The crashed fairy can't yelp. Or exclaim in pain; she was allowed to fix her wings for the flight but she's still got broken fingers and a black eye. She cannot take off again; she could probably run away from the mortal, but she does not, it seems, have to; she scoots away from the heap of mortal and sits, cradling her injured hand and watching him.

He calms down over the course of a few seconds spent watching her; then he sits up and performs a quick, practiced sequence of movements that seem designed to check himself for damage. Flex shoulders and digits and limbs, twist torso back and forth, press on feet with hands. When that few seconds are over, he regards her with a mix of concern and curiosity and ventures a cautious: "Hello?"

Silent sigh.

Blink.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

She isn't usually allowed to go wherever she wants, but she can in fact follow him right now. She does.

A couple of turns through the very mortal house, and they arrive in a very mortal kitchen, where her very mortal guide (who is a little shorter than she is - aren't mortals supposed to be large?) fills a glass with water and leaves it on the counter while he fetches a box of pastries out of a cupboard. (The kitchen is definitely built for people larger than this particular mortal.)

The fairy waits.

He extracts a pastry from the box and offers it to her with a thoughtful frown.

She opens her mouth.

Chew chew. Swallow.

"Okay," says the mortal, picking up the glass and holding it for her to drink from, "something is definitely going on here that I don't understand. Multiple things that I don't understand are going on here."

He smiles wryly at the blink, and keeps holding the water for her. "Which first: painkillers, or attempting to communicate about the nature of your problem?"

Blink blink.

"Second thing?" he guesses. "All right. You seem constrained rather than impaired..."

Blink.

"I confess I am not oversupplied with theories about how that could come to be. But I would like to unconstrain you if possible," says the mortal.

"So. What do I know..." he muses out loud. "You have wings and you fell out of thin air and you weigh much less than I'd expect from a human of your size. And you can hear and understand speech and walk and sip and chew but you seem to be constrained from speaking and gesturing and feeding yourself...?"

Blink.

"I suspect there is a way to unconstrain you. Given the emphatic blink, I also suspect that the food had something to do with it. But clearly it hasn't solved the entire problem just yet."

Blink.

"I—hm, no, first: is there a time constraint of any kind operative here, should I be hurrying to get it figured out as soon as possible lest you vanish by morning or something of that general nature?"

Blinkblink.

"Taking that as a 'no'. All right, good, I still want to solve this sooner than later but at least I'm not racing the clock. So, eating a pastry was step one. Is step two something I can personally accomplish without obtaining further resources?"

Blink.

Blink!

"All right... were the constraints put in place by a person? They seem - guided, intentional."

Blink.

Blink.

"...It would be conceptually elegant, tentatively supported by the evidence, and also slightly unsettling if the maple eclair event somehow added me to a category of people who are able to not only remove constraints but also add more. Am I on the right track?"

"Please warn me in some way if I seem about to do that. —Have I done it already?"

Hesitation; blinkblinkblink.

"...Are you not sure whether I have or not?" he guesses.

Blink.

"Understanding this problem just became a whole lot more urgent," he mutters, mostly to himself, wishing very badly to pace back and forth but not wanting to look away from her lest he miss a warning. "Something I can do, something I may already have done—" and there he stops and looks at her intently. "Is all this inexplicable constraint-management accomplished by speaking?"

Blink.

Blink!

"In that case—you may speak?" he tries.

She takes a deep breath. "Thanks," she murmurs. "...You might be looking for the sentence 'I rescind all your orders'."

"That sounds like exactly the sentence I was looking for," he says. "I rescind all your orders."

She relaxes. Considerably. "Thanks," she manages again, and then she starts crying into the not broken one of her hands.

"Um," he says. "Can I - get you anything else, help you in some other way...?"

"I," sniff, "if you happen to know of any gates back to Fairyland that's probably," sniff, "more long-term tenable than me staying here. The tear I came through won't have lasted."

"I have never heard of Fairyland before this moment. —And before anything else I would very much like to know how careful I need to be about what I say to you, since you seemed unsure whether I'd accidentally added to your pile of orders earlier."

"If it's an imperative or a permission and you mean it it sticks. I didn't know if you meant it or not and wouldn't have until I had something to warn you about that I didn't for whatever reason want to warn you about."

"Thank you. I will do my best to avoid meaning any imperatives in your direction."

"And I'm incapable of harming you, that comes with the names-or-food thing. Which is called vassalization."

