Questions about Visitor

[DanielH]

I was thinking of Earth-style population density, where we have more than a billion people per continent. In hindsight, this was an obvious mistake.

[Alicorn]

Yeah, an area the size of a city in the developed parts of Earth will have at most one large court of ~500 fairies and suburbs of individuals or small courts. If there are no huge courts around, there's typically several mile radii around the home of a given fairy or small court, and there's also large uninhabited areas, like the Steppes, and even-less-densely-populated areas, like the Forever Snows. If they seem closer together than that it's because everyone can fly.

[DanielH]

What is the typical flying speed of a fairy? It presumably doesn’t vary as much by environment as walking does, because there are fewer obstacles and you just avoid most of those instead of going through them, but how much does in vary between individuals or kinds?

Do fairies have any tendency to group into non-court communities, or do fairies outside of courts generally try to stay that way by avoiding each other as much as reasonably possible?

There are some places that could approximately be summarized as “businesses” instead of “residences” (such as the libraries). Are there many types of these? Do they have a tendency to be relatively close to others (as with Earth markets and shopping districts)?

[Alicorn]

Fairy flying speed varies a lot. Excluding any kinds we haven't invented whose kind magic is "they fly stupidly fast", probably between 30 and 200 miles an hour (horizontal overland). Promise can do something like 60-70 if she's trying real hard.

Fairies do not tend to form consensual communities (or if they do, they aren't stable). They sometimes interact/trade, but they do this by going to each other's houses, arranging meeting spots on neutral ground, etc. There are loosely community things/projects like libraries, which usually grow out of hobbyist fairies' pet projects where the hobbyist fairies are some combination of friendly and canny negotiators. They are not very much placed for the convenience of anyone involved apart from the proprietors; no one is relying on libraries for livelihood. Smaller-scale cottage industry exists (if you are good at making, say, fabric, you might make lots of it and trade it for somebody renovating your house or a basket of candied dewdrops or whatever). In the sandbox with Emma we see all the fairies who live in a certain area, Promise included, meeting to discuss whether they approve of letting a colony of breeders move in. The breeders proposed this meeting by finding a fairy who lived in the area, and that fairy knew the area well enough to invite everyone else.

[Nemo]

You can buy food in Fairyland? I assumed there wouldn't be much of a market, considering.

[Alicorn]

It's not common, but fairies really don't have to worry that much about it. People probably wouldn't want to buy food from a berrybush (or even a leaflet) if they had other options, but if you want something (particularly something processed) you may be able to find someone who sells it. Candied dewdrops are made with sorcery.

[DanielH]

What’s a berrybush’s magic, and what’s the relation to the bush they’re presumably named after?

Could somebody who was careful enough know that the kind of food a leaflet was selling did not include any from the leaflet’s tree, such as by recognizing that all of that food was not tree-based, or would that not always be possible?

[Alicorn]

Berrybushes have little branchy antlers that grow berries. They are the strongest case of fairy food and eating a berrybush's berries will typically envassalize another fairy. I don't know a kind magic for them; it *might* just be that but probably they should get something else.

Even if you could recognize e.g. Promise's berries you might not notice if she'd squeezed juice from them onto other things.

[DanielH]

So were the unspecified breeders and other fairies being foolishly incautious in the admin sandbox?

[quote="imeanforever]And Promise goes out of the library and flies to her gate and goes home.

She checks the gate. It's not settled yet.

When it does settle, three days later, she goes to a breeder colony and asks if they want some candied dewdrops in exchange for some paper; she adds that at least two of them will be needed to help carry all the dewdrops, can they come by in a few hours and pick them up. The way breeder colonies work any given two will be master and vassal, and it hardly matters which.

She goes back to her tree, makes a lot of candied dewdrops, and flies back Downside to tell the admin.[/quote]

It seems like it still might be dangerous even if you’re getting your food from a sky-veil; the sky-veil might have a berrybush or leaflet vassal. Is this just an issue of “this kind of scheme is rare and unstable; it’s not worth worrying about in most cases”? Also, could sky-veils be vassalized by water (unlike everything else) because to them rainwater works like food?

[Kappa]

The conditions under which sky-veils can go without food indefinitely are when they drink nothing but fresh-caught rainwater and spend all of their time under the open sky. Water in general is not any more foodlike to them than it is to the average fairy.