Town terrorized by lutins who pacified the populace with a perilous peppermint fairy fruit tree
SOS alert the besieged town of St. Elie, Quebec has officially fallen to the lutin forces who first pacified the unwitting populace with a perilous peppermint fruit tree.
When this innocent-looking tree first appeared in a forested St. Elie park some five years ago, the town hailed the appearance of its soft pink, sweet and spicy fruit, harvesting and consuming it in copious quantities, blissfully unaware of the nefarious effect of eating fae foods.
The whole Internet celebrated with St. Elie, trumpeting the reappearance of a real peppermint tree in story after story about the economic impact on this formerly sleepy town. Nobody seemed concerned about the real consequences…
Now five years later, these consequences become clear. The lutins have landed and a town is over run by feckless fae making a magical mint from folks who flock from around the globe to taste and see the magical fruit of the miracle St. Elie peppermint tree.
Signs of the town’s defeat hang everywhere you look. From special lutin-only crosswalks to lutin-run restaurants and hotels, it’s clear the population of St. Elie now lives in pacified servitude to their wee overlords.
Don’t let this happen where you live! Be on the lookout for any suspicious trees in your neighbourhood.
Never seen a fairy tree? No problem. Count yourself among the lucky survivors. But please, review the following before it’s too late for you and your town.
How to ID a Fairy Tree:
1. Unusual Fruit
While not a scientific term yet, unusual is the best way to describe fae fruit which comes in many shapes, colors and sizes.
But that’s just part of the magic that makes it so appealing. Terrestrial fruits take time to grow and ripen, from flower to small fruit, growing over a predictable time frame to a larger size and deeper color that is more or less uniform.
Fae fruit, by contrast appears overnight with bright colors, often mixed or swirly, fully-formed and sometimes even fully wrapped as in the case of St. Elie. This makes harvesting it from the ground below that much easier, not to mention it can last forever on a shelf.
2. Makes You Want MORE
Faery fruit like all fae foods is magically designed to make you eat more and more AND mooooore AND MOOOOORE…
You get the idea. While fruit of the terrestrial realm will eventually fill you up and switch a stop-light in your brain, fairy fruit will never do this. In fact the opposite occurs. Think of it as sending a flashing neon-yellow GO-GO-GO-TIME-IS-RUNNING-OUT signal. T
3. The Real Magical Fruit
Those feckless fae have learned a lot since the days when they relied on beans to trap their prey…
(Except for giants. Giants are slow to change and many of them still go around trying to trade magic beans for livestock. Yes, the smartest giants have switched to jelly beans but even they have difficulty finding humans willing to accept them in exchange for a cow.)
…the point here is the fruit of a fairy tree is spelled. Spelled to do what? Oh, only to enslave you in one or more terrifying ways. What terrifying way? Just depends on which kind of fae you are facing and their needs. You could end up a fairy farm hand, amassing sweet mints for sale at exorbitant prices in a tourist town for lutin overlords or licking lollipops to generate power to a leprechaun shoe factory.
4. Fairy Fruit is First One Free
Again, except for the giants. See above. The fae of today give the first fruits away for free or nearly free, to rope you in and get you hooked. But very soon you will find there is a price. With leprechauns and lutins, that price will often be money, more and more of it as your appetite for more and better grows. But with other elvish and mixed magical beings and associated underworld-y types, the price can be much steeper. Like what? Oh, only your soul. Your memories. Your feelings. Little things like that.
5. Fairy Farmers Never Eat Their Own Fruit
Need more proof? Find a fairy farmer and offer them a fae fruit. Will they eat it? Ah no. Never. Not in your lifetime. They’ll do everything in their power to not consume it. They’ll sniff it and cut it and cook it and stack it and make buildings and even entire cities out of it but you will never ever see them eat it. That’s because even the fae are not immune to spells from other fae. And nobody is more suspicious than they.
Don’t let the lutins and leprechauns lord over you! Keep your community fae fruit free this summer. Alert the site if you spot a fairy tree in your land and SOS will send a herbicidal service STAT – first one is free.
