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—
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."
"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."
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.
"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.
"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?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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.
"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.
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?"
"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."
"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."
Last safe house! Another one with two stories, a road is visible in the distance but most of the surroundings are steppes.
"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..."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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.'"
"Careful not to break anything," she says, not taking her eyes off the screen.
"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."
"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.
"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."
"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."
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 then: they watch and wait.
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.
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.
"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?"
And if there are any loopholes in that...
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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?"
"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?"
"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."
"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?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
Then, with both Mortal and Promise safely away from her, the stop order is rescinded.
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.
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..
"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?"
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.
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.
"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."
"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."
"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..."
"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?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
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.'
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?
"Okay, so not all is lost," he says, releasing a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding.
"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.
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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"...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."
"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."
"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.
"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'?"
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."
"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?"
"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."
"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 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."
"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?"
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?"
"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."
"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."
"...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, 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..."
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.
"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."
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?"
The video feed starts, and the employee turns out to be a fairly sharp-looking woman in her thirties.
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.
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.
"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."
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."
"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'?"
"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 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."
"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..."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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..."