"I met him when I went down to the village. I thought he lived there, but he said no, he was just visiting and I was more interesting.
Then I realised no-one else could see him, and I never saw his parents, so I knew he had to be a faerie."
Viola nods sympathetically. "And now where is he? Something more interesting?"
Scott
Chryse shrugs. "He gets tired, and has to go and rest. I don't know where he goes - he doesn't have his own house or anything."
Viola shrugs back, and sits down to stare at the clouds until the faerie returns.
Scott
The faerie doesn't return soon, and when questioned further Chryse thinks that he's shy around grown-ups. A few days later, however, Viola notices that Chryse seems to be talking to someone whilst working in her garden - but even to Viola's second sight, there doesn't appear to be anyone there...
Then let's take the experimental approach: how close does Viola have to get before the conversation stops?
She could try to approach with magic, but anything powerful enough to evade her second sight might easily be offended by her attempts at subterfuge.
Scott
It doesn't take Viola long to realise that the main criterion appears to be whether Chryse has noticed her.
After watching Chryse from within the faerie aura of the temple to Poseidon, Viola is becoming increasingly convinced that she would have spotted her friend by now if there was anything to see.
OK, young child with an imaginary friend, that's normal.
Young, emotionally unstable child prone to wild magical outbursts with an imaginary friend--Viola isn't so sure.
Has Viola been able to overhear anything from the "conversations"? If not, she's going to ask Chryse what she and her friend like to talk about.
Scott
It occurs to Viola there's also the possibility that a magically gifted child could effectively will a faerie into existence (because they are, after all, reflections of humanity), whether or not there were an actual imaginary friend to begin with.
Scott
Actually create a Faerie from nothing...unclear. Even with Animae spells, Merinita argue about whether the faerie is being created from nothing, summoned forth from Arcadia or has some other source. That may be a distinction without a difference in practice - certainly a lonely, emotionally turbulant Gifted child might be attractive to such a fae, and this "friend" does seem to have appeared after (during?) Chryse's expedition outside the Aegis.
That, of course, raises the point that Chryse appears to be having conversations with this friend within the Aegis now...If Viola is paranoid enough to double-check, all of the Aegis tokens seem to be where she'd expect them to be.
Viola's been able to hear bits of what Chryse is saying, but never the other half of the conversation. Those snippets she has been able to hear vary in topic, but the main themes appear to be Chryse's new garden, imaginary flowers (some of them very imaginative) and Chryse's mother. Chryse clearly hasn't given up on the idea of getting her mother back.
Viola is kind of stumped here. The only thing she can think of at this point is to have Constantine "babysit" Chryse, as unobtrusively as possible, but she doesn't see that getting very far. InMe magic might work, but she's rather not use that on an apprentice--not the kind of lesson you want to teach her about dealings between mages.
Scott
I think at this point the key question is whether Viola wants to try to intervene in the situation in some way (e.g. trying to interrogate or destroy the faerie) or just monitor it. If the latter, there's a good chance Chryse will develop an appropriate Virtue or Flaw - most likely Faerie Friend, but it could also be Plagued by Supernatural Entity or Faerie Warder (depending on exactly what she's got the attention of).
Viola is quite happy to monitor the situation for now--there's nothing particularly threatening about a Merinita befriending faeries, after all. Constantine would be ideal for the monitoring, since most seasons he has little to do.
Weren't we supposed to do something in this story about Viola's Faerie Friend, though?
Scott
You're right that my starting point for the story was trying to do something with Viola's faerie friend, and I did end up using him to highlight what was going on with Chryse, but it mutated into a story about Chryse's faerie friend.
That said, if Viola wants to do more now in regards to her faerie friend, then let me know what she's doing and I can run that.
Did we ever figure out the nature of Viola's Faerie Friend?
Sort of. I have a concept for the Friend, and it has been interacting with Viola in a manner consistent with that concept, but I've not been explicit about exactly how it's working.
It almost certainly doesn't work the same way as in the original story, but it should be consistent with the fact that you / Viola have a rather gappy memory of what that actually was...
I'm pretty sure the friend never showed up before--I gave her the Disadvantage, but we never got around to involving him.
Scott
Isn't he meant to have been gained on an initiation quest? Did that just happen in the background rather than being played out?
It was in the background. When I fastforwarded Viola from his first saga to her second, I had to fill in something like 15 years, and I decided to write detailed descriptions.
As long as you've got in mind something involving the initiation quest, it works, but even if not, we can always retcon it, since it never happened on-camera.
Scott
Viola definitely met him on the initiation quest, and he was definitely a helpful and useful part of her achieving it. In...some way? When she thinks about it she can't actually remember any details, but she definitely remembers the fact of his helpfulness.