Fair Folk

The Fair Folk is a semiclandestine organization of the Eversky that combats what its members feel is the tedium of life in the Multivirt by staging games and puzzles that they impress generally unwilling subjects into taking part in. Those who do well in the Folk's games may be richly rewarded, but those who fail to achieve the goals they're set may meet a much less pleasant fate. It is those who refuse to play along at all, however, for whom the Fair Folk reserve their worst punishments.

Membership

Outsiders don't know the exact number of individuals comprising the Fair Folk, especially as many of them often like to assume different disguises so that it's not always possible to tell whether two interactions were with the same person or not. However, it seems clear that there are at least ten Fair Folk, though the total number could be much larger, perhaps as many as a couple of hundred. Most likely, the actual number of Fair Folk is at the lower end of this range, perhaps in the twenties or thirties.

The leader of the Fair Folk, insofar as such an anarchic organization has a leader, is a striking woman who calls herself Queen Mab. Her fellow Fair Folk sometimes address her as just "Mab", but only they are allowed to speak to her in such familiar terms, however; outsiders she and the other Fair Folk insist must call her by her full title of "Queen Mab" or by honorifics such as "Her Majesty", whether they're speaking to her or about her. Even the Fair Folk themselves only drop her title when they're speaking to her directly; when referring to her in the third person they too call her "Her Majesty", or use some comparable honorific. Queen Mab is a small woman who always dresses in bright blue, though the cut of her outfit varies widely. She has wings like a dragonfly's, and a long, coiled tongue that can reach several meters from her body, and which she occasionally does extend to such distances apparently for the express purpose of unsettling visitors. The Fair Folk have also claimed that Queen Mab has a vagina dentata, but no one is known to have put that to the test.

Queen Mab is not the only member of the Fair Folk whose name is known. Goodfellow appears like a slender blond youth, generally unclad, who flies without visible means of propulsion, speeding through the air or hovering in place while simply sitting with his legs crossed. Goodfellow is a clever rhymester, and is often the voice of the Fair Folk, laying out the ground rules of their games in rhymed and metered verse. Melusine has the form of a winged dracena, wearing a horned crespine very much like that of the Duchess of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as drawn by John Tenniel. That this resemblance is not coincidental is suggested by Melusine's fondness for throwing about pepper-like sternutative powder and turning people into pigs, both habits that likely took their inspiration from the literary character. Melusine often contradicts Queen Mab and seems to question her decisions, but Mab always takes it in stride and uses Melusine's apparent antagonism as a tool to turn the subject of her discourse—to such an extent as to imply that Melusine's seeming opposition to Queen Mab is a sham, their feigned disagreement planned and rehearsed. Arawn appears to be a handsome man with small horns, riding a flying horse. Arawn makes much of "the hunt", and escaping his "Wild Hunt" often plays a role in the Fair Folk's games. Finally, Mother Gothel has the form of an old woman who gets around by pulling herself by other people's hair, which she can cause to grow to arbitrary lengths and move in any direction. Mother Gothel acts matronly and comforting, dispensing volumes of obviously useless and inapplicable advice. She's especially fond of telling people to eat their vegetables.

While there is reason to believe that the Fair Folk have occasionally invited new people into their ranks, they seem to do this on a whim rather than as the result of any formal process. They often recruit people who do particularly well in their games, especially if they seem to be good sports about it, though not if they seem too sympathetic toward others to be likely to be willing to subject them to like treatment. It's not known whether or not anyone was ever invited to join the Fair Folk and turned them down, but if so, it's likely the Folk made them suffer for their spurning.

Exactly where the members of the Fair Folk get all the hacks and exploits they use to set up their games remains something of a mystery. Some of them may be hackers, or have connections with hackers, but there's some reason to believe that much of what they do is perfectly legitimate from legal terms, implying that the Fair Folk may have connections very high up. It's been bruited that one or more of the Fair Folk may actually be secret alts of high officials of the Sociate, or some other virtual provider.

Games

The Fair Folk's games can take a huge variety of forms, but have a few common elements. First of all, they're very seldom done in the open, among uninvolved people. The Fair Folk usually spirit their victims away to hidden enclosures or even whole separate hackworlds they've set up to fulfill their exact needs. Secondly, the Fair Folk's games are always fancifully themed. They invent backstories and plots to underlie even the simplest rulesets, and lavishly decorate the areas of their games accordingly.

