9th April, 2152

Just as the bells tolled midnight, three figures melted into existence and began winding their way down Charge Road.

These were, in fact, three of the Faverlow family: Paynith, his wife Jesslyn and their son Bengkel; and they walked silently, ghost-like, down the street that literally reeked with poverty. Here, in comparison to the grand manors of the Puritans, the houses were decrepit, run-down and could hardly hold themselves up.

"It's here," whispered Jesslyn. Her voice was soft, but there was a raggedness to it that matched the stats of her grey dress.

She pointed to house 24B.

As they stepped onto the downtrodden threshold, a million cobwebs ensnared their faces like fishing nets. This house wasn't much better than the rest: the beams hung tiredly loose, an inch-thick layer of dust spat clouds at whoever stepped in it and the wind from the forest outside rustled the torn curtains like a sylph.

Bengkel sighed, like he always did. He couldn't have been much older than nineteen or twenty, but his scruffy hair made him look so much younger.

"This is where we're going to leave them?" he said incredulously. "In this dead-end dump-heap?"

Paynith frowned at him.

"It's not that bad," he said. "All it needs is a bit of...refurbishing."

"Wow, Nith," Jesslyn said. "That's the first time you've ever said that."

"Is not."

"Is. You never done any of the cleaning back in Quarters."

"I did."

"And now you're volunteering to clean this place up."

"Who said I volunteered?"

"You sorta did, you know, Da."

"Shut up, Bengkel."

"But –"

"I said shut up."

"But listen," he insisted, pointing out of the door. "The sound."

"The sound" turned out to be a sprite's electrical wings. These particular pair of wings belonged to Emmer Nipjin, leader of the Chet group, although currently, Emmer was invisible.

"Mr. Sprite," called Jesslyn, "unInvisiblize yourself. And by the way, we know you're Emmer."

Slowly, Emmer rematerialized, beating his wings as he flew inside.

"What on Ether Earth made you choose this place, Jesslyn?" he asked, dark green nose wrinkling. "It smells worse then Windile Klus's butt, and that's saying something."

"Hello?" interjected Windile as he entered, his long swathe of red beard tied around his waist. "I am relatively clean for a troll, here. If you wanna see something really stinky, go pay a visit to my cousin Blog. He literally lives in troll dung."

"No thanks," replied Emmer. "I don't want to degrade myself with your... ahhh... bodily excretments."

There was a giggle overhead. Everyone looked up, and saw nothing – until a black ball descended like a black mini-gibbon. It dropped down in a flurry of limbs, used Bengkel's head as a launching pad, flicked around the room like dark lightning and done a handstand on a broken beam before somersaulting to the ground. It nearly knocked over Truch Spickle, the portly dwarf who was just coming in.

"May Dalcott," groaned Truch. "The super ninja pixie. I was hopin' you wouldn' come. You've got'n more show-offish than when I last saw you."

"Which is a good thing," said May innocently. She changed her special pixie camouflage skin to the default colour, beige. "Hallo Faverlows. Paynith, I hear that you want to clean this place up."

Paynith reddened like a sundrying tomato. "Forget it." He turned to a lithe, red-irised elfairy. "Tulip, everyone here?"

"Yes," she replied. "Well, everyone except for Athene. Brey's got the girls on his back."

"Why's Athene late?" asked Paynith, annoyed. "We told her explicitly: midnight."

Tulip's turquoise wings fluttered uncertainly as Emmer hovered over, his own wings twice the size of Tulip's. "Probably another invention coming on. You know elves."

"And sprites," said a cheeky aquelle walking on its extensively long tailfins. A cousin to the mermaid, aquelle were known for their fiercely hooked teeth. So when Phip – the aquelle, of course – flashed a toothy grin at Emmer, the latter bit back a retort hovering on the edge of his lips. He actually bit it back, and injured the tongue in the process.

The leprechaun Harth Denb, meanwhile, was making short work of the dilapidated cottage, casting an Illusioning spell so that any pesky Puritans would see nothing, dusting, cleaning, repairing, sewing, sweeping, refurbishing...

"Show off," muttered May,

"Be quiet, May," smirked Bengkel.

"Yeah right. I heard your Da asking you to shut up."

That wiped the grin off Bengkel's face as cleanly as an eraser wiping chalk off a chalkboard.

Pixies can be so annoying, he found himself thinking. Unlike Lamorna.

Jesslyn, who had sneaked outside without anyone noticing, came whirling back in like a tempest had blown her backwards.

"Spannit," she swore, her limp dark hair falling all over her face. A split second later, she was on her feet again. "Athene's here."

"What was with the wind?" asked Emily the mermaid suspiciously, twirling on her feet grown from her tail.

