What in the World Was THAT?

There is no unseeing a cryptid.
Once you’ve seen one, you can see them all.
And it’s the first one that tends to be most traumatic.
Consider the case of Nathaniel Thorton, who, in 1892 in West Virginia, encountered a creature that would one day be called a sheepsquatch…

“I seen it there, crept up like it was on the barn where my sheep was, right after the rain stopped and the moon come out. The whole flock started in bleating and then a-screaming like hell done opened up wide. That’s when I saw that hideous thing, coming out the darkness and into the moonlight. I musta made a noise ’cause suddenly here it come at me, making this god-awful sound, and I beat it back up to the house. I only made it, I’m saying, ’cause it saw its reflection in a puddle and set about attacking that instead of chasing me to my bed. I locked the door, but I could still hear it head-buttin’ the mud for a good long hour.”

Not long after reporting this to the local sheriff, Thorton vanished along the Seneca Trail, taking nothing with him except clutching what his wife/widow described as “a pile of paper I never seen before.”

Whether you encounter a cryptid by chance, on purpose, or by luck—good or bad—that contact can spark what one researcher described as a “cosmic confluence” (LaVonne, Mapping What’s Off the Map, 1933), resulting in the discovery of a unique tome, one exclusive to the individual who saw the cryptid. This blank tome, colloquially called a “spellbook,” appears on the individual’s path in seemingly random locations.

The Mystery of Spellbooks

For all their varied appearances and presentations, these spellbooks have one thing in common: They are visual guides to the mythological, the legendary, the rumored, the unknown. For those who are of the correct caliber mindset and are mentally beyond just seeing “something strange,” these become functional physical storage facilities for what casters find during their hunts for cryptids.

But more importantly, they provide the incentive and, under more advanced circumstances, the means of interacting with those creatures.

On the condition of anonymity, one spellbook owner—who self-identify as a caster, as in one who casts spells—gave an interview to a researcher at UC Berkeley in 1995 in which she described a spellbook:

“They have cards in them. I can’t think of another word for them, but they’re not like playing cards or notecards or credit cards or something. They feel substantial, you know? Special. I’d been visiting friends up north, in Oregon, and I got separated from everybody else on this Mount Hood hiking trail. That’s where I saw this creature in the woods. It looked like—now, see, if you’re gonna look at me like that, I’m not going to tell you. 
Okay then. Never mind that, then. When we finally got back together, I didn’t tell anyone about what I saw. And when we got back to the hotel, there was this book in my room on the bedside table. Some room service, huh? It had slots in it where I would one day start putting the cards I have now. But it was weeks, and I was a thousand miles away from Mount Hood, before I started figuring out how to track down cards. And when I finally did, one of them was the creature from the woods. And when I touched that card, I could feel something. You know when your hand’s asleep and you touch it with your other hand? That prickling, like you’re feeling things from two different directions at the same time. It was like that. And when I covered it with my hand, something incredible happened…”

The individual cards open up a pathway—sometimes described as spiritual, sometimes as psychological, but always as “a gate”—that “brings the creature to the caster,” in the most rudimentary description possible. But this fails to fully incorporate the experience, as one caster tried to explain it to a researcher who had simplified it that way:

“Well, that’s almost it. It doesn’t seem to take away or affect or harm the cryptid at all. But it shows up, living and breathing, right in front of me. There it is. But instead of whatever untamed beast you might have known before, this one is different. I mean, all of its characteristics and all of its power are the same, but this one listens to you. Wait, it’s more than that. It’s deeper. This one that comes to you—it seems to actually have some of you in it.”

This, then, is the “mapping” procedure… and its outcome.

Mapping

Each “gate” card in a caster’s spellbook is an empty unmarked vessel, designed to serve a singular purpose: to map a cryptid.

