Welcome to the CCOD
The Long Road to Weird
The jeep bucked and growled as it rolled down the narrow forest service road, a washboard stretch of dirt winding through the endless green of the Cascade foothills. Dust plumed behind them like a ghost tail, catching golden in the afternoon sun. Isaac Bellamy clenched his seatbelt for the third time in ten minutes and glanced sideways at the woman driving. She hadn’t said much since picking him up from the airfield—just “grab your bags” and “hope you don’t get carsick.” Her dark hair was pulled tight into a ranger’s braid, and the sleeve patch on her uniform read:
CCOD
Cryptid Conservation and Observation Division
“So just to be clear, when you picked me up you did say this was a Conservation Division?” he finally asked, trying to be polite over the rattle of the tires. “I was told this was more of a biological research post.”
She didn’t take her eyes off the road. “Conservation. Observation. Removal, sometimes. Cleanup. We do a little of everything out here.”
Isaac swallowed. He was dressed for a national park field lab—REI shirt, new hiking boots, not-yet-dirty jeans. He’d packed books on speculative phylogenetics and a freshly minted PhD in anomalous biostructures, not a weapon or bug spray. His mental picture had been clean research stations, climate control, maybe a mobile DNA sequencer or two. Not… this.
“How far out is the station?” he asked.
She smirked. “Far enough the satellites don’t bother pinging us unless we ask real nice. Hope you like solitude, Doc.”
He flinched a little at Doc. He wasn’t used to being called that yet. “I thought I’d be assisting in a lab. You know—cryptid autopsy, tissue sampling, modeling. I didn’t even bring a field tranquilizer kit.”
The smirk grew wider. “You won’t need one. Your partner prefers a shotgun.”
That got his full attention.
“Wait—partner? I thought you were—”
“Nope. I’m just drop-off. Your real partner’s already at Station 47. Name’s Granger. He’s been with CCOD longer than I’ve been shaving my legs.” She downshifted with a grinding protest from the engine. “You’ll like him. Unless he doesn’t like you. Then… well. Try not to get eaten.”
Isaac blinked. “Eaten?”
She finally looked at him, just for a second. “Kidding. Mostly.”
Then, deadpan: “You ever heard of the Rake before?”
He blinked again. “A what?”
She tapped the brake and pulled them to a rumbling stop in front of a rusty old chain-link gate topped with barbed wire. A faded wooden sign beside it read:
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR – MONITORING SITE 47
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY PROHIBITED
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW
Isaac stared at the bottom line.
The gate creaked open, and the forest swallowed them whole.
“So we work for the Department of the Interior?” Isaac asked, gripping the door handle again as the jeep jostled violently over a rut. He was trying to make small talk—trying to feel like this was all still just a government job. A contract. With benefits. And hazard pay. Though the hazard pay part was starting to worry him more and more.
The woman driving snorted. “Sort of. On paper.”
He glanced over, eyebrows raised.
“From what I understand,” she continued, “we’ve got a pretty broad area of operation and support. A real Frankenstein of a mandate. The CCOD started back in the late '40s—back when G-Men were patching over flying saucer sightings with weather balloon stories and shipping lake monster corpses to cold storage in Utah. Whole thing was under the guise of national security. Don’t scare the public, don’t spook the stock market.”
Isaac blinked. “That’s… oddly specific.”
“Yeah, well. That’s what happens when your agency’s unofficial motto is ‘If it howls, glows, or whispers your name when you’re alone—tag it, track it, or bury it.’”
She took a sharp left turn onto an even rougher road, lined with ancient pines that leaned in like eavesdropping gargoyles. The shadows thickened. The GPS on the dash had given up ten miles ago.
“Nowadays,” she went on, “we’ve got ties to the EPA. That’s our public face. Environmental weirdness, ecological preservation, endangered species—just don’t ask what’s on the endangered list.”
Isaac was quiet for a moment. Then, cautiously, “And unofficially?”
Her fingers drummed the wheel. “Unofficially? We’ve got liaisons. The kind of alphabet soup that doesn’t show up in FOIA requests. People who track ley lines, radiation bursts, dimensional anomalies. Magic, too. But that’s above my pay grade.” She paused, then gave him a sidelong glance.
“Don’t worry. Your clearance will catch up to your confusion. Eventually.”
Isaac looked out the window, heart quietly sinking. Towering trees. No sign of civilization. Just him, a duffel bag full of reference texts, and a sinking suspicion that his thesis on comparative chimera evolution was not going to be very helpful here.
“What about you?” he asked, more to fill the air than anything else. “You’ve clearly been at this a while.”
She chuckled, low and dry. “Me? I’m just transport and logistics. You’re officially Ranger Granger’s problem now.”
The jeep rounded a bend, and suddenly, there it was—half-hidden in the trees like it grew there. A squat, reinforced ranger station perched beside a deep, mossy ravine. An old radio antenna jutted from the roof like a broken pike. The only visible lights were dim yellow, behind thick, weatherproof glass.
