“I don’t know why, my mother and father hate the rain, yet I always want to stand outside in it. I want to fly up into the storm clouds where everything is like black silk being ripped and torn again and again by thorns of light. I want to be so close to the lightning I can feel the heat, so close to the thunder that my teeth shake. I want to feel the rain engulf me tight as a blanket and scream in my ears–and I don’t know why.”

 

–Fairy Dreaming

 

“She’s the biggest bitch in school easily, no contest. She shows up without her supercostume on and goes “hi everybody,” who does she think she is? “Oh I just want to be my true self!” Like we aren’t our true selves in our supercostumes? Don’t let that innocent girl act fool you, there’s more to her than you think!”

 

–Snow Maiden

Introduction

 

Ayumi Abe is Fairy Dreaming, one of Japan’s many “magical girls” enrolled in Ishinomori School. A lifelong fan of fairytales, she based her magical girl persona on the Tuatha De Danann. When she shouts GLAMOUR ON, she covers herself in an illusion that makes her appear very different from how she usually is. Her short black hair becomes long and red, her skin becomes flawless and soft, her dull black eyes become piercingly blue, and she shines with a supernatural luster. Her illusion powers come from her father 

 

Or so she believes.

 

Ayumi has a hard time fitting in at Ishinomori. Naturally humble and shy, she doesn’t fit in with the superheroine culture of Ishinomori School which stresses confidence and radiating that confidence for all to see with a bright, flamboyant supercostume. It’s considered rude to not be “transformed” among your peers, yet Ayumi doesn’t like to be in her “fairy form” unless she has to, thus she’s ostracized as her peers assume she thinks she’s too good to dress up like the rest of them. There’s also the matter of how she reacted to several ERC combat sims. She demonstrated a quiet ruthlessness under pressure that was at odds with not just her usual self but the magical girl ideal. She attacked her simulated foes without hesitation, striking at blind spots and vitals with a savage calm. It was disconcerting for her peers and frightening for her.

 

But if she only knew the truth about herself, she would be frightened even more. The truth is that she’s not a human girl who uses a glamour to look like a fairy, she’s a fairy who breaks a glamour placed upon her as a child so that she’d appear human.

 

The truth is that she is a changeling. She is the daughter of Lugh, and a critically important piece in the game Fairy plays with Earth.

The Cover Up Story

 

You’ve just been let in on a very big secret. Try not to let it go to your head. There’s an even bigger secret coming up explaining how and why we know all this about Ayumi in the first place, so buckle up.

Going by Ayumi Abe’s official Ishinomori files, she is the daughter of Hiro and Hana Abe, a retired superhero couple who went by the supernames Mr. Illusion and Lightmaiden respectively. Mr. Illusion and Lightmaiden are rare examples of superhumans with hyperstatic genetics, meaning they can pass down their powers to their descendents like the Abreo family of Royaume. Ayumi can shapeshift and cast illusions like her father and project and control light like her mother, though her light isn’t based on photons but a novel force, likely a wrinkle in her powerset created by the genetics of her parents combining in her. Her light absorbs energy. Her light can turn into objects. Her light is very strange, but many young superhumans around the planet have strange powers. Ayumi thinks she’s strange in that regard, but not unique–when she in fact is.

 

Ayumi admires her parents and wants to follow in their footsteps as a superheroine. It’s why she’s enrolled in Ishinomori. But she’s had trouble fitting in. She’s very quiet. She’s not a social girl. She likes to spend time by herself reading about the multiverse–in particular Fairy. There’s something about Fairy that appeals to her above all other worlds.

Worse still, her peers think she’s a snob. It’s expected in Japanese culture that superhumans keep two faces. These aren’t necessarily two different identities, everyone knows who is who, but there are still two modes of presentation. It’s expected that superheroes dress loudly and boldly when they’re on duty. The supercostumes show confidence and reassure the citizenry. When “practical” supercostumes made of jackets and pouches started getting popular in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, Japan said no. But that is when you’re on the clock. The rules are different when you’re socializing with your peers. Boys dress down among their peers. Lifeman Escher shrinks down, Skull Savior Neo King dematerailizes his armor, and guardian giant pilots leave their robots in the garage. When they have lunch together they eat in their uniforms with the green armbands and everything.

 

But it’s different for girls. Ishinomori’s superheroines, who are known as magical girls even when they have nothing to do with thaumaturgy owing to the great influence Empress Alice Freegift of Croatoan, who was known as Magical Girl back in the seventies, had over shaping the concept of Japanese superheroines, customarily wear their supercostumes when they hang out with their friends.

 

Empress Freegift, who teaches thaumaturgy at Ishinomori when she isn’t busy with matters of multiversal statecraft explains the difference as such: “For boys, the supercostume is like their weapon. For some of them, their supercostume is a weapon. They’re like cowboys or samurai. They put their guns away when they sit down to have lunch and any boy that doesn’t looks insecure. But for girls, the supercostume is an expression of who they are. I believe the old proverb is “A man’s soul is in his sword, a woman’s soul is in her mirror.”Just change soul to supercostumes and I believe it describes the current situation aptly.

 

“I’m probably responsible a little for things being the way they are. I clung tightly to my secret identity in my youth–”Ami Suzuki.” I didn’t want any of my friends to know who I was. There’s another maxim–the nail that stands out gets hammered down,and being a princess from another universe makes you stand out an awful lot. When I turned into “The Magical Girl,” it wasn’t like putting on armor.It was like taking armor off. I took off my disguise and there I was–there was my inner self, my best self, my self shining brighter than a star. Other girls followed in my footsteps. Japan in the 70’s wasn’t very accommodating to the idea of superheroines, so the idea of a supercostume disguise was seen as a form of self-expression by the women who used them–and though attitudes have changed, that sentiment remains. A magical girl who hangs out with other magical girls and doesn’t wear a supercostume is seen as snooty, like they consider it not worth it to dress like everyone else. I know it’s not poor Ayumi’s intention to come off that way, but that is indeed how she comes off to the other girls.”

