Alaric, thankfully, had not any kids show up for the weekend. Valentine's Day was tough enough for him, he didn't need to babysit some AU kid that happened to be his and Isobel's if she hadn't decided being a vampire would be fun. No, instead he drank in his apartment and watched some Julia Roberts movies.

What? It was the only thing on.



Anyway, he was here today and in a fine mood and when everyone sat down in the classroom he dimmed the lights and turned on a powerpoint that started off with a picture of one of those typical Disney fairies that some grown women got too attached to and wore shirts of even though they were way too old to do so. "If it's not obvious, today we're going to be learning about fairies. Or, rather, we're gonna be learning about what people say about fairies because there really isn't much hard fact about them and stories are so varied it's hard to tell what's true and what's not and, mind you, what might be true for some fairies might not be true for others."

It was all very confusing.

Alaric quickly launched into his powerpoint which was sort of flip flopping on what it was exactly fairies did but, hey, it came with a lot of artwork that showed how people portrayed fairies over the last couple hundred years. First going into what might be the origins of fairies (dead people, demons, demoted angels, elementals, pagan deities, born out of a baby's laugh...no, really) and then going into the role of fairies in popular culture. Basically they did everything. Played pranks (both harmless and not), helped travelers, led travelers astray, were hippies that just liked to party in the woods, stole stuff, kidnapped babies and substituted them changelings. They were also, apparently, responsible for tuberculosis in some folklore.

Yeah, that last one seemed like crap.

"Like I said, there's not really much hard fact about fairies. A lot of it comes from fiction, so it's hard to decipher what's what. There does seem to be a distinct line of whether they're good or bad and that line seems to shift to whatever suits the person talking about fairies wants to see," Alaric said. "So today I want you to tell me why would someone do that. Why would we take a whole species of beings, whether we think they're real or not, and put them solely as good or solely as bad when we as humans--or vampire or demon, sorry--aren't solely good or bad."

Alaric already had his own opinion about the question, but he was interested to see what everybody else would say.