A carved wooden sign nailed beside the door read:
STATION 47 – OBSERVATION OUTPOST – ZONE D
Standing on the porch, arms crossed and chewing a toothpick, was a man who looked like he’d fought Bigfoot to a draw and didn’t feel like talking about it.
Canvas jacket. Faded hat. Gray-streaked beard. He didn’t wave.
“That’s Granger,” she said, throwing the jeep into park. “He’s your new mentor, handler, and field supervisor. Don’t call him sir. Don’t ask if he believes in aliens. And don’t wander off after dark. Not unless you like missing time.”
Isaac swallowed again, already regretting the second pair of khakis he’d packed instead of actual survival gear.
She popped the trunk and got out. “Well, Doc Bellamy. Welcome to the CCOD.”
He stepped out, duffel slung over one shoulder, and tried to stand tall as Granger watched him approach with the expression of a man sizing up a stray cat.
The forest pressed in all around. The trees seeming to have whispered conspiratorially about the new arrival.
And somewhere out there… something made a nose that made Issacs skin crawl.
Granger stepped off the porch like the ground had to earn his boots. He was tall—not towering, but rangy in that mountain-weathered way, all tendon and sinew, with a posture like a coiled spring that’d just stopped pretending to sleep.
He squinted at Isaac with pale, glacier-blue eyes that had seen too many things and written none of them down.
Isaac pulled his duffel out of the jeep, tried not to look like he was standing at attention, and failed.
Granger’s voice was dry as old bark. “You’re in bunk three, Boot. You can figure out which bed is yours with the other fresh meat.”
Isaac blinked. “Uh—thank you. Sir.”
Granger’s stare sharpened. “Don’t call me sir. I work for a living.”
“Right. Sorry.” Isaac adjusted his grip on the duffel and started toward the door.
“Boot,” Granger called after him. Isaac turned. “Do not unpack the fridge without gloves. And don’t open the left freezer drawer. Not unless you’ve got the stomach for something with too many mouths.”
Isaac opened his mouth, closed it, and nodded. He wasn’t sure if Granger was hazing him or just… genuinely concerned.
The jeep pulled away, spitting dust and forest silence in its wake. Isaac stood on the creaking porch a moment, listening to the wind in the pines. The station looked more like a fortified hunting lodge than a research post—shingled roof, reinforced windows, solar panels bolted down like afterthoughts, and the faint scent of ozone and pine tar hanging in the air.
Inside, the door groaned open on reinforced hinges. Warm air hit him—wood smoke, gun oil, and wet socks.
The common area was cramped but functional. A couch with claw marks down one arm. A corkboard covered in polaroids and yarn-pinned maps. A whiteboard that read:
“DO NOT FEED THE FAWN-THING.”
—Seriously. We mean it this time. – G
Voices murmured down a hall. Someone laughed, tired and distant. A kettle whistled from the galley kitchen. He found the bunkroom just past the main hall—four bunks stacked against opposite walls, each with various levels of occupation. One had Star Wars bedsheets. Another was covered in field notes, protein bar wrappers, and what looked like a plush Mothman with angry eyebrows.
Only bunk three was empty.
Isaac tossed his duffel onto it and sat down slowly, still trying to piece it all together.
Government contract. Strange job description. Big salary.
And now… fawn-things and freezer warnings.
He pulled out his little leather-bound field journal and wrote one line:
Day One: I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.
Behind him, something knocked twice on the exterior wall. Sharp. Rhythmic.
He froze. Then slowly looked toward the window. Nothing but trees and shadow.
Somewhere down the hall, Granger yelled:
“If that’s the skunk ape again, shoot it in the ass and tell it the trapline’s tomorrow.”
Isaac blinked.
Then sighed.
And got up to find the kitchen.
He had to admit—he half expected weird in his life.
Weird had followed him since he was born. Lurking behind corners. Whispering through static. Peeking out of fog just long enough for him to know something was there.
Isaac Bellamy was a registered D-Class Psion. That meant his psionic talents weren’t just anecdotal—they’d been studied, tested, measured. Repeatable and codified, though just barely. The kind of classification that got you a laminated card, a government number, and the occasional awkward phone call from someone in a sharp suit asking, “Have you noticed any recent increases in sensitivity to interdimensional bleed?”
He was what they called a Sensitive-Type.
Not the most glamorous label.
He didn’t bend spoons. Didn’t throw cars. Didn’t dream the future or set his coffee on fire with his mind. But he could feel when something was wrong. Not wrong like a gas leak—wrong like a child’s drawing that moved when you weren’t looking. Wrong like the smell of wet fur in an empty elevator. Wrong like—
Well. This place.
