Giants

Height is power. Height is attractiveness. If you’re a man, anyway; A tall woman is attractive only to a certain subset of men. But regardless, being tall is almost always a great advantage. It shows you’ve had proper nutrition, it gives you greater leverage and ability to intimidate, it forces others to look up to you. Height has always been an advantage. Therefore, there have always been short people who resented the tall for their vast prowess and advantages. (Li Fang Fen: Alright, I can take a hint, I just said that the heels seemed like overkill. You don’t have to get defensive about it.)

And so, in practically every mythology I know of, there have been giants. Mighty beings who are at odds with the gods, and are often thrown down by them. The Nephilim, the Jotunn, the Fomorians, and countless others. Sometimes they were even righteous creatures- Much Russian mythology has heroic giants for example, and gigantic individuals could be heroes as much as villains. The Jotunn and the Fomorians interbred extensively with their Norse and Irish counterparts. To some tales, Thor is at least ¾ Jotunn.

The specific details of being a giant vary, but the Jotunn tend to be the most notable, so they’re the ones I’ll focus on in this. I might wind up writing about the others if I ever run into one. The thing to realize about Jotunn is that they are never weak. They run the gamut from ’unusually powerful’ to ‘something just short of gods’. You tend to see them accumulate power wherever they are. There are a grand total of three in Binghamton, all of whom are in the Summer Court, and all of whom are related.

Now, I’m going to get into some esoteric stuff, here. In my time with the supernatural, I’ve learned that there’s something akin to gods for the supernatural. Things even the really scary members of the supernatural community treat with reverence. Things I’ve heard referred to only by reputation, by euphemisms, because to speak their name is to call their attention. A friend of mine met one, once. Things of vast elemental power. There tends to be a connection between giants and the elements- Usually Earth, as with the Greek Gigantes. I’d even argue that Ymir and the ice giants were a manifestation of the same idea, since Ymir is usually depicted as making up the Earth after being slain. But then we have the Fire Giants, the Eldjotnar. Surtr, their leader, was generally regarded as the one who would destroy the world.

So… Earth, and Fire, and Wind, and Water. Sound familiar to you?

I refuse to call them Sisters, because that feels like the same kind of euphemistic bullshit that leads us to ‘The Fair Folk’. I always liked Primordials more.

I’m not sure specifically what giants are. Are they actually the offspring of these Primordials? Were they the result of the supposed habit of the Primordials giving a share of their power to others? Or maybe, are the giants that we know now just a race-memory we still have of these Primordials? Maybe the Primordials used to mate with humans, and gave powers to them, and Giants are a fairy echoing the memory of that habit. And if Giants are just an echo of that, it brings up the question: How strong were the originals?

Li Fang Fen: I have, on one occasion, for a few days, spent time with one of the Sisters. She was often irritable, grumpy, and prone to annoyance with human frailties. She was also deeply compassionate, intimate with humans, and protective to a fault. It seems entirely in her character to have children with a human she favored. She was also the most incomprehensibly powerful being I ever met, and while she was kind, she was fearsome in her capabilities, too. I can understand why people would be loathe to draw her attention.

Alfred: One of the iron-clad rules of the magical world is that genetics do not grant magic. In spite of the myths of demigods and changelings and so on and so forth, I have never met a wizard who was more magical than their fellows explicitly because of their bloodline. Most examples could be explained by the same mechanic as my own skills: If you are the child of someone powerful, they may use their connections to help you. This includes a pact. If there were children of the mythological Sisters, I don’t think they’d be any different from any other human, barring a pact.

Powers and Weaknesses

What is it about super-strength, do you think? I realize, looking back on these files, that the number of things I define as having ‘super-human strength’ is pretty goddamn high.

What’s that about? Why the fuck does every single supernatural being make humans look weak? Chimps are seemingly superhuman, and they’re our closest relatives. It comes down, primarily, to energy. Chimps are so strong because they have huge amounts of fast twitch muscles. Humans are specialized for slow twitch muscles, which are better for endurance movements. Human brains are also a culprit. Being big, greedy, energy-sucking organs, something had to give, and evolution doesn’t build with generous engineering tolerances. So muscles took a hit there, too. And finally, we live in a society. The stronger we act physically, the more dangerous we are to each other.