 

And then there was the time she speared a simulation of Gingerbread Man during an ERC exercise.

 

Someone needs to tell Lanty. She’d get a kick out of it considering how much trouble Gingerbread Man gave her.

 

Though it is true that Japanese superhero culture is generally more accepting of lethal force than our own (The Lifemen have put down so many giant monsters that they sell a brand of fertilizer made from giant monster remains), no one thinks you should go full force against a nuisance like Gingerbread Man. But some instinct inside Ayumi told her to raise her spear while he gamboled by and pushed it forward.

 

She’s not the only girl to accidentally toe-tag a BOL flunkie in ERC sims. The reason we have ERC sims in the first place is because kids don’t naturally know how to hold back against one kind of bad guy while going all out against another. If everyone knew how to use just the right amount of force for all situations, we wouldn’t have to train people at all. But because of her quiet attitude, she was teased by girls like Snow Maiden and Azadeh as a “psycho killer.” High school girls can be very cruel, especially when Japan’s attitudes toward bullying are more permissive than our own. They’ve even looked up Fairy scriobh, Fairy writing, written out stuff like “Fairy Killer” and “Deadly Dreaming.” Ayumi knows what the words mean, though her classmates excuse what they do as “doodling” that she “takes the wrong way.”

Though ostracized by her peers in general, Ayumi has nonetheless found a few friends. Misfits are never unique at school. Her closest friends are Blood Witch and Stranger 3, two magical girls who also struggle with fitting in. She’s even developed a crush on Gentleman Shadow, one of the highest ranked students in the school.

 

She’s not that special. Ayumi is just a socially awkward superheroine in the making, struggling with the destructive potential of her powers. She’s not the only one. She’s not even the only one at Ishinomori.

 

That is what she is–your typical teenage superhuman, with friends and bullies and crushes.

 

That is what she appears to be.

 

The Daughter Of Lugh

 

Before we talk more about her daughter, we have to talk about Lugh.

 

Few beings in the Seelie Court are as held in as high esteem as Lugh. That he is held up in an almost worshipful light by his fellow faeries even while he lives as a hermit wandering the multiverse should tell you just how important Lugh is to the Court. On the rare occasions he shows himself at Court, everyone attends, even members of the rival Unseelie Court. Lugh is that respected. Lugh is that important.

He is Lugh. Lugh Conmac, the Dog of War, Lugh Macnia, the Hero, Lugh Ildanach, the many-skilled. God of light. Slayer of Balor. Creator of Excalibur.

 

Now imagine his daughter. Imagine how important it is to be the daughter of such a being.

 

Long, long ago in the time before time, Fairy was one world with one people. Fairies were of one philosophy and creed Then came the Great Riddle–is what isn’t real, real?

 

It’s an old philosophical puzzle known to several worlds including our own. Does the abstract have a substance? Plato thought so. He thought so strongly that be believed the abstract was more real than what was commonly called “real,” that ideas had more of a substance than physical objects. Aristotle thought differently. He thought that forms did not exist independently of things. There was no special substance to forms, to the abstract, to the imagined.

 

But though their debate continues to this day, Plato and Aristotle never came to blows over their disagreement. And that is exactly what the great philosophers of Fairy, Elatha and Ogma, did.

 

Ogma championed the unreal as superior to the physical while Elatha championed the reverse. And if they kept their debate to strictly these terms, it probably would have remained restricted to those terms. It probably would have remained a war of words and writing. But then they had to drag the Great Arts into it.

 

There are two Great Arts in Fairy–the Art of glamour and the Art of shapeshifting. An ancient fairy riddle explains the Great Arts as such–the Art of  shapeshifting creates anything, as long as it wasn’t created first, and the Art of glamour creates anything, so long as it doesn’t exist. To put it another way, the Art of shapeshifting allows one to change one thing into another. A practitioner can turn themselves or another person into an animal, a cloud, a beach, a time of day, a reverberating sound, anything, everything, but the Art could not create something out of nothing. It could only alter what already existed, and it’s a fact that makes faeries very jealous of the angels of God, for the angels of god can create something out of nothing. The Art of glamour creates illusions–mental images, false sounds, false memories, and dreams, but though it can create anything, none of it is real.

 

All faeries know the Great Arts, and all faeries study the Grear Arts to this day, but Ogma and Elatha debated on which Art was superior. Ogma argued that the Art of glamour was superior because it showed the mastery of thought over form. What nature and reality wouldn’t, or couldn’t, create, the mind and glamour could. Elatha argued

 

And what was worst than Ogma and Elatha dragging the Great Arts into their dispute was that the Great Arts enthusiastically took up the debate when they had mutually respected each other for aeons. After the Arts were in play, it wasn’t long before various components of reality got in on the action. Fairy, you see, is a world similar to that of Nazarth and Croatoan. It is a world brimming with life, and though faeries will often assume a human-looking form to speak with us, it is important to remember that they can change their forms as easy as they do their minds.

 

Cold was the first to take a side, and it chose the side of Ogma–initially. Cold liked how Ogma preached that what was not was better than what was. Cold was the absence of warmth. He knew, and everyone knew, that there was no such thing as the substance cold.

 

But then Cold learned that Hot had joined with Ogma because Ogma promised Hot how to see meaning in his mirages and heat shadows.

 

And if it was one thing Cold knew, it was that he would not be on the side of Hot, not matter what that side was.

 

Fairy quickly became a universe of division–light against dark, fiction against mathematics, Summer against Winter, sun against moon, the abstract against the physical–and these camps took the names Seelie and Unseelie and became courts with single rulers at their heads. Ogma led the Seelie as the first Dagda and was called OGMA in an intonation only fairies can hear and produce. Elatha led the Unseelie as the first Anwen and was called ANWEN.

 

The faeries call their aeons-old dispute stemming from the Great Riddle the Division. They do not call it a war. A war is too small a thing to describe the Division. War was only the next inevitable step in the Division, and the Division has lasted beyond the war.