"I hope you don't mind me saying that I am offended on a very fundamental level by the existence of this phenomenon," he says.

"I wasn't planning to defend it."

"Well. I have no idea where to start looking for a gate to Fairyland," he says. "What can I do in the genre of seeing to your immediate comfort? I can go get you those painkillers but I confess I don't have anything that's been tested on fairies. There are plenty of spare bedrooms in this house and you are welcome to occupy one for the forseeable future."

"I don't know if the painkillers will work either. I... don't know very much about healing injuries the long way around. I can't do sorcery here but I usually heal myself that way whenever I'm allowed. I could... I could use some rest."

"There's non-magical medical attention available here, potentially, but it comes with complications and I have no idea how fairy biology works so even if I procured a doctor I don't know how much good he could do for you. I can show you to the guest rooms if you'd like...?"

Nod. She wipes tears off her face with her not-broken hand.

"I'll try it. It's not like it's going to kill me." She follows him.

"...yes, that is pretty unlikely..." he says, slowly, in the tone of one who perceives a deeper meaning and isn't sure how to ask after it.

"...I'm a fairy. We're immortal."

"Lucky you," is the first thing that comes to mind, and he reflects on this for a moment and then adds, "probably."

"Usually. Lucky, not immortal. We're always immortal."

She flies rather than try to walk up the stairs.

"Thank you. ...Do you have a nickname I can use? I'm Promise."

"Um, let me think," he says. "What's the error margin on names? It's surprisingly difficult to come up with something off the top of my head that bears no relation to my name whatsoever..."

"If - on purpose or by accident - I entertain the hypothesis that your name contains a syllable, I'll know if it does or not and if it does that's it. But by default when you talk I'm not paying any attention to sounds, just meanings."

"...One moment while I curse the human tendency to name things after people," he says, blinking. "So no fictional characters whose name isn't mine but might be someone's, in case you run into such a person and accidentally - vassalize them. A remarkable number of towns and geographical features also out of the running for similar reasons. Um, um. How about 'Silver'."

"Didn't click into place, you're fine."

"Although I probably should first have asked what specific criteria qualify a particular collection of syllables as being one's name."

"The first name you are given. I don't know very much about mortal naming customs to go into much more detail than that."

"...Well that's a potentially fascinating experiment that is in no way worth the risk..." he mutters.

"I don't want to hurt anybody, but I don't blame you for not wanting to try it."

"I would like to minimize the amount of irrevocable magical servtude that exists," he says.

"Names aren't irrevocable. I'd forget them eventually. It would take me a long time, though, probably longer than a mortal usually lives."

"Irrevocable from the perspective of the mortal, then. Anyway." He gestures vaguely at the corridor of guest rooms.

She looks at them. She picks one. She swallows a painkiller and flops onto a bed and sighs deeply.

"I'll be around if you need anything," he says, and goes back downstairs to put the pastries away and maybe question his sanity a little.

She sleeps for a few hours.

By which time her host has not quite decided whether or not he should call his mother. If Promise looks for him, she will find him playing a fast-paced colourful holo game on a comconsole downstairs.

"That didn't sound good," he says, looking up from his game. "Did the painkillers help at all? ...How do you know your magic doesn't work here?"

"It's not supposed to work in the mortal world. I don't know why. I guess I've never been here before." She tries making a fairylight.

"Depending on how long of a while, I might still be interested," he says. "I have - well, the short version is I was poisoned as a child and it fucked up my bone development and the reason I yelled when you landed on me is that in my experience unexpected impacts usually lead to broken bones. Being able to un-break them on the spot would be very useful. Is there something I could trade you for - magic lessons? How long would it take to get that far?"

"Years. Maybe longer with no books - maybe not as long with flat harmonics - if it's flat here I can probably just gate to my tree, I don't know that I need anything from here..."

"You might not need anything, but you might like some things," he says. "I'd have to find a way to censor out all the names, but mortals have produced vast amounts of media, I could send you home with enough music and literature and holovids to keep you entertained for the next several thousand years even if you find you hate ninety percent of it. As the first example I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more."

"That sounds like it would take up a lot of space."

"...I think I will answer that question with pretty pictures," he says. "First—" A holographic model of a solar system appears. "Do I need to explain planets?"

"I think I have the general idea behind planets. They're round."

Promise looks at the galaxy. "That's a lot of planets," she says. "Why is it organized like that?"

