1 – Birthday:
Enrichment and Extras

Suddenly the stick erupted with purple, gaseous-looking sparks of light, jumping off of it like misty little firecrackers.

Barry’s head was abruptly thrown backward by the force of two purple mountain majesties bursting forth from his pectoral region in a spray of sparks, their sudden weight bewildering.

“They call the privileged few, ‘Glitter Babies’ because it’s sort of like being reborn in sparkles at sixteen!”
…
“No, no no,” Barry said quickly, “they can’t call it that because that would make something that couldn’t possibly be more emasculating, so much worse!!”

“I don’t want to read it out loud,” he protested, “I sound five years old!”
“You do not,” she chided.  “You don’t sound like a child, you sound like a teenage girl.”
“I don’t see that as better,” he stated.

Blue is as a living river, red in the fires of passion, and yellow as the persistent fields of golden wheat, but the magic of the fairy mothers sits apart, cradling in its arms the jewel of each soul.  As such, it befits each fairy mother to shine with her own select color, in her very own gown.  Her upward empowerment is a window to her own soul, shining forth as a twinkling star of benevolence, of nurturing who each child can be, just as she nurtures the effulgence of her own glorious light.

– The Compendium of Fae

He looked at the placid expression of the woman in the illustration, dreading a sudden future where people could just call him at will and he’d have to show up in the form of a sparkly ballerina and give obeisance to their every whim.

Expression sort of dazed, he extended a finger towards Barry’s swollen chest, like a mosquito entranced by a bug-zapper.

“Hey, it’s not my fault you look like the ‘all grown up’ version of a Victorian baby doll,” Nick retaliated, “whose dress shrunk in the wash.”

…the gauzy skirt basically an upside-down exposure bowl.

“It’s good to know I’m a Pavlovian experiment, and that this amuses everyone.”

“Right?!” Nick burst out, like he was relieved he wasn’t the only one who’d noticed.  “Like he’s ready to be on the cover of the swimsuit issue of Dorks Illustrated.”

Nick chose that moment to give him a look-over again.  “So is Barry going to stop looking like he got squeezed out of a tube of glitter toothpaste?”
Spoke too soon, Barry grumbled in his head.

He looked down at the licentious purple perpetrator in his hand.  The scepter of evil just lay there innocuously, like it hadn’t just flipped everything in his world upside-down.

Not entirely sure why he did it, Barry closed his eyes, hand closing around the wand.  It felt almost alive there, as he slowed down and coaxed it with his mind.  There was a sort of energy that pulsed back at him, like static on a breeze.  He breathed it in and something inside him connected with it, snake-charming it to his will.  It was soft and elegant, and eager to please.

Also, with a bit of chagrin in his expression, he patted the front of his cargo shorts, double checking that everything was where it should be.  “Hey guys, welcome back,” he murmured aloud, laughing wearily.

Barry Anderson had awoken in that same room, that morning, as the son of an accountant and a fairy godmother.  But now, on the afternoon of his sixteenth birthday, he was a fairy godmother, like it or not, and part of him knew that there was no going back to a time where “Grape” wasn’t a piece of who he was.