An Alliance Forms

Pamela was astonished. She would have liked to deny the evidence of her own eyes, but she knew how that felt when people did it to her. Too, her eyes were giving her a lot of evidence: hovering in front of her, goggle-eyed and mouth wide open, was the ugliest hummingbird she had ever seen. Or the largest and most incredibly colored bumblebee anyone had ever seen ... or something else entirely. It was wearing a combination of orange, blue, red and yellow (with green trim) that would have blinded a peacock. It still hadn't realized that there was a dribble of fairy dust coming from the box under its arm, and it had dropped the pooper-scooper.

She looked down. It had dropped the pooper-scooper squarely on the head of a bad little fairy, who was sprawled out on the carpet at her feet. {Served it right, though: it had spent the last few days smuggling in laxative pills to mix into the bluebird's food.} Its fashion sense was no better than the flying one's. And over there on the bookshelf, beginning to snore, was another one, this one fat and propped on the spines of her books.

For his part, Enn stayed frozen far longer than one would expect. He couldn't help it: the only thought that kept bouncing around in his little head was that he would never get his fairy license now. He knew who the girl was, of course. He'd seen her come and go many times while performing his duties. She was quite visible to fairies, you see; it was just people she believed in who couldn't see her. But that was about to change.

"What are you, I mean, who are you?" Pamela finally managed to ask.

The situation was so surreal to Enn that he simply answered the question. "I'm Enn. I'm a fairy."

In turn, the answer was so surreal to Pamela that she found herself following entirely the wrong thread. "Of course you are. But ... what kind of name is 'Enn'?"

Here she hit on one of Enn's greatest embarrassments. He looked, well, even more uncomfortable, but he couldn't seem to stop himself from giving his rote response. "My parents had a lot of children and little imagination for names. I was the fourteenth."

"Oh you poor thing," Pamela pronounced. "My parents had a penchant for 'P's ..."

"Ew, gross," said Enn involuntarily, who like all fairies didn't eat vegetables. They believe that vegetables have souls too, and so drink only nectar.

"They would say, 'Give 'P's a chance', and giggle maniacally," she continued. "It was before I was born, but they locked up a man named Lemon in the dungeons for saying that, I'm told. Then when they had children, they thought it would be a perfect pattern to persist in prefixing our proper names with 'P'," she prattled on, as she pursued a different thought.

"A fairy, you said? Why ever would there be, well, a whole bunch of fairies in my bedroom?"

Enn had begun to appreciate the magnitude of the problem he had created for himself. Clearly he would have to tell the girl something about the fairy world. He could only hope that she could be trusted with the information. "Can you keep a secret?" he asked.

Pamela sniffed. "I practically am a secret!" she said with a trace of bitterness.

"Well then, sit down," Enn said, "it's rather a long story." And he proceeded to change the future, by telling her.

Please continue, I am loving this story. You are a very talented story teller!

What the Universe Needs

It wasn't easy. "Well, you know, the Universe? It's a very big place. I mean, obviously it's big; what I mean is that it flows. And it doesn't flow easily."

Seeing the confused look on Pamela's face, he started over. "We fairies, we're the Universe's helpers. It's a big place, and lots of stuff has to get done, and it doesn't do itself, so someone has to do it. Some of the someones are us."

"Humans too, sometimes," he went on, warming to his subject. "And other things. But fairies have a special place. Some of us work for the good, and some for the bad. Well, those are just words, anyway. Seen from the point of view of the whole Universe, it's all just work that has to get done. When you're doing it, it's often hard to tell how things will turn out, and besides, our perspective can't possibly be the same as the Universe's."

"So the difficulty, really, is organization," he continued, hitting his stride. This had been his favorite subject in fairy school. "All these tasks needing to be coordinated, instructions needing to be given, quality control, efficient utilization of fairy resources. Leadership, in a word," he concluded.

"It sounds like you need a chief fairy, in a way," Pamela put in tentatively. She, of course, had been trained in leadership, or at least had sat in on her older siblings' classes. In fact, it was possible that she had been the only one really paying attention.

Enn looked startled. "Oh, I'm not sure the fairies would agree to that," he replied thoughtfully. "Most of us have a hard time agreeing to form small teams, much less setting up a chief fairy. Then there's the split between the good ones and the bad ones ..."

"But it's all one Universe!" Pamela exclaimed. "It only makes sense that there be one organization."

"Maybe, Your Highness, maybe. Or one could argue that it's many Universes all occupying the same space; it's not as if anyone's going to be able to prove it, one way or the other, are they? Oh, I agree with you that it needs to be better organized; I'm just doubtful that anyone could make it work."

"I bet I could," said the newly determined princess. "Besides, that's the price of my silence."

More? Would love to hear more!

Don't worry; I haven't stopped.

Just temporarily overdrawn at the Idea Bank.

