Siriah's Links
Finding the entrance to Fairyland would probably be a lot harder if she wasn't guarding it.
One of the few people more likely to be scared off by a thief than by what I actually am, and that's because she's too nosy by far - but I'm not going to threaten some kid into giving me her allowance. If I don't stop her, she's probably going to sneak into Fairyland and become forever stuck there.
Am I going to be able to make cool illusions like that when I grow up? ...That's actually kind of awesome.
"Why do we sometimes swap a baby with one of our own?" Hey, don't ask me! I just guard the entrance to Fairyland. I think it's for the experience!
I'm sure the inhabitants of Fairyland can be "reasoned with" and "have good intentions, mostly, if you manage to not break some obscure rule of etiquette." The moment I see a suspiciously glowing light in the air, I'm running.
I like her. She's easy to scare away and it's super polite of her to have silvered her axe, the stench of iron always burns my nose something fierce!
Asks people "may I have your name?" and then runs off with their name without giving it back. Very impolite.
Lives right next door and wouldn't even visit the queen's coronation. Rude! ...Okay we might have not invited her on account of not wanting her to make the whole banquet soggy, but she still should have showed up!
How is he so jolly all the time? His farm is super haunted and way too close to the woods!
Felicia is a lot closer to my children's age than mine, and I don't know her that well - for some reason she's always busy when my wife hosts a potluck. She seems to have grown into a confident young adult who took to the family trade well, though. I'm sure her parents are really proud of her!
I don't like him. He was too cheerful when I found out that all the adults had been lying to me all of my life. He probably enjoyed telling his children that Ol' Clause doesn't really bring them gifts on the winter solstice, too.
I can't believe we actually convinced this kid that he was his parents' biological child! He must have felt so stupid when he found out that none of the other kids have plants growing from their head because that is not, in fact, "totally normal for a platypus." And neither of his parents are even a platypus!
When you ask him a question, he doesn't get annoyed, he just gives you an answer and thinks it's funny that you didn't already know the answer. He is so easily amused! I love that.
Natalie is so funny. She approaches everything she doesn't know with so much curiosity and optimism and so little good sense! I don't know where she keeps coming from. She's definitely not a local, but most people who visit either run away screaming after the first time they see a ghost, or stick around indefinitely.
He asks me to tell him about my adventures out on the sea a lot, and I know he's pulling my leg, so when it's just him I make my tales a lot more outlandish than when I'm telling them to children. He seems to enjoy it the most when my stories make no logical sense. It helps me get the bad ideas out of my system and save the good ones for a more discerning audience.
He wouldn't be able to craft a believable lie to save his life, and I love that about him. He just keeps coming up with these outrageous tales that nobody's going to believe. If half of what he told was true, he'd be better off retiring and becoming a sea weed farmer.
His first words to me, with the absolute biggest grin on his face, were: "Since you're probably a big city vampire I'll give you a tip: Did you know you're supposed to drink the milk, not the blood? It comes out of the udders, those are the sacks dangling on the underside of the cows." Which is a very awkward thing to hear from someone whose barn you snuck into at night multiple times to feed on his lifestock. It's a joke at my expense, of course. I'll allow it, because being told I must not know basic cow anatomy is definitely up there in the top ten percent of best ways people have ever reacted to me doing... that.
Okay, so it's of course very rude that she broke into my barn and drank from my family's cattle, but I can't stay mad at her. She was just hungry! And so bad at being a vampire that she got caught by a teenager! I'm glad we all collectively, as a community, decided to adopt this poor girl before she goes somewhere else and gets staked.
It took me some time to warm up to him. At first I had this uncomfortable feeling that he was probably making fun of me behind my back, but as I got to know him better, I realized that he pokes fun at everyone, and that made it feel a lot less personal. Also, he actually helps out when you're failing at something, which is definitely more than you can say for some other people I've known!
