Praxis: Rank 2

Rank 2 Praxis

(Difficulty 19)

"As I Have Spoken"

Effects at this rank of Praxis call forth the substance of your desire and your intention into the is.

Start the effect with a declaration of what you shall achieve.

Typically this is several sentences—about 7-40 words, using about 15 seconds of real time (not counting hesitation, panic, uncertainty, and "um," so let's call it "up to a minute.") This is usually made in character, which is to say, you use the same declaration in real life that your character silently affirms. If this is impossible for some reason—e.g., your character is declaring an image that you don't have the time or skill to quickly draw, or your character doesn't quite know what they're doing but you do—then you can spend a few more sentences clarifying.

In any case, though, the core is something that your character is focusing their mind and intention and actions to achieve, and something of a mundane character. (That specifically means that you're not trying to manipulate the abstract magical environment like power tokens, diodes, and so forth—it's OK if you want to achieve something magical like enspelling someone or squeezing through a passage smaller than your head or whatnot.) You then spend the next three rounds acting on this intention and make a roll; if nothing interferes, and if you succeed, then your declaration joins the is.

The effects of Praxis are limited to the component in which you act, plus the surrounding generic continuum. It's OK if it diffuses somewhat to affect others, but when you're acting on somebody far away who isn't connected to you with the scene rules above it doesn't have the clear character of the is.

In a similar fashion, actions, in order to interfere with you, have to have a path (connection or diode) to the component in which you act. Nobody in Rome gets to do something that randomly messes with your action in Santa Ynez, at least, not unless they're already magically a "part" of what's going on.

Should you fail the roll, or should someone interfere with your action, then the magic of your declaration falls into the would have been. It remains with you, echoing, but does not manifest. If you both fail the roll and are interfered with, or if the interference is of a particularly perverse or effective character (see the rules for certain Mist effects), then your declaration becomes part of the might have been instead.

Here's an example:

• Declaration: "I'm going to ace this math test."
• Praxis: you ace the math test.

What if you fail the roll? Then you don't ace the test; you just would have aced the test. If . . . something had been different. If you'd been better at magic, or if you'd studied differently, or something. The matter is ambiguous. If someone sabotages your efforts and you fail the roll, then it's more like, wow, you really told yourself you were going to ace that test, didn't you? But in the end that was just a dream, a myth, a fantasy that dissipated on the morning. That's when reality sinks into your stomach like a cold hard stone and you find yourself weeping mathlessly into your milk. Or acelessly. Maybe even testlessly if this terrible conjunction of misfortunes has caused you to be unable to take the test at all.

You can use Praxis for more important things than simply acing math tests, if one accepts that education can pale beside other things in worth. For example, if you're suddenly stuck piloting a plane because the pilot has gone into deliria, you might try something like:

• Declaration: "I'm going to land this plane safely. On a cumulus cloud!"
• Praxis: you do exactly this. The problems that may follow on the heels of this endeavor are really nobody's fault but your own.

The skill that you may or may not have in piloting is irrelevant to the case, and so is the inherent improbability of the landing you have planned. These things color what you choose to do, what you decide on doing, and ultimately whether you're going to succumb to Mist—but the only major advantage of feasible action is that it helps you remain true to the world and who you are. And again if you succeed, and if you are not opposed, then your declaration becomes an element of the real.

That said—and bearing in mind that this is a description of modality and not of fallibility—you do have to be able to act to bring your declaration to pass. The rule of Praxis is that your intention is a thing you are trying to achieve. So you can certainly ace a math test even if you have no skill at math—but to do so you must enact a plan or series of uncoordinated actions in service to that intention. You may land a plane on a cloud, even though clouds are typically gaseous and fairies unpracticed in piloting planes, but you have to set out to achieve this goal and take a series of sensible actions to that end. If necessary or desirable, either to yourself or to the GM (or to the other players, but mostly only if you or the GM wish to satisfy their curiosity), you should make a short statement in each round (again, 1-2 sentences) explaining what you are doing towards your declaration.

This would look something as follows:

• Declaration: "I'm going to land this plane safely. On a cumulus cloud!"
• Action #1: "I am frantically scanning instruments and pulling on things."
• Action #2: "I can see a cloud. I'm moving in!"
• Action #3: "I'm strengthening the cloud with glamour so that I have a place to land."

In rare cases, factual issues may raise their head at this juncture. For instance, the GM may say, in action #2, that no clouds are present. Or remind the player, in action #1, that they are not actually in a plane. If something like this happens, the player may then yield the action (as if preemptively failing the roll); try a new strategy; or request that the GM provide a reasonable alternative path to fulfilling either their original declaration or something closely related.

