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.