Pound for pound, then, humans are very weak compared to the things we live around. We’ve got some massive advantages, but strength isn’t one of them. We’re weak. So maybe supernatural beings are just as strong as we wish we were.

Going back to the subject of strength, though, Giants stand out even among the supernatural. Giants are rarely superhumanly large, though they tend to be on the high side of what humans can be. Nonetheless, I’m taller than any of the Jotunn in Binghamton. They are phenomenally strong, however, capable of effortless feats of physical strength. Uprooting trees, throwing cars, etcetera. But they are also capable of manipulating their given elements on a grand scale- Not quite plate tectonics, but your average giant could probably wreak some havoc on a decently sized town.

My understanding- limited by the few jotunn I’ve met- is that there’s some strong sexual dimorphism in giants. All giants are capable of both great feats of strength and toughness, and manipulating elements. The manipulation of elements is stronger among female jotunn, though I’ve never met one, and the physical strength and toughness are greater among the males.

This extends curiously to the pacts they make, which bestow their partner with whatever they lack; Female jotunn endow their partners with immense physical strength, while male jotunn give tremendous magical capacity to their partners. This is, it should be noted, not based on gender of the partner. King Sidney’s second son is, as Li Fang Fen put it to me, queer as Dick’s hatband, and is known for a number of flings that have, sometimes literally, gotten on like a house on fire. They’ve all been capable of some pretty spectacular acts of fire manipulation. His father is unusually understanding about this for a man over a century old, because his son tends to date firefighters.

Alfred: The question of what, precisely, Giants feed on is a vigorous one. Most Players agree that the specific emotion is not fear, nor love, but awe. This is an important distinction, because awe is damned difficult to earn nowadays. I have heard the best way to describe awe is to see something which makes you feel small, and insignificant- An appropriate source of food for giants. Through deeds, through words, or through sheer physical presence, giants feed upon the inadequacy of others. This doesn’t have to be a negative thing; many great giants have handled problems that others could not, and fed themselves on awe in this way. Nonetheless, the relative scarcity means that many giants must make pacts and rely on fulfilled oaths to support their prodigious need, and their appetite for baubles is legendary.

Eric Grafsson: I know from personal experience that King Sidney’s own needs for energy, worship, and awe are extreme. He has a substantial trade in favors with the Spring Court in exchange for baubles. Frankly, to my knowledge, King Sidney may be the single most potent Fae fighter in the city. Not necessarily the most knowledgeable, not necessarily the most skilled, not even necessarily the most powerful Fae overall, but I don’t know anyone who’d go toe to toe with him, not even his sons. He’s King of the Summer Court for a reason.

Politics

Giants always gravitate towards power. Or maybe the reverse is true. You don’t find a giant who’s not at least a noble, without a very good reason. To a certain degree, this is because they need that standing. Giants, more than most other kind of fae, need to be in charge. They are rare, but they tend to naturally rise to the top of their local fae ecosystem. Sort of the apex predators. For the same reason, it’s very rare to find giants in large numbers. They rarely have strong family dynamics, and it’s rare to see a giant make a new giant.

The Jotunn are a notable exception to this. They tend to have extremely strong clans, with families dedicated to supporting and protecting one another. They’re still not widespread- It’s quite rare to see a family of more than three or four Jotunn at a time. Their natural competitiveness tends to be an issue.

As far as rulership goes, Giants are magnanimous in the extreme. Because of their dependence on pacts, they tend to be extremely stable and trustworthy rulers- Even a tyrannical Giant is going to stick to his oaths, because the amount of damage a broken promise could do is immense. Dishonor is practically unknown among them. (Li Fang Fen: It’s interesting, but from what I know of the giants of Binghamton, they are the kind of people who would not break oaths even if there were no consequences. I’ve only met King Sidney on a handful of occasions, but he has always been a surprisingly trustworthy dealer when it comes to the Night Court.)

Alfred: This is largely true, but there are a fair number of myths about giants who, while not necessarily dishonest, did not honor hospitality, launching sneak attacks or refusing to take in travelers, as with Polyphemus. Generally, you don’t see this among giants who live among the faerie courts, but there are a fair few who still live out in the wilderness, and while they are not necessarily dangerous, counting on the rule of hospitality to protect you can be dangerous. And humans have not always been courteous to giants. See Jack and the Beanstalk, for example.

