#and let's not forget the tendency to appear and vanish on a whim

[singswan-springswan]

cats are the most cryptid of the beasts. beautiful and elegant, but also the cutest patooties with furry little faces and excellent toe beanage and then they open their mouths for a biiiiiig yawn and oh teeth

[bigskydreaming]

Okay, so, Wonderwall.

None of the Faetowns have hard and final niches, they just develop organically from the needs and wants and magic of all the changelings who gather in a set area, once there’s enough of them concentrated in one place to hit critical mass- at which point the Faetown just starts to develop and grow bit by bit around them.

But they do have various reputations all the same. For instance, The City Above is known for its scholars, being a place primarily focused on learning and intellectual growth and stimulation....with most changelings that prioritize accordingly, like, usually moving to that Faetown at some point even if they started out in a different one that was easier for them to get to. With the Painted Portals, that’s easily accomplished.

The three Wandertowns are no different. They tend to draw the most whimsical of the changelings, ones naturally attuned to the Wandertowns’ natural tendencies to relocate and so on.

But of all the Faetowns, and even taking the other Wandertowns like Frostmyre into consideration, its pretty unanimously held that the changelings of Wonderwall are the most capricious, chaotic and downright dangerous of them all.

If there’s one Faetown that holds true to the spirit of the Fae of old, otherworldly beings interested only in their games and pleasure and enticing mortal folk to take part in them through temptations as foreboding as they are compelling....its Wonderwall. 

The traveling Wandertown that began as an abandoned carnival, integrated bits of abandoned amusement parks it picked up along the course of its wanderings, and arrives randomly in a new location just as night falls in that particular place. With bright lights and familiar but oddly dissonant music drawing people from miles around, even if it put down stakes for the evening in a relatively secluded place.

And everyone’s heard of Wonderwall of course. The one Faetown people made extra sure to caution everyone to be wary of. Where you could enter and lose all track of time, not realizing entire days had passed before you emerged.....or leaving Wonderwall to find the Wandertown had relocated in the middle of the night, and you’re now stranded on the other side of the globe. Where the changeling population are each like individual forces of nature....wild and pitiless, nourishing and destructive all at the same time or cycling between one extreme to the other at a whim.

But everyone’s also heard about the other side of Wonderwall...the allure, the glitz, the glamour. Its the place where anything can be found, where there are changelings who can make your wildest dreams come true, where people get what they deserve if they’re confident that what they deserve is good...and even when its not. Some say if you’re in need, Wonderwall will take you where you want to go, that its a safe haven for any runaways or homeless, mainstream human as well as changeling, and you’ll be safe and warm and fed there until you decide to leave it and find you’ve been dropped off in just the right place for your fortune to turn around.

Sometimes people never leave Wonderwall at all...thanks to changelings like Mirror Mirror, whose magic can open doorways to other universes where the grass might be greener for someone and they step through with no desire to ever step back. 

But then some never leave Wonderwall because they came to prey upon those seeking sanctuary or with other ill intentions....but fail to properly heed the warnings, that the changelings who live here include among their number the apex of apex predators, the kind of monsters who only feed on lesser monsters. The changelings who disappeared as helpless human victims only to later Return all sharp-toothed and unafraid, now simply laughing at the worst humanity had to offer....how adorable, how cute. How...mortal.

If your sins were great enough, the Count might devour your soul. If you came to hunt, you might find yourself the one hunted - chased and toyed with by Bloody Mary and her brood through the endless nights and infinite back-alleys of Wonderwall. If you just happened to rub the wrong changeling just the wrong way, they might point you out to the Ticket-Taker, who’d then ensure you depart at a time and place most decidedly not to your liking.

Wonderwall is home to risk and reward in equal measure - the greatest dangers balanced by the most desired treasures.....and come one, come all, step right up and try your luck, ply your skill, or test your fate....and see which one the Wheel of Fortune deals out for you, or maybe something else entirely.

Be careful what you wish for isn’t the caution it should be though, when the town is just as likely to make your dreams come true. But its equally true that while you can find anything past its gates, what you find might not want to be found. Its all in the turn of the cards, the roll of the dice. Once you enter, your fate is out of your hands.

But its not out of theirs.

There’s Gossip Girl, who has no real appearance of her own - rather, she appears to everyone in the form of a trusted friend or confidante, the one person you’re most likely to spill your heart out to and that you’re so used to having by your side.....you forget to realize they didn’t come with you and shouldn’t be there right now. 

Sometimes she has sympathy for whatever story you unknowingly entertain her with today, and she’ll tell you exactly what you most need to hear, even if you had no idea you needed to hear it. 

Sometimes your secrets are sharp-edged and cutting, and the kind that deserve the same in return....in the form of a well-placed reply or judgment or slight that leaves a wound that won’t soon scab over. Sometimes it just depends on what mood she’s in and whether she likes you or not.

Sometimes she’s just bored.

Then over on that stage there’s St. Nicky the Matchstick Man, an old term for con-artists, so old, most people never think its a reference to anything other than the fact that he’s a white boy in his late teens and constantly aglow like he’s stage-lit by St. Elmo’s Fire. Always surrounded by a constant halo, flickering lights like his own personal Aurora Borealis that appear just behind him, around him, wash over his audience every time he laughs.

But his magic is old school too, the kind that would have had him dubbed a faith healer in centuries past....at least as long as enough faith was there in the audience that night. Because the trick of Wonderwall’s Matchstick Man, the magic behind his magic, is that his repertoire is all just a matter of how much he can get you to suspend your disbelief. If he can convince enough people he can do something, that’s all the fuel he needs to empower his magic to do just that...its a con that isn’t quite a con, once you add a dash of magic and only count what you’re left with in the end.

