Part of the idea is that children are kidnapped by faeries when they are babies and toddlers, because children who grow up in Arcadia make better, more docile slaves. It’s all they know. All my Grimms are kidnapped as toddlers, and rescued as teenagers. But the problem with that is, and I can’t believe this never occurred to me before:

See title of post.

Kids who grow up in Faery don’t go to school. They don’t learn to read or write unless it amuses their Faery masters to teach them. The only education they get is whatever their Faery masters choose to teach them, and that may or may not be useful outside Arcadia. There’s even the distinct possibility that Faeries speak their own language amongst themselves, and thus any human children would grow up with Faery as their native tongue. There’s so much basic education and social conditioning that we just take for granted by living in a human society. Even homeschooled and un-schooled people get this. My Grimms have none of that upon being rescued. The other children they rescue are all going to have the same problem. Aside from whatever trauma they’ve endured, they don’t have the education or skills to be rescued and simply dumped back into human life.

How is a sixteen-year-old who has never been to school, cannot read or write or even speak his native tongue, going to last a day in high school? They’d need years of special tutoring to catch up, and how are they going to explain themselves to anyone who might offer such lessons? Especially since the best way to keep from getting recaptured is to not draw attention to yourself.

There are several ways around this problem, and it might even lend some depth to the world and the characters. Certainly I can play with my Grimms’ lack of social skills, which will inevitably lead to some embarrassment and bad situations.

Thankfully Alan Hunter’s backstory can stay intact. He was a teenager when he was captured, so basic education isn’t a problem for him…he’s just been out of the human loop, per se, for about ten years. Which is, perhaps, how he had the will and the knowledge to escape on his own in the first place. Savannah (Mother Goose), was also a teenager when captured…it just took her a hell of a lot longer to escape.

My Grimm team is more troublesome. Rapunzel was six when she was taken, so she at least could talk, and had some basic reading and counting skills. Rora and Cinder were four, so again, they knew some words…although since Cinder doesn’t speak, it’s hard to tell how much she knows. But the rest were mostly two and three years old. However, the Grimms have an advantage, because Mother Goose can homeschool them. She’s the ideal person to catch them up to where they need to be, since she knows what they’ve been through.

I imagine she is posing as a foster mom…which could make for some interesting episodes. She might have to actually be certified for foster care at some point, which means she could get actual foster kids placed with her besides her Grimms. That’s an immediate secrecy problem, not to mention dangerous for the children who don’t have a clue. On the other hand, Mama G can’t afford to have human authorities taking an interest in her. How would she explain eight teenagers who have no family and no official identities?

It’s the children they rescue that pose the biggest plot challenge. Now, presumably all the Grimms can speak and understand Faery, to some extent. So communication with kids who speak nothing else won’t be an issue. But the education problem means that every child they rescue, they also have to rehabilitate. Teach them to speak English. Teach them to read and write. Teach them basic human interaction. Give them what schooling they can. On top of all that, they’ll have to discover what Faery abilities the child has absorbed, teach them control of those, and show them how to keep “under the Fae radar”.

This means that each child they rescue becomes an investment requiring weeks, maybe months of the team’s time. When they aren’t on a mission, the Grimms will be full-time schoolteachers and counselors. Every child they rescue will practically become part of the team for a time, and undoubtedly the Grimms will get attached to each one. That’s a weakness if any of them ever get recaptured, and the Faeries use them against the Grimms.

This means that they cannot rescue groups of children at once, because they can’t possibly teach and rehabilitate them all, and they cannot send them to anyone else for that. That means that the team may have to make difficult decisions when choosing targets to rescue, on the basis of “can we handle this case after we get them out?” Because they know it would be better to leave a child in Faery than to sneak him out, fail to rehabilitate him, and risk him being sent to a mental institution, or being recaptured and taken back to Arcadia.

It may mean that the team will end up targeting mostly newly-captured children, who are still babies and toddlers. These can be turned over to human police (probably covertly), and given back to their parents with relatively little drama. Perhaps such rescues will be the “meat” of their missions, and rescuing older children and teenagers is something they do only every few months.

Another possibility I played with and liked was the idea of an underground school co-op within Arcadia itself. Perhaps an older slave, one captured late, one who still remembers the human world, became distressed at being the only one who could read, and set out to teach some of the younger children behind their Faery master’s back. The movement spread. Maybe on the rare occasions when humans are sent into the human world on some Faery errand, they also smuggle in textbooks and such. These books are passed amongst the various populations of slaves. The older kids (and adults) teach the little ones (once they are old enough to be trusted to not babble to a Faery). I was thinking of calling this co-op “the Hedgerow.”

I imagine that some or maybe all of my Grimms were a part of the Hedgerow before they were rescued. In fact, the Hedgerow could be the primary means by which Mother Goose and the Grimms keep in contact with humans in Arcadia, and decide who to rescue. If I divide the Grimm premise into episodes and seasons, I imagine the big Season 1 ending reveal would be that the Hedgerow is not as secret from the Faeries as they all assumed it was. In fact, most Faeries know about it, but they let it continue because watching the humans sneak around and hide things amuses them.

