#chief pixie smith

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Letters and Numbers

Spring of the Yellow Tailfeathers

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Longwood hovered by the tram station, his shades pushed into his hair and his arms crossed. As I drifted up to join him, I raised an admittedly exaggerated brow. "And you're absolutely sure you don't want me to call your Refracted counterpart?"

"I am."

"You realize that after today, you can never enter a Daoist shrine again. Without her kiss as a juvenile, you're impure. Your window of opportunity will have closed. If you ever want in again, you'll have to travel to the High Kingdom and meet on her territory."

"I get it, H.P." He smiled thinly. "I'm Zodii. I'm all Zodii."

I suppressed my sigh. "All right. No ceremonial coming of age kiss. Well, if we're not going to be spending the evening witnessing a dance, I'm glad we're going out instead." I picked up my coat and pulled it on while Sanderson watched from the stairs. "Where do you fancy? Preferably someplace with soda."

Longwood sized me up with a rueful sideways glance. "H.P., I'm 164,000. Adult wings or not, I can't legally drink for 25,000 years."

"… Right. I knew that. So where do you want to go? Hawkins and I went hiking, and Wilcox and I spent the weekend soaring above the cloudlands as geese. You and I have to go somewhere- anywhere you want. A getaway for just the two of us. That's Pixie tradition."

"I want to go to the Leaves Temple and present myself before Thurmondo."

Oh. I wrinkled my nose. "Um. That place by the Frozen Garden Palace? That's what you want? Am I even allowed to go there?"

Longwood nodded. "You're allowed to be on the lower two levels. The echo chamber is on the top floor. H.P., I know you don't believe, but I want you to come and meditate with me. That's my birthday wish."

I watched his face for any hint of ulterior motives. "What exactly do you plan to do while I'm there?"

"Just pray, and think, and listen. It's the Temple of Curiosity. It's sort of a play area up front for the nymphs and pups, and more of a museum in the back. Lots of little puzzles to fiddle with and solve. You'll like it."

"Okay. If that's what you want." I glanced over my shoulder. "Sanderson, you're in charge. No parties."

"Yes, sir."

We took the pilgrimage without magic as best as we could. I would've been content to ping there and be done with it, but Longwood insisted on the trams. At least using magic on the way home wasn't against their self-imposed rules. Longwood and I arrived in Cornflower City on Wednesday, then paid the temple a visit in the morning. I'd glimpsed the temple in passing: lush plants that betray the frosty outdoors and all of that. I'd never been inside before. Longwood walked me to the door. We entered together.

The noise hit me first. Longwood led onward and we stepped from the hall into an enormous brightly lit room.

"Holy chaos…"

Everything was a puzzle. The floor. The walls. The tables and chairs. Puzzles of cloudland cities. Puzzles of the Rainbow Bridge. Puzzles of famous monuments. Puzzles of planets. Puzzles of farms, animals, factories…

I turned a full circle, sliding my hands up to grasp my hat. Mazes of wire. Mirrors that alter your appearance in nonsensical ways. Children's toys strewn all over the ground (Ah, so that's how the Zodii lure you in young). Fairy nymphs and Anti-Fairy pups raced and poofed back and forth, shrieking and chortling as they zipped from one place to another. Amused parents sat on benches along the walls.

Longwood looked at me, awaiting any further reaction on my part. "If it's too much, sir, on the other side of the room, there's a door that leads into the meditation hall. It's quieter there."

I squinted. There was laughter, and crying. Bright construction paper. Train sets with engines and tracks. Interactive wall panels. Tunnels. Slides. Climbing bars. Trampolines. Squishy blue mats. Ringing rainbow xylophones. Spinning hoops. Wooden blocks. Sports balls. Foam balls. Toy blasters to fire those foam balls. Adventure quests and target games you could work your way through with a pretend wand in hand. Scoreboards?

It was every doctor's office waiting room, playground, splash pad, nymph gymnasium, and socializing nursery I'd ever imagined contained under one roof. My awareness zinged in a thousand directions at once, trying to track every rapidly moving kid, shot ball, and thrown toy. Every toenail, every hair, every dust flake, every skin cell.

Howls of pain. Bruises? Blood? Snot? Barf? Pee? There was no way to know what wild kids did when ducking through the tunnels and enriching themselves where adults couldn't see them. I am almost positive everything in there was liable to give you some contagious disease at the simplest brush of your hand. Nothing in there was sanitary. Nothing in there was safe. It wasn't right.

"Longwood," I whispered, "I can't do this. I can't stay in here. Nothing in here is organized. I'm going to have a meltdown. In front of all these people."

"Really?" He looked again around the Temple. "I thought you'd like solving the puzzles and filling in the coloring sheets."

"I will. Oh, I will. Longwood, I'm glad you have the ability to focus on just one thing at a time. To set up just three of a hundred dominos, to rotate a wheel filled with beads just half a turn, to flip an hourglass over when it hasn't timed out, to roll a play cloudcar a short ways across the floor, and then move on with your life."