"Gravity?" he hazards. "I'm not a physicist. I can probably find you anywhere between an article and a few dozen books on the subject, depending on the exact depth of your curiosity."

"Fairyland isn't like that," she says. "It's just flat. With mountains and caves and things, but basically flat."

"Well, the mortal world is... sparkly," he says, smiling. "...Also, we have some difficulty transporting mortals between these various locations, and depending on how exactly your gates work, if you could create or teach someone to create a stable network of instantaneous interstellar transportation I don't think it's possible to overstate how rich you could get. Sending you home with the entire collected works of humanity, or at least as much of it as I can reach from my living room, would be cheap. What you could get for a gate network... I struggle to even describe it. You could buy your own planet. You could pay hundreds of people exorbitant salaries to comb the galaxy looking for the nicest previously unclaimed planet available and then declare it yours and settle down there with your library of all human knowledge."

"When you say 'your tree'..." he says, trying to think of a way to formulate the question.

"The kind of fairy I am starts inside of a tree. I lived there, before. I'd only be going to take a cutting to plant a new one, but that could be long enough even if I went with my eardrums burst."

"...Long enough for someone to - recapture you? What's - I mean - depending on the exact nature of the danger involved, that may be a problem that I and/or an arbitrarily large pile of money could help solve."

"My old master collects sorcerers and most of them are better than me and the tree's my turf, which matters, but I haven't been there in such a long time and I don't remember all the things I'd need to know to press the advantage. If my ears were broken someone would just have to heal me, that's all, and get out an order before I could puncture them again."

"What if you were, for example, wearing something that blocked your hearing without damaging you...?"

"They'd just have to wreck it. Maybe it'd be safe to open a tiny gate, just big enough for my hand and a branch..."

"I would be happy to offer you any reasonable assistance in getting a cutting of your tree, if it's that important to you," he says. "And varying levels of extravagant assistance are potentially on offer if you decide to do things like teach me sorcery or sell gates. Although the logistics of selling gates could get... a bit complicated."

"Complicated how?"

"...I need to spend a minute thinking this through, actually," he says, and sits down at the desk.

Promise makes more harmonic maps of other locations, meanwhile, confirming that they are Yep, Super Flat.

She is in the hallway, looking pleased at a harmonic map.

"Still flat? What does 'flat' even mean in this context?"

"Harmonics are an invisible feature of places," Promise says. "They vary, usually continuously but not always and at various rates. Sort of like... ground level. Except in three dimensions. They're one of the things that matters for sorcery, and when they are all the same it's a lot easier to take them into account. I don't know why mortals wouldn't already have sorcery if it's flat everywhere. Maybe it's only flat some places."

"Or maybe sorcery can only be done by a fairy, or in the presence of a fairy, or only learned likewise, or maybe there's some less guessable connection to the very weird fact that fairies have all heard of a mortal world where they think sorcery doesn't work but this mortal world, where sorcery does work, has only heard of fairies as fictional beings with some of their most relevant properties omitted. It's fascinating and I'm fascinated but before I get too far into that, I want to talk to you about your immediate plans. How much interest do you have in becoming unspeakably rich via the sale of interstellar portals?"

"I... kind of want to spend at least a month living an extremely boring life in my own tree putting my psyche back together. But after that it sounds more interesting than most things I might be doing in Fairyland."

"Yeah, that's fair," he agrees. "In which case I guess the first problem to be solved is getting you a cutting of that tree?"

"Yeah. The problem with gates is that they can take any amount of time to settle. Days, sometimes. And they start open. If I make one, and it settles while I'm asleep, there will just be an open Fairyland gate to right where he'd be looking for me if he looked."

"...That's... potentially solvable," he says thoughtfully. "And, um. I feel like I owe you an explanation of why I'm so interested in solving your problems - I mean, I'm sure you've guessed that I'm very excited about potentially learning sorcery, and it may be apparent that I'm of a problem-solving nature in general, but there's cultural context on top of that."

"It's... I might make a mess of this, I apologize, I'm using up a lot of brainpower on name-related censoring and trying to avoid saying things that might be orders, but - the word 'vassal', on this planet, refers to a cultural phenomenon with no magical enforcement whatsoever. And under that system, having a vassal comes with responsibilities. I take those responsibilities very seriously. You're obviously coming from a vastly different context, but as far as I'm concerned, for as long as you are magically required to obey my commands I have a personal duty to see to your safety and comfort."

"I know, but I'm being paranoid about it anyway because my level of discomfort with this entire system is extremely high."

