Introduction

     Hi, my name is Jack Underhill. When I was sixteen I wrote and self-published a guide to worldbuilding for fantasy writers. The book was over five-hundred pages long, it featured full chapters for over eighty different supernatural creatures from cultures all over the world, it had a few more chapters in which I quickly went over the creatures that were less interesting or about whom less had been written, it had detailed descriptions of the different theories of magic used by various stories, it included quotes from books over lore going all the way back to Ancient Greece, and there was a section dedicated to analyzing bestselling fantasy novels through statistics to see what we could infer about the worlds they took place in. A few months later I got a letter from a Harvard professor telling me he wanted to use my book in his class, which was cool. A little later I got a meeting with the head of a top secret task force who offered me a job analyzing evidence of supernatural phenomenon, which was cooler.

     That was four years ago. I still get files from them every few weeks, but mostly I work as a supernatural expert. What that means is that when normal people get mixed up in something from the spooky side, I'm the one they call. If your house is haunted, I come and exorcise it. If your kid is actually a changeling, I explain to them what to expect and get them in touch with older person with some faerie blood in them. If you have something valuable and magical to sell, I call some people and arrange a trade. If you tussled with someone spooky and by some miracle you wound up being the one with a body to hide, I make the evidence disappear. If you tussled with someone spooky and now you're a ghost, I make the evidence reappear. It's not usually that drastic, though. It's usually very simple and even kind of boring. Usually...