His primary ability was a form of anomaly perception. He sensed presence—energies, entities, phenomena that weren’t supposed to be here. A sixth sense that prickled like static behind the eyes. Sometimes it came as a flash of emotion. Sometimes a scent. Once, at age nine, it came as the sudden, overpowering memory of drowning… right before a basement wall collapsed and flooded the laundry room.
He’d been sent to training. Government-funded programs. Fringe science instructors with too many rings and too little budget. They taught him about crystals that hummed under stress, psi-resonant metals, and esoteric theory that made quantum biology look like kindergarten.
He’d even manifested a few minor offshoot powers—the ability to detect residual psychic impressions in objects, and, once in a blue moon, a kind of empathic ping that let him sense extreme emotion at a distance. Useful, if a little overwhelming in public bathrooms.
But they told him—kindly, but firmly—that he wasn’t “cape material.”
No costume. No league membership. No heroic codename on a shiny card.
Just a gentle D-class. The kind you don’t put on the battlefield. The kind you stick in a lab with shielding and coffee.
And that had been fine. Better than fine, honestly.
Isaac had found joy in cryptobiology—the study of the rare, the unprovable, the strange-but-maybe. While others chased stardom or supervillains, he chased fossils and field reports. He followed cicada hatching patterns that overlapped with phantom sightings. Compared DNA samples of chupacabra remains to undocumented bat lineages. Developed classification models for creature types that only existed in the gaps between myth and footage.
And now here he was.
Shoved into a ranger outpost in the middle of nowhere, being told not to touch the freezer and to avoid fawn-things.
Maybe it wasn’t the career path he’d expected.
But deep down—beneath the training, the disappointment, the rationalism—Isaac felt it.
A prickle at the base of his spine. A pressure in the air.
This place was wrong. Not threatening. Not hostile. Just… tuned to a different frequency.
He stood in the center of the bunk room and exhaled slowly.
Then he felt it. A subtle resonance—like an echo of a whisper in a dream you hadn’t had yet. The faintest sense of being watched, not with malice, but with curiosity.
He turned.
Nothing there. Just the bunk. The window. The trees.
But the air was humming.
And Isaac Bellamy smiled, just a little.
“Okay,” he said softly to the Kitchen, “Let’s get weird.”
Isaac was halfway to the kitchen—following the smell of coffee and something he hoped wasn’t boiled jerky—when Ranger Granger’s voice snapped from the hallway behind him.
“Good. You found a bed. You can get the tour later. Follow me, Boot.”
Isaac spun, startled, then nodded quickly. It was only partly because this grizzled man radiated the energy of a park ranger crossed with a drill sergeant. The other part? Granger genuinely intimidated him.
Granger moved with clipped efficiency, not looking back as he marched out a side door and toward a squat building that looked like a cross between a library, an old ranger archive, and a bunker. Mossy stone façade, high narrow windows, and the faint electric hum of servers inside. There was even a weather vane shaped like a jackalope.
Inside was a chill air—paper, ozone, and coffee that had been sitting since who knows when. Bookshelves lined every wall, most sagging under the weight of too many field guides, lore compilations, and ring-bound incident logs with hand-labeled spines. At the far desk sat a small, mousy woman in an oversized CCOD hoodie and glasses thick enough to stop a laser.
She didn’t look up, just nodded. “Morning.”
Granger grunted, “Mornin’, Tilly,” without slowing.
Isaac gave her a polite smile and a tiny wave as he followed, but she was already back to typing, muttering something about “taxonomical irregularities in squonk mucus viscosity reports.”
Granger stopped at a long reading table beneath a buzzing light fixture, grabbed a few battered tomes from the nearest shelf, and dropped them with a dull thud in front of Isaac.
Isaac looked down.
Fearsome Critters.
Fearsome Critters of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts.
Illustrations in charcoal ink. Old printing. One of them still had bark lodged in the spine.
Isaac blinked. Slowly.
“Is… is this a joke?”
Granger didn’t laugh. Didn’t even smirk. He just grunted and narrowed his eyes like a hawk sizing up a rabbit.
“No.”
He hooked a thumb toward the books.
“Your first assignment is what we call the Fearsome Critters Unit. And I don’t have time to burn daylight I could be using to teach you a thing or two.”
Isaac frowned. “Wait—you’re trying to say my job is to chase after stories made up by bored lumberjacks?”
Granger leaned in.
Just a few inches.
But it was enough for Isaac to feel the weight behind those eyes. Cold. Sharp. Patient in the way wolves were patient.
“No,” he said, voice like frost over broken gravel.
“I’m telling you to get your head out of your ass and listen—unless you want to get your guts ripped out by a Hidebehind.”
Isaac said nothing.
He sat up straighter and gave a single, slow nod.
Granger finally leaned back and let out a long breath. The kind that came after yelling at rookies, watching them not die, and deciding to give them one more shot.
“First off,” Granger said, tone lowering to something closer to calm, “you think the stories are a joke because you’re taking them too damn literally.”
He tapped a finger on the book cover.