Past cases

I haven’t ever actually had much connection with giants, outside of the King of the Binghamton Summer Court and his sons. On the other hand, the Half-Faced Man has a story, and I’ll let him share it, because he tells it well, and while I don’t know if it’s fact, it sounds true.

The Half-Faced Man: One of the great giants of legend is from a Kievan myth. Svytagor, the Sacred Mountain, was part of the cycle of Ilya Muromets. A great but old giant warrior, he met the great hero Ilya, and the two travelled until they found a place for Svytagor to lie down, and die.

I cannot, myself, say whether the story is true. I wasn’t there, and the story is similar to many others.

But I have seen a giant die of old age.

The death of a faerie by old age is a very rare thing, and almost always a choice. A combination of despair, ennui, and lost love, a faerie dies by deciding it no longer wishes to live. Cutting off its connections with others, fulfilling its pacts and obligations and leaving them behind, and ceasing to interact with humans. I knew one, a once great and mighty warrior who had found his star slowly diminished by his inability to keep up with a changing world, and no small amount of ill fortune. One day, he told me that he had had enough, and he was ready to die, for it was the only adventure that still excited him.

The actual act of preparing him for death was an epic quest in its own right. Suicide would have likely been simpler, but he was a proud creature, and terribly resilient. We tried a fair few methods, and none of them were able to put him down, his own tremendous survival instincts at war with the desires of his heart. Instead, we took the slow route, and concluded all of his business, wiping away the bonds that linked him to the world. And I watched as he walked into the woods.

He asked me not to follow, and I did not. I used a pair of binoculars, instead, for he’d said nothing about not watching. I watched him as he lay down in the woods. And as I watched, his body turned to stone, becoming one with the earth that had fed him for so long, features becoming soft, indistinct, until he was barely distinguishable from the boulders around him. It was far from the worst way to die I had seen. (Atina: You didn’t try to convince him to keep living?)(HFM: No. I, more perhaps than most, have always been taught to respect when someone wishes to die.) (Atina: If you ever start talking about a death wish, you know I’m going to talk you out of it.)(HFM: I would ask no less.)

Ogres

Ogres may, at first, seem related to giants. Certainly, they share the tremendous size and strength, and some of the same traits of sexual dimorphism, powerful magic use, and so forth. Ogres are usually distinct from giants because of one very notable trait: Cannibalism.

Basically every example of an ogre- the thing that defines them, at least in stories- is the devouring of human beings, most frequently infants and children. ‘Ogre’ is practically a synonym for ‘child-eater’. But you may be saying to yourself, ‘Atina, you said the one reason you work with the supernatural is because they don’t have to kill anyone. How can you stand to associate with things that eat humans?”

First things first, to my understanding, there ARE ogres who have eaten human children. Not a lot of them, and they’re not exactly well-liked by other fae, but it does happen. But the point is, that’s not actually what they feed on.

My suspicion is that, in fact, ogres are related to Bogeymen, though it may be more of an example of convergent evolution. Whereas bogeymen tend to feed on the fear of children, ogres feed on the fear of parents. The fear of having their children taken, the fear of child-snatchers and crib death and all of those other horrible things. All of those countless nightmares that plague adults with children.

This is going to make them sound like plain old monsters. That’s some pretty nasty stuff. But fear exists for a reason. Ogres are out there, not to kill children, or make parents miserable, but to keep parents careful. Funnily enough, there’s actually one profession that brings in ogres more than any other, and where ogres are uniquely qualified: Child Protective Services.

Yeah. You’ll find that most ogres you ever meet work with these kind of agencies, taking children away from their parents. That probably seems decent, even somewhat admirable.

Except here’s the thing. If you’re the kind of person who Child Protective Services needs to visit, chances are that you’re not exactly afraid of something happening to your kids. If you care about losing your kids, chances are pretty high you’ll be a good parent. I still remember my parents’ fears, that I might get taken away for something they did. Ogres feed on that kind of fear, the fear that good parents have, that they’re secretly bad parents.

That’s why I don’t work with ogres. That’s why I fucking loathe most ogres. There are exceptions. Ogres who feed on the fear only lightly, and try to use that power to protect the children who are at harm. But most of them just take the easy way, and bureaucracy makes it easy for them to harass people who don’t deserve it.