The fairy term for the result of such an action is a trod: a point of certainty in the vastness of the world. You are not creating a nexus, flow, connection, token, Mist, or anything of the sort: you are creating a single trod, a point of certainty on which to stand, a thing—if you succeed—that you have successfully done. This becomes part of the fabric of your component, fading with time only insofar as time renders the success itself irrelevant.

There are no fairy types that have a bonus on rank 2 Praxis, but Knacks often offer +1. For example a studious fairy could ace a test with an 18, and a terrifying wolf could scare someone with the same roll. Nexuses sometimes oppose the formation of contrary trods; in this case, the character must overcome the nexus' quality in order to succeed. Failure is counted just as if the character was successfully opposed; thus, in the unusual case of a nexus with quality 18, the character would either succeed (19+) and plant their trod in the is, or fail (18-) and have their action instantaneously banished into the might have been.

Elemental Spirits of Rank 2 Praxis include worgs, poltergeists, and pictsies, specializing respectively in "you are devoured in the woods;" "that object is broken;" and "this person has become mazed, disoriented, or lost." These creatures are not required to specify their actions insofar as their very existence is the enaction of their declared prophecy; should they take form and engage in other activities, this benefit ceases and they must perform actions to produce results in a normal fashion.

Magical Structures: Slowing a Connection

This is a specialty of the trickle-fey.

Imagine that there is already a fast connection between two groups. And imagine that you want to make a slow one.

Normally the slow connection would become immediately dormant—magic won't flow through a slow connection when there's a fast one. Instead of creating a new slow connection in this circumstance, you can convert one or more of the fast connections into slow ones.

Here's how this works.

First, you divide the component into two subgroups. These are the groups you'd want to make the slow connection between. Then you look at the fast connections between them. In order to slow these connections, replacing all of them with slow connections, you'll need to make a Praxis roll that beats the quality of the highest-quality connection. If you fail, then nothing happens.

This is treated exactly as creating a slow connection, but for everyone but the trickle-fey there's a base difficulty of -3. The trickle-fey instead lose their standard bonus of a free success.

Character Splat: Treacle-Fey

Treacle-Fey

also named "trickle-fey"

And it was in looking over to see the grinding, opening, and closing of many mouths, and the blinking and shifting and winking and peering of all those trickle-eyes, and the wings! The opening and closing of the wings! And the way that forms traced by the eye faded off into angles and tangents, and the sense that somewhere there were fires, but never where I looked! And the way my gaze would wander, seeking helplessly for a place to rest! that I stumbled and fell headlong, and said, "My friend, once again you are confusion unto me."

She could not help me to my feet.

It was impossible. Each time she took hold of me I lost my senses once again. Finally I staggered up and gripped a tree branch—

And oh! Thank all things good and right, it had no eyes, no mouths, no fires, no lights, no fluttering of wings—

And said, as lucidly as I could, "You are non-Euclidian again."

She looked down. She scuffed the floor with the passage of her wings. She said, "It's my Grecian habit!"

It was several weeks later that I woke up in the middle of the night, stomped over to her house, banged on the door, and told her, firmly, "That was a very bad pun to tell a disoriented friend."

— The Trickle-Fey, by May O'Neill

The trickle-fey are manifestations of disorderly thinking, and as such, their shapes vary as to form. In the most common case they are simply creatures shaped after conjecture: frog-icorns, line rays with blinky eyes, hedgehog-based chimerae with the wings of angels, the warts of toads, and the head and forepaws of a lion. Each is vulnerable to "going Ezekiel," which is to say, losing track of proper form at all and becoming instead a kind of lifeline to the numinous wash of experience, a shape of a thousand disordered impressions and a holy character. (Wicked treacles may instead "shoggoth," which is to say, give off an abominable and unsainly impression in this state; this is more of a weapon than an actual description of their character.)

It is their purpose to shepherd the might have been. They are responsible for keeping the world a little crazy, a little uncertain, a little bigger than what a person can fit inside their head. They have to care for ideas and phenomena that don't actually work, guard the nonsensical and hypothetical, and ensure a place remains for the frivolous. At the same time, they are constitutionally incapable of casual or flippant imagination: what they find in the might have been is what they find, and what they see is what they see, and they are prone to neurotically worry about their lack of imagination, predictability, and rigidity of thought while explaining the benefits of paving over the oceans or recounting their recent journey in a giant teacup carried off by doves. In short they are afflicted with the sort of imagination and dreamscape that is very serious and real to them, populated principally with genuine forms from the might have been, and occasioning grave concerns.

The power of the trickle-fey has a strong tendency to interfere with the magic of what is. It may make bridges and connections where none existed, may in that one sense facilitate the use of power, but the swarming might have been that occupies the metaphysical space around the trickle-fey tends to confuse anything anybody wants to do. In short, a trickle-fey is a great trouble to their enemies, and a kind of safety to their friends—in fact, to the degree that they're often considered good luck, and people will rub their heads or bellies when they're not all Ezekiel in the hopes of fortune—but you don't want one helping you on a spell you want to go right.