“You ever read a medieval bestiary? Stuff from ancient scholars? They didn’t draw lions right either. Called hyenas bone-thieves. Described rhinos like armored pigs. You know why?”
Isaac shook his head.
“Because the damn things existed, but they didn’t know how to explain what they were seeing. Didn’t have the words. The science. The language.”
Granger’s voice softened, just a little. “What on Earth makes you think this is any different?”
Isaac glanced down again at the drawings—long-legged things with backwards knees, creatures with whip-tails and eyes that blinked out of sync.
“First rule of working for the CCOD,” Granger said, “is this: nearly every story you’ve ever heard? Half-right. Half-wrong.” He jabbed the table with a calloused finger.
“And the half that’s true is the half that’ll kill you.”
Ranger Granger turned back to the shelves, grabbed a three-ring binder the size of a car battery, and dropped it on the table in front of Isaac with a solid thunk.
“That’s why,” he said, “before I even think about putting you on the trail, you’re learning about these so-called ‘creations of bored lumberjacks,’ Boot.”
Isaac blinked at the binder. Its cover was cracked faux-leather, and the yellowing label inside the sleeve read:
FIELD LOG: FEARSOME CRITTERS, NORTH AMERICAN RANGE – VOL. I
(PROPERTY OF CCOD, ZONE D – RANGER GRANGER’S COPY – DO NOT REMOVE)
Weirdly comforting.
Isaac exhaled. Truth be told, he was relieved they were starting with book work. Research? That was his jam. Give him a taxonomic challenge over a night hike any day. He ran his fingers over the old binder’s edge and opened it slowly. Inside were field reports, sketches, inked symbols, and pages marked with warnings like "Extremely shy, extremely fast, extremely pissed." It was half biology journal, half wilderness spellbook.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Granger crossed his arms and began to lecture—if you could call it that. More like storytime from a man who’d lived through half of it and bled through the rest.
“The things we classify under Fearsome Critters are animals—of a sort. Not natural to our world. Not native. They’re from a place magical types call Otherworld.”
Isaac perked up at the term. He’d heard it before—whispers in parapsychology journals and old druidic translations—but never in official documentation.
Granger continued.
“Back in the 1800s, something happened. Magical folk call it a Ley Line Storm. Some kind of cross-dimensional harmonic that lit up the Earth’s geomantic grid like a damn telegraph wire. Ripped holes in reality along fault lines of energy.”
Isaac’s eyes widened. “Dimensional instabilities?”
“Exactly. Tears between here and there. Between Earth and Otherworld. And through those rips?” Granger tapped the binder.
“Things came crawling through. Walking, slithering, flying—whatever passed for locomotion in their native biome.”
He paused to grab a thermos off the side table, poured himself something dark and bitter-smelling.
“We didn’t know what to do with them. Folk back then didn’t have the science or the terminology—so they told stories. Lumberjack tales. Campfire legends. Fearsome Critters. Some of them were cute. Some were horrifying. All of them were real.” Isaac leaned in, fascinated now despite himself. “And that’s… most of what we deal with?”
Granger nodded once. “Most. Not all.”
Isaac opened his mouth to ask—but Granger held up a finger.
“A few came over other ways. Wand-wagglers—your wizards and witches—sometimes summon things they can’t put back. Other creatures snuck in with European settlers—Old World stuff, fey beasts hitchin’ rides in bloodlines or salt barrels or cursed heirlooms.”
He took a sip of whatever tar-like brew was in the thermos and grimaced.
“But the bulk of ‘em? They arrived when the ley lines blew like a popped boiler. Think of it like an invasive species event—but instead of cane toads or zebra mussels, you get tree-dwelling nightmares with seven tongues and opinions about jazz.” Isaac blinked. “Wait, is that… literal?”
Granger didn’t smile. “You’ll find out later. Damn thing hums Miles Davis when it’s content. Wakes up if you try to record it.”
Isaac let that settle; he still wasn't sure how much of this was true or hazing but didn't ask.
Then slowly nodded.
“I assume I’ll be getting a primer on ley lines and Otherworld geography?”
“Eventually. First, you learn what’s trying to eat your liver in this region. Then we’ll talk metaphysics.”
Granger jabbed the binder with a thick finger.
Granger dropped into the seat across from him and folded his arms. His voice came low and stern:
“Let’s make this simple. We start with A and work our way to Z. When you’re done, we’ll see how much stuck.”
He jabbed the massive binder again with a calloused finger. “You’ve got three days, Boot. That’s how long I’m giving you to cram every page of that before we head into the field.”
Isaac opened his mouth to ask how many entries that entailed—but Granger cut him off with a glare that had probably cowed cryptids.
“After that? I want you up at 0400 hours. And just so we’re clear—if you’re not early, you’re late.”
Isaac cracked open the Binder and started to read, he only had three days before he would be in the field and if half of what Grander implied was true knowing what he was dealing with out there might just keep him alive.