Unlike the more common expression associated with “mapping” (for example, mapping the genome), the mapping casters perform is a kind of visual dissection and replication of a creature’s essence, not unlike a medical CAT scan. The Berkeley caster described essence:

“You ever met a celebrity? They carry themselves differently, like they know they’re being looked at, like they have a public face that they keep up. They have an aura, a bubble around them that feels like a completely different atmosphere. That’s the kind of feeling you get when you’re with a cryptid—the air is changed because it’s there with you.” 

This atmosphere, essence, is what casters want to “map,” capturing the essential spirit, presence, and being of a cryptid, intertwining it with some of the caster’s own essence, and replicating this new compound onto the card from their spellbooks.

That card, previously the proverbial blank slate, is now a container for this wholly unique essence, and it releases a form of the cryptid—as real and cognizant as the mapped original—that manifests at the caster’s behest. A portion of this new and functional essence serves to stabilize the card, which would be otherwise overcome by the power in the essence of the cryptid. Mapping is at the core of developing as a caster. Without it, the cards are useless and the spellbook technically empty. 

Call of the Wild Cryptids

There is a rivalry among some casters that creates an ever-evolving hierarchy based on successful mapping, expanded spellbooks, and control of their cryptids. This leads to periodic clashes between casters to establish territorial control, to prove dominance, or to settle personal vendettas. These clashes often result in casters losing cryptids, forcing them to rebuild their team of cryptids, assuming the caster is able to replace the shattered gate cards.

When not at odds, some casters have banded together to approach cryptids in their natural settings, each caster protecting the others while they take turns mapping the cryptid. Other casters expand the contents of their spellbooks through an unusual method: biological tracking, using family trees and DNA searches to locate distant relatives who might be casters themselves and then bartering for new cards from kin. Still others have taken to ambushing other casters mid-mapping, interrupting a rival’s efforts in order to map the cryptid for the aggressor’s own spellbook and keep the original caster from mapping it. As one veteran caster put it: 

“By fair means or foul, we all want the same thing. For some of us, it’s all fun and games, to the point of deliberately trying to limit who all has mapped a cryptid. And like coin collectors and stamp enthusiasts, there are always a few who wouldn’t give up their obsession if it were outlawed tomorrow. And they’d then become expert at creating fake dust covers to hide their spellbooks.” 

Still others approach their newfound talents for profit, bounty mapping in order to sell cards to less proficient casters. Given the nature of some of the cryptids mapped in this way and the potential for essence mismatch, such trades can prove disastrous should weaker casters be paired with stronger cryptids.

Advancing Caster Conflict

Because essence has no discernible limits, there is no shortage of possible cryptids for casters to map—yet clashes between casters are routine, often based on ego or pride. One rumored cause, however, has apparently generated anxiety among many casters: undocumented and heretofore unknown cryptids have apparently been showing up in very limited number of socially withdrawn casters’ spellbooks, inciting curiosity, greed, and selfishness among select casters. This has led to more frequent and more violent displays of force, as those who have found these rare cards do battle with those who hope to share in their value, even if they aren’t welcome to do so.

Advanced Caster Ambition

Despite the efforts of casters to keep their activities secret, stories—like cryptids—tend to grow from rumors to speculations to investigations. Among casters are those who continue to do research into lesser-known folktales, myths from diminished cultures, legends that have been transformed from their roots into pop culture status… and stories of cryptids that have been deliberately suppressed by groups or individuals.

These casters speculate that renegade, antisocial casters have, in fact, already located some of these “undiscovered” cryptids, mapped them, and then gone out of their way to destroy any and all societal resources that might lead other casters to those cryptids. In this way, researcher-casters say, bad actors in the world of casters are trying to keep select cryptids a secret from all other casters, making it more difficult for anyone to know:

Just how many are out there, waiting to be seen? 
As we said in the beginning…
There is no unseeing a cryptid.
Once you’ve seen one, you can see them all.

From What in the World Was THAT? by AUTHOR NAME REDACTED, The Enigma Explorer (Annual Edition), 2019