The logic of a trickle-fey is generally not the same as the logic of those around them. For this reason, the invocations of the trickle-fey have two forms. One is the form that the trickle-fey uses; one is the form that the GM can understand them to mean.

These are the standard invocations of the trickle-fey.

• I know what's going on.
  [Interpretation: I am part of what's going on. I am connected to it.]
  
  
• I confound things with logic.
  [Interpretation: I tangle up magic. I cause spells and other magic to go haywire.]
  
  
• I know what to do.
  [Interpretation: I draw on the might have been to make the implausible possible.]
  
  
• Lucky!
  [Interpretation: I bring good luck to those around me.]
  

Example: "I confound things with logic. I can keep this spell bottled up for a few minutes while you guys tackle the necromancer!"

Trickle-fey have a +1 bonus on defensive magic and countermagic, whether defending themselves or others. They are never captured by method tokens, and on a Praxis roll of 23+ they can remove 1-5 such tokens from a scene.

Famous trickle-fey include Ayumu the Seeker, Prill, Angela Severin, and the Kerubim (an order of trickle-fey with a mandate to subdue both wicked treacles and nasty chimerae, ultimately, according to rumor, with the intention of recruiting them both into some greater scheme of which others are unaware.) Stanford and Berkeley have programs in trickle-logic and chimera herding, but for the most part it's a rare trickle-fey that completes its academic ambitions—most of them rise to the level of their incapacities, whether that is elementary school or a graduate program, and then immerse themselves there indefinitely as a minor institution of the program, generating enough improbable successes to keep themselves from expulsion but never enough to graduate and move on to wherever they intended to go. Arguably those few trickle-fey with doctorates are in the same position: they are the eternally untenured professors, the lab workers of problematic productivity, and in Ms. Severin's case, a kind of failed Buckaroo Banzai, an omnicompetent polymath haunted by a trail of not-quite-finished inventions, not-quite-solved mysteries, and incompletely defeated enemies. (She is particularly noted for solving the room-temperature superconductivity problem and then accidentally baking her notes.)

You should play a trickle-fey if . . .
You are tired of being chained down by reason. If you want to protect people from magic more than you want to use it. If you are going to be saying crazy things during the game anyway. If you want to play with chimerae and the world of the might have been. If you want to be more of a follower than a leader. If you want to get involved in anything and everything, but don't want your heart broken by it. If you want to think slow, deep, and sideways instead of fast, shallow, or normal. If you want to find an order and a glory in nonsense, like Lewis Carroll did, or to express the inexpressible insanity of the real world or the world of dream. If you would rather be amusing than respected. If you want to be extremely hard to throw off your track—not just stubborn but also well-rooted and calm. If you want to have your own ideas on things and be able to apply them even if they're wrong. If you want to know that the world is a more marvelous place than even your other fairy friends think, and that you're safe just about anywhere in it. If you can dissociate your real-world common sense without just making random stuff up or being disruptive. If you want to be helpful to others rather than driving things yourself. If you are desperate to know just where that teacup carried off by doves would take you. If you love words and pictures almost more than things. If you think abstractly. If you've ever wondered what the letter "w" feels like when it wakes up in the morning. If you'd add lemonade to your tea to save time on adding lemon and sugar separately. If you've ever forgotten where your glasses are while wearing them. If you can't help talking to dogs and cats in their own language when you meet them. If you think it would be cool to walk on your hands for a day, but keep giving up a minute and a half in when you try. If you want to be cool and beautiful in a way that is absolutely nothing like what people usually mean by cool and beautiful, which is to say, like an airplane crashing into you on a starlit summer night.

Metaphysics: The Would-Have-Been

The Would-Have-Been

And underneath what is, like the deeper currents beneath the ocean's face, is the would have been.

The would have been, too, is made of forms.

They present themselves to the mind: look, here ought have been a cat; here, there could have been a table; here, but for that which intercedes, a person would have died.

The would have been is more personal than the is.

The forms shift; they are ambiguous; they are keyed, in respects, to the mind that watches. They are ghosts and shadows. But they are not unreal. Any fairy can touch upon the would have been, see into it, pull pieces of it closer to the surface or push them farther down.

Something is, beneath the is. Something is, that would have been.

We can say, roughly, that there are two large categories of things that fall into the would have been. The first is myth and story. These are great underdeep currents, powers that shoulder their way in and about the is, things constantly seeking to disturb reality with themselves. These are the things that wish to be and they impinge on the mind as things that we feel, see, believe, but know at the same time they are not true.

These are the closet monsters; these are the triumphs of righteousness; these are the perfect towns that exist somewhere in the country, the perfect lives, the perfect people. These are the killer bees. These are Elvis, still alive, and just a little over at the gas pump next to your own.

