The Outside Inn is a Freehold Glade in the Kingdom of Apples.
Overview[]
This building is one of the hearts of Faerie-in-Manhattan and dates from the glory days of that realm. From the outside, it appears to be just another Upper East Side residential building that has seen better days. Once you enter the art deco glass and bronze doors, you find yourself in a nondescript room containing the building doorman's desk, which is staffed day and night by liveried trolls. Most riffraff never make it beyond this point.
Past the doorman's desk, a short hallway leads into the heart of the building, which is completely given over to empty space. Powerful Glamour has bent local volumes to reverse inside and outside, so the building's interior is actually an open glade surrounded by New York storefronts and floored in rolling grass and wildflowers. The ceiling, seven stories overhead, appears to be open sky, reflecting regional weather patterns and the time of day. At night, the ceiling is dark, with passing clouds, stars, and moon. During the day, it appears in varying shades of blue and grey, with occasional rain or snowfall within the building. For all practical purposes, the ceiling-sky is a real sky, and strange birds occasionally fly down into the building to nest.
The façades lining the outskirts of the building interior are of Manhattan buildings with importance to Faerie. They are arranged in seemingly random order; the Chrysler Building standing beside the Cloisters, next to the Guggenheim, next to the Strand Bookstore, and so on. Due to the overall volume-inversion covering the building, these façades are spatial equivalents of the real landmarks, and curious changelings can spy through the windows into the buildings themselves. Supposedly, there once existed a mechanism to allow people to step directly from the Outside Inn into these other parts of Manhattan, but the various doors are now stapled shut and do not allow transit.
The internal glade is larger than the Outside Inn's exterior might suggest, perhaps a city block square. It includes some light oak and sumac groves and a duck pond that doubles as a skating rink in winter. There are also several pavilions elevated with stilts and scattered throughout the glade. They occupy varying altitudes and are reachable via glass elevators. Here is where Faerie-in-Manhattan holds its outdoor revels and garden parties when the park-side courts are considered too public or too informal.
The hold is owned by an aging grump who prefers to keep out of the day-to-day affairs of changeling society. She was allegedly at school with Queen Mab when both were wilders, and the two are supposed to be extremely old friends.
References[]
- CTD. Dreams and Nightmares, p. 98.