(no worries! i gotcha cx) it occurred to me only because in one of my classes we had a whole day dedicated to how to get children to willingly go home/do something else through singing. also sometimes ppl don’t pick up their kids for hours :C

city fae could influence/steal the attention of children through daycares. daycare kids sometimes spend more time with their ECE/caregivers than their parents and don’t want to leave daycare b/c that’s more “home” than their actual home.

If you want to go with that angle, certainly. I think it would be a bit rare, though, and require some extreme negligence on the part of the parents. Daycares are an institution that are dedicated to caring for children, that is there purpose. The amount of negligence plus the amount of beyond-the-call care needed to sway claim to a child would be huge, I think. not impossible, especially given how shitty some parents are, but it would not be a common thing, I don't think.

No baby stealing? No changelings??

In my personal headcanon, no, that's not a thing for the city fae. Country fae, the more Old World fae, that's still a thing, certainly, but that's not the sort of thing that actively happens in the UMY city.

Or I could see it as the people with parental rights over the children screwing up and having to give the kids up. Or, somewhat more interestingly, the idea that... a parent's job is to protect and care for a child. If they are particularly derelict in their duties, a faerie could step in and take over, and thus argue a claim that supercedes the familial claim.

Which is a throwback to my headcanon for canonverse Kirin and how he became lord of the Twilight, that he simply began treating the forest as his protectorate and proved his claim consistently and for long enough that the forest answered in kind and imbued him with its power.

Obviously. incidentally, Ive got this nice bowl of milk, I’ll just leave it out for you. And this nice bread too. Just… leaving them right here. Not for any reason, of course. Definitely not because you’re fae who will steal my children of I don’t.

THAT REMINDS ME, I have a headcanon for UMYverse that children are essentially Off Limits in the city. (I am way too amused/attached to Auprago, okay, even tho it was a joke of Three's.) For instance, when Kirin goes for walks through his domain, small children can see through glamour and sometimes run over to smile at him and pet his tail. He always smiles indulgently and maybe gives them a honey stick or maple sweet before their guardian or older sibling sees, goes "oh shit", and drags them away as quickly but politely as possible.

And Lying's well entrance is sometimes sat in the middle of a park (it moves around a bit, honestly) and young children will throw pennies down it to hear the echo, and the coins inevitably hit them in the head.

But Lying does not kidnap kids and debts to Kirin do not begin until you're old enough to make some decisions on your own, until you have autonomy (which I don't think is a "oh you're 18 now, congrats new adult" thing, it's more nebulous). Now, Kirin, of course, uses this period of safety nonetheless, making himself a friendly, approachable figure, but he doesn't collect payment/debt until later, after that vague milestone of adulthood passes.

Then, you're fair game.

This extends to anyone under Kirin's court or command, from Kirin chiding Lying about how "there's no sport to it" when the mortals are young and don't know any better, to him enacting punishments on lesser fae who prey on kids.

Remember I couldn't read beyond the first two books tho because wow that cw death content amirite

But I don't know. The mythos of London in Swiftverse is so strong, it's amazing. The worldbuilding required to pull off something similiar with a constructed fictional city like Auprago (Austin/Prague/Chicago, ay) would be intense. I like the idea of something similar, though. Xephos would be a part of some sort of city watch, maybe, the mortal force wanting to protect it. Kirin would consider the whole city his protectorate. Hard to say how the Garbage Court would handle something like the Death of Cities, since they sort of promote the things that call Its attention.

I am so pissed I can't find it but it was a picture of a room with a fireplace, stone walls, and beautiful wooden floors. It had a table with a centerpiece that was a bowl filled with... short antlers, just a few arched sections. They looked like they were a part of a great helm and broken to pieces. Around the same time we were talking about the idea of Kirin having antlers that do actually fall off in the later winter/early spring, and what a relief it would be to him, to have less weight and to not have to duck through doorways.

And because I am me, I mixed the two in my head. Kirin shedding his antlers one a year and breaking the remnants into pieces, going out in the night to plant them around the city. I love the idea of beautiful blue-white birches growing, so fast they are full size before summer even comes around, so beautiful they emit a soft light in the dark and seem to glimmer if you don't focus on them carefully. People are drawn to them unless they are clued in enough to know that it's Kirin's doing, spreading his influence, putting literal roots under the city until they fan out into the foundations of the buildings, fae magic seeping into every crack that isn't protected by a threshold.