 

The War, often called the Open War, began when light and dark disputed ownership of shadow. Did light own shadow because it was created by the blocking of light, or did dark own shadow because that was what it was composed of? Specifically, they fought over shadow because of what could be created from shadow–erlkings, invincible, protean, silent assassins and henchmen who are now used by both Courts, because though the war, which faeries call the Division, has entered a long period of détente, it has still not concluded, and the ownership of shadow is still claimed by both Courts.

 

The war was inittially in the favor of the Unseelie court due to Balor of the evil eye, who destroy anything his one-eye gazed upon.

 

There is fire in the heavens. Our ancestors believed the heavens were a dome, and behind this dome was fire. Heraclitus believed the ultimate form of reality was fire, and according to Simonean aeonology, fire was what lay behind the Monad.

 

It was fire that Prometheus stole from heaven. It was fire himself that rode below the planet on the mesektet to face the dragon Apep. It was fire herself that hid herself in a cave to let the world freeze.

 

It was fire that Balor of the evil eye wielded, fire that was only dimly reflected in the phenomena man calls combustion. The fire of Balor, the baleful, blinding light that streamed forth from his one eye like blood from the sun. The angels called it norea. The genies called it samung. He called it light–his light, the light of Balor.

 

None could stand against Balor, and Balor delighted in his status as the supreme warrior of Fairy. There was no form, no magic, no illusion that could withstand his gaze. All withered. All died, as much as faeries can die. All suffered.

 

Though Balor fought on the side of the Unseelie, in truth he cared only for battle. The politics of the situation held no interest to him.  He fought, he won, he ruled. That was all that truly mattered to him. He cared only for the Unseelie Court because the Art of shapeshifting taught him how to merge his eyes into one.

 

Balor was born with many eyes. His preferred form was not that of a man but of a hydrangea where each of his many eyes was a petal that gazed across the multiverse. Each petal, each eye, gazed with only enough light to peer into another world, but through the Art of shapeshifting, Balor learned that he could combine his eyes into one, massive, powerful eye that shone forth with all their light–all the infinite light of all the infinite worlds.

 

And he found that he liked to make things happen much more than watch them happen.

 

Little by little, the Unseelie Court expanded their territory, the eye of Balor leading the way like an angry star.

 

The fighting was brought to a brief and uneasy cessation when Bres the Beautiful, known for his smooth looks and even smoother tongue, convinced both sides to make him both Dagda and Arwen. Bres was the son of Elatha (and Elatha’s least favorite son, as he felt Bres embodied all the negative aspects of Ogma’s philosophy of illusion over reality) and a Seelie courtier named Eriu and leveraged his parents being from both sides of the conflict for all it was worth. He was a born politician. He was very good at presenting himself as everyone’s friend while being no one’s. Ultimately, despite claiming to be for both sides, he was for the Unseelie, because the Unseelie had Balor, and Bres believed that Balor’s power combined with his guile would make an unstoppable regime.

 

To gain Balor’s favor, Bres persecuted the Seelie and used his clever speech to make unequal treatment look fair. To go against Bres was to go against unity, therefore the Seelie that opposed him opposed unity and were thus against all of Fairy, the Unseelie and Seelie combined. Thus the Seelie Bres locked up weren’t Seelie at all but traitors to peace.

 

Most infamously, Bres made a deal with the angels of Hell. Hell, also known as the Sephira world Gevurah. The angels of Gevurah specialize in containing the most dangerous beings in the multiverse within their universe, and Bres managed to convince them that certain Seelie courtiers had used the many connections Fairy has throughout the multiverse–the Fairypaths–to power a certain Cauldron that a certain race the angels were in a dispute over had tried to use as a weapon. This resulted in many Seelie angels being dragged to Hell under Bres’ testimony in an event known by faeries today as “Bres’ Tithe.”

 

The Court of Seelie groaned under Bres’ oppression, but there seemed to be no solution. For those that could be controlled through trickery, there was Bres. For those that couldn’t there was Balor.

 

To the rescue came Lugh, who was victim neither to the trickery of Bres or the strength of Balor and conqueror of both.

 

Lugh was the son of Cian, the royal physician of the Seelie Court, and Ethniu, daughter of Balor.

 

Balor’s eye was capable of seeing not only across great distances but across great expanses of time. He looked into possible universes and saw in several of them his demise by his own descendants. He believed he could avoid this fate by carefully controlling his bloodline. He imprisoned Ethniu in a tower among the clouds, ostensibly for her safety against Seelie assassins, but her daughter knew better. His light, the light of his hated eye, was in her, though dull and dormant. But the light might shine in her child–might shine brighter than Balor’s eye.

 

Cian, as skillful in illusions as he was in healing, figured that Balor must have been keeping something important in his tower and infiltrated it using tricks that would make a Cerberean Shadow Dancer proud. He expected to find some sort of weapon. Instead, he found the love of his life.

 

Ethniu and Cian fled together, and in time Ethniu gave birth to Lugh, god of light.

 

Balor’s eye searched night and day for Ethniu and her son, and when his gaze eventually came to rest upon the family, he dispatched his minion, a kelpie named Orla, to capture Ethniu and kill Cian and Lugh.

 

Lugh proved Balor’s grandson when Orla tried to drown him in the form of a living whirlpool. With a twinkle of his eye, Lugh brought the living storm that was Orla to a rest, inert and dead, then he crawled his way onto dry land.

 

Balor was right to be afraid.

 

Cian and Ethniu feared that Lugh was an idiot–an almighty being with a slow mind. He was withdrawn. He responded to their voices and touch slowly. And he didn’t seem to improve much as he got older. But Lugh was not an idiot. From his mother came the light, but from his father a keen analytical mind, and when the two met within him it allowed him to see and understand the light in ways Balor could not. He could look at power–be it Balor’s light or fairy glamour, and the power would reveal its workings to him like a clock opening up to show the gears.

