In Strange Town something was happening, something any fairy would recognize on sight, something they'd tried and tried to keep from happening; something inevitable.

They were preparing to swarm, to split up and leave it all behind.

Someone had almost died, almost been murdered.

Two fairies, going about their business at breakneck, high speeds, seemed to collide with one another on a daily basis. At first, it had been funny, but as it went on and on, they each started to wonder; is he doing it on purpose?

The stress of it, along with the stress of Strange Town clearly being a failure, built and built, day after day, year after year, until one day, one of them snapped.

He'd pinned the other one down and started punching as though he were trying to kill a monster. Only the quick thinking of bystanders had been enough to save a life and prevent the shame of having produced a murder.

Fairies had killed one another, of course they had, but it was ritualized combat with rules and expectations of both parties. They never just looked at someone and killed them out in the open.

But it had almost happened. It had almost happened, and the Strangers, the name the residents of Strange Town had given themselves as a joke, knew it was a sign that they could not succeed.

They had been the best of the fairies, come from all over the Overcavern Forest and from even farther beyond that. Fairies of every elemental alignment following a rumor, a dream, that there was a place for ones like them.

A place for fairies who wanted names and lives apart from the villages, a place to become someone!

A City to call their own, and all the benefits it brought along with it.

All for naught. There were tens of thousands of them gathered, each one a unique individual with their own name, gathered at the top of the trees, above the forest, gathered in the sunlight, weeping and wailing openly. The two, the would-be murderer and his would-be victim, were sobbing most of all of anyone else.

The two of them embraced and went their separate ways, and a swarm followed each of them. The fairy who had wanted to be a [Smith] rose with bitterness in his heart, and a swarm rose with him as well. The one who wanted to be a doctor of steel, an [Engineer], rose, and those who followed his dream swarmed with him.

One by one, the leaders, the [Dreamers], rose and left, going their own way, each following their own path. They knew they would lose their class the moment they slept, and mourned its loss.

Finally, only one was left, the forest fairy who had been called Ghost Ears, on account of how his ears had been cut off by the evil ghosts that infested parts of the forest.

He sat among the haphazard collection of structures, the broken pile of hopes and dreams, and he did not weep. He simply sat and stared with blank eyes.

They had been so close! They had been doing so well! Then they'd failed, right at the end, and it all fell apart. Now everyone was gone, and with them, the dream of their City died.

Ghost Ears sat, staring. He was tall for a fairy, and handsome, and strong. His ears had been long and pointed, magnificent before he'd lost them. His hair was blond approaching white, and it ran down his back, long and straight.

[True-Elf Fairy], that's what The System had named him as when he'd touched a Town Crystal for the first time, and he'd never met another like him. He'd thought. . . he felt. . .

But he'd been wrong.

He started to chuckle, lost in his memories, alone in the wreckage of his dreams. Eventually, he would get up either from hunger, or thirst, or exhaustion. Eventually, he would stand up and fly, and find the closest fairy village and join with them; it didn't matter which one, they were all the same.

Only his had been different, and only now did he realize he was wrong, and they had been right.

“This burns,” he said, clenching a fist so tightly it hurt, “they'll never let me forget, they'll hold this over me for the rest of my days. That they were right,” he spat the word, his spine bent low over his crossed legs, his entire face clenched, “that those irresponsible, careless idiots were right!”

It wasn't the worst part about everything that had happened, but it was the part he dreaded the most. Feeling the mocking laughter, the false words of sympathy, the open mockery, the endless pranks and worst of all, they would still expect him to be the village chief, still expect him to take care of them all.

No, the worst part was that he would take care of them, without complaint, because that was the best he could do; just make one, single, fairy village prosper and grow. With the addition of the [Omnivore] skill, that job couldn't possibly be any easier, so perhaps the worst part wasn't that he would, but that it would be too easy. He would spend the rest of his days in a lazy haze, solving one small insignificant problem after the next, never really accomplishing anything with his life, just like every other village chief.

He'd been born with a unique racial gift, [Dream], and some nights when he slept he. . . saw things. Impossible things. Things that were real, then gone when he awoke.

He thought himself mad, and nobody had ever heard of the skill before, but over his life he came to appreciate it as. . . interesting. It was amusing, and the other fairies enjoyed it when he wrote the [Dreams] down, his little silly stories.

A [Dream] was just a [Dream], and nothing more.

Until one day he'd dreamt of something tremendous, something shattering, something huge and beautiful and possible! Oh, he'd seen it all so clearly, it was possible!

He'd dreamt of a city, and when he woke he couldn't forget, no matter how hard he tried. He told others, and most called him a fool, but some hadn't. It was the strangest thing, some of them could see the [Dream] as well, and if they accepted it they gained a class, [Dreamer].

He should have known, [Dreams] were not to be trusted. He dreaded sleep that night, when exhaustion would pull him under.

He dreaded another [Dream], but more than that, he feared he would never dream again.