Enemies: Fair Folk
Ok, I don't expect anyone to actually read this anymore. I just use my LiveJournal as a reminder that I should write.
How pathetic is it that I need to push myself to actually have fun with my hobby?
There are other Fair Folk besides the Erlkönig of course, he's just the worst of a bad lot. That we know of anyway. Fairyland is like deep sea trenches, we don't know what it might contain, and it is inimical to us. Let's look at what else is out there.
The Pale Sons: the Sons are greyish-white creatures with rudimentary features and a anatomy. A bit like half-finished flesh dolls. The Sons have a fixation with the human form, faces, details. There are holes in our world, abandoned places in country and city where the Sons parade bought and stolen faces and features in grotesque carnivals, trying to impress each others. Some want eyes, others voices, others again want teeth.
The Sons can and sometimes do steal people's bodies by force, removing what they desire, leaving quivering messes of flesh behind. The find it easier and more elegant to have humans do their dirty work in return for power and magical trinkets though. After all you might like a steak without having to butcher a cow first, no? This we have to deal with cults harvesting the beautiful or the physically extraordinary. They're usually small groups, nestled deep within the worlds of sport and fashion. There aren't many of those, but they are always a mess to deal with.
The Peacock: Another unique entity, possibly as powerful as the Erlkönig, but focusing much more narrowly. The Peacock never has the same shape twice, but always something that combines the glamorous and the terrifying.
The Peacock loves stories, something humans uniquely supply. Fair Folk cannot really make any new stories on their own it seems. If that helps us at all, we haven't figured out how. Anyway, the Peacock is a manipulator, using coercion, magic and humanity's urge to take part in something, anything. Iit makes individuals, groups, sometimes entire towns take part in stories, archetypal narratives, twisted through the alien tastes and thoughts of the Peacock. It particularly like stories of tragic love, and of great men's omen-filled final days.
Given time, the Peacock shapes fates, faces and feelings and molds the stories it wants to see. It does not seem to fully understand or care about the lives it crushes to serve its creations.
We usually come in when damage control is all we can do. Sometimes we can recognize a story in the early stages. Not that it helps much. In '07 three agents were killed during the second act of Titus Andronicus. Our bet bet is often a cold one: eliminating the main character. Romeo must die, I guess. Heh.
Kabouters: These are the little men, hobs, gnomes. Tiny degenerate gods of mountain and earth. They are cunning, but not truly intelligent, and that is their greatest weakness. We can out-think them.
They are good craftsmen, and create wonders of dark magic. They are highly emotionally volatile, which can be used against them, but don't get cocky, 'k? Kabouters are inhumanly strong and fast, and they don't mind a bit of long pig now and then. A few even go out of their way to eat man, and they have to be put down.
Humans and kabouters have lived side by side for as long as we have written records, pretty much. Early humans have often bargained with them, selling trinkets, favors and even firsborns in return for the miracles of the kabouters' dark caves. In Medieval times, rural villages had long-standing pacts with these beings. The sage Austrians are pretty much the only ones with reliable records of these pacts and agreements. Other agencies do not have the long memory or the myopic focus. They're worth the worth when we have to enter negotiations.
We have in our collection examples of kabouter magic.
A stone and pestle that can crush anything you can fit in it. Even symbols of things, a wedding ring for fidelity and love, a photograph for a memory. The owner will however want to lighten the load of his life, and will crush ever more things. We keep it locked up.
A flintlock whose ghostly bullets never miss and cannot be traced or recovered. Great tool, and we have used it, but it tends to go to the users head. Guy becomes a little bloodthirsty.
The kabouter are rarely seen these days. They don't seem to like throngs of people or anything that's newer than the industrial revolution. Machines stress them, but smaller gadgets also fascinate and frustrate them. A clever agent once distracted a kabouter by giving it her ipod and standing back.
As such they are not generally a big threat by themselves, but stronger Fair Folk can rally them or use them as agents.
Kabouter are generally small men, some human-looking, other trollish and animalistic, while others again seem to be roughly hewn from rock or carved from wood.
Clock-spiders: These creatures are some of the most incomprehensible creatures, and they may not even be fair folk. However the Erlkönig has used then as foot soldiers once, so we're assuming that they came from fairyland.
A clock-spider looks like a spider the size of a small human being. The long metal legs look like watch hands, and its body is a clock face. They give off a slight metallic tapping when they walk, not entirely unlike the ticking of a clock, but clock-spiders are otherwise silent. They are predators, and move in the fashion of hunting spiders.