 

Secrets and mysteries melted away from the gaze of the god of light. What his father’s gaze was to material, he was to secrets.

 

Bleddyn would probably hate him.

 

As he grew up, Lugh began to do things with Balor’s light that Balor never could. He took it in his hands and shaped it like clay. He created things out of it–first simple shapes, glowing balls and sunrise-skinned cubes–then copies of things he saw around himself, trees, plants, birds, and his parents.

 

And as he got older, he started to make weapons, for though the workings of the political world would not reveal themselves to him, and thus held a special anxiety for Lugh, he knew that his grandfather was an enemy of his family and that he was the only one that could protect them from him.

 

His father was a healer, yet he was more his grandfather’s grandson than his father’s son. It was a sadness shared between Cian and Lugh that love ameliorated.

 

When Nuada dethrone BRES back to Bres and became NUADA, it was back to open war between the Seelie and Unseelie. The Seelie fought bravely, but on the losing side, as bravery alone could not stand before the gaze of Balor.

 

To the rescue came Lugh.

 

He entered the battlefield wielding a spear of terrible power and reputation. This spear was the totality of his powers concentrated into the form of a weapon and was called Slaughterer, Luin Celtchar, Areadbahar, Gae Bolg, and Gae Assail. In the aeons to come, Lugh would entrust his spear to various heroes, most notably his son Cu Chulain, and now Ayumi Abe.

 

It flashed like lightning, shone like the sun, and danced like open flame.

 

Lugh’s spear carved a path through Unseelie forces. It mattered not what form they took. Water burned. Vapor burned. Shadow burned. All burned against the living flame that was Luin Celtchar

 

He stood before his grandfather on the battlefield, seeking peace one last time from the eye that only he could ever meet, the eye that would not burn him, the eye that recognized Lugh as kin even if the mind behind it wouldn’t.

What father and son said to each other is unknown, but it did not lead to peace.

 

Lugh slew Balor, as much as a being of the Astral can be killed, by creating a sling-stone with his powers and sending it through the destructive beam, through 9 magical shields, through the iris, through the skull, through the brain, and out the other side.

 

Lugh realized something that we teach our “blaster” kids, something that Balor never got–power concentrated on a small point is better than power spread out over a large area.

 

Their superweapon defeated, the Unseelie were routed. Taking the shattered jelly that was once Balor’s eye, Lugh applied his intuition. He compared the eye to his spear and believed he could make a weapon superior to both.

 

He believed and he did.

 

Lugh forged the Claimh Solais, better known as Excalibur. The Claimh Solais is the ultimate weapon. So great is its power that when it is drawn on Fairy lands, it cannot be resisted or opposed. Opponents of the wielder simply fall, be it unconscious or dead. So great is its power that sparks from the Claimh Solais have been used to forge lesser claimh solais, each the equal of Luin. The swords of the Round Table were claimh solais.

 

Lugh did not like the Claimh Solais. It went against his code of honor to use a weapon that won a battle just by being drawn. He gave the Claimh Solais to the Dagda, and now hangs at the side of King Arthur, who awoke from Avalon back in 2000.

 

Lugh was offered the name Dagda for what he had done. And he accepted, becoming LUGH, but he disliked rulership and his reign proved the shortest of any Dagda. He was too restless to hold court. He was too quiet to lead meetings. And his presence kept the Unseelie at arm’s reach, because they saw him as a living weapon and were unwilling to negotiate with the man who personally slew untold numbers of their kin. LUGH quickly returned Ogma to OGMA, and took his leave from Fairy to wander the multiverse and find monsters to slay. Lugh became a model for the Swan Knights of Lohengrin, who send protectors to universes without guardians, and for the enigmatic Black Knight, who Lanty named Tabula Rasa after his lack of identity and slate-colored armor.

 

But sometimes, Lugh does return to Fairy. There is, after all, no place like home, and when he does return he tries to do so incognito, visiting only his parents and avoiding anyone that might inform the Courts that he’s arrived. The god of light, believe it or not, can be very stealthy when he wants to. After all, being able to control light means you can make light avoid you, or lie for you.

 

Balor, in case you were wondering, left Fairy to hunt for power like that which he had grown accustomed to in the dark corners of the multiverse. He is a wretched, blind giant willing to do anything to replace the hole in his eye. He hunts to this day.

 

Through the defeat of Balor and the creation of the Claimh Solais, Lugh ensured that the Seelie Court would stand above the Unseelie Court for aeons. Even today, 60% of the universe belongs to the Seelie, and the Unseelie must make do with the rest. This distribution has never been disrupted, not even when the Wasteland crept through the lands of the Seelie like a cancer, not even when the walls of Camelot, the Seelie Court’s outpost on Earth, fell.

 

The territorial borders drawn in the days of Lugh have been inviolable and adamantine. They have never changed. They will never change. 

 

And this means the Courts have to turn to different realms and different beings to settle their persistent differences–like Earth and mankind.

 

A New Piece In An Old Game

 

The Courts of Fairy play a long and convoluted game with our planet Earth, and in their game, the pieces are always humans. To immortals whose personalities change very slowly–if at all–humans with their rapid changes in personality and disposition are infinitely precious and rare. Think snowflakes made of gemstones.

 

Humans never stay the same for long. The stages of their lives flash brilliantly and then are gone forever, and are all the more valuable for their brevity. When slain, they are meat and dust and at best they leave a breathfull of smoke behind called a ghost. But they die. Even with their much-vaunted technology healing their bodies through rejuvenation treatments, they can die, which means on the timescale faeries use, humans will die. Age might not get them, but oh, there is more than age that is a danger.

 

They are so mortal compared to faeries and other beings of the Astral that they might as well be mayflies.

 

The Courts of Fairie exercise influence over humans to demonstrate their skill and to leave an immortal mark upon mortal clay. The Seelie court prefers to manipulate humans with tricky deals and the Unseelie court with iron-clad contracts, but they both place humans on their board and take turns moving them.