Alfred: Atina has some personal history with the idea of child protective services. In my experience, the vast majority of ‘bad’ ogres are petty bureaucrats who mostly live for fear. They have no interest in actually caring for the children, which requires lots of time and effort and can have potential negative consequences, so they prefer to scare parents into thinking that they’ll lose their children for as long as possible, without ever actually taking them. It can be a bit harsh, but they’re not as vile as Atina tends to think. Many of them are very noble, seeking to put children into proper families among the fae, where they can be raised to live among the courts.

Powers and Weaknesses

There’s a kind of lion, out in the Okavango River Delta in Botswana. Because of their isolation, they have to hunt almost exclusively cape buffalo, a large, distinctly dangerous breed of animal. Their diet of pure beef makes them extremely muscular. They also have to be in peak condition to hunt their prey.

I’ve always thought a similar thing drives the fear and respect of cannibalism. Cannibalism is often linked to the supernatural, to great magic powers, to inhuman strength, and so forth. The reasons not to engage in cannibalism are fairly straightforward, and fall into two categories: The moral, that is, ‘don’t eat things that can think’, and the biological, that is, ‘don’t eat things which have a whole bunch of diseases which can easily infect you.’

Ogres are reputed to be cannibals, and they’re quite powerful. As I mentioned before, ogres are often similar to giants in their power, possessing great physical strength and magical abilities, but with two important differences. First, ogres exhibit practically no sexual dimorphism; Almost all ogres are big, burly, powerful, and magically potent. Second, while giants are associated with elemental magic, ogres are almost always associated with shapeshifting of various kinds. Changing into animals, becoming bigger or smaller, giving themselves unusual features.

Their pacts are unusual, as most of the time I’ve heard of one, their pacts are oriented around granting the ability to change shape. This can be internal, or external- There have been those who gain the ability to take on an ideal shape, to shapeshift into animals, or inflict a baleful polymorph on others. In general, though, they tend to be fairly useful and low-key.

Alfred: Funnily enough, ogres rarely ever give physical enhancements to those they make pacts with. However, there is also a frequent association with fertility- both in the ‘having children’ sense and the ‘growing plants’ sense. Curiously enough, the cannibalistic trends of ogres were often connected to a potent form of fertility, and there is a substantial connection between ogre myths and the ‘earth mother’ stereotype. I know of one particular ogre whose wife made an extremely good living as a wetnurse, because of the nature of their pact. (Atina: Never tell me how you met these two. Fuck’s sakes, Alfred.)

Politics

Ogres don’t make good leaders. They think they do, but that’s just one of the reasons they don’t. Arrogant and bossy, they represent the worst traits in leaders. Micromanaging, lack of true competence, and a tendency to throw underlings under the boss. There are exceptions to this, obviously, but the main thing is that they don’t need to be nobility to be important to fairy society.

The only way for new fairies to be made, so far as I’ve experienced, involves children. A human, before they reach a certain age- which is more about life experience than biological age- can become a fairy. The specific kind of fairy they become is semi-random, mostly based on their surroundings. It can be inherited, but it’s not a guarantee.

Fairies, despite their age, don’t have kids very often, and these kids aren’t guaranteed to want to become fairies. And fairies… Well, if there’s one unifying thing about fairies, it’s that they’re child-snatchers.

So that’s what ogres do. When kids are taken away from their families by an ogre, they’re given a choice. They can enter the foster system, or they can be given to a fairy family.

All things considered? This is not a bad fate fate. Compared to a lot of things that can happen to a kid in foster care, being given to a family that cares about you- Well, there’s a reason the changeling fantasy exists.

So, a lot of fairies owe their childhood or their children to ogres. And it’s a good deed and all. I still don’t like them.

Polly: My mother actually has raised several children. I was the only one who actually came from her womb, though. The rest have, over the years, been ogre-bairns; She always loved them all equally to me, though. She’s not a great person, but she was always a good mom.

The Half-Faced Man: By and large, fairies do not wish to take the children of those who love their children and care for them. There was a time when this was not so. There were many years where fairies took children where they pleased, uncaring of the parents’ true wishes.

This ended with the Iron Age. Now, fairies bargain for the unwanted and neglected, rather than taking what they please. I am glad for that. Parents can go without fear of finding a glamoured goblin in their child’s crib, and fairies are not spitted on iron pokers.

