Forest Fairy

A Forest Fairy is a species of fairy and animo, a race of being native to the forests of Earth. As an animo, they are the Immaterial Counterpart of forest flowers and sometimes other forest flora.

## Characteristics

### Biology

Forest fairies all have a similar look. They have two sets of translucent wings on their back of varying colors and styles and have long, pointed elf ears, often causing some people to confuse them for elves. Fairies are often small in size, around the size of their flowers that they tend to and are the embodiment of. Usually, fairies are around 13-14 cm in size when adults, although there is a wide variation in their size. For instance, Pomu Rainpuff is only around 9 cm tall, and yet this isn't seen as too unusual or abnormal in the fairy world. Fairies usually have dainty bodies that include things like sensitive skin and a sensitive digestive system and stomach.

Forest fairies, as animos, are the living, humanoid embodiment of flowers. As such, their form is born from the flower that they are the conscious embodiment of. In other words, fairies are born from flowers, although they still have parents, usually considered to be the two flowers that were cross-pollinated to create the seed that would give rise to the flower that would then birth the animo. During mating, fairies cross-pollinate themselves in an act akin to human intercourse in order to produce the seed (akin to human birth) that would produce offspring. While flowers possess both male and female parts within the same plant, there is a male/female dichotomy within fairy biology which is an imposition of the circumstances of their creation.

Since fairies are the embodiment of flowers, in their natural state their bodies consist of 70% nectar, like how human bodies consist of 70% water. However, their bodies become fully human if they take on a human form. While fairies at first were incapable of shapeshifting, after spending time in Heaven and associating more with it, they were able to adopt the heavenly shapeshifting ability for themselves. Modern fairies are thus able to take on many forms, including larger human forms (and even human forms with wings capable of flight, if they lose bone density and increase muscles accordingly), and even have the ability to grow extra limbs or organs.

Fairies can outlive the death of the flower they are the embodiment of by inducing a rebirth and resurrection of the plant, but in the process this costs their own innermost life essence, the internal power at their very core. As such, fairies still have finite lifespans of around 80-100 years, although having more Belief Power can help them live longer, up to 120 years in some cases. When a fairy has outlived the deaths of n flower embodiments, they are said to be n flowers old, where flowers are a common unit (along with petals) to measure fairy lifespan.

### Belief Power

Fairies have many unique powers, which are tied to a special property of fairies known as Belief Power. Belief Power is a special function that relates the amount of Internal Power, and thus accessible magic power, of a fairy with how much humans believe in fairies. When a human believes in a fairy, a portion of their essence becomes shared with fairykind, with their Immaterial Essence becoming cross-entangled with their own matter and that of a fairy's thanks to the intervening Earth. The Earth itself was manipulated to give rise to this mediation property by the Ethyrium, but fairies are unique in this regard among animos, and most animos have constant powers regardless of whether a human believes in their existence or not.

Belief Power holds much significance in fairy life given that fairies must act to ensure that some people still believe in them, or else their magic powers will fade away. The magic powers of a fairy include their ability to shapeshift as covered, but also their plant tending powers, which involve speeding up the growth of plants as well as curing plants of illness. These are crucial since without a healthy ecosystem to survive within, the flowers that the fairies embody may shrivel up, which could kill the fairies embodying them in the process. In addition, some fairies have unique magic abilities they would lose if not for Belief Power.

### Society and Culture

Fairies are a mostly peaceful species, but unlike the Disney versions and more like the fairies of folklore instead, they can be quite vicious and even will not deny allegations that they used to feed on children or humans. Fortunately, in the modern age, no fairy would do such a thing without it being a crime. Still, fairies, when threatened or when passionate about something, will generally fight tooth and nail for that thing. If someone is threatening fairykind, they will be quick to bear arms and fight that threatening force.

Fairies can also be mischievous and vengeful. A common fairy youth pastime is coming up with terrifying stories in order to scare their peers, and doing other similar things to play nasty tricks on them. Even adult fairies still partake in mischief, especially if it will get them ahead in some regard within fairy society. While pulling pranks like this is seen as a natural part of fairy culture and even a celebration of it, if a prank does go too far, which inevitably they sometimes do, the fairy responsible will face the consequences accordingly.

Fairies generally wear what is considered to be a traditional fairy garb. This includes clothing that look like they are from the medieval period, given that fairies were created around that time, adopted that style, and never got over it. Fairy women wear dresses of bright, forest themed colors, while the men wear fancy scarves featuring these colors along with their gentlemanly outfits. Fairies are also commonly seen with headdresses and other accessories usually involving forest themes, such as butterfly and flower themed ornaments.

