The Palace gardens are justly renowned for their magnificent beauty and the Queen loves spending as much time as she can in them. Her favourite place is amongst the orchards where benches have been put amongst the trees. Fruit is available on the trees all year round. There are advantages to living in a magical world - while there are seasons, the Queen can fix her own fruit supply with an additional spell or half dozen. The massive Palace lake feeds the Fountain of Youth. The black sculptured marble gates is the only item that hasn’t been altered in any way by any fairy sovereign being the only thing they all liked.
Village gardens are smaller but everybody likes to grow their own flowers. Sprites like to grow plants that produce a lot of pollen as another weapon to use against their enemies - that is, other sprites. This does not go down well with other species. Plants are meant to be enjoyed, not endured.
Monsters are a fact of life in the Kingdom but not all of them are beastly. The furry beast, Monster, rescued by Wes from imprisonment by Brankaresh during the period of the Queen’s temporary overthrow, proves to be an asset to the Royal Household to everyone’s surprise. He can do all the heavy work and save magical powers for more important things. He also proves to be literate, intelligent, capable of holding more than one thought in his head at a time and is on a one-monster
mission to raise the profile of beasts like him and dispel the prejudices against clawed and fanged creatures. Monster is realistic enough to know these prejudices will never entirely go but he can at least damage them. Monster also challenges Oakstaff’s patronizing attitude to the very downmarket Wes much to the sprite’s delight. Certainly when it comes to a fight, Monster is the kind of creature you definitely want on your side.
All species can communicate telepathically as everyone has an identity code, made up of two separate parts, one of which is the genus code, the other the individual code. Everybody has to recite the code of the person they want to communicate with before being able to use crystal ball technology or telepathy. The Queen’s code is known to all as she encourages her subjects to keep in contact, much to her Council’s disgust. She thinks their aloofness has done much to encourage public disillusion with politicians.
The Queen also knows every subject’s code and Eileen knows most of them (with knowledge to be able to work out the rest). Of course the quality of telepathic communication varies - most people don’t eavesdrop telepathic sprite talks as sprites are rude and low. They’d do this anyway but the fact it stops eavesdroppers is another reason for them not to raise the level of their conversations!
Village gardens are smaller but everybody likes to grow their own flowers. Sprites like to grow plants that produce a lot of pollen as another weapon to use against their enemies - that is, other sprites. This does not go down well with other species. Plants are meant to be enjoyed, not endured.
Monsters are a fact of life in the Kingdom but not all of them are beastly. The furry beast, Monster, rescued by Wes from imprisonment by Brankaresh during the period of the Queen’s temporary overthrow, proves to be an asset to the Royal Household to everyone’s surprise. He can do all the heavy work and save magical powers for more important things. He also proves to be literate, intelligent, capable of holding more than one thought in his head at a time and is on a one-monster
mission to raise the profile of beasts like him and dispel the prejudices against clawed and fanged creatures. Monster is realistic enough to know these prejudices will never entirely go but he can at least damage them. Monster also challenges Oakstaff’s patronizing attitude to the very downmarket Wes much to the sprite’s delight. Certainly when it comes to a fight, Monster is the kind of creature you definitely want on your side.
All species can communicate telepathically as everyone has an identity code, made up of two separate parts, one of which is the genus code, the other the individual code. Everybody has to recite the code of the person they want to communicate with before being able to use crystal ball technology or telepathy. The Queen’s code is known to all as she encourages her subjects to keep in contact, much to her Council’s disgust. She thinks their aloofness has done much to encourage public disillusion with politicians.
The Queen also knows every subject’s code and Eileen knows most of them (with knowledge to be able to work out the rest). Of course the quality of telepathic communication varies - most people don’t eavesdrop telepathic sprite talks as sprites are rude and low. They’d do this anyway but the fact it stops eavesdroppers is another reason for them not to raise the level of their conversations!
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