"Oh." Pause. "What was your idea about the gate problem?"

"Oh. Set up the gate in an uninhabited location that would be prohibitively difficult to leave unassisted, and monitor it remotely in case anybody comes through. Then if we get any unexpected visitors they're alone on a deserted moon with no idea where you are. And you can check it at your leisure with your handy access to mortal technology. It'd be a little expensive to do it that way, but if you verify that the interplanetary portals are possible and express an interest in making some eventually, I, um, happen to be childhood friends with the emperor of this planet and could probably get him to front some extravagant aid if it means you start with us when you do get around to selling portals."

"Difficult to leave how...?"

"I guess I should check my assumptions. How high can fairies fly, and what if anything stops them from going higher?"

"If we go up too far the air gets too thin for wingbeats to do anything. I'm not sure if anything would stop the ones who can teleport. I guess they might pass out eventually."

"...There's ones who can teleport?"

"Crystalswifts. They don't go very far, but they could probably outpace falling speed if they tried."

"That sounds like a deeply inefficient method of space travel," he says. "If there aren't any precise long-distance teleporters, sticking the gate on a moon will almost certainly work just fine. Space is big."

"It must be, if those pictures you showed me were to scale."

"The solar system one actually shrank the distances between planets by a lot, proportional to their size," he says. "Because when the scales are accurate it can be difficult to have more than one planet in view at a time, even in the same system, the littler ones would be the size of dust motes before you could fit them all in a display area together. Space is big."

"Anyway - I don't object in principle to making gates around place to place."

"Okay. Then if we decide on a solution to the tree thing that requires lots of money, I can politely ask the Emperor for lots of money, and he'll want to see proof that you exist and can do magic of the relevant type, but I'm pretty sure he'll come through once that's established."

"Okay. ...It probably is safe just to wait a while until he won't be likely to have the tree staked out and then do a tiny gate, though. Especially if someone can keep poking a stick through the area to check if it's open all the time. I could also maybe just make the gate to the inside of my tree, I think with a little finagling I could get it to extend a plantable branch through the inside. Nobody can get into my tree if I don't let them and he never made me let him."

"That seems simpler all round," says Silver. "What do gates look like? How frequently and how consistently would you want it being poked with a stick to ensure that you caught it soon enough after it opened?"

"They don't look like anything. A minute or two, I guess."

"If you want an invisible portal poked with a stick every minute or two for possibly days at a stretch, I might have to ask someone for help," he says. "But it's doable."

"I don't know that he'll be staking out the tree. If anyone saw me go through the tear, they won't expect me back, and I don't think he wanted to keep me particularly badly. But if he was it would be important to be able to react quickly."

"Yes," he says. "I see the logic. So, you could try to make the gate to the inside of your tree - would that be a secure enough method that you wouldn't want it poked with a stick at all hours?"

"Yeah. I don't think he's motivated to destroy the tree or anything."

"Then I think that sounds like a workable plan. ...It may also be relevant that I have a job that regularly takes me offplanet for weeks at a time. I'm currently on leave and won't be expected back for another three weeks barring emergencies, but if I do have to leave the planet before you're done here, what do I need to do to provide for you in my absence?"

"...Any mortal food that doesn't come directly out of your hand opens me to other claims."

"Well that's... difficult. There are people I'd trust with the job of feeding you but I don't feel I have the authority to ask you to trust them on my say-so. On the other hand I am also very reluctant to take you along when I go to do my job, which involves extensive contact with other mortals and with secrets I am not authorized to dispense to you. And I could request a longer leave so I could stay here and feed you, but - it's not trivial, my job. There are not that many people with my qualifications, and some people are alive today who wouldn't be if I hadn't got the right thing to the right place at the right time."

"I mean, I can't starve to death, and the gate won't take weeks to settle, anyway."

"So, if I get called away while you are still here and dependent on local food sources, you have the unpleasant choice between risking non-hand-fed mortal food, acquiring another mortal master to hand-feed you, and not eating at all. I am definitely going to try very hard to think of clever fourth options if that comes up."

"Sorcery works here. I can gate back to Fairyland and get food there."

"Unless something goes wrong with that. We still don't know why sorcery works here when your sources believed it wouldn't, so we don't know what effects that might have on the creation of gates. But maybe I'm just being unnecessarily pessimistic."

"Right. I don't know either."

