(May 19, 2017) Birthday Surprise [McGriffin] [Hogwarts]

"Hmm?" Quinn seemed distracted, fiddling with some of her things in the workshop, but she turned around and got more interested as Victoire brought up her side project. With such an academic question, she couldn't help but launch into a lengthy lecture. "Ah, some extracurricular research! I was always doing that when I was in school, good on you. Now, the Fae... I have certainly heard of them, no self-respecting scholar could say otherwise, but it is a broad topic. There is much argument as to which creatures, beings and spirits belong under the umbrella of 'Fae', but I won't bore you with that mess. I can say that there is one race of prominent, powerful and unarguably fae-linked beings in the world: the changelings. At least, that's one name for them. They are one of the Four Great Magical Races of the world, along with vampires like Professor Kestrel, 'born' or 'spirit' werewolves (very different from the poor cursed folk we think of as werewolves), and of course mages like us. All of these groups have kept very much to themselves in Europe since the Renaissance, but after the Second Voldemort War there has been a resurgence in relationships between our society and the other three. For example, at least one changeling has taught at Hogwarts, Professor Winterbotham, and one or more of the other current professors might be changelings as well. They are quite able to masquerade as humans or even mages, unlike vampires with their forced nocturnal lifestyle, so in a non-wandwork role they could keep themselves well hidden..."

She scratched her head, and cast her eyes up in thought. "Come to think of it, Professor Oakwood seems oddly youthful for a professor, don't you think? Have you ever seen him use a wand? Well, no matter. I must admit, I am no expert, and I know little more of the changelings themselves except that they exist, they have something of a pseudo-feudal society of nobles and commoners (you may have heard of the seelie and unseelie courts in the folklore you studied?), they have magic all their own that is quite separate from ours or even that of elves, and they shun something called 'Banality', which may or may not be related to the mundane sort. I've just overheard that word bandied about.  At the very least, if there was a scale from most fae-like to least fae-like beings, they would be just about the tip-top, in their own strange hybrid way. All of this I have learned from brief interactions with their kind in the years since the war. I made it a priority to study them as best I could in the late '90s, in case they joined up with the next Dark Lord, as some of them did with Voldemort..."

Seeming rather sober until this point, Quinn smiled broadly and whipped out her wand to point it at a strange painting hanging in the workshop. It was a richly detailed painting of a massive bookshelf seen from far away, filled with thousands of books and documents, and as Quinn recited some low, murmuring incantation, a long glass box disappeared from its place on the shelf to reappear in her left hand. Within the box was an illuminated scroll with bright golden letters and drawings of little faeries and other things. "Now, what I do know a good bit about is Arcadia and the Dreaming, the legendary extradimensional realms of reality that changelings are said to originate from. My specialty is deep magic, as I think we've talked about in the past, and I've done intensive studies into the many possible sources of magic in the world. Naturally, Arcadia is only one of several candidates there, but it's a plausible one. A realm of pure will and thought, of pure subjectivity, an eternal lucid dream controlled utterly by its inhabitants. What else is our magic but will imposed upon the the physical world? They could very well be linked! Arcadia could be the source of all our magic, changeling magic, magical creatures, all of it..."

The professor smiled once again with a scholar's pride, and held up the box in her hand. "I discovered around ten years ago that ancient mages had the same thought. In old scrolls not read since the days of Merlin, I found descriptions of the roads supposedly leading to Arcadia, dream-paths that bring your mind and your whims further and further forward while stripping you of your physical body. Rather unpleasant experience, I'm sure, for us fleshy beings. Most of those who took that journey did not return, it was said, lost and disembodied in this web of paths, which was called the Dreaming. It's likely the explorers never even made it to the center and its purity, and thus that place remains only a legend, a speculation. The in-between, however, the Dreaming, that is very real, and its existence gives greater credence to the possible existence of Arcadia itself... If we could get those bloody selfish changelings to share some of their lore, we could get closer to confirming or ruling it out as the source of all magic, including ours, as I said. Alas, just like ours, their society is secretive. They don't seem interested in sharing..." She stopped for a moment, looking over at Victoire. "Does that answer your question?"