[UA]: Faeries

[Rick Neal]

>How does this sound?  Faeries are the souls of children who died as
>infants, but possess some kind of drive to hang on and not depart to
>wherever dead souls go.
 <snip>

I like this take. A lot, actually.

What I'm thinking about now is a way for these Faeries to manifest 
physically without needing to possess a living host. I've got two ideas 
for this, which I'll note below:

Idea 1:
Faeries start out just as a form of revenant. However, as they are 
exposed to humanity, and humanity to them, they begin to both establish 
an impression of living people's perception of them, and to create an 
impression on the living. This creates a sort of co-operative feedback 
loop, which the Faerie embraces as its identity. (eg I keep hearing a 
knocking sound in my closet. I come to expect the knocking, and the 
Faerie senses that, and knocks more regularly. I wonder why the knocking 
is in my closet, and think about how I keep my shoes there. Tons of 
stories about shoemaker elves, so the Faerie thinks that that is what it 
is because that's what I think it is.)

As the Faerie gains a stronger sense of its own identity in this manner, 
it begins to accumulate a body made of dust, garbage, dirt, rocks, 
insects, etc. like the old hardened ghosts described in Tim Power's 
Expiration Date. The form takes the appearance that the Faerie believes 
it should have, and acts the way it thinks it must. Voila, I've got a 
brownie living in my closet fixing my shoes, and now it's gonna trash the 
place if I don't leave it a bowl of milk every night.

This also explains why there aren't many Faeries around these days. If I 
hear a knocking in my closet, I'm more likely to think that it's the 
water pipes than a brownie. That means the Faerie spirit will also come 
to think of itself as the water pipes, and, eventually, will just fade 
away...

Idea 2:
As the spirits become more sophisticated, they try to affect the world. 
They find out that they can. Demons can't because they each have a 
lifetime of experience teaching them that you need a body to affect the 
world. Faeries don't have that ingrained prejudice, so they just do it 
because they don't know that they can't. You could view this as a type of 
magick, with the obsession needing to be something like "Affect the world 
of the living," or "Get the people with bodies to notice me." The paradox 
of the disembodied wanting to influence the physical works well enough, 
and ... Well, you get the idea. I'm not as fond of this idea, because it 
turns Faeries into what is just a disembodied adept, and I feel that's a 
little too mundane for such a rich tradition.

I just read that last sentence over again. Disembodied adepts are 
mundane. I think I've been thinking too much about this game. I'm signing 
off now.

Rick Neal


It is always best to be a little improbable.
     - Oscar Wilde