too many fandoms

a visitor on the biodome!!

Now, somehow, their entire mental health is based on the continued life and happiness of this fairground goldfish that they picked up.

Neither of you know the first thing about how to care for even a healthy fish. This fish has been poorly cared for, has multiple diseases and the person who handed it over explicitly didn't expect it to live nearly as long as it already has.

You're frantically googling how to set up a fish tank, where to buy fish food, can you even take a fish to the vet? Your partner wants you to know that they're happy they made it home and survived their horrific ordeal, but also that if anything happens to the fish then they're going to kill everyone on this planet and then themself.

You're honestly wondering if you're even helping the fish, or just prolonging its suffering, but your partner will only accept medical help for their many injuries or engage in basic self-care once they're confident that the fish is being looked after.

So you get a tank. You set up a filter and all that stuff. You learn way more than you ever wanted to know about water temperature and ph and nitrate levels. The fish is safe. You start to develop some affection for the little guy. Your partner begins to recover. The fish begins to recover.

Which is when you learn that in its 'healthy' state, the fish regularly refuses to sleep when tired, keeps begging for food that is obviously unhealthy for it (and struggling to eat the food that you do provide because “it tastes gross”), and continually tries to persuade your partner to take it out of its nice safe tank so it can go explore the wonderful world of Outside, where the slightest mishap will kill it instantly.

you’re in luck–i actually spend a solid chunk of time earlier today explaining the wild hunt in my group chat. i’m going to paste that explanation here for you!

the wild hunt is a common folkloric archetype across most of europe which has also been brought over to the americas (mainly the united states). various different hunts have presence all across the celtic world, in germanic folklore, northern european folklore, spain, france, and many other places. the key feature of what makes a wild hunt a wild hunt is that they ride through the skies and on the wind and are usually in or accompanied by a storm. generally i have found that there are three main traits that characterize individual hunts: who the leader is, who the members are, and what its purpose is.

some classifications I’ve identified, with some examples–not every possible one, just something to give you an idea of what the descriptors mean:

the leader might be:

a deity (manannán mac lir, woden, gwyn ap nudd)

a folkloric hero (fionn mac cumhaill, king arthur, herne the hunter)

a legendary ruler or a real ruler who was mythologized (herla, theoderic the great)

the devil

a saint

or there may be no leader, and the hunt be composed of a mob. if there is a leader, they are nearly always male, but not entirely always.

the members of the hunt might be:

faeries

the restless dead

sinners specifically

demons and/or devils

the company of its leader (fionn’s fianna, king arthur’s knights)

a company of legendary heroes, saints, or folkloric figures

the purpose of the hunt might be:

rounding up the souls of the past year’s dead

warning of the dead to come in the next year

actually just hunting otherworldly game

hunting humans to steal away to the otherworld

collecting the souls of sinners and the damned

punishing its members by forcing them to ride eternally with no rest

literally just roaming around killing people

for the most part the wild hunt isn’t a mythological group, it’s folkloric–that is, not legends or myths or written literature, but the oral folk traditions and tales of the common people. this is what the american version of the wild hunt is–if you’ve ever heard the song ghost riders in the sky, it’s a piece of cowboy folklore that is fairly obviously derived from the wild hunt.

that’s the historical and folkloric information; the rest of this post is heavily upg-based, and entirely about my own experiences.

i deal with the irish hunts, which are largely faeries and/or the restless dead, and led by deities or mythological/otherworldly heroes. my personal perspective of the way the hunt works is that there are “local chapters” all around the world wherever faeries are found, and that the leader of each different hunt is a sort of “ultimate authority” over all hunts of that variety, and he chooses a new one to ride with each year.

i see most of the hunts as being a sort of unit of each local court–there are some fey who belong to the hunt and form the core of it, and then there are others who ride with it for a shorter period of time (a year, or seven years, or the like) who get the chance to join the hunt in recognition of some service or great deed.

my hunts are manannán’s, which is faeries and/or the restless dead collecting up the souls of the past year’s dead and warning of death to come, and sometimes taking people to the otherworld; nuada airgetlám’s, which is the tuatha dé danann and the aos sí hunting otherworldly game, and sometimes taking people to the otherworld; and the sluagh, a leaderless mob of faeries and/or the restless dead who just roam around the skies indiscriminately killing, maiming, and generally causing mayhem. manannán’s and nuada’s hunts are connected with the courts, while the sluagh I’ve always sort of thought of as being outside the courts–they’re exiles and solitaries and otherwise too antisocial to belong to a troop.

The fae do not deal in money, they deal in aspects. You can pawn off any aspect of yourself, or occasionally a very valuable item (though it's up in the air what the fae consider valuable) for store credit. And then you can spend the store credit to get things others have pawned off to the fae. People can gain a lot from such a store, but they'll have to lose a lot in turn. And those who try to chest the fae or steal from them end up with truly terrifying consequences.

There have been people who have used the store as a way of getting out of consequences. There was a man in Atlantic City so deep in debt that he feared the loan sharks would kill his family, and he went to the fae. They sold him a magic lantern, so beautiful and powerful he could sell it and become a millionaire. But he had to pawn off his identity and past to get it, and not a single person who knew him would recognize or remember him the momment he left the shop. His family was safe and debt was gone, and it was worth it, and he would watch them from the shadows at times. Though his fate became worse when someone else walked into the shop and bought his past, and got to be his wife's husband and his children's father instead.

Sometimes the true consequences aren't always obvious. There was a child in Boston who had come into the store, and sold her future womanhood to the fae for the best candy bars in the world. For years she didn't know she was going to face any consequence, but when she reached adolescence she didn't go through puberty, to doctors it seemed as if her womb had faded into nothing, and nothing they injected her with worked. As an adult she tried to get it back but learned it had been pawned off to someone who wanted it more then she ever could know.

All the way up in Vermont there was a preacher who wanted to know the true nature of the universe and how it was created, so he could convince people of his religion with perfect knowledge instead of just faith. He pawned the bones of ancient saints to the fae just to get it, and seemed so happy with himself. But when he found out the truth he screamed for days upon days, wandering the woods in terror. When he came to his senses again he said he didn't want to burden anyone with such knowledge, and chose to never speak of religion again.

There was a woman in Brooklyn who had been kicked out of one of the city's greatest underground wizarding schools, who went to the fae shop to try to get phenomenal cosmic power, and eternal life. She sold off the most valuable thing she thought she had, her ability to fall in love (most fae who worked that shop would have given her more credit for her fancy hat but she didn't know that). She thought she would one day earn it back, and she thought that the fate that she was given would destroy her humanity until she got it back. But she ended up being fine with her new way of living in the world, she just started seeing her former boyfriend as her best freind instead, and was still able to form connections and live a good life. She never went back for her romantic attraction, it wouldn't be worth it anyway, (and it was sold off to a vampire anyway but that's a whole other story).

There was even someone out in Connecticut who tried to become the most powerful person in the world by making deals with the fae shop. He started out by agreeing that he would trade a finger for the power to fly, and then he agreed that he'd let them take more and more of his body for the sake of getting more and more powers that the shop had laying around. And when it was all over with and he walked out with so many powers, all that was left of him with a single drop of blood, but it was the most powerful drop of blood in North America.

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.