By Caitlin Waltzer
It was just a little bit of chocolate. Just a wee bit. Really no biggie…approximately sixteen EG’s (elfograms) worth. A day. Every day. For the last decade. Okay, so maybe it was a wee bit more than a wee bit, but it wasn’t worth us getting kicked out of the Faerie realm. It’s outrageous, really. For the love of honey-cake, is it so bad to want to bring a little bit of dark, delicious, creamily divine, sinfully rich and undeniably delicious pleasure to people? Everyone has to go and make a huge deal out of nothing. “Oh no” they said, “we can’t have your kind of shenanigans here, what would the neighbors think?! “ ( Never mind that our “neighbors” are one whole dimension removed from us and they have no eyes, so how would they even know what we were up to?!) And seriously, it’s not like smuggling chocolate is the worst thing we could be doing. Certain people are just jealous that the human realm happened to come up with something so delectable that it actually impressed the gods (and everyone else for that matter.) Everyone started eating it all the time, especially the women and children. It put a real dent in the school lunch programs, and the faerie chefs were piping mad because their businesses were suffering, so they went on strike. When that didn’t work, they got together and made up this Faerie Food Pyramid thing, which they started implementing in their so-called “war against chocolatism”. They started paying scientists to write articles claiming that chocolate didn’t have enough nectar to satisfy the dietary needs of most faeries, and that it was painfully low in acorn tannins and pollen. So then, suddenly, all this “research” came out about how chocolate rots your wing joints and makes your magic go all wonky. The truth is, chocolate brings about so much happiness, that your wings start turning colors and your magic gets so sparkly and pretty that all the boys want you, and everything around you starts shimmering. Anyways, long story short, it was pushed through the faerie court system and chocolate was made illegal and the Chocolate Prohibition was put in place. Those of us who know the truth rebelled…and…well…what can we say? There’s good money to be made in smuggling illegally imported and delicious things that are in high-demand. We all quit our thankless jobs and formed “Cirque Damara” after our very favorite goddess of joy, children and mischief. Anyway, we were doing fine, rolling in enough proverbial dough to keep us in pretty frills and dandelion wine for a decade…until we made a bad call trusting a hired hand that we recruited to make chocolate runs. That lousy mook reported us to the FBI (Faerie Bureau of Investigation). They came, confiscated all our goods and rounded us up to take us to jail (and, might we add, with the unnecessary escort of a very large and pungent member of the troll clan. EW. He totally touched our pretty clothes with his stink and we had to actually WASH to get it off because it wouldn’t magic off once we got to the Borderlands. Thank you Arm & Hammer.) So…there we were, sitting in our cell, figuring out what in the frilly heck we were supposed to do and lamenting our losses, when we had a message delivered through a crack in the wall. A tiny scroll of paper sealed with an acorn stamp that read “We believe in chocolate. We believe in freedom. We will arrive for you at midnight. -V. ” Was it a trick or a joke? Who the heck was this “V”? Perhaps just a crazed chocolate nut? After a brief discussion and deliberation period, we decided we had no other option except to have faith that things would be ok. At midnight exactly, we heard noisy rattling and frantic chittering outside of our window. The sidewall crumbled to reveal a hole to the outside. We were blindfolded and thrown over the furry, warm backs of creatures whose movements could only be described as semi-neurotic. We rode for hours, all the while listening to the chattering of our captors/rescuers. When we finally stopped, the blindfolds were pulled off and we were surrounded by…squirrels. They blinked at us. We blinked at them. After some more minutes of blinking, they said simply “We are to deliver you into the hands of those who seek to protect you, oh great messengers of chocolate!” The largest and fluffiest of the squirrels threw an acorn in the air, which opened up a large portal. “You are to go to that very land which the chocolate doth come from.” Doth come from? Seriously? Anyway, we walked through the portal, and were sucked into a crazy tube thing and when we fell out of the other side; there was a group of women waiting for us. They gave us blankets and hot chocolate, and washed our clothes… and well…that’s pretty much how we landed in the human world. We are still under the protection of our squirrel saviors, but we stick mainly to the borderlands. As much as we try to blend into the human world, it’s hard because we’re so awesome. Plus we’re always dancing. Why don’t humans dance more? Faeries do love to dance… sometimes we even dance with the squirrels!