And then there are the actions of the fey that fail to be true.

When a fairy seeks to act, and is prevented, then their action falls into the would have been. The fore-echo of their intention still lingers in the world. The thing they would have achieved still hangs about them like an aura in the air. It lives. It is like a snarling cat, retreating with reluctance from the good food of the world.

The marks it leaves as it departs the real become a portion of what is.

Then last there is a spare small scattering of forms that emerge on their own into the would have been. It is always possible, after all, to come upon a person and realize, "They would have been a car!" Or to find an apple tree and say, "This would have been an orange!"

Here, there would have been a building---if the project hadn't failed.

This cup! It would have broken, if the floor hadn't been so soft.

These things are unique in their behavior; they have no characteristic quality; they do not organize themselves into rivers of myth or partake in the actions of the fey. They are simply padding in the would have been---things that came close to happening but did not; things too strong for the might have been.

And the meaning of all of this is simple: that the forms of the world, and the actions of the fey, conduct themselves with a certain mindfulness to the thrumming currents of the would have been below. They are shaped by them, buffeted by them, mindful of them: though they are not the same, what is knows what could have been.

It can be denied truth, but not existence.

It lives and piles up in echoes within the substance of the Mist.

Magical Structures: Diodes

Diodes

A diode lets power pass through it in one direction. Creating diodes is the particular specialty of the watch-fey.

Here is how a diode works.

Diodes are a special kind of connections. They can connect to characters, connections, and other things (such as diodes.)

Designate one side of the diode as "active" and one side as "receptive." This is often drawn as a triangle on a line, like so:

———
"Diode"

The left side, with the base of the triangle, is active. The right side, with the point of the triangle, is receptive.

Game tokens and spells on the active side of the line are shared with the rest of the component on the receptive side. So if there is a watch-fey (W) on the active side, and the watch-fey has a spell and a power token, these are part of the receptive component.

W——— (component)
the watch-fey spells and power tokens are available to the component

The active side also has the power to act on, and interfere with actions taken on, the other side. For example, if the component contains a princess and a basilisk, with said basilisk attempting to turn the princess to stone, the watch-fey would be able to prevent that action by doing something of their own.



The converse is not normally true. If the princess wanted to act on the watch-fey, she'd have trouble, and if there's a ton of power in the princess-basilisk component, the watch-fey can't automatically draw on it. The active side of the diode is isolated both from power and from consequence.

However, each diode has a rating—a number that you can overcome to pass power back the other way. Out-rolling the diode's rating on a single-action basis allows someone on the receptive side to act on the active side; it can also allow someone to make a connection or diode the other way, at which point the presence of the diode is irrelevant.

Diodes come in two forms: slow and fast.

Slow diodes are incompatible with

• connections between the active and receptive components; and
• diodes that go the other direction between the two components.

Fast diodes are incompatible with

• fast connections between the active and receptive components; and
• fast diodes that go the other direction between the two components.

What this means is that if you want to add a connection or a diode that breaks these rules, you have to beat the rating of every incompatible previous connection or diode. If you succeed on this, rolling higher than each of these ratings, you cut away the incompatible connections and diodes.


Slow diodes are partially incompatible with

• fast diodes that go the same direction.

If you want to add a diode that breaks this rule, you have to beat the rating of the incompatible diodes. If you succeed, though, nothing gets cut: rather, the slow diode is temporarily disabled until such time as any incompatible fast diodes go away. Anything else that would get cut—if it weren't for this rule—gets to survive until that happens.

Here's an example.



There are two watch-fey interfering with the princess and the basilisk. They are working together, and each of them has made a fast diode connecting to the princess-basilisk component.

The basilisk is getting irritated.

It decides to lash out at the watch-fey, dragging them into the fight. It is, in short, attempting to make a fast connection between the two components. This has a basic difficulty of 20, but in this case it will need a 25. In order to connect the two watch-fey in, it will need to sever both diodes. Success would look like this:



Failure would mean nothing at all.

The basilisk has other options. One thing it could do is establish a slow connection. That's a connection that gives the watch-fey and basilisk a limited protection against one another, but still allows them to act on one another. Since the watch-fey both have fast diodes, this is perfectly legitimate; the result is



Alternately it could try to force a single action back along W1's diode, which would only have to beat a 22.

Suppose that W1 wants to prevent this by using a slow diode. W1 is imagining something like this:



This would handily prevent the basilisk from making a slow connection back to the watch-fey! But it won't work. The instant both a slow and fast diode exist, pointing to the princess and basilisk, the slow diode goes dormant. That means the basilisk is allowed to make a connection, even with a roll like 21.



If something happens later to the fast diodes, the basilisk's slow connection breaks.

