Paranormal Comedy
Supernatural Pet Sitting
Hellhound for Hire
My name is Riley Brooks. I am a licensed Mythic Animal Consultant operating out of a small office
above a dry cleaner on Citrus Avenue in Claremont, California.
What follows is the field guide I wish someone had handed me on day one.
Nobody did. This is what I learned the hard way.
A Note on the Profession
Mythic Animal Consulting is not a recognized career path. There is no university program.
There is no professional association with a helpful newsletter and an annual conference in a
mid-range hotel. There is a licensing exam administered by the Mythic Animal Commission,
a certification handbook that was last updated in 2003, and a great deal of on-the-job education
that the handbook does not prepare you for.
What I do, in practical terms, is handle the supernatural creatures nobody else will touch.
I assess risk. I evaluate claims. I determine whether the thing you’re describing actually happened,
whether the creature in question was properly enrolled, and whether your policy covers acts of god,
acts of malice, or acts of stupidity — which in this business are frequently the same act.
Three years in, I have learned a great deal about mythic creatures and considerably more
about their owners. What follows is my unofficial field guide to both.
The Client Typology
The Confident Minimizer
Recognizable by their opening line, which is always some variation of: it’s really not that bad.
It is always that bad. The Confident Minimizer has been living with their mythic creature
for long enough that they have lost all perspective on what constitutes a normal Tuesday.
They will describe a basilisk with an uncontrolled petrification reflex as a little shy.
They will describe a three-headed hellhound with disputed loyalties as sometimes stubborn.
They will describe a situation that has rendered an entire room structurally unsound as
a minor incident.
Protocol: document everything before they finish the sentence.
Whatever they’re minimizing is the actual problem.
“She said the phoenix had ‘a little trouble’ with the couch.
What she meant was the couch no longer existed in any recoverable form.
I have learned to ask for photographs before the initial consultation.”
The Researcher
The Researcher has read everything. Every forum post, every mythic creature hobbyist blog,
every out-of-print handling manual from 1987. They arrive with a folder.
Sometimes two folders. The folders are color-coded.
The information in the folders is approximately forty percent accurate,
thirty percent plausible, and thirty percent something they found on a message board
that has since been taken down for unspecified reasons.
Protocol: thank them for the folders. Do not tell them about the thirty percent.
Redirect to the actual assessment as quickly as professionally possible.
The Denier
The Denier does not believe their creature has a problem. The creature does not have a problem.
The problem is everyone else’s unreasonable response to a perfectly normal animal
doing perfectly normal things. The neighbors are overreacting.
The MAC is overreaching. The structural engineer is being alarmist.
I have encountered Deniers whose creatures have: redistributed the contents of three rooms
simultaneously, temporarily reclassified four people as decorative objects,
and on one memorable occasion reorganized the local water table.
Protocol: get everything in writing before the assessment begins.
The Denier will deny the assessment too, but a signed intake form is a signed intake form.
The True Believer
The True Believer loves their mythic creature with a devotion that borders on the theological.
The creature can do no wrong. Every incident has an explanation.
Every assessment finding is a misunderstanding. Every recommendation is a personal attack.
The True Believer is not a bad client. They are frequently an excellent client —
attentive, responsive, genuinely invested in their creature’s wellbeing.
The difficulty is that their investment is not always calibrated to reality,
and reality in this business has a way of arriving without warning.
Protocol: patience. Lead with the creature’s strengths.
Get to the concerns by the third conversation, not the first.
The Creature Typology
Hellhounds
Hellhounds are guardian breeds. They are loyal, protective, territorial,
and possessed of a threat assessment system that operates on entirely different
criteria than the one humans use. A hellhound does not distinguish between
an intruder and a delivery person with the same efficiency that a human would.
A hellhound distinguishes between mine and not mine,
and everything in the second category is treated with appropriate suspicion
until further notice.
Multi-headed variants complicate this considerably. Each head has its own assessment system.
They do not always agree. Consensus is not guaranteed.
Mealtimes, in a multi-headed household, are a negotiation.
What nobody tells you about hellhounds: they are, underneath the fire and the teeth
and the territorial display, profoundly attached to their people.
A hellhound that trusts you will follow you anywhere.
Getting to trust takes time, consistency, and a willingness to hold your ground
when all available evidence suggests running.
Phoenixes
A phoenix dies and is reborn from its own ashes approximately every six to eight hours
under normal circumstances, though stress cycles can accelerate this considerably.
The rebirth involves fire. The fire is not contained.
Whatever the phoenix is resting on at the time of death should be considered expendable.
This is not malice. This is biology. The phoenix does not choose the couch.
The couch is simply where the phoenix was.
What nobody tells you about phoenixes: the warmth is real.
Not metaphorically — a phoenix generates a specific quality of warmth that
has no equivalent in any other creature I have encountered.
It is the warmth of something that has died many times and come back each time
and has therefore arrived at a particular relationship with the concept of permanence.
Sitting next to a phoenix is, in my experience, one of the more grounding things available.
The couch is a reasonable price to pay. I say this having paid it.
Basilisks
Basilisks are shy. This is the thing the certification handbook gets right.
They are anxious, sensitive, easily startled, and possessed of a defense mechanism
that is entirely disproportionate to the provocation that triggers it.
A loud noise, an unexpected visitor, a household appliance cycling on at the wrong moment —
any of these can produce a petrification event in an unsecured basilisk.
Universal Solvent reverses petrification. It is available through licensed MAC suppliers.
I recommend keeping it on hand. I recommend this from experience.
Kitsune
Kitsune are intelligent, curious, and motivated by an internal logic
that is entirely coherent and not always compatible with the logic of the surrounding household.
They will rearrange things. They will investigate things.
They will make decisions about the optimal organization of a space
that their human cohabitants did not ask for and may not appreciate.
A multi-tailed kitsune compounds this. Each tail represents an additional dimension
of capability and an additional layer of motivation.
I have not yet encountered a nine-tailed kitsune in a domestic setting.
I am not in a hurry to.
What the Job Actually Is
People ask me, occasionally, why I do this work.
The honest answer is that someone has to, and I appear to be reasonably good at it,
and the creatures themselves are — under all the fire and the teeth and the paperwork —
genuinely extraordinary.
The MAC certification handbook describes mythic animal consulting as
the assessment and management of supernatural fauna in domestic and commercial settings.
That is accurate and tells you almost nothing about what it actually involves.
What it actually involves is: sitting on a floor at 11:14 on a Tuesday morning
next to something that shouldn’t exist according to three different regulatory frameworks,
taking its pulse with your hands because that is the protocol,
and then figuring out what happened and why and what to do about it.
It involves knowing which forms to file and in what order
and what the filing deadlines are and which exceptions apply to which classifications
and how to explain all of this to someone who is having the worst Tuesday of their life.
It involves, sometimes, sitting very still in the concentrated light
of something ancient and watching it do something you don’t have words for yet
and writing it down anyway because documentation is the job.
Three years in. Reference letter from someone whose return address just says The Underworld.
Still figuring it out.
That, I think, is probably the correct condition for the work.
Start the Series Free on Spotify
Hellhound for Hire is a paranormal comedy audiobook series —
Riley Brooks, mythic animal consultant, available now on Spotify.
All three books in the trilogy are streaming free.