The Fae originated on Earth. All life in the universe originated on Earth, and then as different sorts of magical and psionic abilities and strengths appeared and the different races appeared, those with sufficient sensitivity found the multiple dimensions and realms. Several generations had to pass before those with the sensitivity to find realms and dimensions were also born with the strength to deliberately step through the veil of time/space/matter and come back. Usually people stumbled through were too confused or drained by the experience to find the thin spots in the veil and come back. Quite often they got themselves killed or wandered so far away from the thin spots that they never came back. Quite a few dimensions weren't exactly friendly to alien beings appearing out of thin air, literally, and as with innumerable lifeforms the multi-universe over, different equaled dangerous, and the unwitting travelers ended up dead. These places were quickly referred to as the Dungeon Dimensions or Nightmare Dimensions or other not-quite accurate names that provided sufficient warning.

  There were, however, sufficient numbers of friendly realms and dimensions where those who stumbled through decided they were much better off staying. That made quite a lot of sense, because the "different is dangerous" rule held sway in far too many places all over the Earth. People who managed to come back through the doorways, or who were actually seen vanishing into thin air and then returning, were considered … well … dangerous. Or what could be considered a much worse fate, they were reverenced. Set up as gods. Deified. If they weren't labeled demons or demon-possessed or servants of evil powers. While being set up as a god and worshipped might sound like a cozy, comfortable way to live, the reality is quite uncomfortable. Far too many primitive or rather bloodthirsty civilizations--if they could be considered civilizations--found it quite sensible to sacrifice their new gods and goddesses. In a sense, send them home to whatever higher plane of existence the gods deserved to inhabit. And gods who couldn't repeat their miracles, and add to the list of miracles and provide their worshippers with feasts and victory over their enemies or heal fatal wounds … well, they didn't last very long, either.

  About the time that Babylon and Brittania and Atlantis and Egypt and the Incas, Aztec, Toltec and other sophisticated-yet-brutal civilizations were starting their long rise to glory, the people who demonstrated unusual gifts and abilities, beyond the tendency to fall through slits in thin air, were gathering together and figuring out the rules for what they could do. First they clustered together just to survive, but then they slid into that us vs. them attitude. They started having children with other unusually talented people. They discovered that when they focused hard enough, they could make things happen, and they could change the fabric of reality around them.

  They also discovered that the power of belief somehow worked even more strongly among people who didn't have even a hint of what was being called magic, for lack of a better word. So when the surrounding tribes and villages and kingdoms and other groups of people started believing quite strongly that those with powers looked different, and could be easily identified that way, suddenly these magical people started being born to fit that overwhelming belief. Quantum physics was hard at work millennia before the term was invented and the meaning defined. So that was how the Fae started being born with pointed ears and wings.

  Pointed ears and wings were rather useful back then, as the saying goes, all the better to hear you with, and all the better to fly away from you, if you weren't riding a horse, for instance.

  The Fae rather liked looking different when it served them, until it didn't. And by then, they had to resort to magico-cosmetic surgery to get rid of their ears and wings. It took several millennia to refine their magic to the point they could adjust their genetics to remove wings, and until someone figured out how to control the thin spots so they could choose what dimensions and realms they slipped into, wings were necessary for swift escape from those who either considered them deities or demons, or just wanted to capture them and turn them into slaves to make their lives easier with magic that was greatly overexaggerated.

  This was the place in history, especially the history of the Fae race, where necessity and desperation were the mother and aunt of invention. The Fae divided into different tribes depending on where their magical abilities led them. There were the soldiers who protected the nomadic Fae tribes. Then there were the explorers, traveling the world in search of a safe home where all the Fae could settle down and live in peace and anonymity. After them were the scholars and inventors, increasing and preserving Fae knowledge of magic, to enable the other groups to better perform their tasks. Then there were the bureaucrats and record-keepers. These developed into the Fae royalty, mostly because they were also talented at communication, able to transmit their voices around the world to share the latest news and warnings.

