The Magic of Souls (1)

Tales of Monsters, Humans, and Fairies (1)

Fairies and Monsters Gone Fowl (7)

Stories About Fairies, Monsters, and Two Bizarre Humans

Fairytales (16)

Temporal Dynamics for the Magically Inclined (21)

Okay Flowey, Stop Traumatizing the Fairies (11)

Underground Fairies

A Fairy Strange Crossover

Voting is now over! The winning title is… *drumroll* Temporal Dynamics for the Magically Inclined! Sorry to everyone who voted for other series titles, but the votes have spoken! (And to those of you that voted Fairytales specifically, if it's any consolation, if Frisk and Co. ever were to end up involved in UT Multiverse shenanigans their universe's name would definitely be Fairytale!)


"Oh God. They tried to erase my memories! They almost – they –"

Foaly tapped a key on his keyboard, pausing the recording on the monster ambassador's distraught face. Then he turned to the plasma screen showing the faces of the Council, and couldn't suppress a flicker of grim satisfaction at the sight of every single one of those faces hosting expressions of shock and fearful comprehension.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I have four words for you," he drawled. "We told you so."

And, as predictable as human clockwork, and exactly as he'd expected them to, the entire Council began to panic.

"How is this possible?!"

"They regained their memories so quickly! That was less than a day following the wipe!"

"How did they do it? Even Artemis Fowl needed prior knowledge of his wipe in order to counteract it! How on earth did this… this child do it?!"

One elf, an older fairy in expensive clothes and with a naturally crotchety face that Foaly was pretty damn sure was the same elf that Artemis had contacted a while ago, slammed his hand down on the armrest of his seat, his face a rictus of angry denial. "This is preposterous! There is no feasible way that Dreemurr could have recovered their memories without prior preparation!" He jabbed an accusing finger at Foaly. "The centaur obviously thinks himself to be a clever fairy, and faked this footage!"

The centaur in question bristled, highly offended by the accusation. "Hey! I know that pointing fingers is something you politicians do best, but that's taking it a bit too far! I work with the LEP, Councilman! I do what's best for the People! Do you really think I'd go so far as to fake something like this?!" He gestured pointedly at the screen once more. "This is a serious situation, here! We have a human with high influence amongst monsterkind, knowledge of the People, and now a reason to potentially declare war on the fairy people, since you lot went and ignored me and Artemis and Holly and tried to erase their memories!"

The old geezer spluttered. "War?"

"Yes, you old codger, war! Why do you think we were so worried about the mind-wipe not taking this time?! Normally we wouldn't have protested, heck, we would've helped! But little Frisky here isn't like Artemis! They're not a criminal that works in the shadows, they're a highly influential political figure, both to humans and to monsters, and they're the adopted kid of the monster queen. It's entirely possible for them to get the monsters to declare war on us, and now? You've given them a reason to do that!"

The elf looked like he was about to faint. Foaly had absolutely no sympathy for him but still forced himself to calm down anyway. "I did not fake this footage. If you need more evidence for that, then here." He tapped another key on the keyboard, bringing up two more video files of the exact same scene as the first – the little ambassador on the floor of an empty office building – viewed from two new angles. "All three of these files were recorded by the helmet cameras of the three LEP fairies that flew the Mud Kid to the drop point and stuck around until the human and monster police arrived. All three of them have already been interviewed, and they confirmed that what we see in the recordings is what they saw actually happening with their own eyes. That's three unbiased eyewitness accounts to back me up."

Well, to be more accurate, two unbiased eyewitness accounts and one eyewitness that had been very good at pretending to be unbiased. What with the concern she'd obviously had for the human in the shuttleport, even after their little rampage, Lieutenant Crane was probably very much biased in favor of the little ambassador. But the Council didn't need to know that, now did they?

One of the other Council members tentatively cleared her throat. "Foaly, as concerning as this situation is – and I fully agree with you on that matter, this IS very serious – we still need to know how the Ambassador evaded a full memory erasure. Is it possible that the mind wipe was sabotaged somehow?"

Foaly snorted. "Hardly. I was overseeing the entire procedure myself, and I double-checked everything beforehand, just to make sure. No sabotage."

The idiot elf that had already pissed him off once today apparently decided that doing it again was a great idea at this point because he opened his mouth. "And how do we know you're telling the truth? How do we know that you didn't sabotage the wipe yourself?"

