how big are you????? that's going to have a lot to do with how that question gets answered.

but YEAH they're BIG!!!!!! in lots of ways other than the sheer volume and displacement of Wanger

Unless we're talking about penicillin or something. The guppy, though? Bahgawd. That thing was shat out the end of the ugly factory and stopped at every ugly light on the way to the bitchass runway.

There's an old, old RPG character of mine that I think about fairly regularly. Henry Francis Boyd. If it's a name that doesn't sound particularly inspiring or evocative, more's the point. I'd like to share some reminiscing about him, what lead to his creation and some of his origins in-universe. I don't imagine there'll actually be a point to this story beyond the sort of fond warmth that'd come of sitting around a table with a glass in one's hand, shooting the shit and getting misty-eyed over past glories. In a funny sort of way, that's quite emblematic of him.

So let me tell you about Hank.

Picture, if you will, 2003. I'm living in England, 'up north' as they say in local parlance, and I work in a shitty factory which offers decent wages if you're up at Fuck O'Clock in the morning to meet the demands of later, more indolent bastards that meet a day fully formed when they at last need to venture, blinking unsteadily, into a world made to coddle them by your careful hand.

It's 3am. It's winter. I'm fucking freezing. I'm not far out of Sheffield and it's tits o'clock early. No stars. No moon. Just me, the darkness, and the cold. I trudge to the bus stop because I'll be fucked if I try to tackle the usual walk to work with my CD player in my pocket and St. Anger squalling helpfully with what violence 4xAA batteries can manage.

I step into a bus shelter. A small, helpless thing in the dark. There I see a shape. It's small. It feels smaller in the moment. I look, and recognize that there's more tail to this thing than a cat would usually muster; this isn't an ordinary encounter with the urban wildlife. I squint and it comes into focus. A fox. An actual, honest-to-goodness, I come from a land where foxes don't exist fox. Right there in front of me. What the fuck do I do?

I say to it, as though addressing a colleague, "G'morning, fox." And to nobody's great surprise it looks up at me as though I've just pissed myself and shoots out of the bus shelter like a fart in a hurricane. But in that moment - in that split second - for the very first time in my life, I've seen a fox. There. Right there. Up close. Sharing the same space as me. It's real and it happened... and fuck, I hope it wasn't too cold to go running away from me like a maniac.