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Description
OK, this is about done now, I think.

In this world, the rise of spiritualism in Britain before and during WWI that happened OTL involves a rediscovery of magic, which is performed through deal-making, not with demons, but with alien peoples known to myth and legend as the “fey” or “elves” or “fairies.” (There appear to be a number of different species, arranged in alien hierarchies). In part due to magical meddling and also the slaughterhouse of WWI (a mass death of people from a single geographic location thins the veils between worlds) certain ancient gates begin to open, and things begin to slip over from what is referred to as The Otherworld. The Other Side, or just “Fairyland.” Deals are made and the Fairie are ceded certain small territories as “Fairy Glades” in Britain, among other favors, in exchange for magical aid.

Although it doesn’t come in time to change the OTL outcome of the conflict, magic is used to some effect on the battlefield. This does not however lead to “Magic-powered Britain rules the world”: there are still a lot skeptics, a lot of the mystics are really Not The Right Sort of Chaps (See, Aleister Crowley), the C of E and a lot of religious groups are opposed to this meddling with Obscure Forces, and the British army is highly skeptical of this magic stuff and wants to stick to the tried and true methods, such as cavalry charges. Combined with the fact that what the mystics have come up with so far is difficult, unreliable, and definitely well short of “levitate Big Ben” sorts of feats, it is perhaps understandable that the British establishment fails to pour money into magical R &D, and magical study (in Britain, at least), remains the province of dedicated amateurs.

However, everyone who _previously_ believed in magic has received an enormous confidence boost, and new mystical groups and would-be Merlins crop up all over Europe like mushrooms after a rain. (Well, most of Europe: the Soviets declare this is all superstitious nonsense, and possibly a new Capitalist Plot to delude the masses where religion isn’t doing the job – after Stalin comes to power, trying to sell magic as part of the next Five Year Plan will put you in the Gulag). The Nazis, however, were full of kooks and mystics to start with, and after Hitler comes to power, government money and assistance (often of the Laws of Man and God breaking variety) flows in abundance to whatever group of mystics that can produce results. (They do have to fudge their reports to give everything a Hitler-satisfying “Aryan” slant).

WWII comes around. The elderly David Lloyd George regains the Prime Ministership in the late 30s and tries to the end to negotiate, refusing to go to war over Poland, and only finally entering the war in Europe to help France: a magically aided German army does even better than OTL and captures pretty much all of the British expeditionary force, leading to a peace negotiated through Italian intermediaries. He is challenged both from the left and right, and it is likely that 1941 will see him removed from office and Britain reenter the war, his dire warnings of Britain being unprepared to fight a war with magic being ignored.

He turns out to be quite right when Hitler, seeking to secure his flank, launches an invasion of Britain. With magic concealing the invasion barges from both the British navy and the British air force, London soon falls, and the “German-friendly” Lloyd George finds to his horror that he has been chosen as Hitler’s “Petain” for Britain. Hoping against hope that he can spare the British population further horrors by cooperating, he accepts – a decision he will soon come to regret.

German approaches to magic are, unsurprisingly, a lot less concerned with morals than in Britain. There was nothing fortuitous about the mass deaths that opened paths to the world of the Fairies. They have invaded the Other Side’s equivalent of Germany and taken over a vast swath of it in alliance with various opportunistic local rulers, playing divide and conquer India-style (Political centralization and large empires are not Fairy Strengths), and have enslaved large number of the locals with iron and terror campaigns to use their magic on something close to an industrial scale. They are trying to do the same with Avalon, the Other Side equivalent of Britain, but with less success: the local Fairie are aware of what has happened in *Europe, and are fighting to contain German encroachment into their territory and aiding the British resistance, which over the last year has grown enormously. They have been able to find fewer in the way of local allies, and have boosted them with forces (some of them of questionable loyalty) from their *European conquests. (Reports are that they are having even less success in the Other Side equivalent of France, which contains some remarkably strong states by Fairy standards.)

On other fronts, the Reich is doing better. Reports of the Fall of France and the Channel Invasion finally convinced Stalin there was something in this magic stuff, but in spite of a number of British mystics being smuggled into the Soviet Union to create a Soviet sorcerer force, it may be too little, too late, no matter how many people Stalin is willing to kill to punch a hole into the Other Side. The Soviet advantage in Stalin in this world being perfectly aware that Hitler was coming for him after Britain fell was more than cancelled out by the use of magic by German forces, and currently Moscow is under siege and may have to be evacuated. The only really positive note is that Russian spirits and Fae are showing up on their own to help, and some are quite dangerous indeed. Across the sea, the US has declared war on Germany, but is so far unable to launch a transatlantic expedition, and are busy with the Japanese (the Japanese, at least, are not a major magical threat yet. They tried to do a Nazi Germany on the Otherworld equivalent of Japan, and it failed rather badly. Japanese Fae are…different).

