Cryptotrappers!

Cryptotrappers- The First Encounter

I wouldn't say that there was anything special about the day everything began. It was just a normal Thursday, near identical to the one that had come before. Hardly even remotely exciting, barely a day I'd remember even weeks after if not for... Sorry, am I rambling already?

Okay, introductions. Well, my full legal name is Michael Williams. But most of my colleagues tend to call me by my code name, Exo. I'm seventeen years old, though I was sixteen when this began. I attend a completely regular college, average in every way- that is when my current schedule allows me to at least, and I have a double life. As well as academia, I have a what I'd call a 'very interesting job'; something that if you'd told my younger self I'd end up doing, they'd scoff. In essence, I hunt cryptids for a living. And, to be fair, I do it a damn sight more effectively than most others in the field, in my humble opinion! Mainly because I seem to have a sort of sixth sense in regards to taming and capturing these elusive and improbable beasts. Well, maybe not taming. Considering the fact that they typically chase me, attack me and otherwise try to kill me. Dangerous, I know. But how did I get here? How about we start at the beginning of my story.

It was Thursday 17th, pretty much four months ago exactly; just after college had finished for the day. The sun was high in the sky, and I was taking a shortcut home through the local forest. Well, it was hardly a shortcut; after all it actually added to the length of my journey, but the forest itself was a serene distraction from the mundanity of the walk. Admittedly, I wasn't really looking where I was going though, since I daydreamed a lot back then, back when fantasy was more interesting than my real life. About the sorts of things your typical unsporty sixteen year old thinks about. Interesting shows on TV, video games, saving the world with my remarkable talents... as soon as I figured out what those talents actually were. Sometimes, I'd even daydream about girls, but that's almost definitely a rabbit hole best left unexplored. So, as I said, I was slowly meandering home, eyes glued to my phone, scrolling, just waiting for something interesting to come up, barely paying enough attention to my surroundings to not trip over a branch or tree root, when I heard a mighty cracking and snapping sound, followed by a colossal thud behind me.

'Other students come through here, it probably just sounded bigger than it was!' I told myself, shaking, you know, like the average idiot would have done. But hey, that's the thing with our brains. We fill in those difficult-to-fill gaps through any means necessary. Any unexplainable, well, anythings gets rationalised and normalised. When it can't be, then we attribute it to 'paranormal activity' and 'ghosts'. And frankly, back then, I didn't believe in Bigfoot any more than the Tooth Fairy. A notion that almost seems ridiculous to me now. Anyway, away from that psychoanalytical nonsense, and back to that scene. Heart pounding from my chest, I slowly turned around to try and see what exactly had happened to scare the life out of me. Part of me had hoped, ridiculous as it seemed, that somebody had just trodden on a particularly large twig and somehow made the sound of a small explosion, scaring the life out of me in the process. But as I turned, I was perturbed to learn that nobody was there at all. There wasn't even a snapped stick there, not really. Well, to be fair, what was there could definitely be described as a 'snapped stick', in some shape or form. It was just a little bigger than I'd expected it to be. Because, as I stood and looked upon the scene in shock and horror, what I saw was a once towering oak tree, one I had walked past just seconds ago, now snapped in two, lying on the ground.

Needless to say, it was something of a shock. And, of course, my brain was flooded with all sorts of questions. Questions such as, 'What could have snapped such a colossal tree in two, nigh silently in doing so, whilst being so incredibly careful enough as to not leave any trace of its presence; to such a degree that it had vanished entirely before I had even turned around?'. And other, less verbose ones, of course. To be honest, my mind was reeling too much to make sense of the situation. I considered that it could have been a prank, but what sense did that make? Maybe I'd somehow missed that tree being there before, and I'd simply hallucinated the sound, but somehow, I didn't think that was the case. And so it was then, in the immortal, reckless, death-be-damned state that only a bored college student with no self-preservation can really find themselves in, I decided to actually investigate this strange occurrence. And with that, the first domino that lead to my life today had been pushed. That was the one, single decision that started my new, dangerous life of cryptozoology off.