"That's why first look, so we'll know more about who to vassalise next..." Thoughtful pause. "I wonder if hypnosis works on fairies. And more importantly, if it's possible to order someone well enough that they can be suggestible to it."

"...Is this some kind of mental sorcery type thing...?"

"Nnnnoooot exactly. It's regular psychology, er, at least mortal psychology. A therapist or someone with appropriate training can make someone become very strongly suggestible, to the point that they can hallucinate vividly or believe something is hot that isn't or, relevantly, completely block off certain memories and believe other things instead."

"Do you know how to do that?"

"No. I don't know how much training's necessary, even, maybe not a lot but. What I know of it, though, is that it requires, or at least is vastly easier, with... trust? It's usually used for mental illness treatment, and the patient's supposed to want to be hypnotised, or at least be able to just let themself be guided by the hypnotist, and I'm not sure how much ordering someone can overcome their internal resistance to it."

"Orders cannot generate trust, or mental relaxation, although they can force people to attempt techniques that can generate those things."

"There are books about it, and perhaps better a Wikipedia page about it that might give us enough information on whether it's worth pursuing or not. Wikipedia is a sort of encyclopedia you can access using a computer."

"...Cool," is her opinion on Wikipedia.

"Very! And it's—" Pause. "I can nerd about Wikipedia and how great it is later. If we could make a Thorn vassal forget..." he trails off, reaching inside his backpack for a mortal contraption with a screen and various buttons.

"It'd be very promising, although they'd have to forget really thoroughly."

"I'm not sure how much of what I heard is true or fiction, but supposedly you can make someone completely block off a memory until a certain condition is met, like a word spoken or something. It's also supposed to be powerful enough to give the hypnotist master-like ordering abilities with absolutely zero magic." He starts typing into his contraption.

"Then why wouldn't fairies have heard of it? Is it new?"

He looks distracted by whatever's on his contraption, and takes a second to answer: "By fairy standards, maybe. Humans discovered it about a hundred years ago, apparently, and humans have more standardised ways of discovering things than fairies do."

"Yeah, that might be new enough, especially if it's rare and difficult. If it does rely on subject cooperation, though, we shouldn't count on it helping at all."

"It..." He reads some more. "May not rely on intrinsic subject cooperation? The techniques described here speak of focusing on stuff, relaxing muscles, paying strict attention to what someone's saying, stuff that's at least theoretically orderable?"

"Those things are orderable as long as the muscles are ones people have volitional control over."

"Yeah, it does say here one needs to be, like, relaxed and completely focused on the task at hand and not thinking about anything else... Which may not be a state of mind we could induce with orders."

"One can make someone think about, but not not think about, a subject with orders."

"But if they're ordered to focus exclusively on something? Or, suppose they were ordered to try to, to the best of their ability, cooperate with the hypnosis? Even in very stressful situations spending a while breathing deeply and such ought to calm people down, no?"

"Yeah, that might work, I don't know if it would work well enough. Thorn was good at filling up somebody's mind with only one thing, he liked to make us brute-force cube roots of large numbers, but there was usually a little ability to think around it... Most people can't actually volitionally concentrate wholly on a single thing very well."

He scrolls through the page some more and sighs. "Yeah, this kinda works best in a state that's almost like sleeping. There's a bunch of theories on how it works, and some people are more suggestible than others, but yeah, the idea's kinda just letting your mind follow the voice of the hypnotist until it leads you somewhere. I'm not sure if there's a safe way to test it."

"I doubt Yellow's a good example of a resistant mind and I didn't cave after some fifty years with Thorn so I'm probably an outlier in the wrong direction and neither of us knows how to do it so even if we assume fairy and mortal baseline is the same..."

"Not knowing how to do it may not be a strict problem because we could hire someone else, but yeah, this is probably not a resource worth looking into. It does say, here, that it never found military applications."

"And this is after a fashion the same rigor requirement."

"Yeah," he sighs. "So we can't count on having our vassals forget they've been captured, and each mole we plant will need to be watched reasonably constantly. Ideally we'd try to get someone high enough that they'd give us enough information for us to get a reasonable first-look at the web."