When I first met him twenty years ago, I thought one thing: "Wow, he's starting a restaurant over here? That will never work, I have to see this." After actually going to the restaurant, I thought: "Wow, that city kid really knows how to cook! Too bad he put his restaurant all the way over here." He's so funny, I'm glad he was too embarassed about his failure to go back home. He always delivers the mail on time and sometimes even brings us snacks. His potluck contributions are legendary. Could I have thought of a better dad for that random baby my wife found in a cabbage field? Nope! His kid might not learn how to till a field from him, but she'll sure get some great food.
He's a solid and dependable guy. If you need help with something, he's always there for you without asking for anything in return, and he's always sharing so much good produce with my family. Plus, he was one of the first people to actually enjoy my magic tricks, and I can't help but appreciate him for that. My daughter says he sometimes laughs at people behind their backs, but nobody's perfect.
He's one of those "educated" men who thinks you can get all the knowledge you need from a book. You can't, and it's the funniest thing ever to see him try. After a lot of practice he managed to get really good at magic tricks, but the first time he did a card trick? Terrible! I couldn't look away!
He loves helping people because he thinks it's funny to see them fail at things, and some of the things he says to Kalina's mom about my parents seem kind of... like he's making fun of them behind their backs? I really wish I didn't know that about my best friend's dad, he seems so much nicer when you haven't overheard the things he says when he thinks nobody's listening!
My wife found her in the cabbage field when she was just a baby. We already had so many young children that we couldn't take one more. She's growing up to be quite the inquisitor, I'm glad she solved the mystery of why the cows kept getting spooked at night.
He tries his best to be supportive of my interests and dreams even though he doesn't always understand, so I can't be too upset at having him for a father. Sure, it's embarassing when he makes fun of people behind their back at the dinner table, but who out there is never embarassed by their relatives? People are sometimes surprised to hear we're related, probably because he's an extreme morning person.
My youngest daughter. Even if I don't understand why she'd rather become a carpenter than help out in the family business, I'm glad she found something that gets her out of bed in the morning - the rooster definitely doesn't do the trick!
It's actually really sweet of Cody that he thought a heavily-guarded army base might be holding us against our will, and so he snuck in completely unarmed to try to help out by... taking photos that bring the injustice to light, with a comically large camera? That's what the philosophers thought all Earthlings were going to be like. Turns out, they were only mostly wrong! I love that!
Tecko's great, she's very friendly and I feel like by hanging around her, I learned more about things I always kind of took for granted, like power sockets. I was a bit nervous about letting her take apart my expensive camera, but I figured, it was worth the risk for how excited she was to get to take a look inside some real "Earthling" technology. She managed to put it back together again, too, and I got to take a selfie with all of the aliens afterwards :)
I'm happy I met him. We on the First Contact team were all getting a bit disillusioned after our first few weeks on Earth, and meeting someone who didn't have any ulterior motives in wanting to befriend us was a nice change of pace - he didn't even try to make money by selling the selfies he took with us. It's not a coincidence that it took less than a day of hanging out with Cody and his friends to just randomly stumble upon the solution for a linguistic problem that had seemed impossible to solve among all the bad vibes of being guests at a place where weapons were also tested.
The most chill extraterrestrial researcher I know. It was so much fun showing her around Earth, I'm really happy she wanted to be friends. I don't know how anyone can be scared of her, she's super nice and only as tall as a professional basketball player.
One of the friends I play Caverns & Cryptids with. He's a great guy, but I keep wondering how his character does stuff like shape-shift into a rhinoceros, charge directly at the bandits and 'gently knock them unconscious with his horn.' Anyway, this is a game in which the storyteller lets me challenge dragons to poetry slam battles if I roll high enough, so I don't know why I'd expect a magical rhino to obey the laws of physics.
One of my friends. I'm glad they still have time to hang out with me now that they're a famous robot psychiatrist :) We play this game on Wednesday nights where we're adventurers in a fantasy world, and it wouldn't be half as fun if Rio wasn't so good at acting out the part of a travelling musician with magical powers.
Oh no! I only wanted to do a friendly wave to one of the forest-keepers - it's so rarely that they visit me - but she screamed and started running without ever looking back. Did she think I was upset?