Tokens and other constructs on the active side of a diode are considered to be in both components. That means that if the basilisk wants to use some of the gathered power or spells that the watch-fey command, or to deplete it, or any other such thing, it can. Thus we can say that for actions and for things like trying to overload enemies with power, the active side has a strong advantage. But for using magical power to accomplish things in the game, the receptive side has an edge. In effect, the wardens pay for their protection from the hostility of the basilisk by not being able to get any magical help from the princess, and they pay for their ability to act on the basilisk by also—even if they don't want to—offering up the power of their component for use. The basilisk and princess are at much greater risk of flowburn; the watch-fey of having insufficient resources or being used by their enemies.

Diodes are constructed as connections. They have a base difficulty of -3, but for watch-fey this is reduced to -0.

Metaphysics: The Layers of the World

The Layers of the World

To live in a world of fairies is to live in a world where shards of purpose and story impinge inescapably on your consciousness: where the indivisible and ineffable continuum of existence is host to patterns (ideas of "what happened" and "what is present") that are so thoroughly alive as to force themselves on others' experience.

To put it another way, there are experiences that are shared by all—

Greenness, ineluctable; the presence of a cat; the riot on a certain day on a certain time in a certain place; the height of a specific person; the fashioning of a dress; the experience of what it is to sleep and then wake up—

That are certainly limited in scope, for the blind do not see green, but which are in some sense universal to whomever apprehends them.

This is not a world where the age-old question, "How may I know that anyone else perceives anything at all like what I perceive? What if when I look upon a cat, my friends and neighbors see an elephant, only, an elephant that relates to them in some fashion like a cat?" applies.

Rather, though there are some places where these curtains of form fall away before the great all, there is also the occasional point of certainty.

This is a cat.

Its cat-nature is perceived in different ways by those you may know to be blind, or not blind; to love the cat, or see the cat as a stranger; to have an allergy to the cat or not to have such an allergy; but fundamentally, and consensually, to be a cat.

And that is and must be an illusion, for a practitioner who studies deep Zen insights or daydreams away the cat's existence or presence or is otherwise reducing the forms of experience into a vast and unbounded sea can free themselves of that greenness; that cat; that riot; that height; that labor of fashioning; that experience—

But yet in addition to that boundless ocean, there is a shard of form.

There is the undifferentiated truth, and there is the concept and reality of the presence of the cat.

This idea—

In Fairies—

is expressed in reference to what is. What is denotes those things that stand out from experience as expressible to and understood by all, shards of truth that impinge on the mind's conceptualizations.

If there is a table in a room, in what is, then that means that we need not endlessly dispute the implications of its being mostly empty space; we need not reductionistically consider whether it would remain a table with three legs, two, one, or no legs at all; we need not think about what would happen if we replaced the table piece by piece, or took it away like thieves in the night and replaced it with a table identical in every fashion; we need not wonder what tableness would be there if the people who used that room were unable to apprehend its tableness, were constrained by brain damage or some peculiar power of intangibility to be unable to recognize it, were forced by that circumstance never to sit at it, never to eat at it, never to walk around it but always respectively over and through—

If the table is part of what is, then these questions are irrelevant, because its placement in the registry of what is is sufficient to answer the question, "Is there a table?"

And this is something we shall use, repeatedly, to give weight and strength to the arguments of the fairies; to their actions and Attributes in the world. It is because of what is that a fairy may be said to accomplish things using their Praxis Attribute, for instance: the fairy decides that they shall go to a certain place, hunt a certain enemy, create a specific spell, manifest a blizzard, ace a certain test, or otherwise enact some prophecy—

And if they can place that in what is, then it is done.

If they can place it in what is, then the undifferentiated vastness of experience yields in an instant to the presence of that form; and only the power others have to rework that form through analysis, embellishment, and acts of reckless interpretation can cause any reduction in the power of it.

Interpretation?

For yes.

More than anything else, the shards of what is are not things or events but they are words or pictures. They are visions that reveal themselves to a sense or multiple senses or to the narrative constructive sense that is the audience in the mind. It is literally the solidity and visibility of a table—or it is the statement, the words, the sentence, "there is a table." One of these things, and each of them susceptible to new interpretations.

That is the what is:

Sentences and pictures that stand like the spars of endless shipwrecks in the vastness of the world, or rocks that jut forth from a stream.

Character Splat: Firework Fairy

It has the character of a light bursting into being in the emptiness; that flare of light characteristic of the best of fireworks, when night transforms to beauty. Then in unending succession there flow marvels, changes, instances of pattern, brightness, and color: then there is a feast for the mind and senses, then there is the vast inexplicability of beauty, only herein made. That is the appearance of the firework fairy.

