Promise is conducting interviews now. This fairy seems harmless and just wants to go find a place with lots of flowers to live and decompress. Promise has her let go under light safety orders only.

...that makes him smile. "We actually did it."

"Yeah."

"Where's Thorn?"

"Parked in his room in this site in case I need him for anything while I disassemble it."

"And how's that going? How many have you gotten so far?"

"Four."

"All of them like that? Wish they weren't under Thorn, want to go be free and collect pretty things?"

"No. This was the nicest one so far. The torturers in particular probably should not be let go."

"Are they... like Thorn? Just want to make people suffer?"

"Not quite like Thorn but they wind up in their jobs for aptitude."

"Did they all get there by—how did they get there? How did Thorn start?"

"They've all got different stories. I don't think I've found anybody he's had more than a couple hundred years yet."

"Right," he sighs. "...I think I'm gonna go through that gate to the court and get more cameras and stuff there and ask fairies to go drop them at the other courts, we don't need to limit ourselves to only this single bug."

"Okay. Please no careless order enforcement, you could disrupt something delicate."

"Of course. ...actually might just ask Thorn how to not disrupt anything delicate."

"I think it'd be safer if the question came from me; he's not supposed to fuck with you but he's more likely to be able to."

"Yeah, you're probably right. I'll watch and learn."

"You look at me like that a lot, what does it mean?"

"...I don't know, I haven't been keeping track of occasions on which I look at you like that."

"What'd it mean this time, then? I've been taking it to mean something like mild approval but I'm not sure that makes sense."

"...something like 'this is hard, you're doing okay'?"

"Yeah, fits. Thank you, I try."

...okay this is so not the time to comment on how pretty he thinks she is. Moving on.

"Let's find Thorn and ask him, then."

"What in particular do you need to know?"

"Best way to get sets of bugs to all courts so we're not limited to monitoring only one at a time."

"I can just distribute some orders to some of the faster fliers, no Thorn required."

"Okay." He goes to the stash room and fills a cloth bag with a few more cloth bags as well as some cameras and earbuds. He writes down their unique identifier identification numbers so he can find their signal later, gets some other relays because it's a good idea to have more than just that one invisible one, and is ready.

"You should wear an earbud of your own so I can talk to you."

"Yeah, good idea." He gets another set and opens a window on a computer, pairs them up, and he's live. "There we go."

"Off with you, then."

"Off with me," he agrees, and through the gate to the court he goes.

The court is well-managed and quiet by Promise's remote direction.

Where would the fastest fairies there be?

They present themselves.

"Should we interview these already since we're interacting with them and sending them on errands?" he asks Promise.

"I can get to them later, I'm going in a priority order."

"Really? What priority?"

"Psychological condition. Medium first."

He starts dividing the bugs into five separate bags. "Medium on what scale?"

"...not sure what you mean. The ones who are functional enough to be interviewed but weren't really embedded in the court, the ones I can likeliest let go soonest."

"Ah. Makes sense."

He gives the five fastest fairies the bags, equipping each with an earbud-camera pair, then sends them off to the other courts.

"Yeah. It's turned out better than I expected so far."

"Really?"

He equips another fairy with a bug and starts setting up a couple of other cameras and speakers here and there in the court.

"Yeah. He got to them but not - irrevocably? They're taking him not being in charge all right."

He shudders a bit involuntarily at 'he got to them.' "All right meaning 'they'll deal' or 'thank goodness he's gone' or 'they'll figure out how to move on somehow'?"

"Varies. But I feel okay releasing them on light safety orders."

"Fair enough, I suppose," he says, sounding a tad uncomfortable.

"What?"

"Just, leftover discomfort over the fact that even with light safety orders there's still a non-negligible chance that they'll become someone else's vassal and that makes me kinda sad."

"Yeah."

He finishes setting stuff up and goes through the gate. "So of course we're gonna fix it."

"Well, we can try."

"Yep. After we're done here."

