Character Splat: Sprites (General)

The sprites are the fairies of raw life—the vitality that is in the world that causes things to be rather than be not, to move rather than to slumber in stillness, to dance and burn with life rather than fade away into the great gray doldrums that preceded light and faith and existence.

They are the creatures of action, being, and becoming: of the world as a forum for action, a place of transformative doing that makes one thing into another. They are the power source for magic and the world itself—it is their raw energy that sustains the great sea of experience, the fairy courts, human civilization, and the world and sound. To be a sprite is to share an essence with the Sun that gives life to the world, the numinous entities that caused the world to coalesce from nothing, and the "field of sparks"—the quasi-sentient nodes of energy and power in the underlying metaphysical substrate that fairy theologians hold as the source of existence.

Fairies represents the raw power of magic in a scene—the stuff most commonly provided by the sprites—with tokens. Power tokens are magic that seeks to answer need and bring things into harmony: the more of these tokens a scene contains, the more magic infuses everything with its power and draws things together towards a sublime ending. Spells and effects often require a certain number of power tokens to function: they do not consume these tokens, but rather charge up from them, so that, e.g., a flight spell might require three such tokens in a scene, while transforming a city block into a gleaming citadel of faerie might require eight.

Power tokens come at a certain cost. The magic is always seeking expression, and this search does not always yield to conscious will. When someone first enters a scene containing many power tokens, the magic may ground itself out through them; when a scene containing many such tokens breaks up, it may ground itself out through everyone therein. Sprites are immune to this "flowburn," but anyone else might be injured, transformed, or dazed.

Mist tokens, conversely, are a kind of magic that shrouds the world in myth and mystery. It's magic that questions, magic that leaves questions, magic that challenges the conceptions of the mind while infusing the great background of experience with power. Mist tokens function much like power tokens save that where the Mist draws down details become unreal: the world becomes as a dream or a religious experience. Only the very large things, such as emotions, the sun, the sea, love, glory, friendship, hate, and dreaming can emerge from a Mist-charged scene as real as they were inside it. Characters may be flowburned (strictly speaking, "Mistburned") by Mist tokens as well, but the effect is different: not injury but unreality, not dizziness but a waking dream, and a transformation that is more likely spiritual than physical.

The three kinds of sprite, then, are:

• Darkness sprites, who source the Mist;
• Nicknobs, or worldkin sprites, who shape and refine power; and
• Spark sprites, the purest manifestation of magic, vitality, and life.

Each is immune to flowburn and Mistburn. Each is concerned most prominently with the raw power of magic: spark sprites, who are an endless source of power tokens; darkness sprites, who dwell in Mist; and the worldkin sprites, the nicknobs, who manage the flows of power through the world.

TENTATIVE: one or more elements of this post is particularly open to later change.
[nicknobs.]

Metaphysics: the Transformative Experience

The Transformative Experience

And then at some point the numinous superficialities took root on the surface of the doldrums, like dandelion puff raining down from some unknown welkin. They are understood as anything from bright chaff that happened to catalyze existence to active spiritual angels—in fact, it's generally assumed that they're both. That at some point something in the doldrums drew the attention of a great host of shining . . . things . . .

That fell onto its surface and began to transform it.

Then the doldrums quaked, then they rippled and shook and hungered—more than anything else, hungered—for something more.

Certain of the superficialities were swallowed beneath its surface, taken in and made embedded seeds of brightness; others were cast away to serve as distant nexuses of light. Yet this did not suffice. The world remained an inanimate and unfinished thing. It had traces of something, but inchoate, and with large chunks of its suchness missing.

Metaphysics: The Gray Doldrums

The Gray Doldrums

Before the world was made, there was only the gray doldrums: an endless waste of nothingness where forms and formless jumbled together in meaningless array. This was the junkyard leftover from a previous world or something very like it: lifeless, without vitality, possessing the characteristics of a world but not its truth.

It's an interesting question whether this counted as "something."

One argument is that absolute nothingness would look to us like the doldrums; that we cannot help, as people, but to project the echoes of thingness (but without the thing) and lifeness (but without the life) onto the emptiness that came before. Another belief is that the doldrums were a substance, a thing, an actuality, whose meaning was either "dead" or "primordial"—like a field that is fallow in winter or after extensive soil depletion, but retaining the potentiality to nourish something new.

What is known is that attempts to assign a live meaning to the gray doldrums, to act based on the idea that it was thus, or such, or to excavate from it an active life or thing that predates the transformative experience, is not productive. There is no fairy who has achieved victory or gained utility by relying on more about the gray doldrums than that they were there and that we may think about them. A graduate student might make waves with a paper speculating on some detail of the doldrums, but a practical scientist cannot extract from them a useful form—if there is anything in the doldrums that in any fashion matters it was catalyzed to matter in the transformative experience that created the world.