The jeep bucked and growled as it rolled down the narrow forest service road, a washboard stretch of dirt winding through the endless green of the Cascade foothills. Dust plumed behind them like a ghost tail, catching golden in the afternoon sun. Isaac Bellamy clenched his seatbelt for the third time in ten minutes and glanced sideways at the woman driving. She hadn’t said much since picking him up from the airfield—just “grab your bags” and “hope you don’t get carsick.” Her dark hair was pulled tight into a ranger’s braid, and the sleeve patch on her uniform read:
CCOD
Cryptid Conservation and Observation Division
“So just to be clear, when you picked me up you did say this was a Conservation Division?” he finally asked, trying to be polite over the rattle of the tires. “I was told this was more of a biological research post.”
She didn’t take her eyes off the road. “Conservation. Observation. Removal, sometimes. Cleanup. We do a little of everything out here.”
Isaac swallowed. He was dressed for a national park field lab—REI shirt, new hiking boots, not-yet-dirty jeans. He’d packed books on speculative phylogenetics and a freshly minted PhD in anomalous biostructures, not a weapon or bug spray. His mental picture had been clean research stations, climate control, maybe a mobile DNA sequencer or two. Not… this.
“How far out is the station?” he asked.
She smirked. “Far enough the satellites don’t bother pinging us unless we ask real nice. Hope you like solitude, Doc.”
He flinched a little at Doc. He wasn’t used to being called that yet. “I thought I’d be assisting in a lab. You know—cryptid autopsy, tissue sampling, modeling. I didn’t even bring a field tranquilizer kit.”
The smirk grew wider. “You won’t need one. Your partner prefers a shotgun.”
That got his full attention.
“Wait—partner? I thought you were—”
“Nope. I’m just drop-off. Your real partner’s already at Station 47. Name’s Granger. He’s been with CCOD longer than I’ve been shaving my legs.” She downshifted with a grinding protest from the engine. “You’ll like him. Unless he doesn’t like you. Then… well. Try not to get eaten.”
Isaac blinked. “Eaten?”
She finally looked at him, just for a second. “Kidding. Mostly.”
Then, deadpan: “You ever heard of the Rake before?”
He blinked again. “A what?”
She tapped the brake and pulled them to a rumbling stop in front of a rusty old chain-link gate topped with barbed wire. A faded wooden sign beside it read:
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR – MONITORING SITE 47
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY PROHIBITED
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW
Isaac stared at the bottom line.
The gate creaked open, and the forest swallowed them whole.
“So we work for the Department of the Interior?” Isaac asked, gripping the door handle again as the jeep jostled violently over a rut. He was trying to make small talk—trying to feel like this was all still just a government job. A contract. With benefits. And hazard pay. Though the hazard pay part was starting to worry him more and more.
The woman driving snorted. “Sort of. On paper.”
He glanced over, eyebrows raised.
“From what I understand,” she continued, “we’ve got a pretty broad area of operation and support. A real Frankenstein of a mandate. The CCOD started back in the late '40s—back when G-Men were patching over flying saucer sightings with weather balloon stories and shipping lake monster corpses to cold storage in Utah. Whole thing was under the guise of national security. Don’t scare the public, don’t spook the stock market.”
Isaac blinked. “That’s… oddly specific.”
“Yeah, well. That’s what happens when your agency’s unofficial motto is ‘If it howls, glows, or whispers your name when you’re alone—tag it, track it, or bury it.’”
She took a sharp left turn onto an even rougher road, lined with ancient pines that leaned in like eavesdropping gargoyles. The shadows thickened. The GPS on the dash had given up ten miles ago.
“Nowadays,” she went on, “we’ve got ties to the EPA. That’s our public face. Environmental weirdness, ecological preservation, endangered species—just don’t ask what’s on the endangered list.”
Isaac was quiet for a moment. Then, cautiously, “And unofficially?”
Her fingers drummed the wheel. “Unofficially? We’ve got liaisons. The kind of alphabet soup that doesn’t show up in FOIA requests. People who track ley lines, radiation bursts, dimensional anomalies. Magic, too. But that’s above my pay grade.” She paused, then gave him a sidelong glance.
“Don’t worry. Your clearance will catch up to your confusion. Eventually.”
Isaac looked out the window, heart quietly sinking. Towering trees. No sign of civilization. Just him, a duffel bag full of reference texts, and a sinking suspicion that his thesis on comparative chimera evolution was not going to be very helpful here.
“What about you?” he asked, more to fill the air than anything else. “You’ve clearly been at this a while.”
She chuckled, low and dry. “Me? I’m just transport and logistics. You’re officially Ranger Granger’s problem now.”
The jeep rounded a bend, and suddenly, there it was—half-hidden in the trees like it grew there. A squat, reinforced ranger station perched beside a deep, mossy ravine. An old radio antenna jutted from the roof like a broken pike. The only visible lights were dim yellow, behind thick, weatherproof glass.