"The Queen will be harder than Thorn to handle."

"Yeah, she will, but we have more time, and potentially more resources."

"That's true."

"I wonder if we could try inviting some of the sorcerers here to help us..."

"I'm keeping an eye out for any who seem open to that, none so far."

"What about the ones that are too dangerous to release?"

"Wary of trying to use them. I'm good, I'm not perfect."

"But if Thorn is better than you, we could use him to use them...?"

"...that really doesn't help."

"I mean, with some appropriately worded order about cooperation and stuff...? The plan we've used here is his, after all."

"Yes, but giving him lots of complex orders and permission to enforce them on others - or lots of opportunity to decide what we're enforcing - introduces lots of opportunities for our mistakes to cost us. It adds up."

"No, I mean, ask him what we should order. We use his knowledge and skills, not his—self. And also not just that, and maybe not that at all, we should only use the uncooperative vassals if we have absolutely no other plan, I think."

"We'll see what kind of ratio we wind up with, I guess, but using Thorn is still potentially risky even if we only use him as a consultant."

"Fair enough."

"It still kinda sounds like getting the help of more people—fairies or otherwise—might be the way to go."

"Why?"

"Because they're resources. The Queen doesn't have mortals' names by default, and my effectiveness is limited by the fact that I'm a civilian. We could try to vassalise, say, the president of the United States—most economically and militarily prosperous nation on Earth at the moment—and get his country's resources, too, but I'm not a fan of this idea. Point being that... well, that's what she has, is people."

"I wasn't even planning to hang onto Yellow."

"It's why I'm not a fan of the idea, vassalising more people is yuck. Even if only temporarily and to help everyone."

"Yep."

"But still, more people than we have right now would be welcome. Oh, and by the way, I found out there's a thing called Vertical Takeoff and Landing aircraft which could be used here for us to find a place far enough away from the Queen."

"Handy."

"Yeah. And that's the kind of thing we could have more easily if we had access to more mortals, especially politically relevant ones."

"Well, you'd know more than I would about how to get their ideally voluntary cooperation."

He grins. "I have next to no idea how to do that at the moment. I'm throwing ideas at walls to see what sticks."

"The situation's not good but it's not unstable either, we have time to think."

"Yeah, we'll probably need to, like, sit down sometime and start really brainstorming ideas and listing resources and writing it all down and stuff."

"Yeah."

He smiles at her. "So, how're you feeling?"

"...I'm fine? Do I not seem fine?"

"You do, but I mean, like... Plan succeeded, months of anxiety and spending many hours staring at screens are over, a strong contender for 'worst person alive' has been neutralised, you could be on the verge of crumbling down or something."

"No, I'm not crumbling."

"Good! Good."

...okay, how does he phrase this.

"I think so too."

He still does not know how to phrase this! Having a crush on a fairy is hard he did not expect this why does he have a crush on a fairy this is terrible how does he do this.

"...are you crumbling?"

"Nnnno."

"You don't look so good."

"No, I mean, I'm good, I just, erm..."

"Hm?"

"I, er... I wanna ask a question slash say a thing and I'm not really sure how to do it."

"...well, without knowing what it is I can't help you."

"Yeah, I know."

"Lemme know if you figure out how to spit it out."

He grins. See, this kind of thing is why... "Okay I think the best way is probably to just do it."

He sighs. "I kiiiiiinda have a crush on you?"

"Why?"

He blinks. "Erm. How much detail do you want?"

"I'm just confused."

"Okay, erm... You're good? You want to help people, you have good goals, you're skilled at what you do, you're smart, you're amazingly hot, especially when you're being so competent about stuff. We didn't... get a whole lot of a chance to socialise, I suppose, but what I did see of your personality," shrug, "I like."

"Okay. Um. Why are you telling me."

Ssslooooowww blink. "Because I'd rather you know? I'm... I won't do anything about it if you don't want me to, just." Shrug. "Would you... have preferred I not have told you? Not that I can undo it but it's... information."

