awake before Thorn is, although not before Blossom opens her eyes and frowns furiously into space.
"Blossom seems to be pretty annoyed with the wall," she reports.
"Well, we're not there for her to glare at."
"Oh. No. How terrible. We made her boyfriend stop nonconsensually torturing people. We are such horrible people. It is truly monstrous of us," she deadpans.
"We're even considering finding ways of not eternally turning them into birds. Truly there can be no forgiveness for our wicked, wicked actions."
"I don't know how Blossom and Thorn originally got together."
"You think they got together when Thorn one day decided to torture her nonconsensually and she liked it or something?"
"Or something. It's possible she admired him from afar and presented herself as a consort and he liked her moxie but I don't readily envision it."
"I find it hard to conceive that after having lived with him for—however many centuries, she still believes that most people are like her."
"Oh, I wouldn't think she would. I'm just not sure I want to paint her as a guaranteed non-victim, whatever she wound up doing with what she had."
"Oh."
"My best guess is that she will want to stay with him at this point but I'm planning to check."
"Yeah. Should maybe ask her when he's not around?"
"That's the plan."
"But I think even if she started out as a victim she's probably been thoroughly... brainwashed sounds like a terrible word but that."
"Yep."
She sighs. "I kinda wanna ask Thorn about... why. Why all of it. But I'm not sure how good an idea that'd be."
"There's not an obvious way for that to backfire but I don't know that you'd get anything out of it."
"Understanding, I guess?"
"Unless he doesn't have a satisfactory explanation."
"I mean, even 'because I wanted to' would be more information than I currently have. I already suspect that'll be the answer, but, I don't know, I can't... understand... any of it."
"I'm pretty sure he was not under orders from yet another master up the chain, we would have noticed by now even if he was exceptionally discreet about it. So. Because he wanted to."
"But I mean, sadism isn't unheard of amongst mortals, but most still notice that it's... not a good thing to do it to people who don't want it done to them?"
"And how do they notice?"
"I'm not sure, I guess basic empathy and maybe asking? I suppose there are some selection effects that might cause certain types of sadists to go into careers where they can more-or-less express it like law enforcement, so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised that the lack of a government would allow this."
"Lack of a government, availability of orders..."
"It's still confusing and terrible and a part of me wants a better explanation than 'he wanted to and had not an ounce of empathy in his body.'"
"What would constitute a better explanation?"
"I have no idea. 'It never occurred to me that other people existed or had feelings.' 'I thought I was god.' 'I thought I was fictional and so were all other people.' 'My kind needs to torture people to survive in addition to cutting things a lot.'"
"I am reasonably confident none of those are the truth. Especially the one suggesting he needs anything to survive. He's a fairy."
"Yeah, I know, I'm not particularly proud of the reasonableness of the part of me that wants a satisfactory answer."
"He doesn't care about other people," Promise says, "and he gets off on controlling and hurting them. I think that's all that's there."
She runs a hand through her hair but doesn't say anything.
Thorn wakes up and Promise directs him through to the next court site.
And Blossom with him?
Nope, Blossom is staying put.
And does—wait, she doesn't have surveillance equipment with her, does she. Well, they'll ask later.
"We can ferry her some if you want."
"My altruistic impulses and curiosity should not be focusing on her in particular out of all of Thorn's vassals, probably."
"Probably not."
"How many courts did he say he had?"
"Six not counting the secret sites. Do you want me to send him to get your mother after this one?"
"...yes."
"Okay. It's farther away but not so much so that he can't get to it today."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
"I'm... I've been preparing to find something, I don't know, terrible, trying to make myself numb, I'm not sure what—I'll even see, or how to react."
"Do you want me to do the preliminaries while you're not supervising?"
She closes her eyes and breathes somewhat deeply. "No. No, I—no. I'd like to be there all the time. But thank you."
"You're welcome."
She sighs. "And now I think I'm going to sleep, I'm on borrowed time from that nap."
"I'll wake you when he's close to where she is."
"Thank you," she repeats, and off to bed she goes.
Promise wakes her later.
She's feeling more like a he when awoken. He opens his eyes and sees Promise's face and smiles a bit, and then remembers what the waking world is like and the smile disappears.
"Morning. Thorn's about ten minutes out from where your mother is."
He sits up abruptly and gets up and marches towards the main room. "Thanks," he calls belatedly.
"You're welcome."
Gets up and goes to the bathroom to wash up and clean his teeth, it's not that he needs to be presentable but at least not having morning breath would be nice to Promise.
Then he takes his seat again and watches the screen.
He disassembles it neatly and orders a sorcerer to heal the mortal and fetch her out.
Promise is hovering over the button but she doesn't have to press it.
And she is fetched, healed and looking... Well, like she has not been having a fun time.
"Mum-" he cries before cutting himself off, staring at the screen.
"Where do you want her gated?"
"Here- can she? Can you? None of them has been here—" He seems to be having trouble forming full sentences.
"An accurate description will do it but - we don't know what kind of psychological condition she's in and may not want her near anything sensitive."
"Sensitive?"
"If for any reason she has a name and warped goals and presses this button..."
"...oh. We can ask Thorn to rescind all her orders and... order her something else? Like no pressing any buttons?"
"Okay, I can do that. The gate might take a while to settle, you know that, right?"
"Yeah. Can—I don't know if I wanna talk to her before she comes here and tell her it's—did Thorn do psychological torture? Like, could she believe it was all some ruse or game or something?"