But so. Thank goodness I stumbled upon the education problem before I actually started writing any episodes.

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If they take it, I may turn it into a serial thing. Alan Hunter’s story makes a nice lead-in to the overall Grimms storyline, something I’ve wanted to get started on. One of the Grimms, on a rescue mission, meets Alan after he’s been recaptured. They all escape. The Alan/November romantic tragedy will be wrapped in as a subplot to the whole Grimm tale. I don’t think Alan will ever actually be a Grimm; he’ll function more as a solitary ally. He may not be the only one; the Grimms will probably acquire a network of allies as the story fleshes out. Rescued kids who make it back to their families, but still know. Faerie enthusiasts who are in on the truth. Maybe even a rogue Fae or two.

I’m still working on Shades. In the process of spreading out and raising stakes on an already tense scene. I think I’m approaching the point where I won’t have to change much more. I’m also pretty sure I’ve said that before. *sigh* On the upside, I get to burn some mansions down. What’s the point of having a cabal of Cowls in a Mantle city if they never wreak any havoc? Let’s just say it’s high time for some chaos.

I also had a germ of an idea in the car today. I’ve been reading more Percy Jackson books: am currently about halfway through Titan’s Curse. So I was thinking about Greek mythology and heroes, specifically about the so-called “fatal flaw”. And I wondered what it would be like to have a flaw you really couldn’t overcome, and one you knew it really would kill you one day. I mean, how do you live with that? I have this eternal sense of optimism that persuades me that any flaw can be overcome if one perseveres…but I mean, what if there was just no overcoming this?

I think that’s what intrigues me about the vampire myth. No matter what you do, once you’re bitten, once you’ve turned…the Beast within will win. Eventually. No matter how hard you fight. Every slip sends you one step closer to becoming a monster.

But so, what do you do? Maybe the answer lies not in working to overcoming the fatal flaw, but seeking to put it to use somehow. The Greek word for ‘fatal flaw’ is hamartia. Maybe if you combine your hamartia with someone else’s, it turns into a strength. And then I thought, what if there was a world where everyone was born with such a flaw, and the only way to save yourself was to find your flaw-partner. Once you found this person, the two of you together would become unstoppable.

No, not everyone in a world would have this problem. Maybe only a few are born with a Flaw. It would be sort of the opposite idea of Cashore’s Gracelings. It would be terribly unlucky to give birth to a Hamartia, a Flawed One, and so most would be exposed or abandoned at birth. The few that dare to raise a Hamartia child would send them out on a quest to find their Flaw-bound, probably as soon as possible. After all, you never know when a Flaw will reveal itself, or how many people will suffer as a result. Single Hamartia would be shunned in society, barred from public places, etc.

However, Flaw-bound pairs would be revered.

What other conflict could exist here?

Maybe Hamartia are not allowed to fall in love with normal people? Or each other? Maybe falling in love risks the Flaw-bond, as the two are no longer willing to do what’s needed to negate the other’s Flaw. Maybe only same-sex Flaw bonds work, or are trusted to work.

Maybe they just aren’t allowed to have children, as Hamartia always birth more Hamartia.

Or maybe a Flaw-bond has to be between a man and a woman, and for some reason, there are more male Hamartia than female, or vice versa. Maybe same-sex Flaw-bonds are viewed as inferior, or are outright forbidden.

Or maybe Flaw-bound consist of two people who inherently hate each other. After all, who better to mitigate one’s Flaw than someone who sees ALL your flaws and is unwilling to put up with them? Maybe Flawed pairs who last for longer than a couple of years are rare.

This is really only a germ of a magic system, but maybe I’ll dig through my queue of ideas and find a story to stick it into.

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Renegade

Here’s what we came up with:

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I think this will be a fun story concept to play with.

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It gave me the idea of assembling a team of anti-heroes, taking pseudonyms from popular culture, and creating an unlikely crime fighting squad. (Yes, I’m sure it’s been done before, but don’t burst my bubble just yet.) Other than Santa’s reindeer and the seven dwarfs, however, I could not think of any salient characters that come in groups (that aren’t already superheros). My first idea was to create a group of children whose mission is to save other children from getting kidnapped by Faeries…and my first inclination was to name them after Grimm’s fairy tale characters. But then I decided to see if I could come up with something better. I spent a few hours online looking up gods and goddesses from different pantheons all over the world…but the ones that people know are overused, and the ones that people don’t know would take too explaining to make them work.

So, I went back to the original idea.

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I think the next step is to actually construct a plot skeleton for Rora’s rescue story. I may enter that contest of the SCWG, which means I have to finish this before October 15th. *sigh* And I still have to get Shades done.

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