"I just... don't know what to do with the information."

"...okay. You don't need to do anything about it, I guess. I mean, typically when one tells someone else this kind of thing it's on a gamble that it may be reciprocated, but I won't die if it's not, nor will I let it affect—whatever it is we're doing, I think."

"I have been - prioritizing how to reassemble myself."

"That—makes sense, I suppose?"

"And people having crushes on me wasn't something I thought I needed to react to. So I don't have a reaction. Sorry."

"It's alright. I guess my timing wasn't the best, but... I've been pretty sure of it for a while, kinda wanted us to wrap this up before fessing up."

"...a while?"

"Well, I noticed you were attractive when we met, but that in itself is nowhere near enough for me to have a crush. But then you continued to be awesome and focused and good and kind all the time and, well."

"...oh."

He shrugs. "There never was a good time, I was an emotional anxious wreck, even the long boring parts of the plan still had this violin string tension in the background, anything could go wrong any time..."

"...well, I'm glad you're feeling better."

He tilts his head. "Thank you."

"Sorry I don't have a better answer."

He shrugs again. "It wouldn't be fair of me to expect you to. You got your own stuff to deal with."

Nod.

He sighs. "For the record, erm, if it bothers you, it's kinda super attractive when you order me."

"...really?"

"Yyyyyeah. I mean, you know how I feel about the whole business in general, but—when it's you it's, erm, okay?"

"So, you can probably guess that fairy relationships are inevitably kind of fucked up and I don't have, like, a model, of what it would look like for one to be not fucked up."

"Oh. Well, the, er, being ordered thing is usually not a part of it, I'm weird, but there are healthy relationship models that involve it. The general mold is, like... talking about stuff like each other's interests or whatever happened that day or the news or stuff like that, and doing activities together, and hanging out, and recommending books, and going on dates, and holding hands, and other kinds of physical and emotional affection, and exchanging gifts, and sometimes just silently enjoying each other's company... That kinda stuff."

"I am presently unfit to - do physical affection."

"Yeah, I know. You shouldn't, like, worry about it, or rush anything, your mental health is the most important thing, take your time at it, I don't—er, I guess what I'm saying here is that my having a crush on you is my problem and doesn't come with any expectations nor should it be, like, weird or anything, it's been there for the past few months and it's alright."

"How do mortals have relationship models that involve orders?"

"Well, not magically enforced orders, but for instance some relationships are modelled around power imbalances with one person being dominant and the other submissive and sometimes that's only in, erm, intimate moments, but sometimes they extend to the other parts of their life, and it's not unheard of for the dominant to boss the submissive around and stuff. And it's all consensual of course, at least the healthy ones, and that's not the only way to incorporate it into a relationship, just the most salient example, there's a whole host of ways to do it which can be tweaked to the satisfaction of all parties involved."

Blink. "...that is what the least upsetting fairy romance stories wind up looking like," she comments.

"Yeah, like, the important part is consent and... awareness? If everyone involved genuinely enjoys being in that position and all grievances are aired and people communicate and care about each other and stuff... I won't say that guarantees a healthy relationship but it's a very good first step."

"...well, all my various issues are around being the vassal, not the master."

"My issue with the whole thing is and has always been the lack of consent. I personally don't—mind being either, with or without magically enforced orders, it'd actually be fun to have it as part of a relationship I think, as long as everyone knows what they're doing, enthusiastic consent, all that jazz. I'm definitely not going to pressure you into anything. ...except perhaps into saying things out loud when you think of them, I think I'd rather not try to interpret nonverbal cues for the time being."

"You may not attempt to oblige me to tell you what I'm thinking."

He blinks. "No, no, that's not what I meant, sorry, bad phrasing. I just meant I will try to avoid interpreting nonverbal cues and stuff, the 'pressure' there wasn't literal."

"...okay."