"...he did psychological stuff but not in a disconnection from reality way. She should probably believe you're real."
"So if Thorn gives her an earbud and I talk to her she'll believe it's me...?"
"Probably."
"Okay. Erm. But then Thorn won't be able to hear our orders, we need to order him to—wait? Until I'm done talking to Mum?"
And she stabilizes Thorn and his vassals and has him give Laura his earbud.
"Mum?"
She doesn't respond.
"Mum! It's—it's me. You're—" He was about to say 'okay' but... "You're safe now. A friend and I—" Friend? Is Promise a friend? "We rescued you. We used a lot of those things you and I talked about. And we did it! We got Thorn, we stopped him, he'll never hurt you again, his name is Syracerix, he can't hurt you anymore now."
Silence.
"...mum?"
"Who's speaking?"
And now it's Mortal's turn to fall silent.
Oh dear.
"I—it's your son. It's Sam—Sadde. It's Sadde." He hasn't really used his real name a lot in many years.
"...okay."
"We're—we're gonna get you out of there, we're gonna get you home, you'll be fine."
Silence.
"I can get the gate set up as soon as Thorn has the earbud again."
"Can you give Thorn the earbud, Mum?"
She gives him it and continues not saying a whole lot.
And Promise gives Thorn instructions and he gives the nearest gate-capable sorcerer the earbud and she gives them a description of where they are and presently a gate is settling and someone is regularly trying to toss a rock through it.
Mortal watches it all with a kind of mesmerised fascination, as if it was terribly and unutterably interesting, except he looks like he has indigestion. He hasn't eaten since he woke up, though, so that's probably not it.
"We should probably eat something," Promise remarks eventually.
"Huh?" His eyes unglue from the screen and he turns to Promise. "Oh. Right. Yes. Feeling like eating anything in particular?" He looks at Yellow over there being boring. "Or you?"
"Whatever," Promise says.
"I'll go fetch that, then." He prepares something for himself, then brings blueberries and kale and a couple of bananas and cherry tomatoes and an apple to the fairies.
The gate is tested, over and over.
"This could take a while, maybe Thorn could go disable the rest of his courts and when the gate settles we'll know...?"
"I can set that up but it will mean we don't have bugs on the scene while we wait. Is that okay?"
"...watching it isn't doing my mental health any favours, getting this over and done with is, the vassals are not likely to do anything we don't want them to now."
So Promise issues orders - including a couple by proxy to Laura, just to be really sure, but those are gentle - and sends Thorn on his way.
And Mortal releases a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding when he's no longer looking at his mother. "With this we should probably be done in less than two days, huh."
"Yeah."
"What are we gonna do, once they're all neutralised? Go visit and start interviewing vassals? Are we gonna move his court anywhere?"
"Interview vassals, see what they want to do with themselves - maybe use the sites for anybody who actually wants to live all together one way or another."
"I kinda have a sort of instinctive aversion to living anywhere the Queen could reach but I suppose it's pretty normal for most fairies. My brain is going all 'get this over with and run as far away as you can.'"
"You can do that if you want."
"You wound me. Have all these months together not given you an inkling about what kind of person I am?"
"It could reasonably not have held up."
"It'll hold, I'm pretty sure. I never had a momentous thing like a promise to myself like you did, but... Something close enough."
"Okay. ...What are you going to do with your mother?"
"I'm... not sure. I don't know what-all is wrong, I might... get her a therapist, or something, and be there for her."
"...the therapist would presumably not know about fairies."
"...yeah. They might try to treat something she does not have because of the fairies thing."
"How bad would that be?"
"It could... get very, very bad. Depending. If they focus on the supposed delusions they might not treat the underlying problem, they might think she needs to be committed to an institution for her own safety, if I ask them not to try to fix the fairy delusion they might think I'm an unfit guardian and take her away..."
"...well, then that's not going to work."
"Yeah, it's not. I don't know, I might show them fairyland except that would open its own can of worms and I'm not ready to make fairyland public like that."
Nod.
"I'll... figure it out. Somehow. It may not necessarily be that bad, she could eventually cope, maybe."
"Maybe. People hold up differently..."
"Yeah. They do. I don't... I'd expected something else. I'm not sure if she didn't recognise me or, or what."
"She didn't see you?" suggests Promise.
"Yeah, I know, but..." He shakes his head, rubs his eyes, then opens them. "Speculation. I'll figure it out when I see her. No point worrying about it now."
The gate settles around when Thorn's approaching the last court.
And Mortal's mother steps through it and looks around, then at him, a bit blankly. She tilts her head.
"Mum?" he asks, taking a few steps towards her. "It's—it's me. It's Sadde, we got you." He looks over his shoulder, then at her again. "This is Promise, she helped."
She looks at Promise, then.
"Hello."
"Hello," she replies automatically. Then looks at Mortal again.
"...what do I do, I don't know what to do, do you want me to do anything?"
She takes a few steps towards him and hugs him.
He's—surprised, but after a second he hugs her back. And buries his face in her shoulders. And sobs.
...Promise doesn't watch. Seems inappropriate.
"Hi, baby," she murmurs.
"Hi Mum," he sniffles on her. "How—do you—should—"
"Ssshhh, it's fine."
He laughs/sobs. "Why are you comforting me, I should be comforting you. Do you want food? We have food. We have beds. And computers, and phones, and—"
"Food sounds good," she interrupts, in a low voice.
He keeps hugging her for a few seconds more, and leads her to the kitchen by the hand.
Promise supervises Thorn's last court disassembly.