The strangest thing about the Other Side is that humanity’s dead are there. Death opens a passage to the other side because the dead actually go there. (This is another reason British religious authorities condemned magic and its practitioners: the new mystical knowledge fundamentally contradicts basic Christian tenets.) Normally they sleep eternally in barrows preserved by the Fairies (not taking up as much of the landscape as you would think: they stack, and the Other Side’s “Earth” has a number of times the surface area of our world), unless woken by mediums or sorcerers. The Fae claim they will sleep till the End of Days, when they will awaken and participate in some great battle or adventure or perhaps just take over the Other Side (it’s not very clear), but they aren’t sleeping now: Germany has been waking up its soldiers lost in former wars and putting them in uniform again, and in a spirit of turnabout is fair play, an increasing number of dead Brits are showing up to fight the good fight. (The race is on to find King Arthur’s tomb: the Nazis want him on their side).

The whole “Afterlife is Other Side” thing is a problem for the US magical research program: all those dead Indians and black slaves who died still in chains have given modern white America a very bad rep on the Other Side’s North America equivalent, which makes negotiations for magical aid difficult, to say the least.

The struggle continues, in this world and on the Other Side, on the plains of Russia, the green hills of England, the silver fields of Avalon, and the still unconquered kingdoms of Orendel (The Germany-equivalent. It’s a large place). Aside from humans alive and dead and the varied inhabitants of the Fairy realms, mysterious hidden people, unseen since earlier days of magic, have begun to appear. Who are the mysterious, dwarfish people that have been seen in South Britain, and what is the Shining Pyramid? What is the US government’s interest in the peculiar fishing folk of a small New England town? Can it be that there is an entirely other city below Paris? All that can be said for sure is that the future, right now, seems up for grabs.

Description
OK, this is about done now, I think.

In this world, the rise of spiritualism in Britain before and during WWI that happened OTL involves a rediscovery of magic, which is performed through deal-making, not with demons, but with alien peoples known to myth and legend as the “fey” or “elves” or “fairies.” (There appear to be a number of different species, arranged in alien hierarchies). In part due to magical meddling and also the slaughterhouse of WWI (a mass death of people from a single geographic location thins the veils between worlds) certain ancient gates begin to open, and things begin to slip over from what is referred to as The Otherworld. The Other Side, or just “Fairyland.” Deals are made and the Fairie are ceded certain small territories as “Fairy Glades” in Britain, among other favors, in exchange for magical aid.

Although it doesn’t come in time to change the OTL outcome of the conflict, magic is used to some effect on the battlefield. This does not however lead to “Magic-powered Britain rules the world”: there are still a lot skeptics, a lot of the mystics are really Not The Right Sort of Chaps (See, Aleister Crowley), the C of E and a lot of religious groups are opposed to this meddling with Obscure Forces, and the British army is highly skeptical of this magic stuff and wants to stick to the tried and true methods, such as cavalry charges. Combined with the fact that what the mystics have come up with so far is difficult, unreliable, and definitely well short of “levitate Big Ben” sorts of feats, it is perhaps understandable that the British establishment fails to pour money into magical R &D, and magical study (in Britain, at least), remains the province of dedicated amateurs.

However, everyone who _previously_ believed in magic has received an enormous confidence boost, and new mystical groups and would-be Merlins crop up all over Europe like mushrooms after a rain. (Well, most of Europe: the Soviets declare this is all superstitious nonsense, and possibly a new Capitalist Plot to delude the masses where religion isn’t doing the job – after Stalin comes to power, trying to sell magic as part of the next Five Year Plan will put you in the Gulag). The Nazis, however, were full of kooks and mystics to start with, and after Hitler comes to power, government money and assistance (often of the Laws of Man and God breaking variety) flows in abundance to whatever group of mystics that can produce results. (They do have to fudge their reports to give everything a Hitler-satisfying “Aryan” slant).