  As fate would have it, the son of an inventor family fell in love with the daughter of an explorer family. They were so desperate to evade their overbearing older siblings, who didn't think either one was good enough for their brother or sister, the sweethearts stumbled into a way to not only sense a thin spot, but create thin spots at will, and thereby found the missing ingredient that allowed them to control where the thin spots went.

  Within four months, the first wave of migration took place to what became the central realm of the multiple Fae realms.

  Side Note: Several cousins of this famous couple met up and decided they wanted to make history as well, rather than simply being footnotes and only known as relatives of someone famous. Or infamous, depending on which side of the debate about whether discovering the "soft spots" was really a good thing for the Fae, or the downward turn in their history. These cousins experimented and found ways to "bud" realities off the central reality of Earth. For quite some time, these cousins enjoyed their own fame, until someone went too far with the budding. Time became unhinged and disconnected thanks to budding dimensions off of budded dimensions that had themselves been budded off other dimensions. The farther a budded dimension went from the central reality, the more twisted and unreliable the time dilations became.

  The more traffic that went through the thin spots, the easier they were to keep open, and eventually became solid and always led to the same place. That ability to control and predict their destinations became the salvation of the Fae race. Eventually, even the ones who wanted to be worshipped as deities or feared as demons and monsters realized that life was simply better, easier, safer, less stressful, if they lived separate from the supposedly ordinary, magic-less humans.

  Side note: most traffic routes through Earth, either through the intentional plotting of dimensional doorways or simply because nature created the pathways much the same way that water and wind created canyons and the paths of rivers. Because of this, there have always been sightings of the Fae, even during the times of great fear and extreme caution, and the over-use of illusion spells to hide their distinctive Fae features. Hence the creation early on of various ministries to cover up and deal with incidents where Fae either deliberately or totally by accident came to the notice of Humans who were mentally and emotionally strong enough to resist the self-defense inclination of much of the Human psyche to explain away anything bizarre or unnatural that had just been witnessed. The most important and active of these ministries include: 1) the Ministry of Misinformation, which focuses on creating all sorts of outlandish stories about the Fae, so Humans are naturally inclined to disbelieve everything they see and hear relating to the Fae, because so much is either ludicrously impossible or illogical. And 2) the Ministry of Invisibility to Humans, both to create reliable illusion and cloaking spells, and to force troublemaking Fae to act with more discretion. The first and most powerful spell created by this ministry was the You Don't Really See Me spell, followed by the Forget What you Saw Spell. An entire workforce of powerful spell-spreaders are employed year round to travel through Earth and renew the batteries, so to speak, of the spells where they are most needed. Such as in places where evidence of Fae activities and Fae presence are most notable, such as in museums and visual or audio recordings of historic events that, because of the importance of those events, cannot be rewritten or even erased from Human memory. Half the workforce is employed in the anchor points of the motion picture industry throughout the world, such as Hollywood and Bollywood.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Then, as settlements were established in the various realms, and the Fae developed enough specialized skills that they could build safe places within those realms, even on Earth, and more Fae lived in those realms, the fluctuating time differentials became apparent.

  Essentially, time never passes at the same rate between the Fae realms, and between the Fae realms and Earth. Sometimes a Fae retreats to one of the realms to escape problems on Earth or in another realm. He experiences a certain amount of time, but when he returns to the previous realm or to Earth, he discovers that a different amount of time has elapsed for those left behind. And that ratio of passage of time never stays the same. Several dozen theories have been proposed over the centuries to try to predict those fluctuations, but they never seem to work the same for everyone. The closest any of the theorists in the Royal Fae Academy in the central Fae realm have come to a theorem or formula that works most of the time is that time passes slower depending on how large the population is inside the destination realm, but if the population in the origination realm is large, time could pass must faster in the destination. And when a Fae has passed through several different realms, the passage of time will be different for each realm he left behind. The truly frustrating part is that someone else who has taken a different route through the exact same realms, meaning he has visited the same realms but in a different order, and spent different amounts of time in each realm as he passed through, will find that the amount of time that has passed in his perception, and in the realms left behind, will differ from the first Fae with whom he is being compared.