"Sorry. Yeah, that's exactly the thing, the only type of pressuring you I will be doing will be the figurative pressuring caused by my trying to avoid... any... pressuring? Because that'll create incentives for certain things as opposed to others and... yeah. Erm. Sorry."

"It's all right," she sighs.

He shrugs. "So now you know, I guess."

"Yep. I'll - think about it."

"Okay." Pause. "Also it might be relevant that, I'm not sure if you picked up on it but, I'm sometimes a girl? And... anatomically that's not very relevant at the moment but eventually I'll try to figure out how to, like, change with sorcery, if it's at all possible. So, erm. That's a thing."

"...I'm reasonably confident I'm not attracted to girls."

"For what it's worth, on my end that's not a dealbreaker."

"Why not?"

"Well, 'cause... I mean, why would it be? I'm comfortably bisexual, but, like... I mean it'd be a dealbreaker if your brand of straight was the kind that couldn't bear the thought of being with someone who's sometimes a girl but otherwise it seems like that only limits the times when we can be physically affectionate and that's not even on the table for the next while anyway. I have been making an effort not to touch you even accidentally, I noticed you try to avoid it."

"Yeah. ...Thanks."

"You're welcome."

He can't help shooting Yellow a dirty look through a wall.

"...what'd Yellow do?"

"Keep you for twenty years, if I remember correctly."

"...I mean, yes, but frankly by comparison it was a recovery period."

"I don't think I can loathe Thorn any more than I already do and shooting him dirty looks through the camera feels less meaningful but you have a point." He shoots the monitor a dirty look.

He shrugs, smiling a bit. "We've won. I'm not exactly one to want revenge, but gods do I feel tempted to rub it in a little bit, maybe snark at him since he keeps doing it to me."

"Not worth it. Tells him how to get to you."

"It'd be more for my amusement at the look on his face than anything, the thing he'd need to do to get to me was getting my mum and he's already done it, but in any case you won't actually see me go there and do it."

"You shouldn't do it when I'm not looking either."

"That was a figure of speech, I'm not going to do it full stop."

"Good."

"I may not get everything right the first time but I'm a fast learner and I pay attention."

"I noticed."

He grins.

They continue to wrap up the courts and perform interviews, determining loyalties and desires. Most of the vassals can be released with security orders, some light, some not so light, but a number of them (like the torturers) might not be as easy as that to deal with. Some of the fairies they do release choose to stay in the court sites, under somewhat stable tangles of master-vassal relationships, due to liking each other or just out of sheer habit. Mortal pitches the idea of helping out with Science, and a couple of fairies are actually interested in this, which delights Mortal to no end.

And eventually only Thorn and Blossom are left to be interviewed.

The interview turns up no surprises from Promise's perspective. They want to stay together, they would rather not be sparrows but aren't thrilled about ways of crippling them in their normal forms either.

Mortal's curious about a couple of things, though.

First, how did Thorn... become so powerful? How'd he build his court?

"Slowly."

She furrows her brows. Of course.

"And—why? Why all of it? Why torture people who do stuff you don't like, you're already their master, why—that?"

"It's useful for maintaining their attitudes and I find it pleasant."

"You—find it—pleasant—" She closes her eyes and takes a few deep breaths before continuing. "Between becoming a sparrow and keeping crippled normal forms you prefer the latter, yes?"

"Yes."

She opens her eyes. "What steps should I take to ensure you will not escape?"

Because if he has a better idea she's all ears, although he'd probably have mentioned it if he had anything better than sparrowing or equivalent.

"Turn me into a sparrow," says Thorn detachedly.

She shakes her head and sighs. "I wish you weren't a terrible person."

Cut the feed and bury her face in her hands.

"Should we go through the trouble of finding a sorcerer to sparrow them, or should we go through the trouble of trapping them somewhere in the mortal world?" she asks without raising her head from her hands.

"How long will it take to secure them in the mortal world?"

