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.