Fairy social structure is centered around clans, long bloodlines that are the family unit of fairy society. Marriage cannot happen within a clan (for obvious reasons), so instead the children of the marriage usually adopts the clan of the mother except in situations where the clans mutually decide for this process to happen the other way. Of course, this decision is usually the instigator of the vast majority of inter-clan conflict. While most clans encompass fairies from all walks of life owing to a high social mobility, the clans at the top are known as the Royal Clans, of which the Fairy Queen is a member of one.

Fairy language is called "Fairy-go" and usually consists of forest sounds to connote meaning. In other words, it is a language entirely based on onomatopoeia. For instance, the sound of rustling leaves could symbolize change, the sound of a woodpecker could symbolize the act of working, and the sound of crunching worms could symbolize the act of eating. While there are only so many sounds a forest could make, each one sort of acts like its own letter rather than outright word. As such, words are usually strings of these sounds that connote the meaning of the concept behind that word using these essential letter component concepts to the best of fairy culture and history's ability.

## History

### Part 1

Forest Fairies were created as a race in 1020 when the Ethyrium was used by Reimu (and by extension the Heart's Melody) to create all of the animos. However, unlike the rest of the animos, the fairies were singled out to receive the property of Belief Power, meaning their power is tied to humanity's belief in them. This is later explained as being due to Reimu intentionally wanting to create fairies with the rest of the animos (given she always was fond of fairy tales and wanted fairies to be real), and that she recalled belief being a requirement for fairies to exist was a major theme in the fairy tales she read as a child, and so this mental association was brought to life with the fairies themselves.

Fairies were first created in Fairy Forest, a forest nearby the Magus Kingdom. There, they were generated fully operational and with a complete societal order, as if they had an entire history behind them at the time of their spontaneous generation. The current Fairy Queen at the moment of generation was Pomu, who established the long running Rainpuff Clan of fairies. During this period, the fairies often ran into trouble with loggers trying to promote deforestation to gather resources as well as to spite and even attack the fairies, but thanks to the members of the Ethyria Project, an agreement was settled upon.

Due to instability in the Ethyrium, the fairies were soon pitted against other animos in the Ethyrian War. In an effort to stop this, Pomu searched for a way to restore balance to the mysterious orb. In the end, Pomu was replaced as Queen after her sacrifice to stop the Ethyrium, and even though she actually survived, she was corrupted in the process and her former allies had to help the Ethyria Project put a stop to her Pomufication.

When some humans began to turn against magical creatures, fairies became wary of Earth and the troubles that lied within, and decided to flee en masse in a sort of Fairy exodus. They decided to settle in Neverland, the newly created realm of Heaven where animo souls go when they die, and were helped there thanks to a combined effort from Atlantis and Solar Sky Dragons like Elira. While they were still living beings who coexisted among the non-living souls, the fairies, over centuries, started to become more ethereal as they adopted more and more of the heavenly energies. This granted them all sorts of new powers, including most especially their shapeshifting abilities.

While fairies were gone from Earth during the establishment of the Veil, the Veil sealed the memories of humans interacting with fairies in the Fairy Forest into the human collective unconscious. This later led to the prevalence of Fairy Tales based on these collective memories beginning in the 1700s and even culminating in the fairy tales told by the Brothers Grimm.

### Return to Earth

In the 1990s, the fairies returned to Earth, to their ancestral Fairy Forest with patches now existing all across Earth, when God decided to repurpose Neverland to accommodate more humans souls. This decision was made when the fairies, still tied to belief by Belief Power, started to rapidly lose power as modern people, due to a combination of the Veil separating the human and magical worlds and also advances in science, began to believe less and less in fairies. Now the fairies were only subsisting on the power granted by a few young children, such as those who actually still believed in things like the tooth fairy.

After settling back down on Earth, fairies used their shapeshifting abilities to blend in as humans, given the Veil was in effect at this time. Fairies were dispersed in forests across the world given the Fairy Forest had patches all across the world at this point due to uprooting and replanting throughout the centuries. As a result, fairies needed a way to all communicate with one another and maintain their tight-knit community. To this end, fairies became early adopters of the internet and created a subsection of the internet just for fairies, and out of reach of humans, known as Virtual Neverland.

As time went on, Virtual Neverland improved in quality from just lines of text and code to an entire VR environment as of 2021. In this time, fairies were always on the lookout for ways in which they could reclaim their power and potentially Neverland with it, but found it difficult due to the Veil separating the human and magical worlds. The reincarnation of Pomu herself tried a few times at the urging of the darkness within her, but her attempts mostly ended up failing, and most of the fairies soon stopped following her. Fairies were eventually able to find something of a home in Purgatory, but they'd have to share with human souls. A permanent home was made for them and all of animo kind when Hell was destroyed and frozen over, becoming PAW (Petra's Animo Wonderland).