From Changeling Venue

Oneira

Lady Oneira’s most distinguishing feature - without a doubt - is her supreme mastery of illusions. She finds great pleasure in experiments involving the creation and destruction of entire worlds - each painstakingly detailed down the last delicate etching on the most insignificant crystal tchotchky. Her love of these illusions is truthfully one of Oneira’s few constants. The only other known constant about Oneira is that she has none – she is unpredictable, in every sense of the word.

There is no underlying theme to her creations – one might be a harsh winter world with minimal shelter or food, while the next will be the most pristine, civilized land with animated clocks and teacups and other household objects running the mansions that they live in. The durations of her illusions are also varied. If you are the unlucky inhabitant of Oneira’s home, you might encounter periods (that seem to last an eternity) where your surroundings change every single second, never repeating a given illusion twice. Other times, you might remain in one unchanging room for an equally long duration. Such constant and drastic extremes can be exceedingly stressful over long periods of time, and only those with the strongest mental resolves might emerge with a shred of recoverable sanity.

Captors

It is important to note, though, that all this information is known only from one Changeling, Ella’s, account. It would be fitting with Oneira’s inconsistent nature to treat her other Changeling guests in an entirely different manner. For all we know, she might even be known by different names, and it therefore might be impossible to trace all her different identities back to her.

It is not known how many humans Oneira has abducted to live in her imaginary playgrounds, or even if she is guilty of intentionally abducting any at all. According to Ella, she was the only real creature in Oneira’s grasp, at least as far as she could tell. She wouldn’t put it past Oneira, though, to have multiple illusions running at any given time, and so wouldn’t be surprised if other real Changelings like her lived right around the corner, trapped in their own worlds far from where Ella could see them. Perhaps many Changelings were trapped together in a single parallel world. Maybe hundreds. Maybe thousands. Oneira’s mastery was such that it wouldn’t be much effort for her to maintain millions of worlds simultaneously, each one different from the next.

Visits

Sometimes (again, only by Ella’s account), Lady Oneira visits her Changeling captors in person. These encounters are just as impermanent as the illusions she spins, and the same can be said for her visage and temperament. She might appear as a bodiless head of the most attractive Faerie imaginable, blue-gray hair flowing to the ground, inviting you to tea. Another time, she could be a wall of flames, engulfing and choking you with smoke. Still another, she might take the form some strange beast the likes of which you have never seen, enticing you to engage in all manner of sexual acts. Vain, possessive, refined, wild, generous, indifferent…all these conflicting words and more accurately describe that which is Lady Oneira.