the Fierce & the LintKing's Amber Bits

Lepidoptera is predominantly from...start with a basic fairy princess world. Floating palaces, bright glittery clouds, rainbow bridges, flying horses, unicorns, everything stereotypical little girls are supposed to imagine.

Now imagine a stereotypical little boy got ahold of it, and wasn't allowed to play with anything else.

Yep, you got it. They're locked in a world war. The flying horses and unicorns are cavalry, while the rainbow bridges can deliver infantry faster than non-enchanted roads (albeit not as fast as fairy circles, but those only help on your home turf, and are useless for reaching anything in the air). The glittery clouds literally rain diamond shards. From a distance, it's beautiful, with prismatic rainbow effects and sparkles and...from underneath, well, it's still beautiful, but harder to appreciate when diamond slivers are slicing little pieces off of you. After falling that far, they cut right through armor, walls and ceilings, people...they generally end up buried pretty deep in the ground...

Though not quite deep enough to reach the goblins. The goblins are actually a development OF the war. They used to be of the People, but they were warped by radioactive fairy dust - most of them when the Kingdom of Sparkles cast the Deep Sleep over the Kingdom of Beauty, but there have been other instances where it's been used in high enough concentrations to cause goblins. They've lost the sky, banished underground, but they're thriving there. The Fair Folk ignored them at first, feared them second, and have recently begun hiring them as mercenaries. They bring two things to the war: First, of course, they make great sappers, digging out the foundations under land-bound castles. Secondly, they've tapped into underground pockets of toxic gasses. The goblins themselves seem immune, but they can funnel them into places. Landbound kingdoms, caught between the Diamond Rains and the goblins, are largely being ravaged.

That leaves about five kingdoms as real `contenders' still, primarily the three that have developed the flying palaces. The Kingdom of Sparkles is one, and considered the most unscrupulous. Their flying palaces are the most reliable and most extensive, and they don't seem to much care about the ground anymore. They're the ones who developed the Diamond Rains, and, as noted, use the most sleep dust. The Kingdom of Love is actually the easiest on the local real estate, but that's because, as their name might suggest, they have very powerful charming magics...which they're using to enslave whole cities, using them either to mine resources or drawing on the people to power their magics. The Kingdom of Butterflies, of course, is where Princess Lepidoptera was raised. She, of course, would consider them the best of the lot, and she actually might have a case, though they pioneered the use of goblins as shock troops and have done experiments on them to try to control the mutations...not looking for any kind of cure, but with an eye towards creating servants designed to a specific purpose.

Apart from that, however, they've devoted most of their efforts to personal enhancement rather than direct outward-destruction. They are in many ways the weakest of the three major powers now, but at the same time the other two have to consider them very dangerous - they have the fastest palaces, and have pioneered and nearly perfected the art of palace raiding. (Among other things, they've found that if they spin a low-spectrum Rainbow Bridge - just the reds and oranges, say - they get a rather tenuous bridge that is 1) very fast to build, 2) difficult for people untrained on them to use for, say, coming back to THEIR palace, and 3) very fast to dissolve. Useless for moving infantry, perfect for getting a raiding party from one palace to another and back again. The others haven't even worked out what they're doing yet, let alone how to do it. The Kingdom of Butterflies are also the ones who've best mastered utilizing prisms to disrupt other people's Rainbows - along with disrupting troop movements, if you can actually get in to the Palace Rainbows, you can deny them access to their treasuries.) In many ways, you can think of them as a pirate kingdom at this point. Well, a fairy pirate kingdom locked in wartime...well, anyway.

The other two kingdoms that can be considered to have a `chance' are the Kingdom of Light and the Kingdom of Dancing. The Kingdom of Light has woven protective domes over literally every city, town, hamlet, and countryside inn in their territory...and have been expanding rapidly as neighboring lords defect from their old Kingdoms to join them in exchange for this protection. Their cities are bright, shining beacons in the darkness. The darkness is the rest of their kingdom, as they're sucking up all the light to power their forcefields. They can grow a certain amount of food within their cities, but it's getting to be a problem, and the land around them is not merely dying, but fast turning to dust, as the energy is sucked out of it.

The Kingdom of Dancing has wrenched open the old doorways and gone Underhill. That, obviously, doesn't take them to the simple underground places the goblins now own, but someplace entirely different. They have proven an ability to open Underhill doors inside flying palaces, and have brought a number of them down this way. Their biggest weakness IS the goblins, however, as they can dig up their entrypoints...say, if there's a particular hill with a Doorway, and the goblins churn the hill all up into a mound of dirt, the Doorway is gone. Their second biggest weakness is that Underhill is a fine place to visit, but can't really sustain life - everything there is fantasy, even for fairy folk. The Kingdom of Butterflies in particular is making a concerted effort to find and destroy their Doorways, which could trap them there...the Doors can only be opened from Underhill, but can only be MADE from the real world.

Anyway, that's probably enough background on a world that's not going to come up in the game, I suppose...

