"Clever Ways To Circumvent Fairies" thread.

[DanielH]

More simply, if you cannot speak and are given a sound-name, or have no hands and are given a sign-name, you cannot pronounce it.

Does the inability to harm the master go by what the master thinks would cause harm, what the vassal thinks would cause harm, or what would actually cause harm? For example, if your name was a 300-decibel screech (which you have the lung capacity and vocal equipment to produce) but unbeknownst to you the fairy kind had super magic hearing protection, would you obey an order to tell them your name? If the name is the Monty Python joke and the master believes in mind viruses but happens to have a slightly incompatible sense of humor (which neither of you could predict in advance), can you tell them your name if you can avoid laughing yourself to death in the process? What if they don’t believe mind viruses could possibly be real?

[Alicorn]

If you can't pronounce your name you can't pronounce your name.

It's sort of a combination of the three things. What you think will cause harm affects your erring on the side of caution; if you think (legitimately) that something will harm your master you have to give it a wide berth when you're acting of your own volition. What will actually cause harm can kick in if you don't know your master is your master or if they're way more fragile than you think or if you're under orders. What your master thinks of as harm can affect what things enter the category at all (it is slightly more difficult for Promise's vassals to probe the edges of what constitutes mental sorcery with her than with some possible masters).

So if you don't know about the hearing protection you can't screech your name of your own accord until your master's hearing protection is revealed to you, but can if they tell you they have that or if they order you to. But fairies are super immortal so they can't laugh themselves to death (nor even unconsciousness, probably) and making your master just plain laugh doesn't constitute harm so you can say your killing joke name when so ordered, possibly unless your master is Promise, even if you don't know fairies are immortal.

[DanielH]

Then did you mean a different Monty Python sketch for being unable to tell your name to your master? I don’t know much Monty Python, so the only other thing I can think of is “Ni!”, and that doesn’t seem like enough harm to be relevant.

[Kappa]

I'm now imagining frustrated fairies encountering a society of nonfairies where everyone has names that are like, [the sight of this exact configuration of stars in the sky from this particular viewing location combined with the smell of woodsmoke and the sound of windchimes] because magic, and so when a fairy asks one of these people to divulge their name and none of the nicknames or descriptions click, they're like "okay, I guess you'll have to wait until late summer and go to this hill near where I was born and light a small fire and hang up windchimes and stare at the sky until it comes together".

[DanielH]

And that society could exist if everybody had sound-nicknames like “Clearsprings Summer Breeze” or shortenings.

[Kappa]

Yes.

[MaggieoftheOwls]

Society of people where, like skyveils, everyone has a unique sense, and their True Name is always a sensory impression in that sense.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

People who can't or don't need to eat, I.E. Devices like Brilliance, would have an advantage avoiding fairies that mere name shenanigans don't match. Are there ways around the food thing except just not eating fairyland things?

[Alicorn]

You could potentially just manage to avoid any fairies with a sufficient claim on the exact food you eat.

[DanielH]

At some point, it isn’t worth it to go and get the name. The main advantage of having a vassal’s name is the ability to give it to somebody else; a secondary advantage is knowing for sure that they are your vassal, but you can test that other ways (like the way Promise tests her mastery of that one court). A food-based vassalization, especially fairy-to-mortal or vice-versa, usually lasts longer than somebody’s memory of names, right?

Another part of clever fairy circumvention is getting away from existing masters. We’ve already seen a few methods of doing this (loophole exploitation, deliberate deafness, having a third party prevent you from following orders); what are others, or a way to make these more reliable?