Cryptid Quest: Shadow Under the Lake

Chapter 1: Rook's Assignment

Between then and now, things had been tame. They still had their quips when they ran into each other, or if they were unfortunate enough to have the same class together, but nothing compared to the playground days.

That is, until a few months earlier, when sightings of an unknown creature started to pick up in Bridgetown, despite the best efforts of a few. First, some context.

The year was 2017, and the people of Bridgetown, Massachusetts had gained a reputation as a beacon of scientific study. The Bridgetown Natural History Museum had celebrated eight years since it was open. The Bridgetown Times had added a new section dedicated to new discoveries and other scientific breakthroughs. Even Bridgetown High School was enrolling more classes about science, such as oceanography, forensic science, and even botany.

To think it was only a decade prior that the town was known for the opposite. In the 1990s, Bridgetown was considered to be one of the most haunted places in all of New England. A surge of sightings of strange activity headlined newspapers and websites. Books were written about all the various phenomena. And experts from many fields of those research descended to the town to solve the many mysteries that plagued it.

People reported seeing aliens, UFOs, ghosts, demons, men in black, robed cult leaders, and people randomly exploding. Yet the most common thing seen throughout the town, from the wealthy hills of Bridgetown Heights to the swampy undergrowth of the Hockomock, was cryptids.

As Rick explained earlier, cryptids were animals and creatures of folklore who maintain some sort of belief in the minds of promotors of the paranormal. But there were way more types of cryptids than snake-like aquatic beasts and up-right walking ape-men, especially in Bridgetown.

There were sightings of birds the size of small planes flying down isolated roads. Horned men carrying axes attacking cars on lover lanes. Massive blobs of flesh washing ashore on Sandy Beach that looked like a dead, ship-sized octopus.

These creatures ran rampant in Bridgetown during the 90s, and no one could explain what they were. Yet every new sighting ran in the papers, making the tourism industry in Bridgetown boom. Yet this wouldn't last for long.

Sometime around the mid-1990s, things started to change for the town. Many popular TV shows were being exposed for fraudulent reporting and were panned by scientific figures of all fields. One woman, a journalist and professional debunker named Jill Orville went undercover on many of these shows and exposed their dirty secrets. Shortly after her findings were published, the pour of outcry against the paranormal hit the town like a tidal wave.

In the aftermath of this backlash, very few people came forward with stories of seeing strange things. Newspapers stopped front-lining tales of Bigfoot and Sea Serpents. Some professional cryptid hunters, called cryptozoologists, were even kicked out of their university jobs. It would seem the people of Bridgetown had enough of being remembered as the town full of wackos and wanted a make-over.

And in the years following that intellectual revolution, the people got their wish. Now the cryptid sightings were a thing of the past... At least, it almost was.

There are still small communities of people who held onto their paranormal beliefs. Though these people didn't hold any office, nor did they have jobs in mainstream journalism, they were able to thrive thanks to independently funding their own outlets and organizations. Yet these publications dwarfed in comparison with the big name news outlets that use to run their favorite types of stories.

So when a story rocks the paranormal world in Bridgetown, it only creates ripples for everyone else. Yet that didn't mean the story was any less fantastic. Reported by the website "Strange, Isn't It?" on March 11th, 2017, was the headline, "Overturned on Bish Bash Lake: Lake Monster attacks Fishermen". The article read as follows...