Now it is said, and so much is true, that if you should catch one at rest or in a room already bright—such that the impact of their explosions was muted or resolved down to sparkles—that the firework fairy should have the most typical of fairy forms, that is, the androgyne child, shrunk small as an acorn or a mouse, in either case to fit within a hand, and winged with butterfly or raven wings (and in some cases the wings of dragonflies or multicolored birds; but these more rarely). But even in such cases it is best remembered that the key to a firework's presence is the bursting of numinous experience into the ordinary, the pulse of magic intruding on the simple world. Thus if you should encounter a firework having this precise form, but dull, then it is sick, weak, dead, or some other thing entirely; while if you should see something ordinary as a thimble or a hat, and it should intrude thus upon your senses, you may rely upon the belief that a firework is within. The only time, in fact, that a person may look upon a firework without its presence registering is when that person dwells already within a daydream or somnolescent state; then the vibrant colors of their dreams and the dissociative power that separates the dreamer from the world may give the firework camouflage and allow it to pass unnoticed by the eye. The remainder of the occasions where a firework may escape notice, as in the experiments of my colleague M. Ambrose, are cases where the firework is seen but actively denied; "that cannot be," says the uninitiated spirit, "therefore I will take no notice of it. Later, I will reassure myself that I did not see, and afterwards forget entirely."

The persistent character of the firework fairy is to break the stillness of the ordinary and echo what is given to it—to cast back the visions of the world around it in a new and brighter and more magickal of forms. Thus, one may imagine a miser, dwelling in meaningless misery upon their hoard, saying, "Look, I have enough to buy food for all the starving people of this town," and allowing that statement to fall flatly and without interest on the unechoing walls of their chamber; then a firework calls back, "Look, here is enough to buy food for all the starving people of this town!" and it is suddenly a notion. And thus with the Wright Brothers and their creation of the aeromobile, and also the enactors of many great follies such as the house of M. Ogilvie.

— The Manual of the Fey, by Stacio

Firework fairies are charged to break the stillness of things. It is their duty to stop the world from moldering down into the ceaseless soulless ordinary—to trouble the faceless bureaucracies, to waken the disillusioned, to remind the children of magic, and to guarantee that there is in all situations and in all circumstances the hope of change.

It is their power to make other people and things beautiful, to love them, to adore even the bleakest and cruelest things and places; and the people too, though they are not required in that love to serve or aid the Wicked.

It is their power, in short, to make and find beauty and power and change in even the unlikely places, but never to be confined by them.

These are the standard invocations of the firework fairy—the powers they use when brightening the world:

• I am that which breaks the stillness
• I am a thing which moves
• I am the opening of eyes to wonder
• I have found a thing worth loving
• I echo what is given me by others.

Example: "I echo what is given me by others. If this hellhound is going to breathe fire on me, it's getting a face full of fire back!"

Firework fairies have a +1 bonus on Invocation rolls. They are never disoriented by the rush tokens that represent things moving too fast to keep track of, and on a Praxis roll of 23+ they can add 1-5 such tokens to a scene.

Famous firework fairies include Emily Wright, adventuring duo Rachel and Benjamin Starr, and Seraphine (who found the soul of the world). Also notorious is the Wicked firework Jenny Constantin, who steals children from placid homes, and the Rebel, a nameless avatar of unrest. The Johns Hopkins University has a master's program for firework fairies seeking to refine their technique; many of the better known fireworks are either graduates of the program or associates with honorary degrees who occasionally give seminars or talks.

You should play a firework fairy if . . .
You want to be in love with the world, to be drunk on sunsets and sunrises and the beauty of things. If you want joy and madness. If you want to change lives for the better. If you want to be larger-than-life. If you want to think fast, move faster, and laugh at the trouble life throws at you. If you want to get into trouble and out the other side. If you want to be the engine of the world. If you want to be illogical but cool, silly but triumphant, charming but infuriating. And if you want to be a brilliant flare of magic in a dull and dreary world.

Character Splat: Darkness Sprites

Darkness Sprite

The darkness sprite is most typically observed as a soap-bubble distortion of shape within a shadow or darkness. Its surface is the source of ripple-like sensations. One may witness light that has the appearance of gleaming eyes yet cannot be located when looked for—a motif without manifestation. If driven to emerge into the light, it attains a tentative air and moves with some embarrassment; its shape is tenuous and permeated with oscillations, and tendrils like antennae taste the world and feel about as if for danger.

That said, the other common appearance for the darkness sprite is nothing like what was described above. These sprites have an appallingly humanoid appearance, some not even deigning to appear pale, gaunt, or smallen; they are like young men or women, sometimes children, distinguished only by a peculiar deepness and blankness in their eyes and their presence at such times as one would expect not human company but fairy visitation.

