February is World Building Month. Day Nineteen: Fae Apoc

[aldersprig]

piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The ninteenth question comes from rix_scaedu and is for the Faerie Apocalypse

What happens to someone who's Changed and cannot find or persuade an adult to Mentor them?

---

I... do not know. I honestly don't.

There are certainly kids like Reegan in these two stories:
http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/411653.html
http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/588052.html
who have trouble finding a Mentor - because their family or they themselves are disliked, because there are no older fae in the area, because they Change out of a line that hasn't had a Change in long enough that nobody knows what to do, or because they Change away from anyone or everyone.

And I suppose it's possible, especially a couple centuries pre-apocalypse or immediately post-apoc, when the human population and thus the fae population are so thinly spread, that a fae child thus Changed could go unnoticed.

If so, it is almost impossible (unless they are sequestered in a tower full of fae books) that they will develop any use of Words - and that is for the better, because without guidance, Workings can quickly become disastrous.

Without a Mentor to guide them into learning to Mask, they are likely to stick out like a sore thumb. They will either become a mythic figure, a monster, a freak (assuming enough of a Change to stick out, of course) - or they will be locked up, studied, stared at.

Their innate, if mild, will probably be entirely usable and controllable with practice. If they have a more excessive power - pyrokinesis, for instance, or storm-calling - they are likely to come back to "strange Change" above, to bringing way too much attention to themselves.

It's likely, pre- or post-apoc, that they will eventually bring enough attention to themselves inadvertently, one way or another, and some fae will find them.

Then the question becomes: what are the intentions of that fae?