 

Sometimes, the courts want to have one of their own as a piece on the board. Sometimes, they want a piece taken off the board. The tradition of changeling switches accomplishes both desires. Changeling switches are when a human, often an infant, is replaced by a fairy. The Courts traditionally don’t ask permission. They see nothing wrong in never asking permission. The human child is raised kindly and doted on by the Courts. They become a Thomas the Rhymer or a Red Crosse Knight. And the human parents are given a special child, a wise child who can do things no other child can. 

 

Is that not a mutually beneficial deal? Is that not a just deal? Telling the parents that their child has been stolen from out of its crib and replaced by a non-human would just be rude. The human parents finding out about the switch would just overcomplicate things and lead to hurt feelings, and humans become so unpredictable and volatile when their feelings are hurt. They almost become like faeries in the lengths they will go to assuage their feelings.

 

In modern times, under modern contracts signed between the Courts and the Dagda and Anwen, changeling switches simply aren’t done anymore.

 

But do humans abuse loopholes or look the other way to get around their agreements? If  such a young race can say one thing and do another, what can we say about a race of beings who were telling riddles to each other back when all the stars in the sky were young and blue?

 

Changeling switches do still happen. The Dagda and Anwen simply tsk tsk and shame shame the concept when publicly asked about it. And behind the closed and warded doors of their palaces, well, we all know about Danny now…but let’s talk about a far more mature changeling for now, the high school student.

 

We learned that Ayumi was a real fairy when Danny was summoned by the current Dagda NUADA. NUADA presented us with a solution to a problem that had long troubled us and ARGO–a way into the universe known as the Kingdom. When we were last in the Kingdom, a brawl with Mr. Blue resulted in a travelship blowing up in the middle of the Elian fleet. When the debris cleared, crown prince Cadell was missing along with our delegation and most of Mr. Blue’s “students.” Elia was thrown into chaos and the Dagdans reacted by putting their universe on strict lockdown. No one from the multiverse is getting into the Kingdom. Anyone that tries gets rerouted to the Dagdans’ coire, a big roiling extradimensional cauldron, and that’s not good for us because we know that something fishy is up with the Dagdans.

 

During the fight with Mr. Blue, Cadell rebelled from his control and in response Mr. Blue used the powr he copied from Elaine Crow, the power to switch minds, to place his mind in Cadell’s body and Cadell’s mind in his own body. Starshot used his emergency recall switch to move the fight to his own universe, the universe of the Star Prosperity. All the stars in the universe shooting him at once was enough to blow his mind out of Cadell’s body, which is now being used by Cadell’s wing partner Quetzel. Unfortunately, he was teleported away by an individual we believe to be the old Kingdom supervillain Baron Heulogg before Starshot’s parents could finish destroying him.

 

Starshot, knowing that the Dagdans were, ostensibly, a neutral force in the cosmic politics of the Kingdom, used his teleporter to send Mr. Blue’s body and Cadell’s mind to the Dagdan controlled sector of the Kingdom.

 

The problem is, when ARGO goes to the coire to talk about Cadell, the Dagdans act like they have no idea where he is. So he’s in their territory, and nothing enters their territory without them knowing, so they know Cadell is there, but they don’t want to say anything even as Elia falls into chaos. 

 

ARGO diplomats have learned from the Dagdans that a false Cadell, likely Mr. Blue shapeshifted, controls the capital nebula High Elia through the use of an army of “green knights.” Outside the capital, the forces of High Soul Governor Rhion and Low Soul Governor Siarl gather. High Elia orbits the Lia Fail, the great stone in the heart of a sun which anchors the Kingdom’s afterlife. They can’t let the false Cadell control that for long. And yet, despite war looming on the horizon, the Dagdans have kept their mouths shut about the real Cadell being in their territory. Why they’re doing this we can only speculate, but the prevailing hypothesis is that they’re hoping to use the real Cadell as leverage against the false Cadell so that through their puppet they can exert an influence on the Elians and the entire Kingdom afterlife like never before.

 

So we have to get inside the Kingdom ourselves and find out what became of Cadell. The problem is, not even ARGO knows how to get around the coire.

But NUADA does.

 

Through the power of syncretic resonance, the subconscious bond all Astral beings have to beings similar to themselves across the multiverse, NUADA can link his thoughts to the lord of the Dagdans who shares his name–Nuada. Nuada, being a First Born who pulled himself from out of the corpse of the god whom the Dagdans take their name from, exerts a great deal of control over the coire. NUADA can focus his thoughts to send a single, brief command into Nuada’s mind, just enough to get Nuada to open a little door in the coire for us to come through.

 

That’s all we need, but we do need it.

 

So NUADA is willing to do this for us–in exchange for rigging the upcoming CER tournament with Ishinomori so that Ayumi wins.

 

He claims to find it distasteful that Lugh’s daughter is a far cry martial wise from her father. She isn’t a fighter. She’s submissive and mild. The worst moment of her high school career was when she killed a simulated opponent. NUADA hopes that if we rig her into winning the thrill of victory will encourage her to be more like her father. Of course, this means we have to somehow get her to enter a fighting tournament. That’s going to be interesting. It might even be harder than rigging the contest itself. We also have to get her to compete without her finding out that she’s Lugh’s daughter, NUADA made it very clear that the deal is broken if she learns who she really is. That means we need to keep this matter close to our chest. Very few people at Martin’s know what we’re going to do, and no one at Ishinomori knows. The fewer people involved, the more we can trust that Ayumi never finds out.

 

So no big deal. Sure, rigging the Ishinomori tournament after I just sent out a newsletter about sportsmanship isn’t something I look forward to, but it’s what we have to do. It’s not like we haven’t been doing a lot of extracurricular activities lately.