Usually, a large part of the game is simply for the Folk's victims to find their ways around their environments. Some of the games have goals as straightforward as escaping a maze within a certain time limit—or eluding Arawn's Wild Hunt or some other hazard for a particular time. Other games involve finding one or more objects hidden in the area—if there is only one object, this is functionally equivalent to the escape-the-maze game, with the object taking the place of the exit. Some games, however, are far more complex, and require the victims to manipulate their environment in various complicated ways or take advantage of subtle patterns not immediately apparent. For all their caprice and cruelty, however, the Folk do, in a sense, play fair. There are always hints as to what the victims are supposed to do, or where they're supposed to go. These hints may be subtle, convoluted, or deviously misleading, but they're always there, and an attentive and clever "player" should be able to find his way through. The Fair Folks' games, however, are seldom simple, and there are always environmental hazards to overcome in addition to the main thrust of the game. The playing field may be peppered with traps and other dangerous features, and quite often is roamed with perilous monsters of the Folk's own design.

Sometimes, the Fair Folk run single victims through their games, the "players" being alone in the game and only up against time. At other times, however, the Fair Folk may put a group of people in the game at once. This does not necessarily work to the players' advantage, however, as generally when there are multiple players they are in competition with each other. In the case of a maze escape game, for instance, the Fair Folk may decree that only the first person out of the maze will be allowed to escape freely (or the first two people, or three, depending on how generous they're feeling), and all other players will be deemed to have lost the game. Instead of racing the clock, the players are racing each other.

When the game is over, winners are rewarded, sometimes with useful hacks or often with information they were seeking. (How the Fair Folk know what information players want is another of their mysteries.) Losers, however, may be transfigured with morphic hacks or otherwise subjected to deleterious hacks. Some losers simply aren't seen again, perhaps taking a permanent place as a feature of the Folk's future games. Whether or not the Fair Folk ever reuse the same games for different groups of victims is uncertain, since most of the victims don't talk about what they've been through. According to some stories, the Fair Folk enjoin this silence on pain of terrible penalties, but not all accounts agree that this is the case.

Area of activity

The Fair Folk's activity seems to be centered on the environs of a part of the Eversky known as Babylon, to such an extent that many have assumed the Fair Folk have their headquarters there. It's not certain, however, that the Fair Folk even have a headquarters on the Eversky; they may pass their time when not running or designing games (assuming there is a time when they're not running or designing games) in their own hackworlds, or they may live double lives in unrecognizable disguises. At any rate, while the rate of abductions by the Fair Folk is higher near Babylon to a statistically significant degree, they certainly don't confine themselves entirely to this area. The Fair Folk have appeared and snatched new victims from all over the Eversky, albeit from some parts more than others.

Recently, the Fair Folk have begun spreading even outside the Eversky. There have been reports of Fair Folk appearances in Ganeden, Yarramukus, and Crowther, among other virtual worlds. The majority of their activity remains in the Eversky, but that may be changing.

Influence

With their tendency to snatch victims unexpectedly, and the terrible trials they put them through, it's understandable that the Fair Folk have become dreaded bogeymen in many parts of the Eversky. While there are frequent calls for the supervisors to do something about them, so far the Fair Folk have escaped any punishment, perhaps because of their elusive nature and perhaps because of their connections. More than one vigilante has decided that if the Sociate isn't going to do anything about Fair Folk, he will. None of these vigilantes have succeeded in finding the Fair Folk, but many of them have been found by them, and have found themselves involuntary players in their games, and not in a position to take any effective action against the Folk.

Despite all the dread the Fair Folk engender, however, they also seem to be a source of some artistic inspiration. The Fair Folk are a frequent subject of visual and literary art on the Eversky, and much music has also been created by composers who cited the Fair Folk as their inspiration. Many of these artists have themselves been players of the Fair Folk's games in the past, but others have found mere second-hand accounts sufficiently stimulating to move their artistic hearts. What the Fair Folk think of all this is uncertain, but the fact that these artists don't generally find themselves abducted (except in a few cases when they have publicly expressed a desire to play the Fair Folk's games) seems to point to their not taking much umbrage at it.