blood sweat tear

[imeanforever]

He's moving her to a different court to see if it'll improve her attitude. She's allowed to fly. It's been a long, long time since she was allowed to -

She is only allowed to fly to her destination, not anywhere else. She notices that she is not where she should be, that she cannot progress to where she was told to go, and she careens out of control when her wings won't flap anymore, and she crashes.

---

with Miles (kappa)

with Minus (kappa)

Comments

[thisvorlunatic]

"Would it?"

[imeanforever]

"...She's Queen because her kind magic is to know every fairy's name."

[thisvorlunatic]

"...well. That... would definitely change things, yes. But - once you have the Queen, how do you propose to keep her?"

[imeanforever]

"What do you mean?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"I mean, if having control of the Queen confers control over every fairy, then the sort of people who think conquering the galaxy is a good idea are going to want to get their hands on the Queen, and if they can't do that, some might be motivated to try to destroy her instead. This seems like an inherently fragile situation."

[imeanforever]

"Well, they can't destroy her, although I suppose they could make it prohibitively difficult to get her to recite names. Anyway, there's a first mover advantage. The first person to conquer Queenscourt with mortal assistance can then shore it up against repeats of the same tactic in a way it is currently - probably - weak."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Standard mortal defensive tactics have no argument whatsoever against standard mortal offensive tactics plus gates, assuming the attacker doesn't want the defender in any state more precise than 'probably vaporized'. How well do standard fairy defensive tactics hold up against..."

He frowns in thought for a moment, then goes on,

"I'm having trouble summarizing all of mortal weaponry in a single sentence, but the images that loom largest in my mind are the gravitic imploder lance and the electron orbital randomizer. Um, approximately, 'everything in the path of this weapon is briefly made thousands of times heavier relative to inconvenient new definitions of down' and 'everything in the path of this weapon turns into immense amounts of fire'. As opposed to merely being set on immense amounts of fire, which is accomplished by a different and much less terrifying device. Mortal defensive tactics have very effective ways to guard against both of these which require interposing a shield between the source of the weapon and the thing being protected."

[imeanforever]

"I have actually no idea how that sort of thing would interact with a sorcery ward. Maybe the Queen can't be stably held, but in that case she can't stably hold herself and the best bet is to put her somewhere sufficiently anonymous."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yeah. We do have the first-mover advantage, and that's not to be discounted, but... I'm torn between wanting everyone to know about the names problem so they can protect future generations of mortals, and wanting no one to know about the names problem so I don't wake up one morning to find some paranoid individual has gotten hold of a gate-capable fairy and started invading every planet they can find a holo of. I hadn't realized until just now how much of the stability of human relations is maintained by the inability of people to travel from point to arbitrary point without passing through the intervening space... but I know how much it would benefit people to be able to stroll casually between star systems, so denying everyone gates forever seems like the wrong answer. I don't know."

[imeanforever]

"I certainly know less about how mortals and their planets work than you do."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Anything we do, including 'nothing', might conceivably lead to the wrong person getting their hands on the wrong magical or technological advantage and starting one or more huge wars," he sighs. "This is not a good situation to be in."

[imeanforever]

"Yeah."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Looking at things from as unbiased a perspective as I can manage... my planet is probably one of the better ones you could have landed on, and I'm probably one of the better people," he says. "The second-best place I can think of... has a historical problem with trying to conquer other planets to add to their eight-planet empire, but I've met their Empress and she's as sensible and levelheaded a person as you could ask for; if you got in with her you'd be all right. I'm thinking about this because with the stakes as high as they are, I want to be sure you have access to the best possible resources even if that means recommending you set up shop with a rival political entity."

[imeanforever]

"Thank you."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I think the situation you're in comes out on top relative to any attempt to move to the second-place planet, just because there's no good way to send you directly to their empress without anyone else having the chance to interfere. And interference could get unpleasant, and I'd have no leverage there to help. Well, very little leverage. I did rescue their empire from civil war one time, which is how I know how trustworthy their empress is in the first place, but I didn't get much lasting public recognition out of it and I definitely couldn't get you all the way to a private audience with her while maintaining all necessary secrets."

[imeanforever]

Nod.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Barring any further sudden epiphanies about the implications of the situation at hand, I think my major medium-term goal here has to be getting you in a position to overthrow the Queen, and making sure you have appropriate protection afterward. Which might mean you overthrow the Queen and then rule Fairyland as a Vicereine answerable-by-custom to my Emperor, unless you have somebody else you'd like to appoint to that job once you've secured the Queen."

[imeanforever]

"I... don't know who else would be good for it. Answerable-by-custom?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Well, in practice, I'm the only one who can actually stop you from doing whatever the hell you like with Fairyland, and if I thought I might have to do that I wouldn't be trying to hand it to you in the first place. A Vicereine or Viceroy is supposed to do what the Emperor tells them, but the ways in which this is enforceable against mortals mostly don't hold up against you even without all of Fairyland in your pocket. We would pretty much be trusting you to just politely refrain from spending the at most two hours it would take you to find out your own Emperor's name despite our best efforts to hide it, and in return for your forbearance and general cooperativeness with imperial directives, you could fold yourself into our galactic reputation for being a really bad idea to try to conquer, and have the assistance of our military in protecting yourself and the Queen against external threats."

[imeanforever]

"Sounds fun."

[thisvorlunatic]

"It sounds pretty farcical to me. We'd have to redact the Emperor's name from the loyalty oath, assuming you could even take the loyalty oath since I doubt Eleven wants to let you in the same room with the Emperor long enough to say anything, and you couldn't ever learn what the vast majority of planets and interplanetary governing bodies in the galaxy are commonly called because any one of them probably shares syllables with a few billion people's names. For that matter I guess I'm taking your word for it that you're not analyzing everything I say for possible name contents. But even if you're being nice and not peeking, most political entities aren't named things that are otherwise words."

[imeanforever]

"I am not laboriously rendering your utterances into phonemes and juggling them into sequences that might theoretically sound nice to a human parent."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Good. Also, in case you were wondering, my professional analysis of how easily you could in fact conquer my planet is 'very quickly, but for at most a couple of weeks before the inevitable civil war started'. We have a galactic reputation for being a really bad idea to try to conquer for good reason."

[imeanforever]

"I have no reason to think your planet needs conquering, not that I'm basing this lack of impression on much information."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I wish you could meet my Emperor in some sort of minimally fraught social context. I like him. He's... the sort of person an Emperor should be."