 

But we’re still left with a couple of questions NUADA won’t answer that I would like very much to have answered. So all you tricky people out there (that means you, Danny), I want to see if you can dig up some answers for me:

 

Firstly, why did NUADA tell us so much about Lugh and Ayumi? He could have just told us that a certain changeling daughter of a certain fairy warrior needed  to win the tournament. He didn’t have to drop Lugh’s name, so why did he? Did he not think we would take the job unless it involved a fairy of Lugh’s caliber? He has over a barrel and he knows it. He could have told us to cheat for any daughter of any fairy and we would have done it.

 

Was it a matter of respect? Did he do it to show respect to us? Maybe he figured that we’d discover the Lugh connection on our own if he didn’t tell us and that when we did we’d figure something  was going on in the background?

 

Is he hoping that we’ll leak? Is he hoping that Ayumi actually does find out and void his part of the agreement? What’s his angle with being so up-front about Lugh?

 

Secondly, does Ayumi have a counterpart? Changelings are usually given in exchange for a human child. So do the Abe’s have a child in Fairy? NUADA told us that Ayumi was given to the Abes without a switch being made. But then again, he’d have to tell us that, right, since changeling switches are officially not a thing anymore? He can’t say that there’s an abducted human child in his domain. I’d like to make sure there isn’t another Ayumi involved in this.

Thirdly, why is Ayumi a changeling? Why is she on Earth in a foster family and not by Lugh’s side, hailed as the daughter of the greatest warrior of the Seelie Court?I got several theories I’d like to see confirmed or disproven. One theory of mine is that she’s a weakness to him. Did Lugh draw on the same light as Balor? I mean when one used the light, did the other get weaker? Lugh never said one way or the other, and he may not even know. The only time the two really exerted themselves was when they fought. So they would feel themselves get weaker as the other attacked them–but of course they would, they’re being attacked. Even if it’s not a tug-of-war between Ayumi and Lugh for the light, she manifests his spear, which means that he doesn’t have it while she’s using it. I’m sure Lugh’s enemies–and he has many–would love to know when he’s without the Slaughterer by his side. 

 

Another theory is that Lugh doesn’t know about Ayumi. That might seem odd given his dog is now her pet (see the Failinis section below) and she borrows her spear whenever she gears up to battle. Surely he knows, right? But consider that Lugh ended up much more powerful than his grandfather. The Court has always feared that the son of Lugh might be too powerful to control. That’s why the only son he ever had, Cu Chulain, was only half-fairy. But Ayumi is fully fairy. It’s hard to tell how powerful she is since she’s always tanking and sandbagging, but there is a good chance she’s more powerful than Lugh, and that would upset quite a few faeries. 

 

If Lugh doesn’t know about Ayumi, how is it that she’s got Failinis and his spear? Remember that Fairy is the world of glamour. Sure, Lugh being able to see the truth through illusions, but what if it was a truth he didn’t want to see? What if he refused to believe he had a daughter despite all evidence to the contrary? The most intelligent and perceptive people are still not immune from believing in lies they want to believe in.

 

Still another theory is that Lugh keeps himself away from Ayumi because he doesn’t want Ayumi to grow up to be like him. Cu Chulainn died trying to emulate his father as the ideal warrior, and Cu Chulainn wasn’t that long ago to a fairy. He died in AD 1, and while that may seem like a long time ago to us, to a fairy like Lugh that might as well have been a month ago. Do people suddenly want to have another kid a month after their previous child died. True, as a full fairy, Ayumi can’t die like Cu Chulainn, but that doesn’t mean she can’t suffer. Pain is universal to life be it life from Earth or the Astral. And Lugh likely remembers Cu Chulain tied to that rock, propping his own body up because he knew he would die but refused to fall. He probably doesn’t want his daughter to do that, to fight through unimaginable pain and suffering in the name of pride and glory. Cu Chulain was the ideal warrior by both fairy and human standards, but he broke the heart of his father. 

 

Fourthly, who is the mother? Who? Was she Seelie, Unseelie? What does she think about all this? Does she even know? You wouldn’t think a woman would forget having a baby, but remember, Fairy is the world of glamour. Faeries have given birth by laying eggs and coughing up children. Faeries have given birth by dreaming of children who then step out of the dreams.

 

Lastly, why did Lugh give Ayumi to the Abes? Maybe I’m overthinking this part, but why pick them? He’d have to pick someone, sure, and you could ask this of any couple, but if they have some sort of connection to Fairy I’m not seeing, I want to see it.

 

Also, everyone keep this in mind as we investigate the situation–Ayumi is ultimately her own person. She is Ayumi before she is anyone’s daughter. She’s got her own thoughts and feelings and nowhere are they considered in NUADA’s plans. She’s just another game piece on a fairy gameboard, and unfortunately we’re caught up in playing the game. We’re caught up in keeping her in the dark as we move her here and there for “her own good” as decided by a person she’s never met.

 

I’ll be honest, I’m worried about the situation. We’re manipulating Ayumi. Did you like it when you were a kid and the adults manipulated and lied to you? I sure didn’t. We can talk about doing this for the greater good, for getting into the Kingdom so we can save Cadell and figure out whatever it is the Dagdans have planned, but ultimately we’re manipulating a child and placing her in highly emotional situations she would otherwise avoid.

 

I’m worried about where we’ll stand at the end of this. In manipulating Ayumi, perhaps we’re no better than NUADA?

 

Glamour On, Fairy Dreaming!

 

Most students at Ishinomori use some sort of superphrase, a quick, pithy battlecry. It’s part of their school’s culture Ayumi’s is GLAMOUR ON, FAIRY DREAMING! When she shouts this, she has resolved in her heart to take action, and her illusion powers give her the appearance of a member of the Tuatha De Danann as part of a subconscious desire to appear strong and confident–or so she thinks. She really dispels the glamour placed on her at birth, her innate powers rising to the surface of her soul and breaking the glamour, and reveals who she truly is.

 

Ayumi has the standard powers of the Seelie court–she can cast illusions and shapeshift herself and others, powers which she thought came from her father, their superhero Mr. Illusion, but she also has the light powers of her father Lugh, which she thinks came from her human mother, the superheroine Lightmaiden. These light powers are in their infancy owing to her very shy, very non-confrontational personality being at odds with what Lugh’s light is used to–decisive thoughts and inner strength. Remember, Lugh is a war god. It is only by being in combat–and embracing being in combat–that her powers can reach their full potential.

