#a few days ago i plucked like a chunk of really pretty purple flowers and walked like a good few miles with them in hand but then i got

[fionaapplesmackdown]

recently pressed flowers + leaf !!!!!

[fountainpenguin]

Once Act 2 of Origin of the Pixies is over, I can finally delete the Google Docs file for it. For kicks and giggles, here are some deleted scenes that have been sitting at the end of the Acts 1 and 2 document all this time-

H.P. talking biology with Mr. Thimble:

Four and a half centuries after that, just before I was to begin my real work as an employee in the family business of Wish Fixers rather than Ambrosine’s unpaid little tagalong, I returned to Spellementary School to seek something from Mr. Thimble that I had never wanted in the months following my nymphhood: His advice.

My timing was perfect, as it tended to be. I arrived as his latest batch of students was filtering out for recess. He crouched on the floor with a dustpan full of pottery chunks and crumpled flowers (someone, it seemed, had finally put that twisted orange and brown monstrosity on the bookshelf out of its misery).

"Someone broke your vase?" I asked as he stood.

He shrugged and started for the waste bin. "One of the will o' the wisps brushed it with her wing. It doesn't matter- they were just daisies." Then he glanced over at me for the first time. “Ah. Fergus Whimsifinado. You look more like your father every day.”

_

Mr. Thimble considered this. “If you want to say you’re a pixie, then I see no reason why you can’t. The early will o’ the wisps and brownies began in a similar way. Here. You remember this old collection of tablets, perhaps. I would suggest you find some blank ones and create a copy for pixies, containing information such as wing design, particular magical abilities, sexual tendencies, and aggressive behaviors that outsiders ought to be aware of.”

I stared at the heap of tablets with my stomach curling in and out of knots. I wanted to be called something, but I didn’t want it that badly. I thanked him for the tablets and even began my work, but I lacked the attention and drive for it. The project was shelved.

This scene was originally going to appear after the lunch conversation with Ambrosine in “Love Struck Out”. In this early draft of the story, H.P. wasn’t so bogged down by feelings of “not being a real fairy” and “my mutation makes me ugly”, and he was actually going to call himself a pixie from the get-go. He approached his old school teacher, requesting to fill out the tablets to get his species placed in the school textbooks. Because of course he can do that.

I felt like this concept took a LOT out of the story, though, which is one reason why the scene was tossed and I went back to the drawing board (other reason being, it disrupted Chapter 3′s flow). I did really want to make a joke about him hating paperwork in his youth, but after ditching this scene I never really had the chance.

Also, you may notice that the mention of the vase was moved to “The Art of Starting Fires” instead. I was pretty proud of how it was written, and designed the Wish Fixers scene around it (after tweaking the scene as necessary to fit Karowel’s personality, of course). Fun Fact: In Act 4, H.P. owns a vase that looks exactly like this one even though he called it ugly in his youth.

Academy Party:

Sparkle wiggled his brows. “Are you sure you don’t want a sip? It’s orange.”

I studied the drink, then brought it to my lips. “Maybe just one.”

It runs in the family, the sugar addiction. I was at the top of my game one moment, leaning back in my comfortable seat and surveying my kingdom with fingertips pressed together. Shortly thereafter, Polly was leading Sparkle and I down the hall by our ears, both of us with our words bumping together like raindrops. I find it necessary to state, however, that soda is no longer a weakness of mine and should not be expected to work against me again. 

Although this snippet has some merit, I removed it from “School’s In - Not Much of a Musical” because I realized I didn’t want to timeskip the entire party (I played with the idea of having two parties at first). After this, I wrote the second “party” as something rather boring. H.P. was just playing snapjik with Sparkle and Polly in the basement somewhere. Brown walls and quiet people in the study area, yep. There was... no excitement whatsoever until Ambrosine showed up. It just seemed like the kind of place H.P. would hang out.

Then I remembered he’s canonically a rave-lover and grinned a wicked grin.

H.P. meets Pip

1)

I jolted upright, wings flared. “What the- Ow!”

A blue and black shape hovered above me with a horrified stare etched across her entire face. “Of all the places to spill my hot spaghetti sauce, it had to be on a fairy in diapause.”

“What?” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes. “I wasn’t… what?”

She bore no crown, and her bat-like wings were feathered along the edges. An anti-cherub, then. She stared at me, stiff, with a bowl of pasta in her hands.

2)

I took a few steps, but swayed heavily and began to sag. “Take it slow, big fella,” she said, tailing me. “That’s it. Keep walking forward. Forward.”