The centaur seriously considered trampling the elf for a moment, nostrils flaring in agitation. "Really? You're trying to place the blame on me again? What is this, the Bwa'Kel revolution?*"

Fortunately, the rest of the Council seemed to agree with Foaly's outrage, because they all glowered at the offending fairy, who didn't quite cower under their stares but came pretty close to it.

"I think," another Council fairy, a chubby gnome with lots of gold ornaments, began sternly, "that you should keep your thoughts to yourself unless you have actual evidence to support them."

Cowed, for now, the elf sunk down in his hair. Foaly gave it maybe five minutes before the idiot tried to blame him again, though – people like him never seemed to learn, and with this fairy being one of their esteemed Councilmen… well, now at least he understood why Kelp had demanded that Foaly be the one to deliver the bad news.

The Commander's probably having a right old giggle about ME being the fairy to deal with this troll dung. D'Arvit, I'd almost rather be forced to deal with Koboi again.

With a huff, Foaly put his indigence aside to stew in later and went back to the matter at hand. "No sabotage," he repeated. "Our running theory at this point is that the Ambassador's quick recovery has something to do with the magic that they definitely have. One of the techies used a MagiScanner on the kid, and the damn thing practically blew itself up. Magic levels through the roof. We're still not exactly sure what the magic does, so the Section Eight warlocks are still working on that. They're going through every spell the fairies know manually and in alphabetical order. Think they're at M right now."

With a gusty sigh, Foaly tapped a command into the keyboard again, and the three windows of ambassador video footage disappeared back into the depths of hyperspace. "Unfortunately, since the warlocks could conceivably take anywhere from several more weeks to months to figure out exactly how this happens, that means we can't do much about the Ambassador right now."

The old elf from earlier (who Foaly decided from now on would be called Idiot with a capital "I" in his head) opened his mouth again, and Foaly interrupted him before he could spill more garbage out of it. "No, a bio-bomb is not an option. That's even more grounds for inter-species warfare than the mind-wipe."

The elf closed his mouth again, and Foaly continued. "All we can do about the Ambassador is hope they don't tell too many people about us or declare war. It's too soon to tell what they'll do at this point, and we have an infinitely more immediate problem that needs dealing with."

He typed in another command, and a screenshot from the helmet camera of the two-fairy Recon team that had gotten little Frisk out of the hands of terrorists appeared on the screen. The window was filled with the ruddy, coldly furious face of an adult human male with an unnatural spark of both fairy blue and yellow in one eye – barely noticeable really, but obvious if you knew what you were looking for.

"Luis Howahkan O'Reilly," the centaur said, gesturing at the screen. "According to what I've seen of the Ambassador's recorded memories, this human is capable of using a fully fledged mesmer and is behind both the Ambassador's would-be-assassins and possibly behind a great deal more activity done by Humanity's Resurgence. Not only that, but according to the Recon officer that we got this image from, the human bumped into him and actively or passively stole enough magic from him to force him to unshield. I've got my techies running a background check on him as we speak, but we need to figure out how to deal with him, now. He knows about the People and considering his extremist anti-monster ideals, it's safe to assume that he could be equally violent towards the People as well."

Foaly grimaced and turned back to the screen of Council faces. "So, esteemed Council members, any suggestions?"


Several minutes full of anxiety and non-stop debate later, Foaly shut off the Council screen with a groan of relief and practically collapsed back into his specially modified swivel chair.

I have never been more glad in my life, he thought blearily, that I changed my mind about those Politics courses in college. The Commander had better raise my salary for this.

The Council had been exactly the opposite of thrilled that a LEPrecon fairy had been spotted by a psychopathic human while on-duty. Idiot had lived up to his title by oh-so-cleverly demanding that the man be bio-bombed, and this time, at least a couple members of the Council had immediately agreed with the decision. Foaly had spent a good four minutes trying to talk them down semi-politely before he'd metaphorically and literally put his hoof down.

"We can't do that!" he'd snapped. "I don't disagree that a bio-bomb might actually be reasonable, this time around, but we currently have no idea where he is right now, since he went underground after the Ambassador escaped, and he probably won't come out of hiding for awhile, since he doesn't need to be out in the open to cause trouble! He has the mesmer, for Frond's sake! And we don't know what his daily schedule looks like, how many innocent civilians and monsters might be around him at any given point of the day, or what kinds of limitations his magical abilities might have. For all we know, he could absorb the solinium** and throw it back in our faces without even so much as batting an eye! Do you really want to risk that?!"