 

Poor Ayumi just assumes she takes more after her father than her mother. She assumes that she’s more comfortable using illusions than laser beams simply by a quirk of genetics.

 

Though she has yet to use Lugh’s powers anywhere near their full potential, Ayumi has an instinctive understanding of how they work. She knows how to summon and control a strange sort of light–no doubt her hyperstasis encoded genes blending aspects from her parents’ powers together, as sometimes happens to the children of two superhumans. She knows that she can control mundane lights. She can clap to turn the lights in a room on and off. She can make the stars shine in the daytime and turn off at nighttime. She knows that her light projects force. She can send a beam that carries a substantial amount of force to hit someone at the speed of light–something she’s very loath to try. She can shine her light, and it will somehow increase the pressure of a room and make peoples’ ears pop. She knows her light interacts with energy in strange ways. Her light can make a room either very hot or very cold. When bad guys are shooting rays and beams and bolts of electricity, her light can devour it and glow brighter.

 

She knows it’s a weird sort of light she wields, but it’s not that different from her mom’s. 

 

She knows–and she attributes this simply to blind luck while experimenting with her powers rather than an instinctive understanding–how to use her light to change the weather. It’s a complicated combination of altering air pressure and temperature, but for some reason the combination just clicks for her. She can make it rain with a wave of her hand–and likes the rain. She loves storms, the harder and more thunderous the better. She likes nothing better than sitting outside under a black sky roiling with thunder and feeling curtains of cold rain crash against her. It’s a sentiment she inherited from Lugh. Lugh is a storm god, though his association with storms isn’t as pronounced as that of Thor or Zeus. Lugh loves storms because storms are powerful wanderers. Not much for words, storms express themselves through loud, violent action. They leave the ground wet with water, the universal lifeblood, and move on.

 

And deep in her heart, Ayumi loves storms for the same reasons, though she cannot articulate these reasons.

 

She knows how to shape her light into objects, especially weapons. Sometimes she finds herself crae a tiny dagger between her fingers while she’s daydreaming. She finds it easiest to summon a spear of all things. She thinks this is due to the spear’s simplicity and her desire not to get close to her opponents. Were that it was a shield instead.

 

Were that she knew what the spear actually was.

 

The spear is the totality of Lugh’s power compressed down and molded into a weapon. It’s the power of suns held in your grip. This spear is the destructive side of Lugh’s light just as Lugh the fairy is the creative side. This spear is the Fairy version of Sekhmet’s fire and Vril. It exists to destroy and consume. Stories speak to it possessing such a great hunger for blood that when fully manifested Lugh had to keep it sedated with magic like a wild animal to prevent it from killing the innocent. When Lugh’s spear was wielded by the legendary hero Cu Chulainn, it afflicted him, though some would say bless him, with what were known as warp spasms which transformed his body into a monstrous but powerful form which could not tell friend from foe. When Lugh studied his spear alongside his father’s eye, he was able to learn enough about cosmic power to create the ultimate weapon of Fairy–the Claimh Solais, Excalibur, which combined absolute power with absolute will to create a sword that only had to be drawn to grant victory to its wielder.

Lugh’s spear was the father of this weapon, the ultimate weapon.

 

And Ayumi thinks what she has in her hands is nothing more than a spear made out of weird light.

 

It’s a good thing none of her classmates have ever asked to borrow her spear. Odds are the spear would burn them as they held it.

 

Here’s something very interesting–for those of you who have been following Ms. Cryptic’s studies of our Cerberean guests (Joule has taken to calling them Hades Babies, since we got them out of Hades), you might have noticed that Lugh and Ayumi’s light sounds an awful lot like various descriptions of sleg. In fact, the Irish word for spear is sleg. It’s likely that sleg is a Fox echo of Lugh’s light and a very close one.

 

Sleg and Lugh’s light can both generate force, absorb energy, and be shaped into weapons to increase their power. But there are differences, the biggest being that sleg is borrowed power. Cerbereans have a physical and spiritual connection to sleg. They generate it in their blood and soul. They can sense when sleg is nearby. They can feel and see through their sleg. But sleg does not, strictly speaking, originate with them. It originates from the corpse of Cerberus in orbit around a star called Avernus and is dispersed to Cerbereans throughout the Kingdom. This is why it’s very important we have Joule’s artificial sleg on hand. Our Cerberean kids each have a reservoir of sleg they can draw upon, but this sleg will eventually run out without a connection to Cerberus. Because Cerberean bodies have adapted to make use of sleg, without it, they will waste away and die. Florence predicts that without injections of artificial sleg, the kids would die in two to three months.

 

Another difference is that sleg is far more even-handed in temperament. Recall that Lugh himself is the rational, creative side of his light while his naked light is ravenous and destructive. But Cerbereans aren’t sleg, they just contain it and use it. The First Born Cerbereans who literally pulled themselves out of Cerberus’ corpse like how the God Sculptors pulled themselves out of our planet’s molten crust during the Hadean epoch, are actually made of sleg and the way the Cerberean kids have described them brings to mind Lugh. Bleddyn told us that the FIrst Born are known wield sleg far more powerful, fearsome, and unwieldy than the kind average Cerbereans do and yet have greater insight into the workings of sleg than other Cerbereans. First Born Cerbereans make the greatest weaponers among their race and they only take apprentices from those showing incredible promise like Bleddyn’s brother Alwen.

 

A third difference is that sleg “tarnishes” while Lugh’s light doesn’t. Sleg tarnishes when a multitude of thoughts and wills pull at the sleg against the will of the user. This is why Hadeans are about as effective against Cerbereans as Cerbereans are against them. The voice of Hades booms through each Hadean refracting into a multitude of echoes. It’s also why Red Queen with her thought fragmentation can tarnish sleg just by looking at it.