“I know you’re trying to walk me off a cliff. This is where I live. I know this valley.” I rubbed my entire face with my palm. “Was I seriously in diapause? The last season I remember was the Winter of the Scarred Caribou. What year is it now?”

“Autumn of the Flightless Bird. That would be about…” She tipped her head. “Twenty thousand years, I think?”

I blinked several times. “You remember that?”

She coughed into her fist. “Years are kind of my thing. It’s in the job description. You learn to pick them up. Anywho, no one wants to hear about my boring life.”

3)

“Hey, I’d be more grateful in your position. You would have been eaten by predators if I hadn’t waited around until some angels found you and decided to give you a proper burial.”

“They buried me alive?”

“It wasn’t their fault. You still had dust on you and you looked pretty dead.”

“And that was twenty-thousand years ago.”

“Yep.”

“You’ve been stalking me for twenty thousand years, and you’re only just now waking me up.”

“Yep.”

“Why are you like this?”

“I dunno? I come around this area every century or so to listen to that fluttery sound of your core deep underground, and I finally got curious and just decided to do it.”

4)

I checked myself over through bleary eyes, but all my clothes were still in place, well-worn by the elements and damp with ice.

“Identify yourself, or I shoot you with a seven-day blindness hex.”

“Easy, easy!” she protested, flapping her wings.

“Who are you? Why are you here?”

These diapause ideas were scrapped because of the conflict with Baby, You’re a Rich Man, when H.P. tells Sanderson he met Pip about five hundred years before he was born. I used Mortikor to wake H.P. from diapause instead.

The first one was definitely supposed to show Pip’s quirkiness. In that version, H.P. fell into diapause in his little cave, and she snuck in to rob him. Hot spaghetti sauce is, evidently, warm enough to wake someone from diapause. The other three all take place outside in the snow.

H.P. trying to communicate with humans

1)

“You want me to paint?” I tried to infer. I dipped my fingertips in the red powder, then stared at the wall. What to draw? I had never painted anything before, or if I had, it was when I was very young and the memories had been shuffled beneath millennia of more important work.

I looked at Tall, and then I knew exactly what to create. First, I drew two crude angels, to symbolize the concept of ‘more than one’. Then, more carefully, I drew a third figure floating over their heads, with wings spread. After setting my paints on the floor, I faced the pack again. Shiny had her head to the left, but no one really seemed to get it.

“Pack kills animal,” I said pointing to the picture that Tall had drawn. Moving my finger to the next, I pressed, “Pack gives food to the fairy and cares for them.” The third image, “Fairy lives happy life.”

They weren’t getting it. How were they not getting it?

Oh, well.

2)

I stared around the cave. Then I took up the feathers that had been plucked from the meat, and tucked them into my hair. I took up a large bone like a wand. I brushed clumps of purple dust from my left shoulder down to my hand, and clenched my fingers before they could begin to wriggle back up.

One chance. One chance.

I threw my handful of dust to the floor and silently pleaded for them to shoot up white sparks (It was only a small amount of dust, after all). With a sound like a ping, they did. I leapt into the air as I flared my wings, and held.

3)

I clung to my wand. They seemed to understand. They respected me like I was the greatest. I was a king. 

“Okay. For my first order of business, I require an escort to Great Sidhe.” I pointed out the cave and started to leave it, but after a minute of hovering outside the entrance, I came back. “Escort? Why is no one moving?”

The first and third are okay, but I’m not fond of the second. Anyway, like the scenes with Pip, these take place in “The Wanderings of the First and Alone”. I timeskipped them all instead because they weren’t necessary for the chapter, and I was having trouble making them all flow together anyway. 

Additionally, I wanted the first time H.P. is seen naming something to be when he names Sanderson (Hence why the story points out he never named his pet fish or the living cardboard boxes). I also played with the concept of H.P. sticking with this group of humans for decades, observing their mortality, but that idea was quickly discarded when I realized it would give him parental experience, and I wanted Sanderson to be the first child who truly looked after.

Social services are trash

The word- it was the wrong word. That word didn’t belong in conversation.

“Dead!” she exploded, visibly resisting the urge to sink her thumbs into my windpipe and strangle me. “The Fairy Elder’s orders! They’ll kill him to prevent the continuing spread of-”

I flashed for the door before she finished, tying the ribbons of China’s coat with all the wrong loops only to tear them apart and redo them correctly. I barreled through two streets, swerving around more than one magic carpet and knocking half a dozen Fairies to the cloudstones.

Originally, H.P. went out to lunch after dumping Sanderson on social services in “Grand Father”. However, he shouldn’t have friends at this time, so I couldn’t figure out how he ended up talking with this lady. Or how “I just illegally abandoned my son and I feel great” could come up in conversation. 

