The Culture Column
Feytowns have existed in the world ever since 1923, when the Good People began appearing from nowhere in ones and twos and threes with nothing but what they could carry on their backs, fleeing a war of which they (and subsequent expatriates) would not speak further. The number of new faeries grew quickly with each passing year, when a total of twenty thousand faeries appeared around the world, usually in groups of a forty-to-eighty. On January 5th, 1948, the flood ceased, and it would not be until exactly twelve years later that new faeries would appear, this time at their lowest rate ever. Since then, no more than a hundred faeries have appeared each year, supplementing the modern population of three hundred thousand faeries worldwide (with approximately thirteen thousand of these having been born on Earth). Three-quarters of the United States' thirty-seven thousand faerie population is in the Chicago neighborhood officially called North Lawndale (but otherwise known as Feytown, Chicago).
Faerie magic
In addition to their aforementioned fluidity of body, which is believed to be a side effect of the altering nature of the magic they contain, tinsmiths are able to use their magic to perform small tricks, like making rotten food edible again. Each such trick requires individual training and practice and using them requires physical and mental exertion. Because it takes less effort to simply make the appearance of something, rather than to also give it substance, gypsies make illusions far more often than actual changes.
Their ability to change shape bears repeating, and so long as their general size (which at the age of twenty years is the same as an adult human) is maintained, they can take just about any form, from a completely ordinary human to a mass of tentacles and fangs. Practice is necessary for details, however, and most faeries take some time simply to make the conceptual jump necessary to realize that assuming her physical appearance is one of the most important parts of imitating a human. Even after that, it can take years to successfully master another person's exact appearance and take that form without making any mistakes.
Faerie Psychology
Faeries put much more stock in identifying people by how they act than by how they look, and this would more readily make sense if it weren't for the fact that they change personalities like they change clothes, and with less notice. Most faeries have four or five "core" personalities that they shuffle through regularly, and can exhibit a surprising amount of flexibility even within these personalities. Each of these personalities also usually demonstrates its own mental disorders, and it should be noted that these are not personalities in the sense that they are separate identities as the term is usually used when referring to people with multiple personalities.
According to the Good Folk there are still minute similarities between each personality, and they recognize others by noticing these "tells." Humans have to be content with becoming familiar enough with a faerie to recognize his various personalities. The faeries depend very much on personality, however, and find it hard to tell people apart simply by sight (another obstacle in the path of a faerie wanting to perfectly imitate someone).
Devices
While faerie magic is low-powered and tiring normally, the pre-1948 expatriates brought over objects they refer to as "devices." When powered by a faerie a device can produce exactly one kind of effect, either something more powerful than what could be worked normally (such devices are called "grand" when especially powerful) or something of normal strength, but requiring less effort. About a quarter of all devices instead have a magical effect in themselves, such as a coin which always lands on one side, or a whetstone which can completely sharpen any substance in only a few seconds.
Buttermilk
It's called by many names: Fog, Phederrur, Sweetmeat, FantasyÖ The most common name, however, is "buttermilk," and there isn't a single person who has any idea why. What is known is that it first appeared in the Feytown of Liverpool in 1926, and that it is produced through applying a bit of magic to marijuana. While any faerie has the potential to make buttermilk, the process requires training just as with any other trick of magic. Since its creation, buttermilk has held its own against other drugs, even the magical sort such as ghost eye (a particularly intense variant of cocaine), and it runs for a high price.
Users of buttermilk find themselves experiencing their deepest desires until the effect wears off, but this quickly leads to psychological addiction, and mental issues arise when a long-time user is denied his regular fix, which might be taken as often as every hour for as long as he has any of the stuff left.
Outer Feytown
The area known as "outer Feytown" or "the edges" generally comprises the outermost three or four blocks on any side, and is populated by an even mix of humans (mostly Jewish or African-American) and tinkers. This is the area of Feytown which is strongest in the minds of tourists, and any Chicagoan who realizes that someone intends to go into Feytown will offer a quick word of warning to stay in the edges.
There's plenty to keep the tourists entertained however: Outer Feytown is full of deviceshops (selling mostly devices which even a human could use), "authentic" tinker cuisine restaurants (usually leaving out the less palatable dishes), fortunetellers, and ghost-talkers. As in deep Feytown, empty lots are often full of tables set aside for the playing of foa, and it's rare to find more than one empty table in a lot (most collections of tables keep this in mind, and the single empty table is for ëexpress games,' where you're expected to move after a single game).
Deep Feytown
It is believed that the magic of the Good People is ultimately a force of change, as demonstrated with the fluidity of their bodies and minds. There is another seeming side effect of this, not as readily apparent, which causes areas with a heavy, long-term faerie presence to become "semi-static." In a semi-static area such as deep Feytown (which houses nearly all of Feytown's twenty-eight thousand tinker population) may become larger on the inside, or gain new doors, or change shape or color, and the entire course of a street may change. The tinsmiths seem to navigate deep Feytown easily enough, never being caught by surprise when they turn a corner and things are different from how they were last week (indeed, that's why they turned that corner, because now it's a short cut to their destination), but this is the chief reason why it's considered common sense, and not discrimination, to encourage faeries and humans to not mingle quite so freely.
Marunay Ched and Foa
The tinsmiths brought with them many cultural traditions, but there are a few which bear a special mention. Marunay ched is a form of chanting accompanied by drums, with a few distinct styles determined by the speed of the chanting, whether the speed of the drumming is consistent with or opposing the speed of the chanting, and whether the chant is performed by one person, by several, or by one person in conjunction with another chant by several other people. A final distinction is made between complex poetic works and nonsense mumbling and shouting made while in a trance-like state. Marunay ched has proven popular with Chicago, and the so-called Chicago Blues genre has been influenced by it (and influenced new styles of marunay ched in turn).
