Plenty of variations and folklore to cover anything unexplainable ever. Certainly there was no need to invent a new creature like the Minagee. But arrive they did.

Mostly small children spot them, as they often play close to the house floors and field floors of our world. It was a child who named them, attempting to say miniature. Farmers too, and cleaners. No scientist has seen one yet, but that is simply down to too few looking.

Farmer Marcus was collecting acorns when he saw a trail of minagees, dozens of them in a row, weaving through the pasture grasses like ants, only more deliberate in their marching and slightly bigger. Fascinated, he lay down and tried to get an eyeball close enough to see what they looked like, what type of insect they are. That failed when they perhaps saw him and changed direction, and there were more grass stems put between them and his eyeball. So Marcus knelt over them and tried to entice one to walk up a twig that he held in their path. And it worked! One ran up the twig (he now knew they could run very fast) and into his finger and bit him with such intensity that he half-screamed and then looked around at the curious cows, embarrassed. He told his wife, who told the neighbors, of the nasty insects that are best avoided, and are most likely the minagees that some local kids had been banging on about. But they were definitely insects he said, because farmers know about such things, and “miniature naked humans with spears” has simply arisen from the imaginations of little uns.

Meanwhile the minagees were evolving tactically, and had decided that humans were best avoided, and added them to a long list of birds and insects that wanted them dead. This land is inhospitable, so they need to create permanent shelter, study their surroundings a whole lot more, and make babies.

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Such large premises have an additional value: layers.

Like the layers of an onion, like asking someone five questions to find out what they truly want, like the darkest cave in the deepest forest, layers take effort. And for a king or queen, every layer, from their staunchest ally to a mere lackey on a wage, keeps their enemies (and the overly curious), away.

Assassinations in castles come from within, from nephews and bodyguards. Not from infiltrators.

But it is also the queen’s home, where she is most relaxed, especially when everything is as it always was. The same roast pheasant, the same cutlery… the serving staff have been unchanged in a decade. Curtains drawn precisely when the sunset has gone. The clock wound by the the same boy who polishes the shoes and boots.

And the queen is loved, she is told. So when a stranger visits with gifts, having negotiated the labyrinth of checks and balances, she is welcoming and pleased, the validation that she privately seeks.

An eligible teen princess has been visiting, wining and dining, and letting the queen recall the wonders of youth, when the castle is attacked, and all of the henchmen run to the perimeters, while the queen and her bodyguards flee to the safe room. Two guard outside, and two within. The queen takes the princess with her. The princess takes a carving knife with her, secretly. In the room the princess releases 3 hornets. The queen is allergic and the guards are trying to kill them when she stabs them in the neck. After the queen is dead and the talisman stolen, the princess implores the outside guards to come to the queens aid. As they run down the tunnel, the princess makes her escape.

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