In the end, the Council had agreed with him, and come up with a much more reasonable plan of action – that plan being that several Section Eight fairy patrols would scour Dublin and the surrounding countryside for signs of O'Reilly, and hope for the best. It was far from the best plan, but it was a lot better than the Council's usual plan of "chuck a bio-bomb at the problem and hope it dies."

With a gusty sigh, Foaly tore his mind away from its spiraling path of frustration and dislike for the Council's stupidity and instead turned his attention to far more interesting matters. Namely, the memories of a certain monster Ambassador that had been downloaded into his lab computer's databanks.

He had supervised many mind-wipes as the LEP's technical consultant, and it was practically an official step in the procedure to record the wiped human's memories. It allowed the LEP to find out how the fairies had been discovered or sighted by that particular human without risking an in-person investigation or interrogation, and gave their psychologists enough information to create a psychological profile on the human that, in the possible event of rediscovery, they knew how to deal with the human without taking violent action. But in all the recordings he'd gone over, he'd never seen memories like the ones sitting in his computer files right now. He may have only seen a few month's worth of memories during the wipe, but what memories he had seen were so unusual that he couldn't just leave them for the psych eval.

The first startling thing he'd noticed, and far from that last, was that apparently, the Ambassador heard voices.

Well, more accurately, one voice. Foaly hadn't been able to use any of his audio enhancement programs yet, and the voice itself was extremely distorted and hard to understand, but it there was clearly only a single voice, a human child's voice that followed the Ambassador around as they went about their days that had no discernible origin and nobody else seemed to realize was there.

Foaly's first thought, that the Ambassador might have some sort of mental illness, had been immediately dismissed. While memories of actual physical events could be easily recorded by the mind-wipe equipment, actual thoughts were beyond their current level of technology. Thoughts were just too abstract for the memory drives to store – which meant that the voice that did everything from giving running commentary to laugh at stupid puns to possessing Frisk's body and moving it for them wasn't coming from inside Frisk's head, but from an outside source.

The possessing Frisk's body thing suggested that the voice might be some sort of ghost, but if it was, then it was nothing like the Berserkers*** that Holly, Artemis, and Butler had dealt with. The Berserkers hadn't had a pact of symbiotic possession like the Ambassador and their possible ghostly friend seemed to have, for one thing, and honestly, that little unspoken pact the kid had was mildly disturbing. Who would willingly let a ghost take over their body more than once? Foaly couldn't deny that there were clearly some advantages to be had there, what with Frisk being able to avoid spilling important information under the mesmer, but the entire thing was just… ugh, it gave him the shivers. And that was without him wondering if the ghost had been invisibly trying to strangle him while he was doing the mind-wiping, because they certainly seemed like a violent enough person to do so.

The second, and far less jarring, thing he'd noticed had been the glowing star that Frisk had been able to see hovering over the fairy roses. Bright yellow, big enough to be seen from the windows of Fowl Manor, and Frisk had clearly known that it was there since they'd interacted with it at least twice, and yet nobody on the Fowl grounds was able to see it. What exactly it was, Foaly wasn't sure – he hadn't had enough time to look at those memories in detail during the wipe – but if he had to hazard a guess, the star had something to do with the Mud Kid's magic.

And finally, the third thing he'd noticed? Some of Frisk's memories repeated.

His techies had thought the repeating memories were glitches. They had had problems like that before, with too many copies of certain memories being made by the system. That was why there was always an actual fairy overseeing the wipes, instead of relying on the machine. But Foaly wasn't too sure. Sure, some of the memories were almost carbon copies of each other, but others? Others were completely different.

He'd almost thrown up when he'd seen the extra memory of Frisk being shot in the chest with a bullet, and then getting one between the eyes. No little kid, human, fairy, or monster, should have memories like that in their head, and yet the Ambassador did.

Anyway, regardless of what else was going on, something wasn't adding up here, and Foaly intended to get to the bottom of it. He had an entire decade's worth of memories to look through and analyze, and if he had to go through every last one to figure out what was going on, he would.