"Then I guess the plan is you trying the gate to your tree and me standing back and hoping nothing goes wrong...? Will you be growing tree number two here, or gating to Fairyland to find somewhere to put it?"

"Here's fine. I can take cuttings from the second tree if I want more in Fairyland."

"Sure," he says. "I'd prefer if you grew it closer to this house than any other house in the vicinity, and in a spot not easily visible from a distance or from above, but there's plenty of locations that meet those criteria and it won't be an enormous problem if your preferred spot doesn't, I'm just trying to minimize the likelihood of local mortals noticing you."

"I don't need it to be anywhere in particular. The main criterion for if I plant another one in Fairyland is that it'd need to be near water; you have a lake."

"I do have a lake. I like my lake."

"It's a nice lake."

"And my tree grows fruit and that's safe for me to eat, even if I don't bring back any other Fairyland plants."

"Convenient for you. All right. Do you want to try that gate to your tree now?"

"Yeah. Where should I put it?"

"I've been thinking about that, and I think a good spot would be in front of the house, a short distance away," he says. "Seems like a reasonable compromise between convenience and defensibility."

Miles comes along to observe the gate-making process from a distance.

It doesn't look like anything. "It's settling," Promise announces after a brief moment.

"As in the process that takes some unpredictable amount of time, or as in the end of that process?"

"The former."

"Time to wait, then, I guess. Would you like me to show off more nifty mortal gadgets in the meantime?"

"Okay."

"Did you like the look of that game I was playing? I could show off some of those. Or, I don't know, what do fairies not have, lightflyers? Float pallets? I suppose you don't need lift tubes..."

"I don't know what any of those things are."

"That is a lightflyer." He points. "It's a flying vehicle that goes very fast. A float pallet is a levitating platform that can be hauled around as though it's mostly weightless regardless of how much stuff you pile onto it, as long as you don't exceed the safety limitations and break the thing. And a lift tube is a different application of the same technology used in float pallets, which allows wingless people to move from one floor to another inside a building without having to go up and down stairs. If none of those sounds sufficiently exciting to be worth a look, I'm sure I can think of more."

"They sound worth looking at," acknowledges Promise. "It must be inconvenient not to be able to fly."

"I am pretty pleased about my lightflyer," says Silver. "If you'd like, I can fly you around in it and demonstrate how well it compensates for my tragic lack of inborn flight capability."

"Okay."

Promise's wings roll up behind her and she sits a bit forward. "It's okay."

Promise looks dubiously at the safety harness. She does not wear it.

Promise beholds the view. "The plants are different here," she murmurs.

"Are they? The green stuff is from Earth, the red stuff is native to this planet," he says. "I'm nastily allergic to most of the local plant life but I do admit it can be attractive from a distance."

"Fairyland plants are more often green than anything else, but they can be other colors."

"They're nice."

"I think there are some fairies who can fly this fast but I top out much lower."

"It goes faster," he says. "If very fast flying vehicles are a thing that interests you, there's a wide selection available. Also some that will operate regardless of the presence or absence of air outside them, but those tend to be bigger and harder to fly."

"It's... not exactly that?" he says. "I'm - I might have mentioned I'm a problem-solver by nature. You have problems. I'm not sure how to solve them. But making you aware of all the cool mortal stuff available seems like a better plan than not doing that, for the goal of generally improving your existence, you know? I am also entertaining some hope that if I offer you lots of cool mortal stuff I might get cool magic stuff in return, but, I don't know, I am a bit freaked out by this accidental magical liege lord thing and may be overcompensating."

"I want pretty simple things to start. I want to be safe. I want privacy and my own tree and a way to eat on a regular basis and to be safe. After I'm... more confident of that... we can talk about getting me a planet. But, um, making it look like you really really want cool magic stuff makes me wonder if you want it more than to not so much be my magical liege lord."

"Well - I see your logic," he says. "And I'm not sure what to do about it because most of the things I can think of to say that would be very reassuring to me would probably not be helpful to someone of a less twisty paranoid mindset, and if it were just me on the line I could tell you my name as reciprocal security I guess, but it's not, it's an entire galaxy full of hundreds of billions of other mortals who I would be putting in harm's way if I turned out to be misjudging your intentions badly enough."

Promise peers at the villages. "Fairies usually don't live in groups that large."

"...Really? Why not...?"

"Well, sometimes courts get that big, but it's hard to hold that many. You have to be really good at it and accumulate a lot of vassals."

"I met a mortal once before so I know you don't arrange yourselves like that but fairies... pretty much always live alone or in vassal nets of one sort or another."