In the final version, he goes to the post office instead, and finds out from the Keepers that Sanderson was on the chopping block. The final version works well because it’s a good way to remind the audience that the Refracted exist, and it shows that despite everything, H.P. feels guilty about dropping off Sanderson with little fanfare, and so brings him the scarf.

The draft version was a little too panicked and emotional considering that technically, Origin IS supposed to be written for the pixies and H.P. wouldn’t normally let something QUITE like that slip in. I mean, for the sake of storytelling, I haven’t been writing the way I imagine he truly would, but that’s why he has an editor whom he hates.

I’ve been waiting for the right time to bring the magic carpets up again, but I think I missed my chance, so that might just end up a Frayed Knots thing.

Anti-Sanderson meets Sherri

The door opened, and a slim figure headed across the grass for the showers with a bucket in one hand and rag in the other. A damsel. A cherub damsel. Anti-Sanderson looked at me. “Watch this.”

He went bouncing and sliding down the tree, ricocheting off a tangle of branches, and at the bottom ran over to the cherub. "Can I help you carry that, twizzlerbit?" he asked, and she let him with a smile.  

The pair had nearly reached the showers when the cherub made the mistake of holding her eyelids shut, or perhaps darting her gaze away, and Anti-Sanderson lunged for her face. She screamed against his lips and slapped at him with her hands and snapping wings, but with his arms wrapped around her, even the yoo-doo doll struggled to tear him away. As the cherub scrambled off, we all dropped to our knees. We knelt there, hands behind our backs, glowering at one another, until finally Venus stormed in and grabbed the offender by the elbow.

"That's it. I have hit the roof with you. You can spend the next five hundred years in solitary confinement."

I REALLY like the phrasing of jumping down the tree, but had to toss it due to the scene change to the ballroom in “Snowflake”. Shame.

(By the way, Sanderson was mentally nine in “Bells and Whistles”, and is mentally eleven by this point in the story. Once he hits twelve, he’ll be mentally twelve for a looong time until his lines catch up with his mental age. After that, he’ll start aging with his line count. So I guess aging with lines is like a puberty thing? That makes sense to me. Let’s do that. Pair it with a wing moult and other features like an adam’s apple or something, yeah.)

H.P. meets Wanda

“Wanda Fairywinkle.”

“You’re the damsel who traveled back in time to kill the dinosaurs.”

She took the folds of an imaginary skirt and curtsied.

That’s it. That’s the scene. That’s as far as I got before I realized I would MUCH prefer to write “Rain Dance” instead, and I didn’t want to accidentally write myself into a corner.

This scene, and the next one, would take place during the war.

Chatting with Schnozmo

Robin leaned across the table. “They say some lunatic called Doubletake snuck a cú sith into the camp.”

I sipped my coffee. “That in itself was against the Fairy Elder’s orders, isn’t it? Poor sucker didn’t stand a chance, I suppose.”

“I dunno about that. Maybe.” He shrugged. “All I know is, people are sayin’ how Doubletake got himself sugar-drunk and killed Shiverwand. Just stabbed him right in the back, no warning or nothin’. His own bunkmate, while he was sleeping! Got the dust everywhere. How’s that for juicy?”

I rotated my mug between my fingers. “And the cú sith took him on the grounds of dishonorable killing?”

“Sure did! The mangy yellow thing snapped his soul up before you could steal a peach cobbler off a windowsill.” Robin slapped his knee and leaned back, both hands wrapped around the edge of the bench between his knees. “Wish I coulda seen it. Two words: Night patrol reeks. Anyway, they say Doubletake’s body’s new driver is a charming fellow. So, if you wondered.”

“Thank you.”

He flashed his jagged teeth. “Hey, that’s what the Hooded Robin’s here for.”

“And Doubletake in the cú sith’s body?”

“Got away into the trees. They’re trying to round him up. I dunno if they’ll try to get him back in his own body, though. I mean, he was a loopy fellow. A couple years in hot fur might cool him down.”

Mmhm. Originally, H.P. didn’t take Sparkle with him when he left the Academy at the end of “The Fallen Angel”. The rebellion in “A Grain of Truth” didn’t even exist. I’m still trying to decide WHAT H.P. and Schnozmo are going to talk about during this scene, or if the entire scene needs to be removed.

Additionally, the soul-swapping scene worked well for Chapter 6, because it drives home exactly what fairy dogs can do, and justifies H.P.’s reactions in “School’s In” and “Bells and Whistles” sooner rather than later.

Anyhow, those are the deleted scenes, and they’ll be deleted for real when I finish the Act 2 finale and discard this document!