An Interview with a Bottled Faerie

Me: What were you doing the night you were captured?

Flora: Most Neopians don’t realize this but earth faeries help make the medicine that they buy every day. I was merely doing my part to make Neopia a better place to live in when I was caught. You see, one of the key ingredients to Neopox Pizza is an herb that is only good if you pick it under the full moon. It was my turn to pick the herb and so under the full moon I was picking the herb near the Wishing Well where it grows strongest, when I heard a deep bass voice chanting the dreaded words I could not escape, and next thing I knew I was in a bottle on a shelf in a store for sale.

Me: How do you feel about being sold and traded?

Flora: It’s an insult! An insult, I say! How would you feel if you were being bought and sold as if you were nothing but a lowly pile of dung, when you had enough power to lead a war and win against a small nation? It’s humiliating, I tell you! So why don’t you let me out of here!!! I really don’t think that faeries should be traded and sold. If you must do something with us besides release us, we’d much rather be gifts to someone you care about.

Me: Why don’t you use magic to release yourself?

Flora: If you must know, about a thousand years ago, pets were just learning that faeries would bless them. The most common way was to do a quest for the faerie and then they would bless you. That was fine for a few years before some of the nastier villains discovered that they could bully a faerie into blessing them and faerie kidnapping became quite common. The faerie queen, desperate to put an end to the terror, reluctantly made a deal with all pets. There would only be two ways for a pet to be blessed; one, the usual way by completing a quest, or the new way was to release a faerie from a bottle.

Me: How exactly are faeries captured?

Flora: I won’t give you the details for obvious reasons, but basically all you need is a bottle and knowledge of the ancient words. You chant the ancient words to force the faerie into the bottle. A faerie is defenseless once the words have begun to be chanted. It is the cruelest thing to do to a faerie and the offender must either seek the forgiveness of the faerie or forever live a cursed life. This was meant to ward off Neopians from capturing faeries, but apparently the curse isn’t strong enough of a threat to ward off the scarier of bounty hunters.

Me: What kind of misery does the curse inflict?

Flora: The curse I mentioned above does the usual, turns you ugly and makes you a horrible cranky person. I must say that a better curse to have hanging over your head is one that changes your gender and makes you sweet as can be on the outside but still allows you to be the same horrible person on the inside. Good thing for the bad guys that I didn’t make the curse up, because then they would have been really afraid to hunt us.

Me: How long have you been in the bottle?

Flora: I have been in my bottle for sixty-eight days, which really isn’t too bad, considering the light faerie your owner bought yesterday was in her bottle for about seven hundred forty-eight days. Wish I was as lucky as the fire faerie whose bottle your sister broke last week; she was captured only that morning. I really wouldn’t mind if you would let me go now!

I guess that I was asking too many questions, those last few minutes in her bottle must have seemed to last eternally to her.

Me: I am sorry; I just have a few more questions, like what will be the first place you will visit when you are released?

Flora: I think that the first place I will go is the healing fountains. Aqua, the water faerie, should have no problem fixing the cramps one gets sitting in a bottle for several days. Though I guess I should stop home and make sure that my shelter is still in good condition it might need to be fixed. Well, anyway I can’t go anywhere unless you release me!!!

Me: Two more questions that’s all, what do you miss the most from the time when you were free?

Flora: The feel of the rush of cool air as I flew through out the air looking for the herbs and making sure that Neopia was still green and flowering. I miss that a lot; I also miss the power I felt as the magic pumped through my body as I used my magic for the welfare of Neopia. I miss many things of Neopia but those are the things I miss the most.

Me: And lastly, as thanks for giving me this interview, where would you like me to release you?

Flora’s face lit right up as soon as I said the word release, I was getting the hint that she couldn’t wait to be released, but it was then that I realized just how much it would mean if I was the one to release her. Her final answer was filled with plain joy.

Flora: Right here, right now!

I picked Flora’s bottle and walked over to midnighters9496, and asked, “Can I have this one?” Midnighters9496 looked at me strangely and then replied, “Sure. I didn’t know that you were into bottled faeries, darling!” As soon as my owner paid for the bottled faerie I ran into the busy streets and released Flora into the air. She lingered only long enough to bless me and then she flew into the skies, the place she loved to be the most.

This would be my first article to be published and I am accepting all constructive criticism via Neomail.