#pixie police

[philcoulsonismyhero]

Worldbuilding June, Day 3: Who lives in your world?

Here’s a by no means exhaustive list of some of the magical creatures and folks that live in the magical version of Scotland that exists just slightly to the side and (if you try really hard to ignore it) out of sight of the ‘real’ one:

Faeries/the Fair Folk/the Sidhe (keep to themselves in faery hills and rings and other such locations, although this has been getting harder as human settlements have grown and spread over the centuries)

Assorted subcategories of faeries like pixies, brownies, gnomes, bauchans, banshees etc. (mostly ignore humans as humans ignore them, but also fond of mischief and none too friendly to those who bother them)

Selkies (often integrated into seaside communities, or have their own settlements on isolated islands)

Wulvers (human-shaped beings with the heads and fur of wolves, usually peaceful and friendly and found in cities more than most other magical folks)

Kelpies (shapeshifters that usually take the form of horses and lure people into bodies of water where they drown and eat them)

Nuckelavees (monstrous, skinless, centaur-like creatures that bring havoc and death wherever they go)

About a dozen other varieties of demonic water horses, a result of the many unfortunate horses that have been ridden into faery hills by unwise humans and returned changed, much like their riders

Ceasg (mermaids who live in both fresh and salt water and have tails resembling those of salmon)

Glaistig (similar to fauns or satyrs, often found around castles and rumoured to drink blood)

Possibly dragons? (evidence is conflicting)

And whatever the hell is going on in Loch Ness...

Also, sometimes humans spend a little bit too long in magical places and end up with powers of their own, and they’re come to be known as Changelings after the old stories of babies replaced by the Fair Folk.

[philcoulsonismyhero]

Worldbuilding June Day 1: Tell us about your world, what’s it about?

It’s been a long few days but it’s now June and I said I was going to do Worldbuilding June, so here’s a quick intro to the two settings I’m going to be putting some work into:

The Sci-Fi One (the setting for what will eventually be a novel, so growing out of a plot outline):

It’s a few hundred years into the future and the human race has spread out into space. We’ve got FTL and have been living on other planets for a few generations, plus there’s a whole culture of folks who live on their ships and are known as Spacers. Forming one of the edges of explored space, an edge that’s quite far away from the main bulk of the colonies, is a huge anomaly known as the Cloud. Astronomers originally thought it was a nebula, but it’s far weirder than that, full of black holes and strange stars and spatial Weirdness. Naturally, we’ve set up a research base on the edge of it.

A ring station with a central core, Nimbus Station has grown beyond its original purpose into a thriving colony in its own right, as well as acting as a home base for a branch of the Exploration Corps. A group that has the same sort of prestige and reputation in their space-faring society as astronauts do in ours, the EC has been sending ships into the mysterious depths of the Cloud for years in an attempt to map it and learn its secrets.

However, there’s one (of many, but this may be the biggest) secret that they haven’t uncovered yet: on the other side of the Cloud- nestled within its fringes, hidden by the signal distorting effects of the anomaly, and completely unaware of the station- is the home planet of humanity’s closest alien neighbours. An avian race that was migratory in their distant past before settling down to build a civilisation of cities, they’ve had space travel for a little over a century. And they’ve been sending ships into the depths of the Cloud too…

Main locations: Nimbus Station, The Cloud, Bird World (placeholder name)

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The Fantasy One (without a main plot other than Monster of the Week, mostly just a place for OCs to live):

It’s present day Scotland, and the faerie world exists alongside ours. Except it’s the complicated sort of alongside where you don’t quite see it unless you’re looking for it, and most people choose to go about their daily lives without paying it much mind at all. They don’t notice the brownies causing tiny havoc, or that the man who always seems to be at the butcher’s actually has a wolf’s head if you look at him properly, or that sometimes you can walk down a street that doesn’t seem quite Right for reasons entirely unrelated to Edinburgh’s unusual geography.

Except sometimes they do, usually because they’ve gotten themselves into magical trouble, and that’s where the so-called ‘Pixie Police’ come in. (The organisation has a proper name, but I’ve not come up with it yet and most people don’t use it anyway.) Mostly comprised of people who got exposed to some sort of magic and now see it everywhere (because the more magic you encounter the more you become aware of it and so on in a vicious cycle), they deal with the situations where the magical and the mundane collide. Students who drank the wrong thing at the Wrong Kind of Party and have to be ransomed back from the Fae, reports of shapeshifting demon horses terrorising seaside towns, the persistent nonsense that people get up to around Loch Ness (which is Their Problem even though they’ve yet to find the real truth behind the whole Nessie business)... Life for the Pixie Police is definitely never boring.

Main locations: Edinburgh, but also pretty much anywhere in Scotland