A carved wooden sign nailed beside the door read:
STATION 47 – OBSERVATION OUTPOST – ZONE D
Standing on the porch, arms crossed and chewing a toothpick, was a man who looked like he’d fought Bigfoot to a draw and didn’t feel like talking about it.
Canvas jacket. Faded hat. Gray-streaked beard. He didn’t wave.
“That’s Granger,” she said, throwing the jeep into park. “He’s your new mentor, handler, and field supervisor. Don’t call him sir. Don’t ask if he believes in aliens. And don’t wander off after dark. Not unless you like missing time.”
Isaac swallowed again, already regretting the second pair of khakis he’d packed instead of actual survival gear.
She popped the trunk and got out. “Well, Doc Bellamy. Welcome to the CCOD.”
He stepped out, duffel slung over one shoulder, and tried to stand tall as Granger watched him approach with the expression of a man sizing up a stray cat.
The forest pressed in all around. The trees seeming to have whispered conspiratorially about the new arrival.
And somewhere out there… something made a nose that made Issacs skin crawl.
Granger stepped off the porch like the ground had to earn his boots. He was tall—not towering, but rangy in that mountain-weathered way, all tendon and sinew, with a posture like a coiled spring that’d just stopped pretending to sleep.
He squinted at Isaac with pale, glacier-blue eyes that had seen too many things and written none of them down.
Isaac pulled his duffel out of the jeep, tried not to look like he was standing at attention, and failed.
Granger’s voice was dry as old bark. “You’re in bunk three, Boot. You can figure out which bed is yours with the other fresh meat.”
Isaac blinked. “Uh—thank you. Sir.”
Granger’s stare sharpened. “Don’t call me sir. I work for a living.”
“Right. Sorry.” Isaac adjusted his grip on the duffel and started toward the door.
“Boot,” Granger called after him. Isaac turned. “Do not unpack the fridge without gloves. And don’t open the left freezer drawer. Not unless you’ve got the stomach for something with too many mouths.”
Isaac opened his mouth, closed it, and nodded. He wasn’t sure if Granger was hazing him or just… genuinely concerned.
The jeep pulled away, spitting dust and forest silence in its wake. Isaac stood on the creaking porch a moment, listening to the wind in the pines. The station looked more like a fortified hunting lodge than a research post—shingled roof, reinforced windows, solar panels bolted down like afterthoughts, and the faint scent of ozone and pine tar hanging in the air.
Inside, the door groaned open on reinforced hinges. Warm air hit him—wood smoke, gun oil, and wet socks.
The common area was cramped but functional. A couch with claw marks down one arm. A corkboard covered in polaroids and yarn-pinned maps. A whiteboard that read:
“DO NOT FEED THE FAWN-THING.”
—Seriously. We mean it this time. – G
Voices murmured down a hall. Someone laughed, tired and distant. A kettle whistled from the galley kitchen. He found the bunkroom just past the main hall—four bunks stacked against opposite walls, each with various levels of occupation. One had Star Wars bedsheets. Another was covered in field notes, protein bar wrappers, and what looked like a plush Mothman with angry eyebrows.
Only bunk three was empty.
Isaac tossed his duffel onto it and sat down slowly, still trying to piece it all together.
Government contract. Strange job description. Big salary.
And now… fawn-things and freezer warnings.
He pulled out his little leather-bound field journal and wrote one line:
Day One: I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.
Behind him, something knocked twice on the exterior wall. Sharp. Rhythmic.
He froze. Then slowly looked toward the window. Nothing but trees and shadow.
Somewhere down the hall, Granger yelled:
“If that’s the skunk ape again, shoot it in the ass and tell it the trapline’s tomorrow.”
Isaac blinked.
Then sighed.
And got up to find the kitchen.
He had to admit—he half expected weird in his life.
Weird had followed him since he was born. Lurking behind corners. Whispering through static. Peeking out of fog just long enough for him to know something was there.
Isaac Bellamy was a registered D-Class Psion. That meant his psionic talents weren’t just anecdotal—they’d been studied, tested, measured. Repeatable and codified, though just barely. The kind of classification that got you a laminated card, a government number, and the occasional awkward phone call from someone in a sharp suit asking, “Have you noticed any recent increases in sensitivity to interdimensional bleed?”
He was what they called a Sensitive-Type.
Not the most glamorous label.
He didn’t bend spoons. Didn’t throw cars. Didn’t dream the future or set his coffee on fire with his mind. But he could feel when something was wrong. Not wrong like a gas leak—wrong like a child’s drawing that moved when you weren’t looking. Wrong like the smell of wet fur in an empty elevator. Wrong like—
Well. This place.
His primary ability was a form of anomaly perception. He sensed presence—energies, entities, phenomena that weren’t supposed to be here. A sixth sense that prickled like static behind the eyes. Sometimes it came as a flash of emotion. Sometimes a scent. Once, at age nine, it came as the sudden, overpowering memory of drowning… right before a basement wall collapsed and flooded the laundry room.
