infiltrating the court

[msmortal]

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-

Comments

[mrmortal]

"I... have kinda given up hope on getting her back. Two months watching Thorn, I-" He falls silent.

[imeanforever]

"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."

[mrmortal]

"Yeah," he shakes his head and sighs, then focuses on the task at hand. "How will they deal with food? Foraging? Is there a reason why Yellow himself can't also use the large phone thing, as added precaution?"

[imeanforever]

"Yellow should also have a large phone thing, good idea. We could rotate them."

[mrmortal]

"And I'm thinking of different, faster ways to video orders than sign language. I'm not sure how they'll interact with plain speak, but..."

[imeanforever]

"Writing only works if you see the writing process. It's slower than sign."

[mrmortal]

"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."

[imeanforever]

"I'm betting typing doesn't count but we can check. Stamping - maybe. Word assembling maybe."

[mrmortal]

"Stamping would be really cheating, I'm not sure you can sign faster than you can hit paper with a thing full of ink."

[imeanforever]

"Can't."

[mrmortal]

He turns the screen on on another computer and opens an empty text document. "Let's test typing?" he says, gesturing around to let her.

(And being filled with some trepidation.)

[imeanforever]

...She blinks at the keyboard.

"I don't know how to type," she says.

[mrmortal]

"...oh. Right." Slight disappointment? Surely not. "Can I try it on you, then?"

[imeanforever]

"You may type an order to unroll my wings."

[mrmortal]

Unroll your wings.

[imeanforever]

Typing doesn't work; her wings stay rolled up.

[mrmortal]

He sighs. "Well, was worth a try."

[imeanforever]

"The other two might still work. I think mortal language might be more consistently legible in stamped or assembled form."

[mrmortal]

"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?"

[imeanforever]

"Maybe 'order them to stop'."

[mrmortal]

"Order, them, to, don't, no, not, do- make it ten of each, yes, and twenty of the kind that you can change. Yes, as soon as possible. Thank you." He puts down his phone. "We'll get stamps in about an hour."

[imeanforever]

"Okay."

[mrmortal]

"Sorcery and mortal scarcity combine so well."

[imeanforever]

"Because you have so much money now?"

[mrmortal]

"Yep. I mean, the final utopic plan is moving humanity to a post-scarce society and fairyland to a post-vassalisation society and I'm not above cheating my way there."