After retrieving Frisk from where the fairies had apparently seen fit to drop them off, Undyne, Toriel, and the squad of police officers that had come with them escorted Frisk back to the police station, and, as much as Frisk would have loved to simply sit down in a sitting area with all their friends and cry in sheer relief at being back and everyone being safe, they knew they couldn't do that. Not yet. The police had been almost entirely in the dark about everything that had been going on, no matter their best efforts, and it was only fair for Frisk to fix that.

Once they'd been sequestered away into a private room in the station and the police had given up trying to get Toriel or Undyne to leave the room, (Toriel because she had made it very clear that she wasn't letting Frisk out of her sight any time soon, Undyne because she'd threatened the officer that had tried to pull her out of the room that if she didn't get to hear what had happened to her bestie, then she'd shove a spear were the sun didn't shine) did Frisk tell them everything they could about what had happened after they'd woken up in a cell. They told them about the Wizard, about his hypnotism ability, about the threats he'd made, everything they could think of, while around them, humans and monsters grew more and more tense as they talked.

However, despite everything, they didn't tell the officers about the fairies. They wanted to. They wanted to desperately. But something told them that was a bad idea, and that something had come from someone by the name of Chara.

*I think the fairies are scared of us.

The ghost had said this on the ride home, sounding incredulous, and Frisk hadn't been able to let that lie, even with their mind still in chaos after the recovery of their memories. Us?

*Monsters. And humans, too, but mostly monsters. That centaur that wiped your memories? He said that if it came down to a war with the monsters, then the fairies would lose, and he meant it.

Frisk hadn't wanted to think about it. They were more than a little upset about the mind wipe (the monsters had come so close, so close, to being put in danger because of what the fairies had done), and they'd wanted to tell the police about the fairies. The fairies could clearly be a threat to humans, with that ability they seemed to have, and Frisk definitely hadn't stopped thinking of them as being a threat to monsters either.

But Frisk knew what it was like to do something because you were scared. They didn't approve, but they knew. So they'd held their tongue when talking to the human police, and spun a quick story about not remembering anything about their rescuer except that they were very short and might have been a woman, and then when the interview was over, they'd kept holding their tongue as Toriel had swept them down the hall to the waiting area where the rest of their friends were waiting for them.

The instant they were through the door, three voices practically screamed their name, and in a rush of motion, they were swept up in a bony hug with a flowerpot being pressed painfully against their ribs.

"FRISK! YOU'RE OKAY! I KNEW IT! I KNEW YOU'D COME BACK SAFE AND SOUND, NYEH-HEH-HEH!"

"Frisk don't you ever fucking do that again, you hear me?!"

Frisk couldn't help the hiccupy laughter that slipped out of their mouth and wrapped their arms around both Flowey's pot and as much of Papyrus's ribcage as they could. "I'm sorry, guys," they whispered. "I'm sorry, I'm back now, I won't let this ever happen again, I promise."

Flowey glowered at them, thorny red vines emerging from his pot to cling aggressively to the front of their shirt. "You'd better not! And if I ever get my hands on those assholes -!"

Frisk laughed again, louder this time, as Papyrus set them down on the ground and beamed at them with immeasurable relief. When the skeleton pulled away, Flowey remained clinging to the front of their shirt like a thorny limpet, stubbornly refusing to budge even as a harried Alphys rushed up to give Frisk a hug as well.

"Oh my goodness, thank God you're okay! I was so worried, the police were looking everywhere, they couldn't find you, I tried to help but I couldn't do anything, I'm so sorry, I tried -!"

Frisk hugged her back, patting her back before pulling back and giving her a faint smile. "It's okay, Alphys. It's not your fault."

"So do I get a hug too, or…?"

Frisk turned toward the last monster in the room. Sans stood a little ways away from everyone else, arms held ever-so-slightly apart in front of him and his grin looking a little strained.

He didn't normally offer things like hugs, and he probably wasn't doing it just for their sake right now, but Frisk didn't care, and took full advantage of the offer by crossing the distance between them and throwing their arms around him too, burying their face in his hoodie and ignoring Flowey's indignant yelp as he was squashed headlong into Sans's ribcage.

For a moment he let them have their moment, rubbing their back comfortingly. Then the moment was over, and just as they'd expected him to, Sans said to them, in a quiet whisper, "What happened, kid? Was it the fairies?"

They shook their head, then sucked in a deep breath and pulled away, squaring their shoulders.

