Ampelmanns

The faer known as ampelmanns most commonly work as traffic signals. You'll see them all over - hanging above roads and changing colour to indicate when traffic can:

GO!STOP!GO AND/OR STOP- OH GODS HIT THE BREAKS!

Three ampelmanns in the colours or traffic lights - red, orange, and green

Ampelmanns by Zuza Gruzlewska

Many people dislike ampelmanns because they seem to enjoy their work. The globular faer will often be seen smirking when stopping a driver who almost made it. Some suspect that ampelmanns in quieter parts will change early just to inconvenience people. It doesn't help that they snigger when drivers yell this at them.

Ampelmanns don't only work as traffic lights - they basically show up anywhere you'd need a light to indicate something is in one state or another. You also see them on the roofs of police carriages in pairs - alternating between red and blue while the siren below them goes:

"WOOOOOOOOOOO-WOOOOOOOOOOO"

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Ampelmanns Facts

It's 'ampelmanns' rather than 'ampelmenn', confusingly.They're most famous for red, orange, and green, but they can turn any colour. Any colour except lilac, for some reason. They also do patterns like 'rainbow twinkles', 'zebra stripes', and 'extreme tartan'.Ampelmanns will grass people up to the constabulary if they ignore the stop light. This can lead to problems when the ampelmanns abandon their post to testify in court.

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Creation Notes

These guys are based on traffic lights, obviously, but the name comes from 'Ampelmännchen' - or 'little traffic light man'. This is the German word for traffic signals, but it gained significance because they had a unique design in East Germany.

East German Ampelmännchen

According to Wikipedia:

The Ampelmännchen is a beloved symbol in Eastern Germany, "enjoy[ing] the privileged status of being one of the few features of East Germany to have survived the end of the Iron Curtain with his popularity unscathed." After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Ampelmännchen acquired cult status and became a popular souvenir item in the tourism business.

There's nothing particularly East German about the ampelmanns, I just thought it would be cool to give a nod to another personified traffic system. Saying that, now that I think about it the ampelmanns in the book do have a tendency to rat people out, so I suppose that makes them a lot like...

...the Stasi...

So I've inadvertently taken a beloved East German symbol and made it more like a hated East German institution.

Sorry, I guess?

I basically just wanted to personify traffic lights in a way that's closer to how people view them when they get stopped!