Clock-spiders can only manifest at certain times, but what exact time that is varies by creature. The spider will have a chosen victim and ignore all others, unless specifically attacked. They can appear anywhere they like, but only for an hour. When the hour has passed it disappears only to return when it is 'its time' again.
The spider pins its victim to the ground, and sucks it dry. We assume that it sucks out the victim's time somehow. Look, it sounds crazy, but the victim ages rapidly and disappears when he reaches death. The victim won't be remembered by anyone, so the only way to discover an attack is by being in the right place at the right time.
The victim will leave a vacuum of course, especially if they had family, friends, a career etc. Those who are left behind will walk around this 'hole' in their lives in a very peculiar manner. Children wil not be interested in who their other parent might be, and a remaining parent will be unable to answer questions about the lost partner. Bosses will have a vague idea that someone with certain responsibilities has gone, but will not be able to say who. Cronies at the bar will be reluctant to sit on 'his' stool, but not know why. When you push these people they get confused, frustrated, angry or burst into tears without knowing why.
Coming across an absence like that is creepy as hell.
Defenses against the Fair Folk
It seems that Fair Folk, from the greatest to the least do not die, and a very hard to kill. We have smart people working on it, but we are largely left with folkloric weapons.
Cold iron
This is the big one, and the poetic phrase means simply unalloyed iron. For some reason meteoric iron works best.
Nailing an iron horseshoe to a door can repel fair folk, but mostly the weaker kinds.
Surrounding a cemetery with an iron fence was thought to contain the souls of the dead in the old days. This isn't true, but an iron fence can keep out most fair folk.
Iron weapons my friend! Some minor fair folk can be killed by gunfire, but for the stronger kinds you need a real iron weapon to make an impression. Little tip: if you're entering melee with one of these things, something must have gone wrong somewhere. Don't.
Some fair folk have human associates who will open doors and remove iron and so forth. Beware of these fucking traitors. Shoot them if you can.
Prayer, symbols of faith
Crosses, the Lord's prayer, the star of David, the Islamic profession of faith, all these thing may work. Some fair folk are nauseated by them, deeply annoyed, frightened, or physically harmed. Or it might do nothing. Some fair folk are just too... I dunno, eternal for that stuff to work.
Another factor is entirely intangible: your own personal faith. How much firepower do you reckon you have in the faith department? Are you sure? Enough to bet everything? Huh?
Knowing what you are dealing with
This is absolutely paramount. Know your enemy. These creatures operate according to bizarre strictures and laws. Some have OCD-like urges to count things or place them in patterns before they can do anything else. Some a curious or lecherous, or have certain ancient agreements with humanity or parts of nature.
Most fair folk can be enticed into riddle-games or competitions. Think outside the box, be sure you know what you are competing for, and have a plan B. If you can remember the strange logic of old folktales, they will help you a great deal.
Who are they?
The fair folk sometime seem like they have stepped out of old folktales. Some see that as proof that they have been around since the early days of human civilization. Others draw very different conclusions.
Divine Monsters: A prevalent, 'old-school' theory is that the fair folk are a class of primordial beings who are responsible for all the folktales and mythologies with their gods, demons, sphinxes, hydras and so forth. All of these tales are based in real creatures, greedy, powerful and cunning, but with just as glaring weaknesses. They certainly hunger for our supplication and worship, and it seems that they need us in various ways.
We on the other hand have outgrown these parasites.
This is the one I subscribe to, if it matters.
We made them: Here is where it gets a bit odd. The fair folk are our creations, monsters sprung to life from some part of our psyche. Some say that they embody our fear, an emotion so strong that it may give crude life to monsters. Peculiarities, agency and behavior has come along the way, as mankind has imprinted the ideas on the beasts. This is something that must be taken on faitk, as there is no evidence.
Others claim that the fair folk embody our ignorance, our irrationality, and our attempts at filling the dark places of existence. This theory posits that with scientific advances we have left less and less place for these monsters and that they may disappear in the light of human reason.
Even though it is true that some fair folk dislike human inventions, this theory is pure horseshit. Ask anyone who has sat face to face with the Erlkönig if he feels that the light of reason is just about to reduce this monster to past tense. No way.
The fair folk don't play fair, they want to subjugate or seduce us, and there is on a shred of humanity in any of them. At the end of the day, that is all you need to know.