  Sometimes, a Fae could spend several years in the Human realm, and discover that barely any time at all passed back home in the Fae realm. In several notable instances, a Fae was exiled to Earth or even a Dungeon Dimension for several years, and when he returned home, his family and friends and fellow troublemakers were only just starting to realize he was gone. [See: the recorded adventures and misadventures of Maurice in the Neighborlee novels, Shrunk: the Exile of Maurice, Allergic to Mistletoe, and Angela's Knight.]

  Side-side Notes:

  Earth-based Fae enclaves exist, and because of multiple dimensional doorways anchored in the enclaves and the Fae dimension, time there also passes differently between the enclaves and on Earth. Hence the tendency to refer to Earth time as the anchor or standard time.

  Earth-based Fae enclaves include Atlantis, Himalayan, Asiatic, Moon, Bermuda Triangle, and Briggadone (to keep it separate from the time-warped enclave created as a tourist trap, Brigadoon).

  Trans-dimensional elevators, created to carry cargo and a large number of passengers needing to go to the same dimensional destination at the same time, and also accommodate older Fae whose internal dimensional locator senses have started to go fuzzy.

  See: Dungeon Dimensions and Corridor Dimensions

  See: Pocket reality. A spinoff invention from the grandchildren of the pair who figured out how to bud dimensions off of the central reality. Pocket realities are personal storage space, able to hold vast quantities of luggage and necessary equipment for those adventurous or scholarly Fae who spend most of their time traveling the Human realms and other dimensions. Simply tug open the flap holding the slit in reality closed and insert whatever needs to be put away out of sight. Especially handy for quick escapes, when an observant Human who is inconveniently immune to You Don't See Me spells notices the Fae taking samples for further study or in the case of quite a few troublemakers, stealing something to take back home as a souvenir and to prove they faced down the "barbarian Humans" on their own turf and survived. Unfortunately, this sometimes includes Human, either to stop them from calling for help or to help them escape from a villain or despot or unwanted suitor. Or simply to keep the authorities monitoring the borders between dimensions from realizing that they had slipped over into the Human realm without permission. The problem with pocket realities is that time stops once something, or in the case of someone, is inserted into that pocket. Hence the large number of stories of people who encountered Fae and though they were only gone from home for a few hours, but returned to find days, months, and even years had passed. Hence the necessary establishment early on of the Ministry of Border Monitoring and Traffic Inspection.

  See: Ministry of Dimensional Maintenance and Oversight for keeping track (or attempting to keep track) of the time dilations and variations between enclaves and between enclaves and Earth.

  See: The Ministry of Invisibility to Humans

  See: The Ministry of Misinformation

  See: The Bureaucracy Enclave, and similar divisions of the government which became so huge, and threatened to create a black hole through the sheer weight of paperwork that new dimensions were budded off the central reality to accommodate the storage required for recordkeeping activities.

  See Enclave wimps: Derogatory term, also referring to the slightly less derogatory and somewhat apt label, enclave babies. Fae who were born in enclaves and spent their entire lives in the enclaves of their birth, never venturing to other enclaves, even for field trips during their schooling years. This is especially applicable to Fae who have never gone to Earth, and consider it a badge of honor, much like those who proudly announce that they have never see movies such as Titanic or The Lord of the Rings/Hobbit movies, or Rocky Horror Picture Show. Most enclave wimps are male, although there is a growing number of females who are victims of a psychosomatic type of agoraphobia, where they experience hives and other physical symptoms if they step too far out into the Human realms. Part of the reason most enclave wimps are male is the simple fact that Fae women are so much better at blending in when they venture to other dimensions and especially when they explore Earth. Fae men are like carrier pigeons, in some sense. They're so busy hving fun and playing tricks on Humans, and showing off their pointed ears and earning strange looks and doubletakes, they have a tendency, even in the 21st century of skepticism and rampant cosplay and overwhelming numbers of Trekkers who wear Spock ears to work, to get caught and clobbered and stripped of their magic before they know it. Despite the efforts of the Ministry of Misinformation to keep Humans from remembering how to trap Fae and keep them from using their magic to escape.