WWII comes around. The elderly David Lloyd George regains the Prime Ministership in the late 30s and tries to the end to negotiate, refusing to go to war over Poland, and only finally entering the war in Europe to help France: a magically aided German army does even better than OTL and captures pretty much all of the British expeditionary force, leading to a peace negotiated through Italian intermediaries. He is challenged both from the left and right, and it is likely that 1941 will see him removed from office and Britain reenter the war, his dire warnings of Britain being unprepared to fight a war with magic being ignored.

He turns out to be quite right when Hitler, seeking to secure his flank, launches an invasion of Britain. With magic concealing the invasion barges from both the British navy and the British air force, London soon falls, and the “German-friendly” Lloyd George finds to his horror that he has been chosen as Hitler’s “Petain” for Britain. Hoping against hope that he can spare the British population further horrors by cooperating, he accepts – a decision he will soon come to regret.

German approaches to magic are, unsurprisingly, a lot less concerned with morals than in Britain. There was nothing fortuitous about the mass deaths that opened paths to the world of the Fairies. They have invaded the Other Side’s equivalent of Germany and taken over a vast swath of it in alliance with various opportunistic local rulers, playing divide and conquer India-style (Political centralization and large empires are not Fairy Strengths), and have enslaved large number of the locals with iron and terror campaigns to use their magic on something close to an industrial scale. They are trying to do the same with Avalon, the Other Side equivalent of Britain, but with less success: the local Fairie are aware of what has happened in *Europe, and are fighting to contain German encroachment into their territory and aiding the British resistance, which over the last year has grown enormously. They have been able to find fewer in the way of local allies, and have boosted them with forces (some of them of questionable loyalty) from their *European conquests. (Reports are that they are having even less success in the Other Side equivalent of France, which contains some remarkably strong states by Fairy standards.)

On other fronts, the Reich is doing better. Reports of the Fall of France and the Channel Invasion finally convinced Stalin there was something in this magic stuff, but in spite of a number of British mystics being smuggled into the Soviet Union to create a Soviet sorcerer force, it may be too little, too late, no matter how many people Stalin is willing to kill to punch a hole into the Other Side. The Soviet advantage in Stalin in this world being perfectly aware that Hitler was coming for him after Britain fell was more than cancelled out by the use of magic by German forces, and currently Moscow is under siege and may have to be evacuated. The only really positive note is that Russian spirits and Fae are showing up on their own to help, and some are quite dangerous indeed. Across the sea, the US has declared war on Germany, but is so far unable to launch a transatlantic expedition, and are busy with the Japanese (the Japanese, at least, are not a major magical threat yet. They tried to do a Nazi Germany on the Otherworld equivalent of Japan, and it failed rather badly. Japanese Fae are…different).

The strangest thing about the Other Side is that humanity’s dead are there. Death opens a passage to the other side because the dead actually go there. (This is another reason British religious authorities condemned magic and its practitioners: the new mystical knowledge fundamentally contradicts basic Christian tenets.) Normally they sleep eternally in barrows preserved by the Fairies (not taking up as much of the landscape as you would think: they stack, and the Other Side’s “Earth” has a number of times the surface area of our world), unless woken by mediums or sorcerers. The Fae claim they will sleep till the End of Days, when they will awaken and participate in some great battle or adventure or perhaps just take over the Other Side (it’s not very clear), but they aren’t sleeping now: Germany has been waking up its soldiers lost in former wars and putting them in uniform again, and in a spirit of turnabout is fair play, an increasing number of dead Brits are showing up to fight the good fight. (The race is on to find King Arthur’s tomb: the Nazis want him on their side).

The whole “Afterlife is Other Side” thing is a problem for the US magical research program: all those dead Indians and black slaves who died still in chains have given modern white America a very bad rep on the Other Side’s North America equivalent, which makes negotiations for magical aid difficult, to say the least.

The struggle continues, in this world and on the Other Side, on the plains of Russia, the green hills of England, the silver fields of Avalon, and the still unconquered kingdoms of Orendel (The Germany-equivalent. It’s a large place). Aside from humans alive and dead and the varied inhabitants of the Fairy realms, mysterious hidden people, unseen since earlier days of magic, have begun to appear. Who are the mysterious, dwarfish people that have been seen in South Britain, and what is the Shining Pyramid? What is the US government’s interest in the peculiar fishing folk of a small New England town? Can it be that there is an entirely other city below Paris? All that can be said for sure is that the future, right now, seems up for grabs.