Fairy Metamorphosis

--- Jon Whitaker ---

"And you're sure she's okay?" He couldn't help but once more ask as he stared at Pix, or rather what Pix had become, a little grey sphere -roughly the size of a baseball- a pink glow just barely visible from beneath all of the plants in his room, and the only indicator she was okay in there.

"Yeah, I've told you before she's doing just fine." Miss Edna assured him once more before adding that, "This is no different than a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, perfectly normal."

Instead of reassuring him that made his heart stop because, "She's being melted down into a homogeneous slush before regrowing from the paste?"

Miss Edna opened her mouth before closing it, a grimace on her face as she mumbled. "Is that how that works?" His second parent shook her head. "I-it doesn't matter, that's not what's happening."

"Then what is happening?" He had to ask once more.

"Okay, um, lesson time." Miss Edna decided with a clap of her hands. "So just to be clear, you know how taxonomy works, like in Biology, right?"

"Kingdom, Phyla, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species, Sub-species." He listed out.

"And you knew that off the top of your head…" Miss Edna blinked.

"King Phillip came over for good soup." He answered via mnemonic device.

"Right… Anyway, due to how magical creatures work that system both does and does not work due to how a lot of mystical species were born via magical mutation in native species, and others are just native to other worlds with wildly different ecosystems and evolutionary paths." Miss Edna explained. "Fae and Spirits, such as Fairies, fall into this given how some Fae are Spirits, and some Spirits are Fae but while overlapping they are separate things."

"Yeah, I remember noticing something like that in some of my books." He nodded, hand vaguely reaching for Pix's cocoon but never quite touching it for fear of hurting her.

"Fae are naturally occurring sapient magical creatures capable of interacting and forming cultures with each other, while needing Nature magicks to survive making them weak to pollution and overly refined metals. Spirits on the other hand are entities that don't really have a corporeal body but instead having a 'spirit' that can use magic to project a body." Miss Edna continued to explain.

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"Like with Demons?" He frowned, due to just how similar that description was to the one he'd read from DeSade's books.

Miss Edna gave him a look before narrowing her eyes. "Of course that asshole taught you about Demons…" After a moment to curse DeSade she answered his question with a, "Yes and no? Demons and Spirits are related, and a lot of Demons could count as Spirits but… think of it sort of like bugs and insects I guess. Most spirits run on Anima rather than Malice after all. Though if we're on that subject Angels technically run on it more so, with Spirits being a more neutral category between the two?"

"Angels?" He repeated with a tilt of his head. "Angels are real?"

"Yes? Though that involves gods and theology and… We're getting off topic!" Miss Edna told him, before going back and summarizing that, "The core point is that Spirits are physical manifestations of magic not actually bound by their bodies, okay?"

"Okay." He slowly nodded.

"Now then certain Fae -more specifically fairies- are sort of half-fae half-spirit, which is why they can undergo metamorphosis as they gain power. With pretty much all of them doing so at least once and the stronger doing it multiple times." Miss Edna elaborated with a snap of her fingers as several different shapes took form in the air, the smallest of them looking like Pix and the rest becoming more elaborate. "Each of these metamorphosises-metamorphosi- meta-whatever- allows them to further manifest their [Spirit] half as their magic grows, even if their [Fae] half remains a physical anchor to them grounding them to reality… This is also why the Faelands are a bit… dangerous for most humans."

"Really?" Because while his trips to the Corrupted Faelands of Blackwell weren't the greatest, he was fairly certain the place would've been much better without the Corrupted ruining everything.

Miss Edna made a so-so gesture with her hand. "All those stories about getting trapped in the Faelands? Most of them are because the Fae and Fairfolk don't realize humans can't sort of… transition between physical and magical bodies. There are ways around that, but you need magic of your own which is less than one percent of the population."

"Ah." There wasn't much he could say about that.

"Yeah, anyway. This metamorphosis naturally occurs whenever a fairy accumulates enough magic, and involves a rare magical process that sort of… realigns their innate affinities. Which is part of why they're all Madness touched, because it's such a key part of their metamorphosis." His second parent continued, dismissing all but the original Pix projection and the second one that was almost twice as large. "Usually the whole process lasts a week give or take, during which her physical projection will rapidly expand and slowly reinforce itself."

"But she's going to be okay, right?" He stressed once more.

"She'll be fine. This is basically the fairy equivalent of puberty, just with them being lucky enough to sleep through the whole mess." Miss Edna reassured him again, before taking a seat next to him on the floor and wrapping an arm around his shoulders. "Look I know it's going to be rough but this is something Pix has got to do. What you need to do is just… try to keep busy while she's out of commission."

"I know but…" Watching Pix's unmoving sphere, unable to do anything but watch her… (This is too much like what happened with Ma…)

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