They may not have told the human police officers anything, and wouldn't, not yet. But they wouldn't lie to the monsters unless it was to reassure them, or unless it was about the Resets and the timelines, and although they might have said they wanted to wait until they died again, they couldn't wait that long anymore. The monsters needed to know.

"Guys," they said, quietly, turning to look at the rest of the room. "There's something I need to tell you."


The wizard has been officially named, guys. Yay?

"Howahkan" is a Native American name that means "Of the mysterious voice." Considering the wizard's talent for the mesmer, it seemed fitting. And "Luis" is a European variant of "Louis", it looks like, and means "famous warrior." O'Reilly's definitely making a name for himself, wouldn't you say?

… Goddamn it, did I just make a pun outside of the fic? Really?

*Bwa'Kel revolution: The Bwa'Kel were a gang of goblins that managed to corner the smuggling market in the Lower Elements in Book 2, and was the gang that Opal Koboi funded a rebellion for against the LEP. During the "revolution" in question, Opal disabled LEP weaponry, locked Foaly up in the Ops center in Police Plaza, and her partner in crime Cudgeon went to the Council and placed the blame for the entire affair on Foaly. If Opal and Cudgeon had managed to get away with the rebellion, Foaly would have been their scapegoat. Fortunately, that obviously didn't happen.

**Solinium: the radioactive material used in fairy bio-bombs that actually makes them lethal. Solinium has a very, very short half-life – I think maybe fourteen seconds in the books – which makes it ideal for dealing lots of damage to BIOLOGICAL material without damaging infrastructure around it, and leaves next to no traces behind. As it was put once in the books, "murder made easy." However, I actually have no idea if this is an actual material, so for all I know it could be magical in origin – and if it is, Foaly has every right to be concerned about a human that's already stolen fairy magic possibly being able to do the same with solinium.

***The Berserkers: During the Crash, Koboi used an old fairy site that had been buried under a tower on the Fowl Estate called the Berserker's Gate to control the spirits of fairy warriors that had been buried there during the last battle between humans and fairies ten thousand years ago. In order for these spirits to be of use to her, they had to possess the bodies of creatures around the Gate, which meant pretty much anything on the grounds. Some of these bodies included a hunting dog (which Mulch ate later that night because of course he did), a number of small wildlife, and Myles, Beckett, and Juliet, who were on the manor grounds at the time of the Gate's activation. From what I can tell, the Berserkers actively suppressed the consciousnesses of their hosts to take control – I know this because the Berserker possessing Myles was having difficulty keeping Myles suppressed, and the kid kept breaking through and exerting influence on his own possessor. Go Myles! :D

And now worldbuilding! Someone called Death of Snipers asked me this: "Every time frisk does something physical, you describe chara taking over. Are all of their dodging/combat skills chara based? Is frisk just the mental abilities they have? To what extent is what they did in the games chara and to what extent Is it frisk?"

No, not all of Frisk's dodging and combat skills are from Chara. Frisk is perfectly capable of dodging and dealing out a few blows by themselves physically – like, for example, when they tried to escape from the fairy shuttleport when they realized their memories were going to be erased, in recent chapters. A lot of those blows, though helped by Chara, certainly, were all Frisk. However, thanks in part to them naturally being a very compassionate person, and in part because of trauma from the Genocide Runs, Frisk usually just can't bring themselves to do anything violent – so, in situations where Frisk knows or thinks such things are necessary, they usually let Chara, who is a naturally more violent person, take over. Also, Chara is actually physically faster and stronger than Frisk is when they're the one in control of their body, which is another reason why Frisk lets them take over in violent situations – they're better at ending said situations quickly.

Most of what Frisk does in-game is done by Frisk in this 'verse, not by Chara. It took a very long time for Frisk to trust Chara enough to let them take over like they do now, and by the time they did, for the most part they knew how to get through the Underground on their own, so they never really needed Chara's help. They might have let Chara take over every now and then if, say, they wanted to eat a chocolate bar or something, but other than that, Chara doesn't do much Underground. The Genocide Runs, too, were all Frisk's doing as far as the fighting and killing of monsters thing is concerned, both times around – and actually, interesting fact here, during the second Genocide Run, Chara was actively fighting AGAINST Frisk, trying to take over to stop them from killing more monsters. They never managed that, unfortunately, but they DID manage to slow Frisk down somewhat, which let more monsters get evacuated…