Princess Lepidoptera (you can call her Terra; people do) is, as even distant scions of Amber tend to be out in Shadow, well noted among the best. This is actually in the sense of, "The best make note to stay the heck out of her way," because otherwise they're likely to join the other non-best as fertilizer. (Unless they're goblins. Grinding goblins up and sprinkling them over the ground is better - or rather, worse - than salt. This is indeed a known fact.)

She has long, multi-shaded violet hair; predominantly a darker violet, with lighter whorls. In dim lighting, it shimmers faintly; it's not noticable in brighter light, and doesn't do it in the dark. She has large eyes, also violet, which also seem somewhat luminous, also only noticable in dim light. Her complexion is fair, with a small smatter of freckles at the top of each cheek. She has an entirely bright and cheerful smile - her canines are distinctly pointed, but not fangs. She wears a many-layered gown of a very light, irridescent material that could be grey, or could be transparent, or could be almost any color imaginable. She doesn't wear shoes, and doesn't need make-up or jewelry. Her laugh is infectious, and her walk hints of dancing.

She is always surrounded by a light dusting of tiny silver sparkles - these are Glitterings, and they're one of the Kingdom of Butterflies' biggest advantages. They're a devolution of will-o-wisps. Will-o-wisps, of course, are like fireflies, but brighter, and more mischevious, and have long been used as decoration or for lamps. Glitterings can be thought of as...armored gnats, maybe? They're like tiny shards of metal imbued with magical flight. They're not in any way `intelligent', and are only arguably `alive'. (The Kingdom of Butterflies, to be sure, takes a firm stance that they are not.) To those they're bonded to, they just kind of hover nearby, and interfere with anything coming in. Lepidoptera's are strong enough and well trained (not that there's anything trainable, mind) enough to block quite a lot. Projectiles (arrows, knives, elfshot - which in this world is a shotgun load - etc.) they can deflect quite effectively - they could keep her quite safe in the midst of a Diamond Rain, but of course, that's a part of what they were developed for. Melee weapons they can certainly interfere with, but it's harder when something is still being held by someone who can push against them and redirect the force of it...it's hard to push through them with much inertia still going for you, but it's certainly possible to push through them. They can also blunt area-force effects like a fireball. They also, quite incidentally, keep her from getting things like blood on her...

The other effect they have is to give her a kind of `featherweight' ability - she can't *exactly* fly, but she can jump as if she were in low-gravity, and she can change direction in mid-jump kind of like Ness from Smash Bros (eg. not a complete turn-around, but she can shift angles considerably, and put herself in or out of tumbles...) She can certainly glide, and she can climb as if in low-gravity as well (eg. little finger-and-toe touches against a wall, just kind of pushing herself up...) She can walk over water no problem, and doesn't leave footprints or squeak boards or anything like that - her feet barely touch the ground. Falling isn't a danger to her, regardless of how far, as she won't pick up speed on the way down.

Broadly speaking, their `flight' is a matter of being able to change direction. Objectively, not subjectively. They can make "up" be "down", or "forward", or, well, whatever. So when, say, an arrow or a spray of acid or whatever is coming "towards", they just make "towards" be "to the left", and off it goes. One isn't powerful enough to affect more than a small area around it, but when you've got a small cloud of them around you, you're in a little bubble of controllable directionality that can redistribute things like your weight and incoming velocity quite neatly.

Yes, they have great potential as weapons, but the Kingdom of Butterflies is still working on getting them focused enough for it. When they DO, expect to see Palaces of Sparkles imploding.

Crystallite is the weapon of choice for ANY warrior of note, of ANY Kingdom. It originated in the Kingdom of Light, and until the other Kingdoms duplicated it, was a big reason they're still strong enough to be holding out despite the relative lack of airpower. It's what they refer to as a "between substance" - partly crystal, partly light, shaped by the wielder's belief. It might be hard for someone from, say, Earth, to ever get the hang of - if it was handed to you in the form of a sword, one would be inclined to believe that it IS a sword, and so it will remain.

To one of the Realm, however, belief has always been a tool to be used, so they're fine believing that it's a sword one moment and a whip the next, or that what was a narrow spear when they thrust it into someone now has heavy barbing on the end, or even that the weapon they just finished slaughtering dozens of enemies with is actually a fashionable belt...its mass is *somewhat* malleable, because it isn't entirely mass-based, but there are limits. {It can be a spear or a dagger, but not a needle or a catapult. It CAN be a bow, but it can't shoot off bits of itself, so you'd need your own arrows. It could be an arrow, but once you fired it, you wouldn't have it anymore...Lepidoptera has sometimes thrown hers as a dagger, but only if she's sure she won't need it before she can get it back. A boomerang is a more common choice when distance is needed...}

Craftsmen have smaller bits of Crystallite that they use as tools, and it's one of the reasons the Fair Folk have such exquisite works of art, and why even their non-art can be so beautiful. To make a Warrior's Crystallite anything but a weapon or decoration, however, would be an insult to it and to them, like spitting on a samurai's sword.