"It will have to be in one of my safe houses or equivalent, probably, and actually fully automatic food delivery systems would require me to throw a fairly large sum of money at them and I'm not sure it's worth it. If we order them to stay in the house and collect food at regular intervals that we'd have delivered, that probably could be made tight enough to actually work, but regardless of what we do they'll probably need to be watched fairly constantly."

"Sorcerer to turn them into sparrows, then, it won't take that long and won't be that hard to maintain."

"Yeah," she sighs. "Won't that sorcerer be a liability? Also, can anyone other than that sorcerer turn them into something other than a sparrow?"

"A small liability. And no, it's like gates."

"Let's hope said sorcerer doesn't have a pang of conscience and one day decides to undo their job, then, I suppose."

"We don't have to keep them anywhere easily accessible."

She finally raises her head. "Yeah. I suppose your tree is pretty inaccessible?"

"Yeah. I can plant one just for them."

"Could leave a small gate from within it to one of my safe houses for if we ever need to remove them there in a hurry for any reason. Not that it's likely to come up, but..."

"They'll turn back from being sparrows if they go through."

"Yeah but if they're ordered not to go through we'll only have them to that if something worse than them not being sparrows happens, or if we really really need a very very skilled sorceress very very fast."

"I'll need to put some thought into it being airtight that they not go through, but yeah."

"How do we find a sorcerer willing to do this?"

"Ad at the library."

"...really? And someone would just, like, show up to turn someone else into a sparrow, no questions asked, no being horrified by the moral implications of it?"

"I don't know about no questions asked."

"Alright, I suppose. What do you pay them with?"

"Vassals are customary but we can probably find some interesting harmless mortal doodad."

"Ooh, interesting harmless mortal doodad, yes, that's a good idea. We have lots of those. I need to show you those."

"...okay."

"I mean, unless you don't want me to, but something about you tells me you'll like exploring the internet now that we have actual free time. Or electronic books."

"Possibly."

"Not to mention all the foods, you did mention fae food didn't come in as much gradation as chocolate does."

"Yeah, it seems like that would require a lot of refining we mostly don't do."

"I wonder why not. It's not like the underlying physics works really differently here, all the stuff we've made fairies could've, too."

"We don't work together as much."

"Yeah, I suppose that'd do it. Although having an industrious master over a diligent court should probably do away with a lot of the coordination problems that could hinder progress, so it's still overall mildly surprising."

"I suppose the priorities associated with having a court are not necessarily technological progress."

"Sure, but what I mean is that there is a trope in certain kinds of mortal fiction about power-hungry scientist types and it's interesting nothing like that cropped up as a court holder here."

"Maybe they have to give their vassals a lot of flexibility to get anywhere and that's too much to let them keep them?"

"Plausible. Or maybe scientist types don't actually tend to be very good managers in spite of what mortal fiction would have us believe."

"You have fiction about this?"

"Yeah, like I said, mad scientist trope. Especially superhero fiction, with the evil genius at the top of a huge evil organisation meant to do evil science."

"Evil science."

"Yep! It's like science, but evil. With nefarious experiments figuring out answers to questions no one really ever asked or trying to steal the Moon."

"...steal the moon?"

"Yeah—I dunno if it's come up yet that in the mortal world it's a huge ball of rock orbiting the earth and reflecting the light from the Sun, but for some reason mad scientists sometimes want to steal the moon. Granted, that's mostly in children's cartoons and very old superhero comics, but. It's a thing."

"Why do they want it? ...Who owns it?"

"No one owns it, it's just—there. It's responsible for the tides, though, and maybe other things though I wouldn't know what. Not to mention that if it were stolen and not just displaced it'd destroy the Earth. As for why, no idea, I haven't actually read the kind of fiction in question, I presume it's usually to be evil. Or maybe they threaten it and want to be paid not to do it."

"I'm not sure I'd call it stealing if no one owns it. They want to harvest the moon."

She sporfles.

"What?"

"That was an unintentional pun," she giggles. "There's an old video game called 'harvest moon' about farming. And it has nothing to do with harvesting the moon, but it's just—the image is great, and the pun, and I dunno."

