The Land of Fresia.

There is a park in the city of Amsterdam where, if you can catch rays of the sun as well as drops of water, you will be instantly transformed into another world, called Fresia. Most people don't realise this however, they think it is just a pretty park, near the Amstel...
But pretty things have hidden dimensions and this is something we tend to forget, out here in the World of Beings.
It takes a special person to be able to catch the rays of magic flowing so freely there.
Fortunately this is the case though! Imagine if just anybody were able to cross over, it would turn into a veritable mess over there in that delicate land. No, it is just as well that the city people have no idea of what is under their nose (and huge, stomping feet, for that matter). A bit of seclusion never hurt anybody. One must be selective, especially these days...

Magical spaces and places in time. We all know they exist from early on but gradually we let that part of ourselves go, finding life easier to deal with one reality at a time (this, current reality being hard enough as it is...)

This means, however, that the magical places, like Fresia, are disappearing...All living things need juice to grow and flourish and these places especially need juice, creative saps to keep the life force going. Stories are what keep them alive, the telling and re-telling of adventures and mishaps in the Land of Amazing Possibilities.....but have we lost our ability to believe in stories? This would seem to be the case indeed. We no longer believe in our own imagination, which is the key to other worlds.

But if only you could believe you would know that the toads under the trees really do have smiles on their faces... mainly because they are happy to be swelling up in the sun but sometimes also because they have just been to Burt's Pancake House, the best (and only) eatery in Town. This tends to add to their swelling, of course, even if the pancakes are actually mini poffertjes (a Dutch tradition that even the Fairies can't do without). It is enough for them to go there of a morning, have their fill of coffee and glucose mixed with carbs and then gossip... This sets them up for the day, all they need after that is some mud and they are happy to lay about processing all the assimilated stimulae in a haze of contentment. It is a happy life being a toad.

The population of green eyes monsters is such, in fact, that the Town has been renamed Swamp Toad Hill, the former name being Junction XL (for lack of a better name at the time... it was, after all, a rather large intersection serving to distribute the Land of Fresia with Goblins and what not from all manners of places, some of them not even in existence as we know it. But that is another story).

This was by way of introduction, next time we will meet some more of the various and varied weirdo's living side by side near the Amstel (I am not being insulting here, I mean honestly! If you choose to call yourself Droopyguts or Liverwuss then you have a serious problem).