"I mind that this phenomenon exists," Silver mutters.

"Sorry. I can stop talking about how upsetting I find the fundamental rules of your existence if you prefer. Well, I can try, anyway."

"It's sort of reassuring."

"Well in that case: the fundamental rules of your existence are really upsetting! The immortality part's not bad, admittedly, but in context it also means that the magical unilateral liege relationships have more staying power. If I had somehow found out ahead of time that I would be meeting a magical immortal fairy and somehow believed this information I would've predicted my reaction was going to be 'immortal, you say? where do I get some of that?', but in fact it's mostly," he lifts one hand from the lightflyer's controls briefly to make an expressive gesture and accompanies it with a somewhat self-consciously dramatized moan of dismay.

"Sorcery can de-age mortals," she mentions, after a hesitation.

"You could explain it."

"Some kinds. ...It is however very different because if you have one or more parents, well, they name you."

"I'm sorry you have to be mortal," she says. "It sounds scary."

"I'm used to it."

"I don't have parents, if you were worried," she adds.

"...I was a little worried," he admits.

"I just started in my tree. Childhoods sound inconvenient."

"They have their ups and downs."

Promise doesn't ask.

"There are a lot of kinds of fairy wings. Some of them allow sitting on chairs with backs comfortably."

"Well. There are still plenty of practical obstacles."

"Yes. For instance, I don't know how to turn anyone into a fairy, and even if I could it might count as a harmful spell the same way turning you into a sparrow would."

"Turning me into a sparrow would count as harmful?"

"Yes. Well, probably, if you really wanted me to turn you into a sparrow I might be able to, there's a little flex around what one construes as harm."

"I don't yearn to be a sparrow. It's just - well, slightly unsettling but also kind of intriguing that turning people into sparrows is an option," he says. "And very interesting that it's defined as harm."

"Animals can't talk. Or use most of the active fairy kind magics. Or do sorcery. And are pretty physically harmless."

"Yes, I see what you mean. I suppose that where killing someone is not even theoretically possible, that tactical role gets filled with things like 'turn into sparrow'."

"Well. More often 'turn into snail'. But yes."

"Is it possible to turn a mortal into a fairy...? I'm asking mostly out of theoretical curiosity; I'm not at all sure I'd like the tradeoffs."

"I've never heard of it being done. I doubt it, but it could be theoretically possible somehow."

"I'd also be fairly surprised if it turned out to qualify as harm, especially given the reasons why turning someone into a sparrow does," he says. "On the other hand - turning someone into a sparrow doesn't make them mortal, right? Which sparrows traditionally are. So turning a mortal into a fairy might not accomplish the reverse, in which case it would be a much less useful trick. Still handy if you really want wings, I guess. Hmm, is it possible to turn a fairy into a different kind of fairy, with a different set of wings?"

"Not that I know of, but maybe. It might just be cosmetic, though, I would be more likely to have heard of it if it did something more potentially useful like change fairy kind magics around."

Promise gets out and pokes her gate. It is not settled yet.

Silver goes into the house.

Promise considers, then follows him.

He sits at his comconsole and starts playing that game again. It's very fast and shiny.

"Well, the Emperor's going to want to trade for those portals but he'll be perfectly content to wait for them; out of everyone I know, I think he has the strongest understanding of the inherent responsibilities of a situation like this. My boss will freak out about the fact that you could fairly casually conquer the planet by wandering around asking people politely for their names, but while he can tell me to do things about that and by custom I am supposed to do as he says, in practice this wouldn't be the first time I disagreed with the decisions of someone whose orders I am supposed to follow. As long as you do not actually proceed to conquer the planet, I don't think he'll even threaten me with particularly dire consequences if I tell him to fuck off."

"I could buy a planet, apparently, if I want a planet I wouldn't go for conquest as a first choice. Mostly I want a tree. I should probably go get a branch now."

"A completely reasonable set of priorities."

"I didn't look outside the tree, but it didn't seem to have been damaged. And I got a branch to grow on the inside for me to take off."

"That seems like it went as well as can be expected, then. Where do you think you'll put the tree?"

"Wherever would be convenient for you to have a big tree, I guess. Near the lake? Is it all right if I grow some fairy food here or would someone accidentally eat it?"