"Her new invention, o'course." Jesslyn winced and put a hand to her back. "Calls it the Aeropulse."

Athene rushed in, holding up her hands, sorry.

"Order! Order!" commanded Tulip. She was an elfairy; elfairies were believed to be descendants of the first Dynasty of Magicreatures. Hence Tulip's natural superiority. "Meeting shall commence in five...four...three...two...one...all present and accounted for?" An assertive nod met her words. "Good.

"Now, as imposed by TRUE, the Total Resistance Undercover Enforcement, we now meet with representatives of each Adeviare magical, that is to say, the Good magicals.

"For the elves..."

A hand went up. "Athene Dior!"

"For the fairies..."

Another raised hand. "Vestus Leach!"

"For the aquelles..."

"Phip Collage!" He raised his hand and gave a fanged smile.

"For the mermaids..."

"Emily Bronze." She said it softly as she extended her arm, and her voice made everyone's hair stand up on the end.

"The sprites..."

"Emmer Nipjin!" His hand was raised.

"The dwarfs..."

"Truch Spickle," he mumbled as his hand reached for the ceiling.

"The pixies..."

"May Dalcott!" She raised her hand and changed her camouflage skin – her camo-skin – to black, then rainbow.

Tulip rolled her eyes the way elfairies do: she rolled them horizontally, brining her red irises into her and out again. The general effect of this was pretty unsettling.

"Leprechauns..." she continued.

"Harth Denb!" He lifted up all his limbs.

"The trolls..."

"Windile Klus!" (Guess what he did.)

"And for the elfairies, me: Tulip Flurr," she concluded. "As well as the representatives of TRUE and the family of the subject of the meeting: Paynith, Jesslyn and Bengkel Faverlow." They gave a little bow.

As everyone arranged themselves around the platform, someone — Vestus Leach, to be precise — spoke up. "What about Brey?"

"Ah," said Tulip. "He's coming in."

She gestured gently towards the door.

A soft clip-clopping, and Brey Canter, the unicorn representative, slowly trotted in with a pod on his back. Athene swelled visibly at this contraption, since it was her invention — the Acoustic-Infrared-Kinetic-Analyser-Controlled-Incubator-Extrapolator, or the AInKinAC for short. It was designed to keep the person/people sleeping inside as comfortable as possible by using radiations from the body and automatically-adjusted settings. Inside the AInKinAC was not one person, but three, and they were...

"My girls," breathed Jesslyn. Her eyes, which had had a pathetically deadened look to them, slowly brightened until they were stars in her thin face. They're so beautiful, she thought as as she stared, hypnotised, at the three tiny girls inside.

Jesslyn had never seen her daughters before. Each time, after she had given birth, they were whisked away by TRUE doctors, leaving her to recuperate in the knowledge that they were being taken care of without her. TRUE has some negatives, she had thought as her first daughter had been taken away. She and Paynith had named her, all three of them, without the slightest idea about what they were like. That was the thing about TRUE; you were expected to put work before "family affairs". Bengkel had been lucky, really, being already legible to join TRUE when they had.

But the girls had vanished from their lives.

And here they were, cocooned in an AInKinAC, three of the world's supposed future hopes sleeping like nothing on earth, Planet or Ether, hold matter.

Bengkel was in a similar state; somehow, he had to fight to keep his face devoid of emotion as expected at a serious meeting.

They're cute, he thought. Then: Someone really ought to impose bathing requirements on trolls.

"Tulip," grunted Brey, depositing the pod onto the ground and turning into a semi-humanoid, bipedal unicorn. (His other form.) "Can you ask Athene not to make these so heavy? It almost broke my back like a 100-tonne earthquake stamping its foot on me."

"Earthquakes don't have feet," quipped May. "Don't go braying about your complaints. You should see my ninja training."

"I have, and it involves busting someone's butt open," said Brey, miffed by the pun on his name.

"Enemy butts," corrected May. "And sometimes their smell in disturbingly familiar..." She directed a pointed glance at Windile.

"May you stop with the troll comparisons, please!"

The pixie, however, went for another pun, delighted that Tulip was too busy consulting some mental notes than ticking her off.

"You know, if you cantered around the dojo..."

"SHUT UP!!!" yelled Tulip, chucking away her mental notes. "Enough!"

Silence.

"OK," said Tulip. "We need to get moving. It's already fifteen past midnight and we haven't done anything except clean up, and we have Harth to thank for that. May, you weren't exactly helping either."

"Whatever," muttered May.

"What do we have to do?" asked Vestus.

"It's simple," responded Tulip. "TRUE wants us to...ahm...imbue some of our magic into the Faverlow girls. Don't ask why."

"Why?" asked Phip immediately.