I had to get them to extend my credit, so I offered them my third kidney.

I just hope that bank fairies don't know much about human anatomy.

Okay. Now I'm curious. When you write, do you have the entire story all mapped out in your head first? When I wrote stories, I would only have an idea about the message I wanted to send. Then I'd put the characters together and just let it go...see where it went. Fun. We used to write a continuing story with different authors (forgot what that is called now) and I'd always write the romantic scene, lol. Anyway, I was wondering how your stories play out.

It varies. With Seamus ("It's Tough, Being Super"), I had most of the plot set up. In fact, that one's on hold because I feel I've written myself into a bit of a corner. Or maybe a dungeon.

With this one, it was more that I was completely out of ideas for a while. Here I've basically just been writing, with the only up-front ideas being an invisible princess and the references to Her Majesty's Secret Fairy Service from some of the older stories. This one, so far, sounds too much like my workplace ... ;-)

Something Takes Shape

Later in life, Enn often looked back on the following months as the hardest ones of his long and distinguished career.

The princess insisted on keeping Enn as her liaison to the fairy world, despite the embarrassment this caused him in the face of much more senior (and some said, more intelligent) veteran fairies (at least, they said it). Many of these put themselves forward as being superior candidates, but each of them was thwarted by the inherent fragmentation of the fairy hierarchy. None of them could gather sufficient support, or rather eliminate enough fierce resistance, to prevail over the others. In fact, it is possible that only a relative unknown like Enn could ever have built the organization envisioned by Princess Pamela.

She too changed during this period. Though the work often kept her secluded in her own suite of rooms, the effect on her self-confidence could not be denied. She chaired innumerable conferences of fairy clan chiefs, heads of departments, and assorted fairy potentates. Though they balked and argued and pleaded, she would not back down: she was to be the head of an enormous organization of fairies, not for the sake of any kind of power, but simply because she was the best one for the job.

"People tell lots of stories about fairy princesses," she would say, "and whether you or I like it or not, it looks like that's exactly what I'm going to be." And gradually, she began to win them over, at least to the point where they were willing to try her ideas.

Much to his discomfort, she appointed Enn to be the actual chief fairy. "I know my limits," Pamela told the assembled chiefs. "I can't possibly handle the day to day business of an organization as big as the Universe; I'm only human. But I can set it up, and I can guide it, and I can see that it runs smoothly. After all, I'm a princess, and that's what I'm trained to do." Too, given the general lack of organizational skills among fairies, who are basically designed to fly around doing magic instead of thinking, she really had no competition.

She was, however, smart enough not to try to over-organize. The various fairy clans and departments were left more or less intact. Besides the resistance they would have offered to being broken up, these smaller groups had worked well for the fairies in the past. What Pamela improved most was the coordination between these groups, reducing overlap in their duties and increasing communication between them. She carefully chose her leaders from among those who showed enthusiasm for the new system. She arranged for checks and balances to be put in place so that the system never depended on a single fairy. Her teachers had always cautioned against single points of fairylure, I mean, failure.

As the organization began to function and positive status reports began to stream to his desk, Enn was tempted to conclude that they had succeeded. Pamela cautioned him, though: "It's good that the system is beginning to work. But keep in mind, we haven't really been tested yet."

This would not be the last time that she correctly foresaw the future.

The Expected Opposition

The Universe, containing as the name implies pretty much everything, also contains a force that opposed Pamela's attempt to organize. Just as there are human attitudes, and even mathematical quantities, that are described as "rational", and ones that are called "irrational", there are things out there that can only be described as "just plain whacked".

Now, forces like these are not simply unorganized. That would describe a lack of organization; what these forces have is the opposite of organization, a quality that would destroy organization the way anti-matter would destroy matter, if only it could.

So, you can imagine this force to be made up of any number of smaller members, which in no way form an organization, yet which tend to act, in the aggregate, in a definite direction. For lack of a better way to refer to this aggregate, and because people have a need to organize even the unorganized, this force is called Kayoss, and its constituents are called "kays".

In some ways, kays resemble fairies. However, they're smaller, closer to bee size; like bees they fly on multiple lacy wings that move rapidly fore and aft rather than wings that flap like a fairy's; and unlike fairies, they are never visible to humans except by their effects. They make up for their smaller size and anti-organization by being considerably more vicious than fairies. Fairies, even the bad ones, tend to be mischievous rather than vicious, but a kay, even a small one, is a tough customer. A bad fairy on assignment might trip you up; a kay would do it for sheer fun, and at the top of a stair. When people say things like "sh-t happens", they're usually referring, unknowingly of course, to the work of a kay.

It should be no surprise, then, that kays can sense an increase in organization in the same sort of extrasensory way that toddlers can detect that you have something in your pocket for them, and they are attracted in much the same way. In fact, if we didn't know where small children came from, we might suspect that they were kays, only slightly more destructive.