Past cases

I always swore I would never get involved in family law. Every story I’d heard about lawyers who work with families- whether it’s a will, child protective services, divorces, or child custody- make it sound like the biggest nightmare imaginable. Families tend to get very acrimonious, and the things they fight over matter a lot to them. There’s little room for debate. So, for obvious reasons, I’ve never really had a lot of encounters with ogres in a legal setting.

Nonetheless, I keep an eye out. I’ve been tracking at least a dozen or so CPS case workers in New York State. I’ve attached a list of their names and operating districts. If one of them is giving you shit and threatening to take away your children, get in touch with me, and I’ll help smooth things out. Of course, if you’re actually abusing your kids, I’ll find out, and things are going to go poorly. But since when have the innocent had anything to fear, right?

King Sidney and Queen Aniss

Binghamton, by and large, is a kind of dangerous place. It’s in the top 5% of most dangerous cities in the country, with twice the violent crimes of the average in New York State, and three times the property crimes. In the context of its crimes per square mile, it’s about five times greater than the rest of the country.

This isn’t the fault of the supernatural. Not the Night Court, or the Summer Court, or anyone else. It’s the fault of a city that’s been dying slowly over time, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the rise of drug abuse, the destruction of the modern family, and all of those other painfully prosaic and mundane issues. The supernatural doesn’t cause that, so far as I can tell. It just generally takes advantage of it. There’s a lot of room for predators and scavengers, and while murder’s still awful rare in Binghamton, assault will happen plenty. There’s a lot of room for the dark side of both human nature and the supernatural.

The Summer Court doesn’t like that kind of thing. Alfred has a fair amount of work ensuring that fairies are punished when their acts hurt humans. Most of the crimes that the fairies are responsible for are simple fairy-on-fairy violence. The Summer Court’s bang alongside the idea of using violence to solve feuds. (Li Fang Fen: You’d be amazed how many crimes can be explained by internal tiffs in the Summer Court. I’m actually fairly convinced a decent amount of the violent crimes in Binghamton are because of their internal feuds being taken for human affairs.)

As it happens, the Summer King is the youngest, by a fairly wide margin, of all the kings and queens of Binghamton. He was born in the worst single disaster in Binghamton, a clothing factory fire. 31 people died in the fire, which was a confluence of damned stupid behavior. Someone throws a cigarette, the weather is hot and dry, people don’t take the alarms serious because of frequent drills, and just like that, 31 innocent people died. Well, officially 31.

There were two particular notable people involved in the fire. The first was Nellie Connor, an old woman, employed by the company for 31 years. She was instrumental in organizing the girls and getting them out of the fire. The other was Sidney Dimmock. Sixteen years old, a company foreman, Sidney came out of the building holding two women up, and went right back into the flames. Neither of them made it out. The building burned to the ground, consumed utterly. Nellie died there. Sidney didn’t.

He wasn’t a faerie, at that moment. So far as I can tell, he was completely human when he plunged into those flames, and no matter how brave I like to think of myself, I don’t think I’d ever have the sheer cajones that 16 year-old-kid did. He crawled out of the wreckage, barely alive. I don’t know the name of the fairy who saved his life, he’s never shared it, but he became a giant. Skin blackened by the fire, hair turned red and wild. He was the Summer King by 1930. And he’s the reason that Binghamton doesn’t have fires anymore. (Alfred: He doesn’t like talking about it. He seems to consider it something of a failure on his part that he couldn’t save more. I know he works frequently with the volunteer fire departments in Binghamton.)

Queen Aniss goes back a bit further. I’m sure she’s not Black Aniss, but she might be related. She’s English, she’s an ogre, and she’s a dangerous figure. Funny thing is, though, she’s also an extremely decent soul. Unlike a lot of ogres, she doesn’t do the Child Protective Services thing. She works with drug counselling in Binghamton.

The fact that she manages to feed herself on the fear of parents for their children in that line of work is fucking nightmarish. But that’s life, isn’t it?

Alfred: Queen Aniss, it should be noted, is something of an anachronism. She is, indeed, an ogre, from a time when her body type would’ve been considered gross, monstrous, and depraved. The thing is, times change, and Aniss hasn’t changed with them. She still thinks she’s a terribly intimidating monster, whereas most of the men she meets, and a fair number of the women, think she looks like something out of one of the more niche porn magazines. She’s got a mom-bod. This isn’t really good news for an ogre, who prefer to be terrifying and intimidating. So, by and large, everyone just humors her and tells her how scary she looks.