"Okay."

"More elaborate fiction involving mad or evil scientists tends to have genuinely interesting questions being answered through unethical means. One that particularly bothers me is how seeking immortality is almost invariably a bad thing in fiction."

"...why?"

"Well, humans in general aren't. And they have come up with some quite clever ways to deal with this fact, two of the most persistent of which being the existence of an afterlife and the opinion that 'death is a part of the natural order of things.'"

"...but natural orders of things are often terrible."

"Yes, you won't see me agree with this line of reasoning. For whatever reason living your life out to the fullest and accepting your death when it comes is a sort of virtue or something, I'm not sure."

"Weird."

"Yeah. At the same time there is very active research in life extension, medicine, curing diseases, getting rid of cancer, that sort of thing. So it's like, accept your death when it comes to you, but try to delay it as much as possible. Or something."

"...so they'd like healing and de-aging just fine but not something to make them outright immortal?"

"Healing, yes, but I expect lots of people would probably object to de-aging, too, on the grounds that ducked if I know."

"...huh."

"Humans are weird," she shrugs, then looks at the screen. "Fairies are weird, too, in a different way. I guess that just means people are weird."

"Yep."

"Anyway. Guess this about wraps everything up. Do you know of a library nearby?"

"Not trivially nearby but accessible, yes."

"Cool, then, we—oh, there's also the library Mum used to go to, doesn't need to be one close to the tree."

"People there are more likely to know of Thorn and take personal interest in what happened."

"Is anyone there likely to be friendly towards Thorn?"

"He didn't antagonize his neighbors. He traded me to Yellow, say."

"But surely people knew about what stuff he did? Or did he keep a lid on it?"

"He's unusual but mostly in finesse and sadism, not repertoire."

"Yyyyyep, I definitely want to fix that."

"What are we going to do about the other people loyal to Thorn, torturers and such? Sparrow them, too?"

"Yeah. I can do some of them myself, they didn't all have my name."

"We're gonna end up with a menagerie of sparrows that hate us."

"Yup."

"Will you want to have your new tree already grown before we move them?"

Is it obvious she's anxious to wrap this up and never have anything to do with it ever again?

"Grown some, yeah, but I can get it big enough to hold sparrows fast."

"Then I suppose we could just send Yellow to the library to post the ad there while you grow your tree."

"And soon we will be able to shoo Yellow altogether."

"If I were a fairy I'd offer to do it myself but alas."

Nod.

"Is he up? We could send him now."

"Yeah, he's up."

Promise writes up her ad and assigns Yellow his errand.

"...and I think I wanna do some science while we wait."

"Oh?"

"Test stuff! There's lots of stuff to be tested. Especially with plain speak. And a couple of the fairies we interviewed were okay with helping."

"Have fun."

"Thanks!" Pause. "Do you wanna come, too?"

"Do you think I'd be helpful?"

"Well, the practical thing you'd bring to the table is the fact that you're my Master and they're not, and also you're really smart and might come up with stuff, but I was asking mostly 'cause you might have been curious or interested in it for itself."

"I'll come along."

"Awesome! They're in one of the courts here—I wish fairies had phones, I'd know if we can show up or if they're busy, but oh well."

She gets up and makes her way to the appropriate gate.

Follow follow. "What are you thinking we'd try first?"

"Well the very first thing I wanna try to figure out is just what counts as a language for plain speak. I was pretty surprised Elvish does but Al Bhed doesn't."

"Why?"

"'Cause they're both fictional languages spoken by fictional peoples who also happen to have a nonzero number of real people who can actually speak them. The difference between them is how many people have spoken it ever, how old each is, and the fact that Elvish is its own language with its own syntax and vocabulary and stuff whereas Al Bhed is just a cipher applied to English. But the difference between something being a cipher and being a completely different language is quantitative and in-game it's a language. So."

"Are there intermediate cases?"