How pathetic is it that I need to push myself to actually have fun with my hobby?
There are other Fair Folk besides the Erlkönig of course, he's just the worst of a bad lot. That we know of anyway. Fairyland is like deep sea trenches, we don't know what it might contain, and it is inimical to us. Let's look at what else is out there.
The Pale Sons: the Sons are greyish-white creatures with rudimentary features and a anatomy. A bit like half-finished flesh dolls. The Sons have a fixation with the human form, faces, details. There are holes in our world, abandoned places in country and city where the Sons parade bought and stolen faces and features in grotesque carnivals, trying to impress each others. Some want eyes, others voices, others again want teeth.
The Sons can and sometimes do steal people's bodies by force, removing what they desire, leaving quivering messes of flesh behind. The find it easier and more elegant to have humans do their dirty work in return for power and magical trinkets though. After all you might like a steak without having to butcher a cow first, no? This we have to deal with cults harvesting the beautiful or the physically extraordinary. They're usually small groups, nestled deep within the worlds of sport and fashion. There aren't many of those, but they are always a mess to deal with.
The Peacock: Another unique entity, possibly as powerful as the Erlkönig, but focusing much more narrowly. The Peacock never has the same shape twice, but always something that combines the glamorous and the terrifying.
The Peacock loves stories, something humans uniquely supply. Fair Folk cannot really make any new stories on their own it seems. If that helps us at all, we haven't figured out how. Anyway, the Peacock is a manipulator, using coercion, magic and humanity's urge to take part in something, anything. Iit makes individuals, groups, sometimes entire towns take part in stories, archetypal narratives, twisted through the alien tastes and thoughts of the Peacock. It particularly like stories of tragic love, and of great men's omen-filled final days.
Given time, the Peacock shapes fates, faces and feelings and molds the stories it wants to see. It does not seem to fully understand or care about the lives it crushes to serve its creations.
We usually come in when damage control is all we can do. Sometimes we can recognize a story in the early stages. Not that it helps much. In '07 three agents were killed during the second act of Titus Andronicus. Our bet bet is often a cold one: eliminating the main character. Romeo must die, I guess. Heh.
Kabouters: These are the little men, hobs, gnomes. Tiny degenerate gods of mountain and earth. They are cunning, but not truly intelligent, and that is their greatest weakness. We can out-think them.
They are good craftsmen, and create wonders of dark magic. They are highly emotionally volatile, which can be used against them, but don't get cocky, 'k? Kabouters are inhumanly strong and fast, and they don't mind a bit of long pig now and then. A few even go out of their way to eat man, and they have to be put down.
Humans and kabouters have lived side by side for as long as we have written records, pretty much. Early humans have often bargained with them, selling trinkets, favors and even firsborns in return for the miracles of the kabouters' dark caves. In Medieval times, rural villages had long-standing pacts with these beings. The sage Austrians are pretty much the only ones with reliable records of these pacts and agreements. Other agencies do not have the long memory or the myopic focus. They're worth the worth when we have to enter negotiations.
We have in our collection examples of kabouter magic.
A stone and pestle that can crush anything you can fit in it. Even symbols of things, a wedding ring for fidelity and love, a photograph for a memory. The owner will however want to lighten the load of his life, and will crush ever more things. We keep it locked up.
A flintlock whose ghostly bullets never miss and cannot be traced or recovered. Great tool, and we have used it, but it tends to go to the users head. Guy becomes a little bloodthirsty.
The kabouter are rarely seen these days. They don't seem to like throngs of people or anything that's newer than the industrial revolution. Machines stress them, but smaller gadgets also fascinate and frustrate them. A clever agent once distracted a kabouter by giving it her ipod and standing back.
As such they are not generally a big threat by themselves, but stronger Fair Folk can rally them or use them as agents.
Kabouter are generally small men, some human-looking, other trollish and animalistic, while others again seem to be roughly hewn from rock or carved from wood.
Clock-spiders: These creatures are some of the most incomprehensible creatures, and they may not even be fair folk. However the Erlkönig has used then as foot soldiers once, so we're assuming that they came from fairyland.
A clock-spider looks like a spider the size of a small human being. The long metal legs look like watch hands, and its body is a clock face. They give off a slight metallic tapping when they walk, not entirely unlike the ticking of a clock, but clock-spiders are otherwise silent. They are predators, and move in the fashion of hunting spiders.
