Ailil

Originally written: Spring 2015

Name: Ailil

Species: Fairy

Gender: Not only do fairies not have a concept of gender, they are incapable of comprehending such a thing even if it is explained to them.

Pronouns: It/its (the idea of having separate pronouns for living and nonliving things is also incomprehensible to fairies)

Orientations: Unknown

Age when written: Unknown, recently old enough to be expected to reproduce

Family: Unknown, but lives with other fairies in the human world

Friends: Unknown

Description:

Ailil is the title character of "A Fairy in a Coffeeshop" and was the first character to have a story written about them (in fact the only other character to actually have a story written about them was Melina). Ironically, it is also the character that Curi knows the least about. While writing Ailil's first story, inspiration for Deborah struck and Curi wound up spending more time on each other character than she ever had on Ailil. As a result, very little is known about who Ailil is as a person, but its story revealed a decent amount of information about how fairies live in that universe. Most importantly to Ailil's story is that this is the type of fairy that produces changelings.

At the time of the one story written about Ailil, it is recently of reproductive age (whatever that is for fairies) and is under a lot of stress due to societal expectations as a result. It does want to have a child but isn't certain if it's ready or if it should wait. This type of fairy can't reproduce on its own and requires a human child to turn into a fairy using some unspecified process. As a result, fairies look like humans despite the fact that they aren't even technically mammals. The stress Ailil is under causes it to become snippy and short-tempered and less cautious in pretending to be human. At one point in its story it blows up at a coffeeshop employee for mistakenly putting real milk in its drink rather than soy (milk is poisonous to fairies) before realizing such a reaction would be extreme for a human.

Fairies in that world have multiple ways of acquiring a human child for their own. Technically they can create changelings or even fetches and simply kidnap infants, but that practice has been seen as horribly immoral for millennia. The one situation where kidnapping human children is seen as acceptable is if doing so rescues the child from a bad situation. For instance, it's not unheard of for fairies to kidnap children from abusive parents and replace them with fetches that grow sickly and die not long after. Most often though, they just legally adopt children.

Fairies live among humans, pretending to be humans too. They have citizenships and ID cards and everything. They're very social creatures and large families of fairies will typically live in single houses. A fairy residence will of course have a few odd quirks, mostly as a result of their necessary avoidance of iron and steel. For instance, fairies tend to have quite expensive cars in order to have as little steel in its construction as possible (though in the case of even minor engine trouble they have to rely on non-fairy mechanics to handle the situation for them). They also have kitchens with no iron or stainless steel components, which can also be a bit more expensive than usual. They live longer and age slower than humans, so most fairies are homeschooled.