"I mean, it's quantitative in theory, in practice I think the closest thing to an intermediate case would be a dialect and those are close enough to languages that I'd be very surprised if they didn't count. My thing is that languages are basically just arbitrary sets of sounds attached to arbitrary meanings plus arbitrary-but-consistent rules about how to relate those sounds to each other to form more complex ones, and that's true of Al Bhed as well as of Elvish and Esperanto."

"Are all these sets of rules the same age?"

"Inasmuch as a non-constructed language can be said to have an age, no. Al Bhed is only like five or six years old, English has been evolving for thousands of years but something that's recognisably English has existed for maybe a few hundred, Elvish is a few decades old, Esperanto's about one or two hundred years old."

"So that might matter."

"Yeah, it's what I'm thinking, but I'm not sure how to test it to appropriate levels of rigour."

"Not enough languages of various ages?"

"There might be, but even so that's not the only thing that varies, number of users being the most salient."

"How inconvenient of mortals not to set up their language use to provide a varied experimental range."

She giggles. "I mean I don't think there's a way to fix it or a way it could've evolved that would be easier or anything, it's just bothersome from a practical perspective."

"Well, presumably languages get older over time, you could just wait."

"...I am not a very patient person."

"I'm not either, but if there aren't any languages that work for the experiment you want right now..."

"Yeah, I'll check first. One thing I want to check is whether ciphers don't work in general, I'll get some historically relevant ones and check."

"So what are you going to test today having not done that yet?"

"I will open a tiny gate to HQ so I can get wifi and use this," she grabs a phone from her pocket, "to find those."

"...you can't plan on starting anything today that relies on a settled gate."

"I could try to use that trick you mentioned, several gates on top of each other?"

"Yes, but it feels untidy to have that many gates lying around for a non-emergency. You can't permanently get rid of them, only close them."

"What's the practical difference between a single gate and several gates on top of each other that no one else can even detect?"

"Not practical so much as aesthetic, but it is very unaesthetic to make something that will last forever because you didn't want to wait a week."

"Well, alright, since that bothers you if a gate doesn't settle I'll do something else instead."

"Like what?"

"I wanna see how homophones behave, for instance. And I do know a couple of ciphers that were historically meaningful, like very simple numeric substitution ciphers when this was invented. I have downloaded a couple of dictionaries into my mobile phone and I wanna see how plain speak from the fairies' side works when I write stuff in other languages, or like partial words or sentences..."

"What's a homophone?"

"Two words that sound the same but have different meanings."

"...doesn't that defeat the whole encoded-sounds-for-meanings purpose?"

"I think conlangs tend to not have those, but languages that have evolved naturally do."

"But why?"

"'Cause there isn't a central coordinator for languages? I'm not sure what kind of answer you're looking for here."

"Why would people start using a sound that already meant something to mean something else? Do you run out?"

"They don't really start using a sound out of the blue, words sound like one thing and then like another, similar thing, and then another, and so on organically over time until they eventually end up sounding the same. I think homophones often happen due to different origins of words, like this word comes from Latin and this other from Greek."

"Comes from?"

"Languages sometimes borrow words from other languages, and most languages that exist today are actually modified versions and combinations of languages that existed a long time ago. Latin and Greek in particular influenced a lot of languages in the continent where I'm from, and people from my continent colonised a lot of other places a few hundred years ago."

"If you're going to make up dozens of different codes anyway why don't you at least make up original ones?"

She giggles. "No one really makes them up, they just sort of appear and are adopted by people. If for example two peoples that speak different languages are neighbours, then the people living near the border will often mix and borrow to be able to communicate better. Whole new languages can be born that way. Or sometimes a language has a specific word and speakers of another start using it because there isn't a central authority deciding these things for everyone to agree on new things and then it's adopted and adapted."

"You poor things."

She giggles again. "It's not that bad, and the way it works and changes is fascinating, and reflects a lot about the culture of the place that uses a language, and all that. I kinda wish I'd had the time—and skill—to learn any other language. Ooh, another thing I wanna check is the difference between transient and permanent 'to be.'"