So he starts out small, with each new audience, each new crowd. Simple tricks, stage magic, sleight of hand. Nothing fancy, nothing real.....until somewhere in the sea of faces past the stage, someone starts to believe. Just a little at first, just a tad...he’s a changeling, magic is real, why can’t those tricks of his be real magic? Its as likely as anything else, right?

And from there he starts to build. Testing the waters, carefully feeling out what he has to work with as he adds a little more impossibility to each trick he performs, draws a little more faith and builds a platform to erect the rest of his act on. And by the end of it all he’s transformed, at least for the night...no longer a matchstick man but a genuine miracle worker, for as long as his audience lingers and wants real magic to believe in, to wonder, to marvel at.

Then cut away to the opposite end of the town and find another stage, one set for Panic! The exclamation point is implied, its part of his name....you don’t say his name, see, you yell it, if its not spoken like a shock to the system you’ve got nothing to say to him that he cares to hear. He’s Japanese-American, he’s goat horns and grunge rock, he’s a guitar riff that brings the night to life, alight with black radiance that’s somehow both pitch-dark and illuminating all at the same time. He conjures symphonies straight out of your fantasies, things you didn’t even know your subconscious could compose but that feel familiar all the same.

Sometimes your party might be joined by the Wisp, a delicate, laughing, spritely black girl with cotton candy hair and an ever shifting wardrobe that flickers like the constant changing of channels until she settles on something she likes. She seeks out those having a genuine good time, the best time, is drawn to it like a flame....but she’ll never be burnt by it because she’s only ever here as long as she wants to be. Lose her interest, cause her alarm, just plain piss her off...she’ll wisp away into nothingness, vanishing in a pink misty haze and randomly reappearing somewhere else....then flicker-stutter-stepping all throughout the town in however many blinks of the eye it takes for her to find new surroundings more to her liking. Even the memory of her is ephemeral...you only get to hold onto it if she wants you to. Otherwise she’s nothing but a half-remembered daydream forever just out of sight, just out of mind. She’s not here to be your manic pixie dream girl....the good time she’s after is entirely her own.

Over there operating the roller coaster and the funhouse side by side are the twins, Maher and Kyd - their nicknames are just the rushed pronunciation of acronyms they use as their actual names...and refuse to let anyone in on what they mean. They’re Cuban, identical, and the rarest kind of changelings of all.....appearing to have the same identical Change, though technically its just in the eye of the beholder. They’re constantly shifting in size, can be giants one moment and barely come up to your knee the next, but though the end image might be the same, everything else is a matter of perspective. Maher actually grows and shrinks as he appears to, but Kyd’s size is all relative to distance. Kyd’s magic makes for hallways that never end and folds space til everything is just a hop and a skip away; Maher’s magic means you might spend the whole night in Wonderwall thinking nothing’s amiss, and then exit to find you’re as small as a mouse and have been the whole time.  

And there’s Mirror Mirror, with his hall of mirrors that are all glimpses of other lives you could lead, and if you’re in luck, on the other side of one of them there’s another you staring back thinking yours looks pretty good too....he can turn that window into a door, let you swap places so long as there’s another him on the other side with the same magic - infinite universes, there’s a lot where there isn’t, but a good few million where there is....its not usually a problem. The more pressing issue is just the matter of the return policy....if you decide you’d rather your stay not be a permanent one, he’ll let you back through....as long as you can find Wonderwall and him again in the first place.

And the Caricaturist can make your outside match your inside, whatever that means for you, and Wyrd’s a levitating hooded cloak empty except for two glowing eyes, with whom what you see is what you get, as in, for a time even illusions, hallucinations and nightmares can be real to the touch....and looking to bite.

When Scream Queen belts out an aria, you’d better hope she’s not singing it for you, and Stranger Danger is the ominous and unforgiving guardian angel at the shoulder of every child who enters Wonderwall unaccompanied. Shadowjack’s shadow puppets are an everpresent entourage that serve as a dozen extra hands to do or get or be whatever he needs, and Seven is the seventh son of a seventh daughter and seven people in one, one for each day of the week.

But if pressed to pick one changeling in Wonderwall as sought out as he is avoided, most would have to go with the Count. He presides over his own version of a Guess Your Weight game, though his version is about guessing your sins, and you’re the one who has to do the guessing. Reclining lazily in a makeshift throne with a crown rakishly angled atop his head, the brown of his skin is offset by the white mask covering one side of his face and extending down to encompass his neck, his shoulder, his entire right side all the way down to his waist....like the Phantom of the Opera decided why stop there and kept going. 

Only upon closer inspection, its not quite white, more streaked with gray that occasionally flickers with filaments of all the rainbow colors, and the gray isn’t static, it moves, like clouds crossing the sky, and peeking out from under the edges of it all is a warm, amber light, constantly flaring up and dying back down again as if in a never-ending effort to break free and....do what, you’re not entirely sure, but something, definitely something. There’s something almost hungry about that glow, though you’ll be damned if you know what makes you say that.....but of course, you’re before the Count. Odds are fifty/fifty you might end up damned regardless.

Guess right, judge yourself honestly, and there’s a boon in it for you, a magical goodwill that leaves Wonderwall and sticks around for the perfect opportunity to change your entire life for the better. But guess wrong, judge yourself over-optimistically, and you might leave with a curse instead, one tailor made to deliver the perfect comeuppance and no doubt whose work it was.

And of course, if you try and game the gamesmaster, or perhaps are naive or just plain stupid enough to believe he’s all just for show and can’t see right through you.....

Well. That’s not a good idea, and that’s best left at that.

The only guarantee upon venturing into Wonderwall is that your life upon leaving it will never be the same.

....though guarantee is not quite the right word, when first there’s the matter of whether you ever leave Wonderwall at all.