Name: Mei (means ‘plum’)
Gender: none (for practicality’s sake I shall refer to Mei as a ‘she’.)

Appearance: because of her condition (see ‘defects’ below) Mei is rather androgynous in looks, though slightly more outwardly female: she has small breasts and her bone structure is somewhere between genders. Due to her youth, she could well pass as either gender. Either way, she is clearly Chinese in looks: slanted dark eyes, dark, straight hair long enough to reach her buttocks and pale skin.

Defects: Mei is a hermaphrodite: she has ambiguous genitalia and both male and female tissues. She is unable to reproduce because of this, at least without magic. She also has a tendency to refer to herself in the plural but this is not because of some mental condition, only due to her history.

Age: she is currently fifteen or sixteen, exact age uncertain.

Personality: Mei, for obvious reasons (see ‘history’) is very fond of and connected with nature in general. She tends to be gentle and good-natured, quiet most of the time, and much as her original shape she is very resilient – basically she has a tendency to be what people imagine when they think ‘Zen’. She thinks of herself in the plural and refers to herself in the plural. She doesn’t really know how fairies work.

History: Mei was a plum flower (Prunus mume) before she was accidentally blown into a rip after a strong windstorm. Now she’s a fairy.

Sample post:

We are one as we are many. All life is interconnected. All life springs from the earth; all life returns to the earth. This is what we are and this is what we mean: we are born in winter and we flourish in the cold of snow and we offer shelter to the snowbirds. When it is spring we will dance among our friends, in the spring wind, and when it rains we will blow away with the water and only the trace of our perfume will linger. In summer we will be rich with our children, fat, sweet fruit to be plucked and consumed and thus, we will live forever through our death. Such is the way of life.

This is what we are, this is our nature, and thus, it is only right that we spring in the wintertime here too. Oh, certainly, the sun is bright and warm and it rains gold over us, and the sky is blue as the robin’s egg, but we can feel it, the winter through our veins – we have changed, as all things change. As we stand upon the shore – we are one now as we were before, the embodiment of all we were, bark and leaves, flowers and fruits, a single being – the world has changed. The sun turned. The beach is vast and pale and impossibly inviting.

We stand. We wobble; we tremble; we fall and rise again; it takes practice, motion, we who are unused to the ways of walking, of rushing – the small rushing things we once knew, we are one of them now. We are too used to the wind and the stability and the precarious dance between air and earth. We know of the sun, however, and of the water, though we know instinctively that the one rushing over the sand and the shore is not the same that nourished our roots and ran through our cells, once.

Our skin is soft, however, and the world altogether different: it is strange to be one of them, and our hand rests upon our chest and for the first time we can hear – if we focus – the beat of our heart within us. A heart and blood and skin and hunger that cannot be quenched by the sun and the earth, the rain and the wind and the humming of bees and the singsong of birds in our branches.

We sink our feet (roots, we think, like roots, our feet, but so mobile, like tumbleweed) in the sand, we brush it through the seawater, and we shiver at the sensation of it, warmth and roughness and heat, a thrill that runs down our spine, bending as the reed, strong as the oak; will we forget, then, what we were, will we remember what we became? The earth remembers, the earth dreams its dreams, and so do we; we have changed but we are one – a paradox, a dream, a whim.

‘Tis Rae and it’s all Georgia’s fault.

Snowbirds look again before they land,
butterflies would faint if they but knew.