Tulip scowled; her natural elfairy born impatience was starting to get the better of her. Didn't I just say not to ask?"

"But when someone says not to ask, it's normally worth asking," Phip protested, flashing his teeth as he spoke, and Tulip thought the better of it.

"Fine," she huffed. "TRUE believes that the Faverlow girls would be strengthened by creature magic. And they have plans for them later on. Cleansing plans."

"Plans," said Paynith, suddenly fearful. He didn't want his girls, his girls, getting mixed up in cleansing. It was bad enough that Jesslyn was involved; even worse was Bengkel was now part. And now his three innocent daughters? "What plans?"

"I don't know!" Tulip burst out. "TRUE gave me orders to carry out the transfer, they didn't tell me all their cleansing plans eight years into the future!" Seeing that Jesslyn was on the verge of tears, she composed herself. "Look, all that I've told you is all that's important. I just need you all to cooperate. Please."

This time, the silence was sober. And so absolute that you could hear a leaf singing. If leaves could sing.

"You have that look in your eye."

"What?" snapped Tulip, cricking her neck as she rounded on the speaker.

"You have that look in your eye," repeated Vestus.

"What look?" Tulip flinched and rubbed her neck.

"The I-know-something-more-but-I'm-not-gonna-tell-you-'cause-I-think-that-you-all-can't-take-it-look," he said in one rather breathy exhalation.

Tulip pouted and muttered something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like "damned fairies" before sighing and saying, "Well, yes. There is a bit more. It's just that..." She looked over at the Faverlows. "...it's just that it's a bit harsh to – to some."

"Who cares?" cried Bengkel, drawing shushes from the others. "Me and my Ma and Da deserve to know. They're our family, after all." His eyes carried a strange glint to them, one Jesslyn and Paynith hadn't seen for a long time, not since they refused to let him and Lamorna get together. They were made of steel, both of them, with a fire which would not become subtle.

Tulip shook her head sadly, like she was announcing the end of the world, and stared out of an opposite window, little more than a gaping hole in a wall where, outside, a forest whispered and rustled.

"The thing is, Bengkel," she said softly, "TRUE's been very interested in the theory of magical connectivity, proposed in 2102, It states that, with the right infusion of blended magic, a more powerful bond would form. If enhanced into a person, it becomes psychological."

"And – what? You're going to test it on them?"

She blinked.

"I don't want to test it. TRUE does. And I'm following orders here."

"Oh, sure," he replied caustically. "Then what?"

Looking around the room helplessly, Tulip flapped her wings and hovered a foot off the floor.

"I – I," she gulped.

"Say it," said Jesslyn, starting to become a little demented, "say it!"

"I – well..." She came back to earth and slumped onto the ground, her hand in her hands as her resolve failed her. A public display of despair from a elfairy. And everyone knew what that meant.

This was not good.

Paynith braced himself for the worst.

"Just say it, Tulip," he said, taking in deep breaths of air. "Please."

"They want to leave them on their own," came Tulip's muffled voice from behind her brown hands. "TRUE wants the, to survive on their own in this hell of a place."

A horribly shocked silence followed.

"No," Jesslyn finally gasped. "No. Never. They can't..."

"They can," replied Tulip; it sounded like she was struggling not to choke.

"But – but... but the Room? They won't be able to avoid that..."

"I – I don't – I don't know... I protested, but... they said that I was just an elfairy and that their decision was – was final."

Over in a corner, May's camo-skin flickered angrily through every colour on earth.

"This won't happen, right?" she growled, all humour gone. "Will it?"

"I seriously don't know." Tulip straightened up to her full height, 1.2 metres, and looked drained, exhausted.

"Maybe this could work," said Athene suddenly. "We carry out the transfer—"

Paynith's eyes widened to the size of teacups. "Are you crazy, Athene?"

"—and follow the plan, but add a little something. We station one of us in the forest outside. Help them if they really need it. Secretly."

Windile tried to grin.

"Yeah. If they can have a secret plan, we can have one too."

"Why not?" agreed Truch.

"But one thing's for certain," said Harth. "I'll never fully trust TRUE again."

"Me neither." May stretched like a cat. "TRUE kept stuff from us and expected us to cooperate willingly." She flexed her long fingers; sparks of blue magic fireworks flew out of the tips.

Slowly, everyone concurred with the plan—everyone apart from Emmer. He simply stared at his own feet.

Tulip smiled weakly. "I guess the majority approves. Emmer?"

"Is this right?" he said slowly. "TRUE's normally been right so far."

"Emmer, please," sighed Bengkel. "You're outvoted. And we can't leave them to die, either."

"OK, fine," he replied. "Because whatever I say will get shouted down anyway."

"That's agreed then?"

"Yes."