Powers and Weaknesses

King Sydney’s a Jotunn- Specifically an Eldjotunn, one of the Fire Giants. Queen Aniss is, to my understanding, a fairly bog-standard Ogre. Queen Aniss is not unusually powerful, herself. Though King Sidney is legendarily powerful, I’ve never heard of anyone testing that in direct conflict since he killed the old King.

What makes them somewhat odd is their habit of not taking human pacts. King Sidney hasn’t engaged anyone in a pact as long as people can remember, and while Queen Aniss has made occasional pacts, they’ve all been relatively brief and bitter affairs. This is a particular issue for King Sidney, and part of the reason why he engages in such vigorous trade with the Spring Court.

Alfred: King Sidney’s been the subject of more than a few questions about his actions. His usual answer is that he’s a romantic, and ‘waiting for the right woman’. Both of his sons are the children of by-blows, but he’s taken them in. There’s apparently some hard feelings between them because he never married their mothers, but few people have ever been able to make King Sidney do something when he didn’t feel good and ready to do it.

The Half-Faced Man: Queen Aniss, for her part, has a fairly simple set of criteria for her lovers. She wants them to be able to take her on in an unfair fight. So far as I know, she’s still a virgin, not least because few people are mad enough to really challenge her.

Politics

Honestly speaking, King Sidney and Queen Aniss do a hell of a lot to keep the Summer Court, and Binghamton, stable. The only way that you can take the position of a Summer Court noble is by defeating them in combat, and they have the choice of the method. This is the kind of thing that leads a quirk of one noble becoming the tradition of the next, and different noble titles tend to have different traditions. For example, the Summer Count of Vestal is traditionally decided through a shooting contest, and is a position currently held by the least relax and laid back sniper I’ve ever heard of.

King Sidney’s a boxer, and his contest is always a boxing match. The previous King had been a bit of an asshole, and his preferred contest was a ‘Deadliest Game’ sort of thing. The contest was a three day hunt through the woods. This was supposedly fair because to win, the king had to land a single iron bullet in his prey, whereas all the challenger had to do was hide. He got a lot of practice hunting humans during the Great Depression, apparently, with similar rules. Sidney let the king shoot him, dug the bullet out, and made the king eat it.

The only reason that Sidney’s kids are not members of the Summer Court nobility is because he’s apparently made them swear not to hold noble office until they can defeat him. Of course, if they could do that, they’d just take his kinghood. Royal succession laws get weird with the fae.

Aniss, for her part, has a cooking contest. Whoever can stay in a pot over a fire for the longest without succumbing to the heat wins. The loser gets put back in the pot. It’s like extremely viciously competitive hot-tubbing.

So far as I know, no one has ever actually gone through with the challenge.

Alfred: The queen’s habit of hot-tubbing in boiling tar has been well-documented. Nobody ever said that the competition had to be something anybody could succeed at.

Past cases

Man, I’ve been talking out of my ass a lot with these things. It’s always embarrassing to admit I haven’t done a case with some given supernatural. Thankfully, the Summer Court? I’m all over that stuff.

Alfred tends to be my go-to when I’ve got someone being brought before the Summer Court, but while he’s the best at the frontline stuff, there’s still a lot to be accomplished even when you’re not sitting in front of the judge, so to speak.

When it comes to the legal procedures of the Summer Court, and their contracts, there are a lot of protections for most people accused. Usually, this has to do with the specific kinds of contests that can be ordered, the champions that can be appointed, and the kinds of punishments they can be given for failure. This is, understandably, very open to abuse. Except, of course, for the current King and Queen, both of whom are extremely hard on abuse of power, and Alfred.

Alfred: It is, unfortunately, a fact of life that there is no ‘good’ Fairy Court, just as there is no ‘evil’ one. The Summer Court is egalitarian and fair-minded, but those who cannot survive harshness and violence are not well-suited for the Summer Court; The King and Queen only intervene for those who they respect, and while their respect is easily earned, it is not guaranteed. I still need to do all that I can to protect those who wish to find their footing in Summer. Some of them choose a softer, less direct place. Some thrive. But it’s always a struggle, and in a way that’s often more in your face than the others.

But you can get a long way on strength of arms and quickness of wit. Often, a lot further than you could get in one of the courts that relies on established resources. Even a young man can make a difference in the Summer Court. That’s one of its best qualities, and one of its most dangerous.