When the Lake of Catsbane reaches out with an enormous column of frothing water, and forms it into a hand large enough to drown you where you stand, you know you've messed up. I'm sorry, I'm never chopping wood on the shores of your domain ever again!
I love that deforestation isn't really a problem around here. The people are convinced that if they cut down the wrong tree, bad supernatural things will happen, so lumber is only collected by people like Felicia who have been trained in the secret family art of "only chopping down some of the trees (and charging extra for it)." The woods are beautiful, and I have her family spreading tall tales about cursed trees to thank for it.
I remember his restaurant! Vaguely, though, I was like five. He brought out this cake thing for dessert that he set on fire, and I started crying because I didn't realize that it was supposed to happen. Wish I could pay him to make that again, but he only bakes for fun now.
She no doubt has lots of exciting stories to tell about the woods. It's kind of a waste that she doesn't do that - I get that it's all about keeping the family mystique intact, but surely, she could share a little tale of adventure, every once in a while? If she's worried she's not a good story teller I could give her some tips on how to make it more entertaining for an audience!
I'm kind of jealous: his stories don't make him seem very brave, but nobody thinks less of him when he mentions that the first thing he allegedly did when he ran into an enormous sea serpent was to hide behind a barrel of fish. Sure, it's all made up to entertain young children, but I can just imagine the disapproving frowns of my older relatives if I told a story like that!
I don't buy a lot of wood, so I don't end up speaking with Felicia all that often. The funny thing is, I still distinctly remember her wanting to become a balloonist when she was a child. Must have come up in class at some point.
Like most people in this town my age or younger, I've had him as a teacher at some point. Recently I found the essay I wrote for his class about how hot air balloons work, and it was so bad, grammar and spelling mistakes everywhere - I hope he remembers nothing about it.
There's a powerfully unpleasant aura around her. I'm not sure if I can somehow sense her dislike for 'reading for fun' like it's a palpable thing, or if my vampiric nature is causing me to have a reaction to the silvered earrings she wears, but it feels physically uncomfortable to be close to her.
I'm not afraid of Romy. My mane covers most of my neck, silver wards off the undead, and this particular vampire only drank from farm animals, so she probably won't drink the blood of anyone who's late to bring back a library book. Does that mean I'll ask her for a book recommendation? Nah, reading is boring. Waste of good paper, had to do too much of that in school.
She's so cool and brave, I want to be the Felicia of music when I grow up! Actually, maybe Felicia is already the Felicia of music? I've never heard her sing or play any instrument, but maybe she's very good at it.
His dad's one of my family's biggest customers. Even I'm not scared of him, I've known him since he was a baby, he's practically my nephew! However, I am absolutely terrified that his relatives are going to come back and, I dunno, decide that they made a mistake abandoning him here. Not a good fear to share with him.
Don't tell her I said this, but I think her family doesn't really believe the woods are dangerous, and that they're only claiming it is so that they can sell lumber for higher prices. Most of the woodland spirits are very nice, and the sentient trees will ask you not to chop them down long before you swing your axe into them.
Her boss is one of my family's biggest customers so I've been seeing her around quite a lot after she started her apprenticeship! I'm excited about all the cool stuff she'll make... What do you MEAN you've gone into the woods to pick up firewood before?!
Doesn't like me for some reason and I'm not sure why. I get the feeling that she's hiding something from me... Her family's secrets on how they can get high-quality wood from the forest, maybe? I'm not interested in that, I want to know why the trees are cursed in the first place!
I absolutely can NOT have her find out that I'm not as brave as everyone thinks I am. She can investigate her "mysteries" far away from me.
He's kind of scary looking because of the "resting bounty hunter face" he's got going on, but I already knew that he was actually friendly before he knitted me a pair of socks, because that is DEFINITELY the astronomical symbol for Earth tattoo'd on his shoulder. That's like Pal and her "Earthling Symbol of Peace and Nuclear Disarmament", except he can still show off his peaceful intentions when he goes to the beach :)
Joe's a naïve fool, and he deserves nice things. Don't ever let him know I said that.