The abnormal darkness sprite has a fairy appearance but with some of the overt distinguishing characteristics of the spherical darkness or deep-eyed children above; these creatures are doubtless tainted by or bordering upon other fairy types, and thus distinguish themselves by a character of darknessing or darknessishness rather than the full character of the darkness sprite.

One must be cautioned against presuming the malignity of these sprites. They are, while not notably beneficent spirits, no more inclined to mischief or malevolence than the average of their kind and perhaps, in truth, burdened by their distinctive experience with a greater awareness of responsibility and the costs of suffering than other fairies might be. One must consider the darkness of their appearance not a sign of moral failing but of magical negativity: they are prone to consume or direct light rather than scatter it about, they receive energy rather than give it, but they are as efficacious in absorbing, mitigating, or neutralizing curses and banes as their brighter cousins are at bestowing blessings.

Thus we may say, befriend such darkness sprites as ye may encounter, but do not invite them into rituals which have an intent to raise power, as this will in no wise do ye good.

— A Catalogue of Faerie, by Tracey Oengein

Darkness sprites are keepers of the great silences and mysteries of the world. It's their job to clean up the loose magic in the world, the petty and unproductive disorder, and leave instead the echoing vastness of Nature, Being, and Truth.

It is their duty to stop—to eat, more precisely—random surges of power, follies of magic, and disruptions of the mundane. But they do not devour, and sometimes even augment, the spiritual openness that is magic at its best. They protect people from random manticores but leave behind not simple mundanity but a quiet transformative potential.

And, too, theirs is the duty to swallow—when they can—the mundane things that ought not be. To let the darkness rise around unbearable things, and consume them in that darkness before the light returns. They are that which leaves the world clean.

Into them spins what is unnecessary, and it is gone.

These are the standard invocations of a darkness sprite—the powers they rely on to do their work:

• I am a void into which power falls
• I am a devouring spirit
• I take this into me; I accept it.

Example: "I am a void into which power falls. I can decaffeinate her coffee from here."

Darkness sprites have a +1 bonus on Mist rolls. They are never burned by the power tokens that represent loose magical energy, and on a Praxis roll of 23+ they can remove 1-5 such tokens from a scene.

Famous darkness sprites include the West Wind's hound; Professor Evans of the High Academy; and the Central Darkness that lives beneath Providence, RI.

You should play a darkness sprite if . . .
You want to think about what happens to things that aren't part of the world any longer. If you want to fight curses and misfortunes. If you want to be a creature of the shadowy borderland, but don't want to be dispassionate like a monitor fairy watch-fey would be. If you think that your group needs a cool head and someone to draw off the consequences of excess. If you like the idea of being a power of cold, dark, sobriety, loneliness, quiet, stillness, openness, and release. If you'd rather bring an end to pain than a beginning to happiness.

Introduction

Congratulations! You are welcome into the world of Fairies.

You thought that you were an ordinary person — didn't you?

Maybe you knew you weren't.

Or maybe you understood that everyone is extraordinary —

But most likely, you thought you were an ordinary person. Until you realized that you had a fairy in your soul.

Fairies are real.

Fairies are a kind of people. They may be different than humans in their basic peopleness or they may not — that's more of a personal choice than anything. Many of them are little wild creatures with wings, such as you see in myths of fairy-kind, but that's not all of them and that's not the core of it. Fairies are, more than anything, a spiritual state.

Your fairy, on top of being you, is a piece of your soul that's excited itself into a state change into something magical. It's typically the most evolved or best part of you, though there are sad and problematic cases where this is not so — that is to say, usually it's that sophisticated part of you that you think with and think of as the boss inside your head that goes all fairy, but sometimes it starts as something lower and more primal, like your wants and tantrums. Either way, fairy nature is a progressive transformation that spreads through the rest of your soul and converts it, so if you're hampered by humanity or terrified by emerging fairy nature, either way, you'll eventually be all one piece.

There are some freaks who'd want to stop it, but it's never a good outcome unless there's something particularly special going on. Like, maybe if you're turning into a horrible evil and if there's something bright and beautiful that can give you some soul-stuff back, it's possible that you could stop the transformation and have it be OK — but that's a weird epic story, not something that happens to everyone. Normally, as awful as some people might find it to realize that they're transforming and that their whole soul will soon be infected, there's no way to realistically oppose it because just like the rest of your soul, it's you. It's like growing up or waking up or going to sleep, it's scary sometimes but you've got to do it when you do.

That means, when your soul started going fairy, you were irrevocably committed and you've joined a new and different world.

School

Part of transforming is that you have to re-learn how to be. And since most of the fairies who transform are pretty young when they do so — it can happen if you're like 80 or whatever, or even if you're some 50-something banker in a suit, but usually it's the alchemy of childhood that stumbles on the start of a fairy transformation — there's other kinds of learning left to do to boot.

So the Fairy Court has established programs and special schools all over the country and the world for fairies to attend.