"It's not impossible that someone might accidentally eat it, but it seems like an acceptable risk, at least if we mark off a little plot for you with a fence or something so it's obvious that the plants in question belong to someone. That's the sort of thing I could ask my parents to help arrange, if you can't produce a fence on short notice yourself. As for location, I can think of a few spots I could show you."

"Once my tree is big enough I can make wood come off it in any shape I want and make a fence. Let's see some places?"

Places! They are suitable to house a tree, and for the tree in question to be surrounded by a little plot of land for growing things in. Of the places, the one nearest the lake is also the one with the best affordance for conveniently-fenced extra growing space.

Gosh. Tree.

"I should definitely tell the Emperor about you soon if I want to minimize the degree of fuss involved," says Silver.

"...Okay."

"I'll go call him. I would appreciate if you avoided listening, in case he says any names before I explain."

Promise is leaning on her tree, munching berries that fall from its branches straight into her outstretched hand one at a time.

"I don't mind proving I can do magic. It's certainly not hard to do here."

"That's convenient, then. I'll ask Mother to nickname herself and come by."

Nod, nod.

"The tree seems to be coming along nicely."

"I should be able to sleep in it tonight."

"That seems good."

"It is."

Nod.

Promise leans her cheek on her tree almost like she is nuzzling it. "I missed it. ...Thank you for not being awful."

"Um. You're welcome? I feel slightly weird accepting thanks for not being awful, but I also acknowledge that there are a staggering variety of ways in which I could have been awful if I were a different and more awful person."

"Yeah. I mean, also thank you for being nice, but mostly right now I'm feeling the not-awful."

"Yeah. Well. You're welcome and I will endeavour to continue in this not-awful vein."

"Thanks."

"I am once again struck by how much I dislike the existence of this entire system."

"I don't think there's any getting rid of it."

"Unfortunately."

"Vague ambitions?"

"There's... are you obligated to relay everything I say to your boss and emperor and so on?"

"Only if it's immediately relevant to topics such as people being casually able to conquer this planet."

"Not the planet. Fairyland. It has a Queen."

"...I see."

"Vassalizing her would let somebody who really wanted to fix most of the things about the place. But it's incompatible with vassalization no longer existing at all."

"If you want any help with that I can maybe bring myself to accept such a fundamentally inadequate solution."

"I might. But - not soon."

"Yeah."

"I'm a curious person in general but I think I can pass on this particular information."

Nod.

"Anyway. I'm glad you've got your tree going now. It's a nice tree."

"Thank you!"

Promise grows her tree some more. She can't fit completely inside it yet, but she can make a hollow in it big enough to sit in. She does that, humming to herself.

"That's good."

"Yeah."

"I hope I'm not too much of a disruption for all these people."

"The disruption to the locals will be minimal. I'm sure my mother can fit a few more things into her schedule without too much trouble, and the Emperor I expect to be actively delighted about any disruption that ends in functional instantaneous transit between worlds, even if it causes a bit of a security headache in the meantime."

"Hello."

"You can call me Copper. I'm told you can do magic. Would you mind demonstrating and explaining some of that for me?"

Promise makes some hovering fairylights, then turns and grows her tree another several feet. "What kind of explanation do you want?"

"I'm curious about how it works and what sorts of things it can do. What I've specifically been asked to verify is that it can do things that would be hard to accomplish without magic, but that can be difficult to verify. I don't think I've heard of anyone being able to grow a tree that quickly, but it wouldn't astonish me if someone could. I'm told you can heal injuries much more effectively than a mundane doctor or medtech, but I don't have any injured people on hand to test that with."

"Silver saw me fix my broken hand and black eye... I'm not really keen on replicating either." Pause. "I can move my tree around." The tree waves its branches more energetically and irrespective of wind than trees are normally wont to do.

"I wouldn't ask you to injure yourself just to prove a point. But... hm. What sorts of things can you heal? If someone had a very old injury that mostly didn't trouble them anymore, could you heal it without knowing what it was?"

"Probably? I haven't run into many of that description but I can't see why not."

"I'd certainly accept that as strong evidence of magic, and I happen to have an injury like that."

"I'll need to be around you for a bit longer before I can cast anything on you. Maybe another ten minutes."

"I could hang around here for another ten minutes."

Nod. "I could also go through my gate into my old tree, if that would be helpful."

"That and the healing would be a comprehensive demonstration that you have magic of the described kinds, I think."

Promise flutters over to her gate, opens it, steps through, steps back, and closes it.

Copper observes this sequence of events and nods thoughtfully.

