Character Splat: Snapdragons

Snapdragons

also named "flywheel fairies," "summerkin," "fae knights"

The character of their presence was laughter — yes, laughter, bright and full of bubbling joy, even at such times as these. In that dark period of my life I looked up and saw the gray and dying world transformed by them. They drifted past me in a great diffuse cloud: the kite-dragons, the fire-wheels, the pilots of great soap-bubble floats, and where they passed an by virtue of that passage I knew that I was safe.

They are the children of wonder, naïve joy, waterslides and lollipops and the warmth of a sunbeam.

They are as wheels, turning wheels, and the edge of them sparks so that they seem entirely as fire. They form sizzling shapes in the air: then, suddenly, relax into patterns of sheen and lazy shimmer. Looking at them closely, one sees a sinuous dragon-shape, with a motile face and reflective scales, that tends like the hoop snake to gather its tail in its mouth before going about: and when they move, it is that motion that gives forth fire, and when they are still, they spread great delicate films of wing.

But most of all where they are is safety. Most of all they are that joy that is where the world is blessed, that certainty of justice and that things are all right that makes even the most dire-seeming circumstance a promise of great joy.

. . .

The basic form of the summerkin, then, is a highly reflective dragon or serpent, thin as a leaf and flat like an anglerfish, an inch in height, hardly anything in width, and indefinite but typically around eight inches in length. In some cases the reptilian character was pronounced; in others, the summerkin bore more of a resemblance to an otter. Its limbs were long and clever tendrils, able by some sleight to stiffen for leverage into a resemblance of twigs or perhaps thin arms with elbows. Cotton or a soap-film may spread between these, the former to allow the creature to spin thread or form cat's-cradles (the shape and structure of which had a complicated lexicon of meanings in the snapdragons' community, representing a secondary emotional vocabulary much like the language of flowers and more visible than facial expressions at a distance.) The latter, of course, allows them to drift languidly in the air when they do not bother themselves actively to fly. The soap-film also allows them the presentation of images: they may make magic mirrors from this substance, or spread film across a doorway to manifest an image of their human guise. When they wish to travel quickly, as noted, they spin themselves into a fiery loop and skate off furiously through the sky.

— The Green Book

Snapdragons are the shepherds of the clouds and the wind. They keep the currents of the sea. They live in the passage of hours and the summer of a childhood — they may make a home inside everything that moves, anything that flows, anything that moves swiftly or languidly from a beginning, or a general direction of a beginning, towards an end.

They have no "charge" — no duty. They are rather made to seek out their own obligations, to find the things they wish to preserve as a hermit crab searches for a shell. One will house himself in a household or a country; another will immure herself in the sunlight flowing over an open field. One will serve some great principle or good; another will wander, laughing, changing little things as seems most fit.

But always they are creatures of making safety, making clarity, making right, because the sense of rightness, the sense of goodness, the sense that all the world is in harmony and that what is going on now will lead to no bad end — is simply the presence of a snapdragon in the world. That numinous sense of safety, that things are OK, that knowledge that no matter what happens the world is good: that is the sense that there are snapdragons. That there are the fae knights, somewhere in the world; or very near.

And these are their standard invocations:

• I am things turning out all right;
• I am things being OK;
• I am a power of safety;
• I move with this, flow with this, make its motion my own;
• I help these things move together.

Example: "I am things turning out all right. The plane may be plummeting furiously towards a nuclear silo, but seriously, don't panic. We'll figure something out."

Each snapdragon fairy has one flow that they maintain — they can keep it going as long as they like, waiting for it to reach an acceptable end. Adult snapdragons can live in an ocean current or the motion of an RV; for a snapdragon child, who must stay in one place, a flow might be "my sixth grade year," "the way the wind blows here in summer," "the life of that old dog of mine," or "the spirit of the hockey team." It's basically something that is going on, something that is always changing in little ways but simultaneously the same, something living and in motion that — either because of the snapdragon or because of its own nature — just doesn't end. They can change this in play, or use the ordinary rules for maintaining a magical flow to add another to this list.

Snapdragons receive a +3 bonus when trying to stall or hurry somebody's action. They are never disoriented by rush tokens; in fact, they charge up with them, keeping a number of rush tokens when they leave a scene equal to the number that that scene possessed. Snapdragons can accumulate these tokens between scenes by hanging out in fairy form in a gale-force wind or visiting NASCAR races in human form or otherwise associating with exceptionally turbulent and quick events; this is known as "rushing," as is the effect when they rejoin more placid events and share their rush tokens with that scene and everything is suddenly a-whirl with magic. The snapdragon must take the usual action (e.g. a rank 3 Praxis effect) to join these scenes and accumulate rush, but they do not need to play such scenes out.