I met his gaze, tugging my hat lower. "But if you start me on this, I swear I am not leaving until every one of these puzzles is done at the same time, and stabilized that way. And I do not care how many nymphs or full-grown adults I have to bowl over to do so. Either let me absolutely loose, or get me out of here- now."

The first thing we need to explain is Fae sex chromosomes. I gave them ZW and ZZ chromosomes to parallel insects (instead of XX and XY like humans).

Some animals can choose the sex of their offspring. This ability still exists in Fae genetics, sort of, but the fully conscious choice has been lost. Some Fae can produce both ZZ and ZW children while some can only produce ZWs.

Here is How This Works for Fairies (Not Pixies)

Damsels have the heterozygous chromosome (ZW); their body determines baby’s sex. Mom gives the baby a W unless she herself was exposed to royal jelly. If she was, she’ll give either.

In other words, most Fairies are born damsels. All moms with sons were exposed to royal jelly as kids. Unexposed damsels can only have daughters- never sons! Gynes who reproduce with exposed damsels have the highest chance of producing sons.

Here is a flowchart, broken down into bullet points below:

Mom and Dad have a kid, designated either drake or damsel at birth. They either expose the child to jelly or don’t.

An exposed drake becomes a gyne.

An exposed damsel develops slightly differently from an unexposed damsel. These damsels would be gynes if they had been born drakes; they tend to be more dominant than unexposed damsels.

An unexposed drake born to a kabouter father becomes an unexposed kabouter.

An unexposed drake born to a gyne or drone father becomes a drone.

You cannot have an “exposed kabouter drake.” They are gynes. However, there are two types of unexposed drakes (drone and kabouter) depending on what their father was.

Fairies believe there are four sexes: Gyne, drone, kabouter drake, and kabouter damsel. They do not yet know it’s the three months after birth that determine whether a kid is a gyne or that kabouter damsels can be divided into exposed and unexposed categories.

In my final FOP ‘fic, Devil’s Backbone, Foop discovers the effect jelly has on Fairies.

Remember: The Fae don’t know the effects of jelly yet. However, they can sort of sense a difference between exposed and unexposed damsels. Exposed damsels are often tall and are considered more attractive in Fairy culture for the same reason gynes are: a tendency towards dominance.

So that’s how birth/gender works with the Fae. Maybe now it makes sense why 75% of the Fairy and Anti-Fairy babies are born damsels (I talked about this in the Fairy and Anti-Fairy class overviews under “Gender Dynamics” if you are interested in further reading, and the effect this gender skew has had on their cultures… I find the Anti-Fairy gender dynamics section particularly interesting if you’re only going to pick one!)

Will o’ the wisps are an exception to the 75% damsel rule. Compared to most Fairies, wisps have a very high chance of having sons. Wisp damsels tend to be fragile due to genetic instability, so you end up with a lot of wisp drakes.

The gender skew is connected to the once-high mortality rate of damsels. Once upon a time, Fairy damsels would die after mating, so there needed to be a lot of females in the species to reproduce. In modern times, the Eros family shoot Fairy damsels with arrows that give them the magical energy boost they need to survive mating.

Fun Fact: This history of damsel deaths is also partly why Fairies marry young but have kids late, and why Fairy culture has never been the type to pressure people to have kids… You only mated if you accepted you or your partner would die! This contributed to mating being a rare, super ceremonial act in Fairy culture and is why we see special mating rooms (yidreamu) in Fairy architecture.

It’s Different For Pixies and Here’s Why

Pixies are infected with Wolbachia pipientis, and one of its phenotypes [in insects] is feminization (in Fae it’s masculinization). Some pixies are born with ZW chromosomes, but ZZ reproductive parts. These kids would have been born damsels, but because their father is infected with Wolbachia, they were turned into drakes midway through development. In the Frayed Knots chapter “Bottled Emotions,” we learn Wilcox is one such pixie.

About 50% of Pixies have damsel sex chromosomes. However, most do not know it because they are not tested for it (Why would you bother?) As a result, 50% of Pixies are drones and 50% are kabouters who identify as drones because they were raised thinking they are drones.

(Commelina is still the only pixie born with ZW sex chromosomes and ZW reproductive parts, so she is definitely a kabouter).

So what does this mean? Not much. These “kabouter” pixies are half drone and half kabouter, so they’re pretty similar to full drones. They are still influenced by pheromones, but not as strongly. As a result, they’re a little more rebellious than the full drones, but not as rebellious as a full kabouter (the least influenced by pheromones) would be.

Here’s another example: Longwood is a ZZ pixie gyne. He’s considered moderately attractive since he’s a gyne. Smith is a ZW pixie gyne. He gets the attractive bonus for being a gyne AND the attractive bonus for being an exposed ZW. People don’t understand it logically, but their bodies can sense he’s “double attractive.” As a result of being doubly attractive, his pheromones were incredibly strong from a young age. Very seductive boy. All the other pixie gynes are ZZs, so he’s the only one like that.