He’d been sent to training. Government-funded programs. Fringe science instructors with too many rings and too little budget. They taught him about crystals that hummed under stress, psi-resonant metals, and esoteric theory that made quantum biology look like kindergarten.
He’d even manifested a few minor offshoot powers—the ability to detect residual psychic impressions in objects, and, once in a blue moon, a kind of empathic ping that let him sense extreme emotion at a distance. Useful, if a little overwhelming in public bathrooms.
But they told him—kindly, but firmly—that he wasn’t “cape material.”
No costume. No league membership. No heroic codename on a shiny card.
Just a gentle D-class. The kind you don’t put on the battlefield. The kind you stick in a lab with shielding and coffee.
And that had been fine. Better than fine, honestly.
Isaac had found joy in cryptobiology—the study of the rare, the unprovable, the strange-but-maybe. While others chased stardom or supervillains, he chased fossils and field reports. He followed cicada hatching patterns that overlapped with phantom sightings. Compared DNA samples of chupacabra remains to undocumented bat lineages. Developed classification models for creature types that only existed in the gaps between myth and footage.
And now here he was.
Shoved into a ranger outpost in the middle of nowhere, being told not to touch the freezer and to avoid fawn-things.
Maybe it wasn’t the career path he’d expected.
But deep down—beneath the training, the disappointment, the rationalism—Isaac felt it.
A prickle at the base of his spine. A pressure in the air.
This place was wrong. Not threatening. Not hostile. Just… tuned to a different frequency.
He stood in the center of the bunk room and exhaled slowly.
Then he felt it. A subtle resonance—like an echo of a whisper in a dream you hadn’t had yet. The faintest sense of being watched, not with malice, but with curiosity.
He turned.
Nothing there. Just the bunk. The window. The trees.
But the air was humming.
And Isaac Bellamy smiled, just a little.
“Okay,” he said softly to the Kitchen, “Let’s get weird.”
Isaac was halfway to the kitchen—following the smell of coffee and something he hoped wasn’t boiled jerky—when Ranger Granger’s voice snapped from the hallway behind him.
“Good. You found a bed. You can get the tour later. Follow me, Boot.”
Isaac spun, startled, then nodded quickly. It was only partly because this grizzled man radiated the energy of a park ranger crossed with a drill sergeant. The other part? Granger genuinely intimidated him.
Granger moved with clipped efficiency, not looking back as he marched out a side door and toward a squat building that looked like a cross between a library, an old ranger archive, and a bunker. Mossy stone façade, high narrow windows, and the faint electric hum of servers inside. There was even a weather vane shaped like a jackalope.
Inside was a chill air—paper, ozone, and coffee that had been sitting since who knows when. Bookshelves lined every wall, most sagging under the weight of too many field guides, lore compilations, and ring-bound incident logs with hand-labeled spines. At the far desk sat a small, mousy woman in an oversized CCOD hoodie and glasses thick enough to stop a laser.
She didn’t look up, just nodded. “Morning.”
Granger grunted, “Mornin’, Tilly,” without slowing.
Isaac gave her a polite smile and a tiny wave as he followed, but she was already back to typing, muttering something about “taxonomical irregularities in squonk mucus viscosity reports.”
Granger stopped at a long reading table beneath a buzzing light fixture, grabbed a few battered tomes from the nearest shelf, and dropped them with a dull thud in front of Isaac.
Isaac looked down.
Fearsome Critters.
Fearsome Critters of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts.
Illustrations in charcoal ink. Old printing. One of them still had bark lodged in the spine.
Isaac blinked. Slowly.
“Is… is this a joke?”
Granger didn’t laugh. Didn’t even smirk. He just grunted and narrowed his eyes like a hawk sizing up a rabbit.
“No.”
He hooked a thumb toward the books.
“Your first assignment is what we call the Fearsome Critters Unit. And I don’t have time to burn daylight I could be using to teach you a thing or two.”
Isaac frowned. “Wait—you’re trying to say my job is to chase after stories made up by bored lumberjacks?”
Granger leaned in.
Just a few inches.
But it was enough for Isaac to feel the weight behind those eyes. Cold. Sharp. Patient in the way wolves were patient.
“No,” he said, voice like frost over broken gravel.
“I’m telling you to get your head out of your ass and listen—unless you want to get your guts ripped out by a Hidebehind.”
Isaac said nothing.
He sat up straighter and gave a single, slow nod.
Granger finally leaned back and let out a long breath. The kind that came after yelling at rookies, watching them not die, and deciding to give them one more shot.
“First off,” Granger said, tone lowering to something closer to calm, “you think the stories are a joke because you’re taking them too damn literally.”
He tapped a finger on the book cover.
