Corporeal Forces: 2 Strength:
4 Agility: 4
Ethereal Forces: 2 Intelligence:
4 Precision: 4
Celestial Forces: 2 Will:
4 Perception:
4
Vessel: human/2
Skills: Area Knowledge/3 (Varies), Dodge/1,
Dreaming/4, Driving/1, Emote/3, Knowledge/3, (How to be a whatever), Language/3
(Varies), Large Weapon/2 or Ranged Weapon/2 (any), Lying/3
Songs: Corporeal Entropy/6
Elements: Society (The Family) (primary),
Astronomical Concepts: the Stars (secondary)
Affinities: Deception (Moderate), Glamour (Slight)
Dread: Having ethereal nature discovered (Common/2)
Well, folklore was never precisely what you'd call a
hard science; it was even worse in the old days.
Of course, to be fair your average denizen of Faerie
had and has quite enough of a deserved bad reputation - what with the
leeching off of humans, the glamour, the Wild Hunt, alignment with Hell, little
things like that - that it doesn't seem too unusual to think that they might
have also gotten blamed for things that they, in point of fact, did not
do. Unfair, to be sure, but nobody
that the Fae are even remotely prepared to believe has ever said that life was
fair.
The supposed practice of changelings is a case in
point. The legend goes that fairies
would steal children away for their own purposes, replacing them with imposters
who would often last quite a long time before being caught out and subsequently
disappearing in a cloud of smoke.
There's more to the legend than that, but it all involves motifs,
archetypes, plot elements and the rest of that damnable critical analysis
methodology that more than one ethereal has idly daydreamed about making
illegal, upon pain of death. Hard to
blame them, seeing as a folklorist has roughly the same effect on their
existence as somebody who could disrupt the strong nuclear force at will, at
range and without thinking about it would have on ours, for roughly the same
reason.
At any rate, faeries do not steal children. They replace them.
Well, more accurately, they replace newly dead
children. - which, as a general rule, they did not put into that state
themselves. Not because faeries are
such a sweet example of sentient life, but for the very practical reason that
an angry angel is a killing machine, and there are few better ways to make an angel
angry than to kill a baby. Even the
Mercurians and/or Servitors of Flowers - actually, especially Mercurians
and/or Servitors of Flowers: Changelings aren't humans, after all. For that matter, it needn't even be said
what a Servitor of Children will do to a baby-killer: whispering will do just
as well.
So... find a recently dead human baby, which was
frankly not that difficult a task for virtually all throughout human history,
quietly bury the corpse and take its place.
Grow up. Fit in. Hope that a celestial never comes within
Disturbance range while you're artificially aging your vessel. Grow 'old' and
'die'. In the meantime, enjoy the
corporeal plane and act as the ethereal on the scene for either the Seelie or
the Unseelie Courts, or possibly both.
There were worse ways to go through life.
While the practice is not as prevalent today (in the
more industrialized parts of the world, at least) as it was in the past, it
continues. Generally speaking, the Host
does not actively hunt Changelings, although it will certainly investigate a
genuine lead on one. This is not due to
forbearance on the part of Heaven, but rather a recognition of the limited
resources available... coupled with the determination that most revelations of
a Changeling status end in the vessel death of the ethereal. Stories of creatures that slay and take
another's shape are common to most cultures, after all, and it's amazing
just how badly an otherwise-rational human being can react to proof that
something apparently like this has actually happened. That stories could be so used to combat stories made flesh galls
ethereals, not least because of the irony involved...