Never Play Board Games with the Fae Read online

already has to go through the experience of a complete and utter loss of all control once every lunar month. Do not compound that by wresting further control away from him or her. My friend (who took eight years before he fessed up to me) says that the nicest thing you can do with your suspicions is keep quiet about them and refrain from pulling out the good silver when you know that your friend is coming over for dinner.

  Leave Nessie Alone

  Words of wisdom about the Loch Ness Monster do not actually belong here (being that she is, in fact, not a fantasy creature). There has, however, been so much speculation about her and her origins over the years that everyone else sort of considers her an honorary member of the club. (When I say everyone, I mean everyone except the Fae proper because they are snobs.) It comes down to the same sort of misinformed tale spinning that leads people to thinking that vampires are harmless or that it might be entertaining to watch a werewolf transform. People see something and gossip about it without troubling themselves too much with what the truth may or may not be. You have an almost entirely inaccurate legend on your hands before you know it.

  I can honestly say that Nessie has never done anything to encourage the things that are said about her. (The Fae are liable to perpetuate the idea that you might actually be able to hold your own in a game as long as it will encourage you to play, and vampires are all for anything that makes it easier for them to track down their next meal.). Nessie just goes along living her life and minding her own business. The hubbub that surrounds her can be entirely laid at the feet of the people who spend their time trying to stir up the stories.

  Let us set the record straight. I am sure you have very often heard that the Loch Ness Monster is secreted away in Scotland just waiting for the lucky individual to manage to snap the next grainy photograph or equally poor quality cell phone video to become an internet sensation. This is simply not true. What you would refer to as the Loch Ness Monster does, in fact, live in Loch Ness. She (actually they if you want to get down to brass tacks about it) is not a monster. She is also not spending her time contemplating the local (and visitor) human population and teasing them with glimpses of herself so that they can be further motivated to stalk her. That part is all nonsense.

  Something does live in Loch Ness. As a matter of fact, a whole lot of somethings of a variety of species live in Loch Ness. The creature commonly referred to as Nessie is actually a clan of water dwelling creatures that have made those depths their home for far longer than people have bothered to notice them. The clan matriarch is getting up in years and has grown rather large over the course of them. There are times when she needs to stretch out and likes to let a little warmth from the sun soak in and limber her up a little. Her mother and grandmother did it before her and whichever of her offspring takes over after her will likely do the same. There is really nothing mysterious or fantastical about it.

  We human beings get so caught up in things at times that we miss the obvious. Just because we try to insist that something must have gone extinct because we need it to have because we are all attached to timelines that we posit but cannot prove does not make it so. Just ask the fishermen who caught the coelacanth in 1938. (Well, I don’t think that you can actually ask them, but you know what I mean.)

  She may come to the surface of Loch Ness from time to time, but she mostly keeps herself to herself and tries to keep her clan far away from gawkers and an interfering public. You would not much appreciate someone trying to sneak up on and snap photos of you while you were soaking up sunshine in your backyard, would you? Nessie would, likewise, prefer to be left alone. I am sure that you understand.

  Refrain from Picking Pixies Up

  There is a very practical reason for this. Pixies bite. This should not come as a surprise to you. What does any wild creature do if you unceremoniously pluck it from its habitat and hold it up for your inspection? They bite you of course. You should have known better than to go around scooping up strange creatures in the first place. I do not want to hear any complaints or gushing about how cute they look, how you were curious, or how taken by surprise you were that you actually spotted one. Do try to exercise a bit of common sense.

  Think of it this way -- do you really want to have to explain where this infected spot on your hand or arm came from to the people at the doctor’s office? Trust me when I tell you that the chances of something nasty being in that bite are very high. They may pay careful attention to a meticulous preservation of their little green outfits, but practitioners of oral hygiene the pixies are not. Have you ever seen the things that a pixie is willing to eat? It is not pretty. I shudder to think of the variety of bacteria that is multiplying in their little petri dish mouths. They, naturally, being what they are remain unbothered by a slew of germs that would bring a full grown human quite messily to his knees (or a hospital bed).

  Wound care and cleaning is all well and good, but by the time that your average human has recovered from the shock that the cute little, pointed ear critter had equally pointed teeth to match, the damage has already been done.

  My aforementioned great aunt (several times removed) once dodged around the expected terms of a wager by filling the man’s house with an entire enclave of pixies, and I am still not certain that a small outbreak of mad cow disease that happened shortly thereafter was not directly tied to that fact. She, of course, will not tell me one way or the other. She just smiles so that her own slightly pointed teeth show and tells me that some stories are not meant for half-breed ears.

  Even if you do manage to avoid being bitten, you will still have an upset pixie in close proximity. Pixies (in addition to the natural response of trying to bite what they view as an attacker) are very bad tempered. They do not like to be meddled with -- who can blame them? They are not inclined to take things calmly, and they have very good aim. Perturbed pixies like to throw things. Actually, they like to throw things all of the time. The difference is that upset pixies throw things at people instead of just randomly around the room. They rarely miss, and an irate pixie can launch a multitude of items at you in a very short period of time. It does not matter how good you are at ducking and dodging. The sheer amount of items heading in your direction is going to be overwhelming.

  Luckily for you, pixies have a relatively short attention span. They will move on soon. They will probably not take a chance on getting close enough to be picked up again in order to bite you (unless they are having a particularly bad day). Your best bet (if you have ignored my advice and angered one) is to cover your head the best you can and wait them out. Post pixie encounter concussions are not uncommon (although people are usually smart enough to not mention that at the emergency room).

  All of this can be avoided by keeping your hands to yourself.

  Messing with Mermaids is Not a Good Idea

  I am just going to have to fess up to this right up front. There is really no way to sugar coat what I am about to impart without undermining my point. Mermaids are not very bright. There -- I have said it. I am really not trying to be insulting, but facts are facts. This particular fact is very important for you to understand before you entertain any ideas of going off to frolic in the sea. It is not that they do not know all that they need to know about their own natural environment (and I am sure that they are capable of having wonderful, deeply thought out conversations among themselves). The trouble is that they are not very adaptive. They have a very slow learning curve, and they do not catch on to the cause and effect of things outside the scope of their normal experiences very well.

  This leads to one very important problem for any human being that interacts with them in any way, shape, or form. They do not understand that you (as a human) cannot breathe under water. Are you seeing why this is a problem? This is complicated by the fact that mermaids as a whole are rather fascinated by humans. They are curious, and they generally have no qualms about coming up to one that they have been studying for a bit to
try to find out more. This is where the real trouble begins because, you see, mermaids are natural huggers.

  It is just one of those things. We say hello and introduce ourselves; mermaids wrap their arms around you and squeeze. It is a cultural thing for them -- rather like a fussy old grandmother who can never manage to understand that no one particularly enjoys having their cheeks pinched into a chapped state. Further, you cannot reason with a hugging mermaid. They are very certain that a good, solid hug is the appropriate step to be taken at the start of any new acquaintance.

  In centuries of oral tradition, they have never once made the connection between their enthusiastic greetings of the humans that have come to visit them and those same humans nearly immediate demise. Since the humans they encounter most often have been the victims of shipwrecks, they tend to operate under the assumption that the poor things must have suffered some sort of an injury during the trauma. They pat themselves on the back (metaphorically speaking) for having offered the comfort of an affectionate embrace to the dying. They are, in fact, a little bit self-righteous on the