It's almost impossible to travel through a Feytown and not hear someone chanting somewhere, and in Feytown, Chicago there are twenty-four faeries, called tseer sayas, who spend the majority of their day wandering through the streets, alone and in groups, performing marunay ched. It's not uncommon to see a tseer saya walk down the street and then hear everyone else spontaneously burst into an appropriate chant until he passes out of earshot.
Foa, on the other hand, is a complex strategy game often called Faerie Chess (not to be confused with fairy chess). It is played on a hexagon-shaped board with blue, green, and white spaces, ten spaces long on each side, with twenty-two pieces on one side and ten pieces on the other, and only one kind of piece shared by both sides. The two sides each have their own objective, and it is indeed possible for both sides to win if they accomplish their objectives within two turns of each other. This of course means that a rematch must commence with all possible haste, but considering the Fair Folk and their love for the game, this is probably why a win for both sides is possible.
Spectator gambling on the results of these games is very common, although in the edges (as opposed to in deep Feytown) it's less "gambling" and more "taking advantage of tourists." Many games will have a few faeries standing by, watching, half out of interest and half because they're waiting for a chance to play.
Religion in Feytown, Chicago
Faerie religion, or at least what's been explained of it, is very practically-minded: For everything it is possible to conceive, from luck to malaria to the act of being caught in a hurricane at sea, there is a spirit, or "irraal." Faerie religion consists of doing things to convince beneficial spirits to do things, and to convince harmful spirits to do things, but to do it somewhere which isn't where you are (it's impossible to get an irraal to just not do something). Marunay ched plays an important part in this, with chants for many different circumstances, and one of the duties of a tseer saya is to keep all the random irraals of Feytown convinced to do what the gypsies want. The game of foa is also said to have a religious component, but as with so much else of tinker culture, no further elaboration has been provided.
Cuisine in Feytown, Chicago
"True" tinsmith cuisine no longer exists, as they lack any food from Faerieland, but they have found alternatives. Carrots and other plants which "grow in the ground" as the faeries put it (as opposed to plants whose edible parts grow out from it) are generally the only plant matter consumed, and carrots in particular are important. Most faeries have a few carrots on them at any moment, and carrots left on the ground are common in Feytown; these are believed to be offerings to the irraals. Bread made from corn or potato flours are common, and are used in "Feytown pizzas," an adaptation (or mutilation) of the Chicago pizza heavy on meat, lacking plants which "grow from the ground" and possessing an artificial tomato sauce (since real tomatoes are unacceptable and the first tinkers seemed to believe that the essential elements of a pizza were meat, sauce, cheese, and crust) and a crust made of the aforementioned varieties of bread.
Meat makes up a heavy part of the diet of the tinkers, with a heavy emphasis on mollusks, reptiles, and small poultry. Fish is usually prepared on the spot, with smaller species (such as goldfish) placed in alcohol or a sauce for a few seconds before being swallowed whole, without any further preparation. The most controversial dietary practice of the tinsmiths involves the preparation and consumption of a living cow, accompanied with elaborate performances of marunay ched, eight days after the first snowfall of the year. There are always calls to ban the practice, when winter draws near, but the only government to do so, France, quickly lifted the ban four days later, before the first snowfall. The tinkers, for their part, decline to explain what is so necessary about the practice.
Alcohol is indulged in so long as is made from plants which do not "grow from the ground." Dairy products are not used often but are on occasion. Carrot juice is extremely popular.
dha Cerruu Cerreir
A notable gang in Chicago's Feytown, dha Cerruu Cerreir translates literally into "the Iron Hand," although this is more properly along the lines of "the Evil Eye." Iron is not lethal to faeries, but merely a severe allergen, and the concept of the iron hand, or iron touch, carries connotations of sickness or ill health and bears a similarity to the evil eye in human cultures, albeit with the implication that the bearer of the iron hand will harm himself in order to get to his target (as the iron will affect him as well).
Until recently, the gang dominated the buttermilk trade in Feytown and kept rackets on the deviceshops and ghost-talkers, but kept good relations with both faeries and humans in Feytown and surrounding neighborhoods by providing generous donations to the ill and to broken homes, and making sure to get a job of some sortó even if it was untrained laboró for anyone who was unemployed. Some of the most well-constructed homes and apartments (which then went to house anyone who needed it, for cheap) were financed by dha Cerruu Cerreir. The good will more than outweighs any financial loss (and they make ends meet anyways, even if they rarely make much of a financial profit off of such public relations activities). And, of course, they have plenty of purely legitimate sources of profit, too; most of the gang's members worked in one of several restaurants owned by dha Cerruu Cerreir, which were also held as neutral ground for any other parties in Feytown (or, indeed, anyone who can travel to them).
Most of that is still true, but two months ago the gang suddenly stopped distributing buttermilk and turned in everyone involved in its production, and now everyone is waiting to see what else comes from the gang's leader, Lur Dek Kude (or Long-Coat Jim, if you're going to insist on speaking English).
Rumors range from a deal made with the police, to a plan made long ago to destroy a major source of buttermilk, to a simple case of just how drastic a change can come over some of the more powerful faeries (like Lur Dek Kude), who receive greater mental instability hand in hand with greater magical endurance.
As two final notes, look up "The Lotus Sutra" and "Gregorian Chant" on YouTube, and design notes (explaining the reasoning behind certain elements) and tips for adapting cultures will appear in accompanying discussions for this and future installments in the forums, to save space in the column.
Next Month: The Ardwmus, a society of matriarchy, desert-dwelling nomads. Also, soul-knives and, less importantly, Neat Hats.