Promise flies back over to her tree, makes it give her a few more little fenceposts, and resumes placing them, looking at Copper periodically.

Well, this activity sure does strongly resemble magic. Copper continues to watch.

"Yes please."

Heal!

"Thanks."

"I'll get out of your hair. If you tire of Silver's company and want someone else to talk to, he can summon me anytime and I'll be visiting now and then to see how you're doing."

"Okay. No need to check in on me very frequently."

Promise draws and writes and thinks. She sings and sews and grows crops. She sleeps and eats and drinks.

Promise takes about two weeks remaining comfortably in her tree at the Electrically Conductive Metals family's lake house before she remarks that she is getting a little bored.

"Well, what would you like to do about that?"

"Well, you could just give me the sum total of all human media but I was thinking I could make you a gate or two."

"Eleven's got some people working on erasing all the names out of books and so on, so you can have the sum total of all human media pretty soon, but in the meantime, yes, some gates would be nice. What are the parameters here? Both in terms of the actual constraints on gatemaking and in terms of how much traipsing around nearby solar systems you'd like to do for testing purposes?"

"The gates will have to go through Fairyland. I can't make them point to point. So it will actually be two gates per. I have to be near both ends, and they'll take random amounts of time to settle. I'll make the Fairyland ends right next to each other and someplace it would be extremely unlikely for anyone to come through by accident. What kind of testing do you mean?"

"Well, for example: locations in the mortal world are not always fixed relative to one another. Locations in Fairyland mostly seem to be. So do you know how the stability of gate locations will be affected by the fact that this planet is constantly rotating and orbiting its star, which is moving relative to other stars, whose own planets also rotate and orbit them? If gate locations are straightforwardly stable relative to planets but not relative to smaller objects, how small can a planet get before it stops capturing gates? That sort of thing is best tested in some out-of-the-way system where if you lose hold of a gate it won't have sunk halfway through an inhabited planet before you can get back to Fairyland and close it from the other side."

"Oh. I don't have any idea at all. The one I made to my tree hasn't moved..."

"Yeah. I really should've thought of this earlier, but it's hard to think on a cosmic scale. What seems likeliest to me is that planets capture gates in a straightforward way, and then I have no idea what happens if you open a gate on a moon or a jumpship. But since it's conceivable that all gates in this world are now anchored to the rotation of this particular planet, or something similarly inconvenient, the first gate you open not on this planet should probably be in an uninhabited system just in case."

"Gates have been opened to the mortal world before. I don't know what planet they were to, but I would've maybe heard of it if the mortal world had a lot of red plants?"

"It's possible that different planets or solar systems have different harmonic properties and this one in particular just happens to have the property of convenient flatness, but it's also possible that there are multiple mortal worlds in this picture, and if that's so, maybe there has never been a gate to a different planet in this - galaxy, universe, what have you. I suppose if you like you could make a test gate to Earth and test its harmonic properties - Earth is definitely the strongest candidate for 'planet in this galaxy that fairies have been to before' - but I'd still prefer to soothe my worries about gate locations relative to planets-in-general first."

"Doing tests sounds reasonable."

"Yeah. So. What sort of information do you need in order to make a gate? Would I have to show you pictures of a suitable test location, or actually take you there, or what?"

"You mean if you want me to make the gate from the Fairyland end? I was planning on having the Fairyland ends all be too high up to fly to prevent accidents, as long as I can make them from here at all."

"Travel time to the nearest other inhabited planet we might want to gate to is a week. Making the Fairyland ends all too high to fly to is a good idea, but if you can make a gate from Fairyland to a desired location with some amount of information, it'll be a whole lot faster to make the gates from the Fairyland side anyway, perhaps by taking a lightflyer or small shuttle through to Fairyland so you have somewhere to sit while you construct them. For testing purposes, though, I can probably take you to an uninhabited planet that's as close as a few hours' travel away."

"Lightflyers don't need much air to fly in?"

"They need some air, but I could look for one that didn't need as much. Or use a shuttle, which is bigger but has no air-related requirements."

"I don't know exactly how much air there is at various altitudes so a shuttle's probably better."

"Logical. And... hm. Making gates across pressure differentials seems like it might lead to things like my planet losing a lot of air. Maybe we should be testing that in a nearby uninhabited system, unless you happens to know for sure that air doesn't cross gates by itself...?"

"...I don't think it does. I can check. My tree is airtight. If you have a candle I can leave it in there and go check on it later."

"...because they're leaves?"