You have NO idea how humiliating things were for us right after it happened. I mean, it was very nice of the Swedish government to offer us resettlement, and in fact when it later came out that one of their civil engineering contractors had caused the whole thing during a landslip in a hydro dam construction project, well, I guess they didn't really have a lot of choice. But still, as if having to shop for furniture in the doll's house selection of the children's department at IKEA wasn't bad enough, having to go there with your Designated Human because a) they hadn't figured out how to give us bank accounts yet and b) you're too small to carry all the stuff home from the retail park anyway. I mean, come on!
We needed work pretty quickly, of course. Charity only went so far, even though we were a lot cheaper to house than conventional refugees. Each of the major families from the tribe were assigned a shipping container on a disused Stockholm dockside and went about decorating it as they saw fit. There's a limit to how much physical work you can do in the human economy when you're only a foot tall, but then someone caught on to the idea of the service sector. Specially designed miniature keyboards, a little voice pitch modulation in the headsets, and you've got yourself a micro-sized call centre team ready for action.
That we were eager for the chance to support ourselves and, at first, royally stiffed out of a decent pay packet, caused some resentment among the bigger folk we naturally displaced. They had a right to be angry, of course, but preferably at the system itself rather than us who were still, as we liked to remind them, victims of the system as much as they were. If not worse.
It only took a couple of calls of "Go home to fairy land!" at the protests for one of us to fly up to the microphone on stage and respond to the effect that our ancestral territory NO LONGER EXISTED thanks to someone who didn't carry out their environmental impact assessments properly. Stick that in your capitalist economic system and smoke it.
Later, when it started getting around that actually things weren't too bad up in the human world, other tribes began coming out of the woodwork. Cornwall, Galway, Massachusetts, Wellington, Sapporo, the list goes on. By 2025 it was estimated that over five million pixie folk had integrated in some way into human societies. Comment
We needed work pretty quickly, of course. Charity only went so far, even though we were a lot cheaper to house than conventional refugees. Each of the major families from the tribe were assigned a shipping container on a disused Stockholm dockside and went about decorating it as they saw fit. There's a limit to how much physical work you can do in the human economy when you're only a foot tall, but then someone caught on to the idea of the service sector. Specially designed miniature keyboards, a little voice pitch modulation in the headsets, and you've got yourself a micro-sized call centre team ready for action.
That we were eager for the chance to support ourselves and, at first, royally stiffed out of a decent pay packet, caused some resentment among the bigger folk we naturally displaced. They had a right to be angry, of course, but preferably at the system itself rather than us who were still, as we liked to remind them, victims of the system as much as they were. If not worse.
It only took a couple of calls of "Go home to fairy land!" at the protests for one of us to fly up to the microphone on stage and respond to the effect that our ancestral territory NO LONGER EXISTED thanks to someone who didn't carry out their environmental impact assessments properly. Stick that in your capitalist economic system and smoke it.
Later, when it started getting around that actually things weren't too bad up in the human world, other tribes began coming out of the woodwork. Cornwall, Galway, Massachusetts, Wellington, Sapporo, the list goes on. By 2025 it was estimated that over five million pixie folk had integrated in some way into human societies. Comment
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