Clock-spiders can only manifest at certain times, but what exact time that is varies by creature. The spider will have a chosen victim and ignore all others, unless specifically attacked. They can appear anywhere they like, but only for an hour. When the hour has passed it disappears only to return when it is 'its time' again.
The spider pins its victim to the ground, and sucks it dry. We assume that it sucks out the victim's time somehow. Look, it sounds crazy, but the victim ages rapidly and disappears when he reaches death. The victim won't be remembered by anyone, so the only way to discover an attack is by being in the right place at the right time.
The victim will leave a vacuum of course, especially if they had family, friends, a career etc. Those who are left behind will walk around this 'hole' in their lives in a very peculiar manner. Children wil not be interested in who their other parent might be, and a remaining parent will be unable to answer questions about the lost partner. Bosses will have a vague idea that someone with certain responsibilities has gone, but will not be able to say who. Cronies at the bar will be reluctant to sit on 'his' stool, but not know why. When you push these people they get confused, frustrated, angry or burst into tears without knowing why.
Coming across an absence like that is creepy as hell.
Defenses against the Fair Folk
It seems that Fair Folk, from the greatest to the least do not die, and a very hard to kill. We have smart people working on it, but we are largely left with folkloric weapons.
Cold iron
This is the big one, and the poetic phrase means simply unalloyed iron. For some reason meteoric iron works best.
Nailing an iron horseshoe to a door can repel fair folk, but mostly the weaker kinds.
Surrounding a cemetery with an iron fence was thought to contain the souls of the dead in the old days. This isn't true, but an iron fence can keep out most fair folk.
Iron weapons my friend! Some minor fair folk can be killed by gunfire, but for the stronger kinds you need a real iron weapon to make an impression. Little tip: if you're entering melee with one of these things, something must have gone wrong somewhere. Don't.
Some fair folk have human associates who will open doors and remove iron and so forth. Beware of these fucking traitors. Shoot them if you can.
Prayer, symbols of faith
Crosses, the Lord's prayer, the star of David, the Islamic profession of faith, all these thing may work. Some fair folk are nauseated by them, deeply annoyed, frightened, or physically harmed. Or it might do nothing. Some fair folk are just too... I dunno, eternal for that stuff to work.
Another factor is entirely intangible: your own personal faith. How much firepower do you reckon you have in the faith department? Are you sure? Enough to bet everything? Huh?
Knowing what you are dealing with
This is absolutely paramount. Know your enemy. These creatures operate according to bizarre strictures and laws. Some have OCD-like urges to count things or place them in patterns before they can do anything else. Some a curious or lecherous, or have certain ancient agreements with humanity or parts of nature.
Most fair folk can be enticed into riddle-games or competitions. Think outside the box, be sure you know what you are competing for, and have a plan B. If you can remember the strange logic of old folktales, they will help you a great deal.
Who are they?
The fair folk sometime seem like they have stepped out of old folktales. Some see that as proof that they have been around since the early days of human civilization. Others draw very different conclusions.
Divine Monsters: A prevalent, 'old-school' theory is that the fair folk are a class of primordial beings who are responsible for all the folktales and mythologies with their gods, demons, sphinxes, hydras and so forth. All of these tales are based in real creatures, greedy, powerful and cunning, but with just as glaring weaknesses. They certainly hunger for our supplication and worship, and it seems that they need us in various ways.
We on the other hand have outgrown these parasites.
This is the one I subscribe to, if it matters.
We made them: Here is where it gets a bit odd. The fair folk are our creations, monsters sprung to life from some part of our psyche. Some say that they embody our fear, an emotion so strong that it may give crude life to monsters. Peculiarities, agency and behavior has come along the way, as mankind has imprinted the ideas on the beasts. This is something that must be taken on faitk, as there is no evidence.
Others claim that the fair folk embody our ignorance, our irrationality, and our attempts at filling the dark places of existence. This theory posits that with scientific advances we have left less and less place for these monsters and that they may disappear in the light of human reason.
Even though it is true that some fair folk dislike human inventions, this theory is pure horseshit. Ask anyone who has sat face to face with the Erlkönig if he feels that the light of reason is just about to reduce this monster to past tense. No way.
The fair folk don't play fair, they want to subjugate or seduce us, and there is on a shred of humanity in any of them. At the end of the day, that is all you need to know.