 

When sleg tarnishes,.it’s properties change. It becomes immaterial. It’s radiance dulls. It becomes weak and to most Cerbereans useless, though Shadow Dancers like Bleddyn have learned how to tarnish sleg in a controlled manner so as to produce shadow sleg, which is far from useless when handled by a master.

 

What these similarities and differences mean in light of Emyr’s mysterious deal with NUADA and the Dagdans secretly transporting Cerbereans like Emyr through their multiverse blockade into Fairy, we can only guess. But it’ll be very interesting to see how the Cerberean kids’ powers interact with Ayumi’s light. We’d have to keep what we learn to ourselves though. Say that Cerbereans are able to wrest Lugh’s light away from Ayumi. That would tell us that a single Cerberean could, for instance, cause King Arthurs’ Excalibur sheathed by his side to suddenly activate while he’s in a meeting with a bunch of Unseelie Courtiers. 

 

That would shake things up and then some, wouldn’t it?

 

A fourth thing you might think is a difference between sleg and Lugh’s light is that sleg can heal while Lugh’s light can’t. But you’d be wrong.

 

Ayumi, in her meekness, has discovered an aspect of Lugh’s light that Lugh himself is entirely unaware of. Ayumi can heal wounds where her father could only give them. This is Ayumi’s favorite out of all her powers and she likes to use it to heal her teammates after a battle. But this contributes to her social ostracization as Ishinomori believes that every student should be combat focused (Martin’s only requires students to complete ERC 1. Ishinomori requires students to complete ERC 2.) The Japanese place a great emphasis on making sure the next generation of superheroes can fight. Our system which recognizes superheroes specialized in combat, rescue, and support is seen as inefficient. If everyone knew how to fight, you wouldn’t need several types of superheroes–just one that could do everything. Ishinomori believes that If you’re a superhero, you need to fight, plain and simple, but Ayumi constantly places herself into the role of the healer in the back of the group waiting for someone to fall. Her peers view her as a burden in a battle, an indecisive firefly who flitters around the battlefield. Yes, she’ll patch you up when all is said and done, but if she actually got her head in the game and did something you wouldn’t need patching up in the first place.

 

But Ayumi is scared of what happens to her when she does get her head in the game.

 

Ayumi’s instinct also tells her how to fight and fight very, very well at that, and it scares her because it’s something she can’t readily attribute to her birth parents. They tell her she’s just a natural, that she’s got a good head for combat like they did back when they wore costumes and patrolled Japan. But she knows that the instinct she has is different. She knows how to parry and strike and grapple with a muscle memory that should only belong to multi-black belts like the Shisa twins. What’s worse, her instinct tells her to strike at full force and go for the weak spots. It tells her to crush and cripple her opponents, not just beat them.

 

After a bad day in ERC where she speared a low-level BOL flunkie named Gingerbread Man in front of her class, she feared she was some kind of psycho killer in the making, and though her teachers told her that young superheroes sometimes use too much force, which is why they train, the whispers around the lunchroom from her peers got to her. She now forces herself to lose every single sparring match with her classmates just to show that she’s not a threat, that she’s not a danger, that she’s really harmless and wouldn’t hurt anyone. When the Ishinomori kids respond to a danger, be it real or simulated, she’s in the back doing as little as possible.

 

Failinis The Guardian

 

NUADA let us in on a little secret about Ayumi’s canine companion Fally–he’s the legendary Failinis, loyal hound of Lugh, known in some stories as Fer Mac and Shallinis, sent by Lugh to protect his daughter.

 

We can’t really determine how Lugh feels about Ayumi. It’s clear he doesn’t want to have any hand in raising her, otherwise he would have revealed himself to her, but on the other hand he does seem to care about her. Failinis is not just any dog, he’s a Fairy dog. He’s a powerful warrior who has been by Lugh’s side throughout his wanderings. Lugh trusts Failinis more than any other being.

 

Failinis appeared to Ayumi one day in the form of an adorable, if curiously large, shiba inu. It was a classic story–he ran into her on the streets, she fed him some leftovers from her lunch, he followed her home, and then “Mom can I keep him?”

 

The Abes know who Failinis is–he told them who he was. But to Ayumi, “Fally” is just a weird dog–a yokai or kaiju perhaps–who took a liking to her. She doesn’t know Fally can talk, and she certainly doesn’t know that his cute white teeth have been stained with the blood of countless warriors, but she does know that Fally can do a lot of magical things. He can turn water into wine by swimming in it (she learned this from a very interesting bath time,) disintegrate objects with his breath (she goes through so many balls and toys playing with Fally, but she never clues in that what he really wants her to do is throw her spear like Lugh would do), create gusts of wind with his tail (which happens more than Ayumi would like because Fally is a happy boy), and vomit quantities of gold and silver on command (She found this out when she needed money to go the movies. Unfortunately, they don’t accept gold coins stamped with the face of the Dagda as payment, not even if the face changes to reflect whoever the Dagda is at the moment).

 

Don’t tell the Cerbereans this, but I personally think Failinis is kind of cooler than Cerberus.

 

Oh, and if you’re wondering how Ayumi happened to know to call Falinis Fally, it was because Falinis telepathed FAILINIS…FAILINIS…FAILINIS…while Ayumi was brainstorming names. He wasn’t about to let himself be called Woofers or Mr. Paw-Paw.

 

Failinis longs for his new owner to lead him into battle just as Lugh did, but he has to be content with Ayumi pulling him back from the action time and time again and being told “Fally, no!” over and over.

 

She’s not his old master. She’s not Lugh. She does a lot of things that don’t make much sense to Fally. When she fights a giant monster, instead of decapitating the giant monster with a single slash of her spear, she hangs back and uses her light to heal her friends–something Lugh never did with his light. But he loves her all the same. So she’s awkward around people. Lugh was awkward around people. It’s why they have him. He’s not a person, so they can open their hearts to him without any fear or worries.