“You ever read a medieval bestiary? Stuff from ancient scholars? They didn’t draw lions right either. Called hyenas bone-thieves. Described rhinos like armored pigs. You know why?”
Isaac shook his head.
“Because the damn things existed, but they didn’t know how to explain what they were seeing. Didn’t have the words. The science. The language.”
Granger’s voice softened, just a little. “What on Earth makes you think this is any different?”
Isaac glanced down again at the drawings—long-legged things with backwards knees, creatures with whip-tails and eyes that blinked out of sync.
“First rule of working for the CCOD,” Granger said, “is this: nearly every story you’ve ever heard? Half-right. Half-wrong.” He jabbed the table with a calloused finger.
“And the half that’s true is the half that’ll kill you.”
Ranger Granger turned back to the shelves, grabbed a three-ring binder the size of a car battery, and dropped it on the table in front of Isaac with a solid thunk.
“That’s why,” he said, “before I even think about putting you on the trail, you’re learning about these so-called ‘creations of bored lumberjacks,’ Boot.”
Isaac blinked at the binder. Its cover was cracked faux-leather, and the yellowing label inside the sleeve read:
FIELD LOG: FEARSOME CRITTERS, NORTH AMERICAN RANGE – VOL. I
(PROPERTY OF CCOD, ZONE D – RANGER GRANGER’S COPY – DO NOT REMOVE)
Weirdly comforting.
Isaac exhaled. Truth be told, he was relieved they were starting with book work. Research? That was his jam. Give him a taxonomic challenge over a night hike any day. He ran his fingers over the old binder’s edge and opened it slowly. Inside were field reports, sketches, inked symbols, and pages marked with warnings like "Extremely shy, extremely fast, extremely pissed." It was half biology journal, half wilderness spellbook.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Granger crossed his arms and began to lecture—if you could call it that. More like storytime from a man who’d lived through half of it and bled through the rest.
“The things we classify under Fearsome Critters are animals—of a sort. Not natural to our world. Not native. They’re from a place magical types call Otherworld.”
Isaac perked up at the term. He’d heard it before—whispers in parapsychology journals and old druidic translations—but never in official documentation.
Granger continued.
“Back in the 1800s, something happened. Magical folk call it a Ley Line Storm. Some kind of cross-dimensional harmonic that lit up the Earth’s geomantic grid like a damn telegraph wire. Ripped holes in reality along fault lines of energy.”
Isaac’s eyes widened. “Dimensional instabilities?”
“Exactly. Tears between here and there. Between Earth and Otherworld. And through those rips?” Granger tapped the binder.
“Things came crawling through. Walking, slithering, flying—whatever passed for locomotion in their native biome.”
He paused to grab a thermos off the side table, poured himself something dark and bitter-smelling.
“We didn’t know what to do with them. Folk back then didn’t have the science or the terminology—so they told stories. Lumberjack tales. Campfire legends. Fearsome Critters. Some of them were cute. Some were horrifying. All of them were real.” Isaac leaned in, fascinated now despite himself. “And that’s… most of what we deal with?”
Granger nodded once. “Most. Not all.”
Isaac opened his mouth to ask—but Granger held up a finger.
“A few came over other ways. Wand-wagglers—your wizards and witches—sometimes summon things they can’t put back. Other creatures snuck in with European settlers—Old World stuff, fey beasts hitchin’ rides in bloodlines or salt barrels or cursed heirlooms.”
He took a sip of whatever tar-like brew was in the thermos and grimaced.
“But the bulk of ‘em? They arrived when the ley lines blew like a popped boiler. Think of it like an invasive species event—but instead of cane toads or zebra mussels, you get tree-dwelling nightmares with seven tongues and opinions about jazz.” Isaac blinked. “Wait, is that… literal?”
Granger didn’t smile. “You’ll find out later. Damn thing hums Miles Davis when it’s content. Wakes up if you try to record it.”
Isaac let that settle; he still wasn't sure how much of this was true or hazing but didn't ask.
Then slowly nodded.
“I assume I’ll be getting a primer on ley lines and Otherworld geography?”
“Eventually. First, you learn what’s trying to eat your liver in this region. Then we’ll talk metaphysics.”
Granger jabbed the binder with a thick finger.
Granger dropped into the seat across from him and folded his arms. His voice came low and stern:
“Let’s make this simple. We start with A and work our way to Z. When you’re done, we’ll see how much stuck.”
He jabbed the massive binder again with a calloused finger. “You’ve got three days, Boot. That’s how long I’m giving you to cram every page of that before we head into the field.”
Isaac opened his mouth to ask how many entries that entailed—but Granger cut him off with a glare that had probably cowed cryptids.
“After that? I want you up at 0400 hours. And just so we’re clear—if you’re not early, you’re late.”
Isaac cracked open the Binder and started to read, he only had three days before he would be in the field and if half of what Grander implied was true knowing what he was dealing with out there might just keep him alive.
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