She's a four-year-old girl, and people (especially her Dad) insist she's a boy.
Not that she isn't sometimes. She is. But not today! Today she's a girl. And Dad keeps saying that's not true, that God made her body perfect and she shouldn't second-guess God's plan for her. God made her a boy, so she's supposed to be a boy. And on the one hand that kinda makes sense. God doesn't make mistakes, right? So if she were really a girl sometimes, then she'd... what? Her body would change, she guesses. But on the other hand, she knows she's a girl. She's a girl with a peepee, that's obvious. She'd prefer not having a peepee when she's a girl, but it's not the worst thing ever. And if God doesn't make mistakes, God also didn't make her feel like a girl sometimes on accident, right? It must be part of His (because God is always a He, even though God made everyone, boys and girls, in His image, he's always a He, Dad says) plan.
She tells Dad that, today, and Dad gets angry, and yells at her, and she doesn't know why he's yelling. It makes sense to her! But he won't explain why she's wrong, he's just yelling, Dad's so mean, she hates him, and she's not crying, shut up, you're crying!
And now Mum's coming and she's talking to Dad, and that usually makes Dad stop yelling and go away but he won't stop now and Sadde's angry and afraid and hurt and she's running away. A part of her thinks that it doesn't make much sense to run away, the park is pretty open and she can't really hide anywhere, and she'll have to go back because she'll get hungry (not now, though, she just ate a sandwich).
So she runs until she finds some bushes where she can hide, and she hides there, and she doesn't cry, and she spends a long time not crying. Mum and Dad don't come after her, though, and after she's done not crying she doesn't wipe her eyes and her nose, and she comes out the other way of the bushes she was hiding in.
And she's pretty sure that's not the park.
"He probably has those, and I bet they prevent him from hearing further orders. I guess you could justify either first."
"If we stop him first and then he can't hear any more orders, we won't actually have him, only whoever we hire will. If he gives us his name, we'll have him, but he will be able to do whatever."
"Yeah. And if we have him but we can't further order him his other vassals will still know our names if they do, or if he tells them. He works through intermediaries anyway... If he expects you to come after him he may have something set up to kill your mother if anything happens."
"Works if we get it all out. We'd have to hope to get him while he's in a different site from the one holding your mother so we'd have time to interrupt the information."
"We don't need to hope for it if we make it so. We'll lay the trap in some specific court, we can choose our ground, I think."
"Puts more constraints on the plan and leaves potentially longer for the moles to be discovered, but yes."
"So there's at most a seventeen percent chance that the site we end up with will be the one that contains her even a priori, it's not that big a constraint."
"But it just occurred to me—how does plainspeak work with other languages? Like, could I cram a longer order into a shorter amount of time if I used words in other languages that translated relevant concepts?"
"I have no idea how plain speak works, either," he shrugs. "Mortal languages string sounds together to form words, which have particular meanings. And some languages have single, short words for meanings that other languages need multiple words for. For instance, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some language out there that had a single, short word for the concept of 'lying convincingly' or something like that. And same thing for 'say your name' which in English is three words."
"I mean, I'm sure you could just hire someone who talks fast, that would have the same effect."
"Not the literal same effect, 'sayyournameandstop' takes a minimum amount of time to be comprehensibly said."
"...By all means find the mortal who can say that the fastest, however they go about doing it. And you can drop the 'and'."
"- I was imagining cutting in with 'stop' right when he finished saying his name but I guess you wouldn't know exactly when it ended automatically, let alone whoever you hire. 'And' is probably better though. Or 'then'."
"Yeah, 'sayyournamethenstop' is probably best. I wonder what he'd do if he got a stop order and then whatever precautions he has kicked in, if he doesn't have anyone to unorder him. That'd probably be pretty unpleasant."
"Not sure. He might have a backup and just do a really good job of seeming like he doesn't."
"What would happen to his court if he really didn't, though? If he were completely removed from the picture like that?"
"I'd expect it to fragment; Blossom could take substantial parts of it but not necessarily all of it before others made off with the rest. This assumes they're not well-ordered to fetch him back and reinstall him, though, which they probably are."
"No, I mean, if he were ordered to stop and then could hear no further orders. Presumably if we succeed we won't just remove him, his vassals would probably be only marginally better and the point is to eliminate horrible torture not just decentralise it."
"If he were just sort of stopped indefinitely I think Blossom would try to get him to safety and run the court for him until she could get a berrybush besides Sugar, or a mortal besides you or your mother. More likely the latter."