Dirk Strauss: Pixie Hunter

Agent Strauss stood alone in a yellow field holding a comically large butterfly net, reflecting on where exactly his career had gone wrong. Ten years ago he'd been struck with inspiration when reading 'Witch Hunting For Fun & Profit', and had set himself up as a witch hunter for hire. He'd made a name for himself. The work was dangerous, but he was good at it. Rooftop swordfights under the full moon, pitched battles in forgotten cave networks, ghost busting, Dirk Strauss had done it all, and he'd looked incredibly cool doing it.

When the P.R.B came calling, he was ecstatic. He was in the big leagues. But the big leagues weren't as big as he'd been led to believe. Sure, there were moments. A coordinated strike on the lair of Görguvir, lord of vampires was a highlight, as was the running gun battle through a hive of aliens in the white house last month. But then there was stuff like this. He'd been assigned pixie hunting duty. His job today was to capture and deliver to Research and Development a specimen of an unrecorded cryptid that was by all accounts invisible to the human eye.

He felt like an idiot.

The issue wasn't that they might not exist. They almost certainly did. The problem was that human science had thus far been unable to prove it. The Parahuman Regulation Bureau intended to rectify that, at any cost. The other species assured them that pixies were merely a flying parahominid species that exuded pure joy from every orifice, but the Bureau knew the score. The score was drugs.

Agent Strauss was disillusioned with his job, but he accepted that what he was doing was important. It was like Director Eames had been telling him. Pixies led to drugs, drugs led to hookers, and hookers led to suffering. Or something. Actually, that might have been from a movie. A terrible, terrible movie. Strauss' vision was swimming a little. He felt like he should sit down.

Snatches of beautiful music came drifting on the wind. Strauss found himself lying on his back amongst the flowers. The fluffy white clouds were fascinating. Some of them looked like stuff. He could really go for a pizza right now.

Something buzzed by his head. If he squinted, he thought he could see two little people hovering above him. He reached for them, smiling inanely. It seemed like they were laughing.