"Huh?"

"Well, the language I'm currently speaking in only has one version of the verb 'to be,' which we use for all states of 'being' whether they're permanent or not, but there are other languages that don't do that, and have different verbs for a permanent 'to be' and a transient 'to be.'"

Oh look there's the court.

"Huh," says Promise. Here indeed is the court.

"I wanna do experiments on sorcery, too, since it only works in fairyland, but I'm not sure what I wanna experiment with in particular."

"That will make it more difficult to perform the experiments."

"There's one I want to do that you probably won't like."

And presently they've arrived! Are fairies about?

"Why won't I like it?"

Fairies are about. They incline their heads politely to Promise and Mortal.

That feels weird. That feels really weird. Anyway.

"'Cause it involves opening lots of gates I'll never use."

"If the experiment requires it they're not inessential."

"Well the experiment in question is trying to figure out which aspects of... the world... affect settling time. And in general, trying to be more systematic about harmonics and whatnot and how they affect sorcery."

"Sounds interesting."

"Yeah. I don't currently have hypotheses beyond some intuitive sense from watching fairylights flicker so I wanna collect more data and start there. If I can figure anything out based on this it might significantly speed up learning new things or even inventing it."

"What do you want to invent?"

"Well the first thing I wanna do is gendershifting 'cause out of inventable stuff it's probably easiest. Figuring out how to make people completely unaging instead of just deaging them manually would be wonderful, too." 

"I've occasionally mused about inventing teleportation. I'm not sure it's conceptually doable; yours sound like they could be."

"...teleportation would be so useful."

"I know, right?"

"Did you ever look into anything related to that or just idle musings?"

"...haven't been in a position to do independent research for a while."

"...right, erm, sorry."

"But! Now we both are in such a position and we're going to revolutionise sorcery with science."

"You sound very sure of this."

"Well as far as I've been able to determine no one has actually done this kind of thing systematically, and sorcery seems to have consistent rules, so it's the kind of thing that will probably eventually crack."

"Fair enough."

"Not to mention the fact that I'm incredibly self-confident and also confident in you."

Now, where are those fairies that wanted to do science with her?

Here they are!

"Hello!" she greets 'em.

"Hello!" some of the fairies say back.

"Leeeet's do some science," she says, and tries opening a gate to get signal.

Conveniently, it's an instant settle.

Cool! So the first thing she tries is looking up some cipher that someone certainly has used in the past. The most obvious one, it turns out, is a Caesar cipher, moving letters a fixed number of steps ahead or behind. Since this doesn't tend to produce pronounceable words, she has to write the order 'wave' in paper: xbwf.

Nobody waves. They can't understand it.

What if she tells them in advance what it is and how it was gotten from another word and what it means?

(She doesn't expect this to work, and if it does that's an entirely new feature of plain speak.)

They will have to take her word for it that this is a meaningful connection of some kind between the word "wave" and meaningless scribble but that doesn't make them able to read it.

Okay, so just naively using ciphers doesn't work even if they were the very first ciphers invented. ...can they read Al Bhed at all or does 'fyja' also come off as meaningless scribble?

Meaningless scribble!

Hmmm... Atbash cipher? That one even has a cool name! She'll try writing a word in Hebrew (google google) and then writing the same thing with the cipher applied to it.

Fairies cannot read that either.

But they can read the thing in original non-ciphered Hebrew?

Sure! They can barely tell the difference between that and English, really, although Promise notices that it's being written the other direction.

What about the size of the word? Like, say... 'education' and 'הַשׂכָּלָה'?

...yes, one can write things smaller if they want. Is this news to Mortal or something?

No, but in this case she's actually using fewer separate characters, look.

...okay. So?

So she's writing the same word in completely different ways!

They're not, like, exactly the same.

...okay can one of them—actually, can all of them write that word down separately?