Special kindergardens! Elementary schools! Junior and high schools! And also there are programs at various colleges, ranging all the way up to postdoctoral education for the fairy sort.

The young fairies usually get transferred to a different school, ideally at least somewhat local, but if you have to go to another state or something for a boarding school, or if they need to pay your parents to get them to move to a region with a fairy elementary, this can be done. Anybody up to high school age, in short, is going to find that their studies can continue basically as they were, just, in a new place and with the addition of fairy-related classes. If you were a high school junior or senior, they may tack on another year or two to your education, but that isn't so bad—fairies have an easier time getting into college than most people, due to various programs and legacies, so the years held back won't hurt your chances, and you'll be able to study advanced topics and such.

College-age fairies are expected — sometimes required, but it depends on their stability and maturity — to attend a program at University. This can be highly focused (if you're not academic or conversely already have your degree) but it's an important set of life lessons, and it gives you the chance to take a few courses you may have otherwise had to miss with the Fairy Court helping to foot the bill. There's also a basic Masters in Fairy Magic & Operations for people who have some reason to jump in at the deep end — professionals whose pride would be hurt going back to college proper, prodigies who need a challenge, and anybody who's already gone through the college program who wants a deep and technical understanding of fairy life at a level that college can't provide. After college you can also generally find a solid Fairy Education program if you want to teach at the pre-collegiate level. Finally, there are doctoral programs — an organic development that came out of the need for the earlier systems — in which fairies learn some combination or subset of original magical research, investigative understanding of the nature of the world, and the thorough grounding in some topic or other necessary to teach it at the college level.

What this means, in short, is that there are educational options for every newly-transformed fairy, and the standard setting for a Fairies game is a school of some sort: a fairy kindergarden/elementary, a fairy junior/high school, a ladder school covering all of the above, or a fairy-associated college.

Attendance Minimums

Even before the college level, though, it's not always possible to place every fairy in a fairy-only school. Population distribution argues against it: there aren't enough fairies to place a fairy-centric school in every city or even every state, and it's not always reasonable to take every fairy out of their life and dump them in a boarding school surrounded by strangers with magical powers. Young fairies are sensitive sorts, and while there are plenty who are all "OMG magic nom nom nom" there are others who want normal life while they can. At the college level, this is even more true: if there were one central fairy University, there'd be no pressure on it to maintain its academic standards and either it would be so awesome that it'd have to turn away the best and the brightest mortals when they found out about it or its standards would sink and fairies would start wanting to sneak off to Yale.

So a "fairy school" can be a pure all-magic all-the-time sort of thing, or it can be a school with a working relationship with 1-2 adult fairies and room for a minimum of five fairy students. If the Fairy Court can't scrape up at least five fairies in your region of about your age who want to go to a local school, then you'll have to go away to board — it's a working minimum to make sure that young fairies don't get lonely, isolated, or out of control. In bigger cities they aim for 10-30.

What this means is that either you are part of a rare group of fairies with 1-2 sympathetic administration officials in a sea of mortal students, or, you're at one of the fairy-packed magic schools where everything is weird.

Adulthood

The role expected of an adult fairy, principally by the Fairy Court but also as a natural outgrowth of fairy nature, is to answer prayerful wishes.

What that means is, you find someone with a genuine need or wanting — almost always a human, but it can be other fairies — and hear it echoing through the world. Then it's your job to find a way to make that wish into something that is real.

Except for graduate students, who like to make no end of puns on "grant," it's always "answering" and not "granting" wishes. That's because most of the time, granting wishes is going to get into semantics and wordplay and magical solutions that don't exactly fit the real needs of the heart. The job of fairy magic is to make life luminous, to fill it with a wholesomeness and healing, and that often doesn't fit the words of a wish at all.

The good news is that there are magical ways to find these wishes, and even without them you'll have a nature that tends to stumble on them — to overhear people wishing in secret, to find hints at good wishes in the oddest places, and the like.

The bad news is that there are fairies who like to make cruel answers. These are the Wicked; they practice the arts of terror against humanity, and twist up the human life with their enchantments. Certain Wicked are "legitimate," in that they have a license to be mean "for the overall moral betterment of the human race, or when their interests are unfairly infringed upon." These are cynical practitioners of the notion that experience requires terror, pain, and unpleasant resolution of bad karma in order to be whole. Other Wicked are not philosophical and have no good justification to be cruel; they may pretend to have humanity's best interests at heart or they may revel in their own selfishness, but there's no plan for anybody's betterment in their Wickedness.

As a starting PC, you may be tempted by Wickedness but you have not given in. It's the baseline for the game that you intend, when you grow up, and even to a lesser extent while still in school, to answer prayerful wishes when not doing whatever else it is you do.

July 22 Mindmap