#cryptid town

I'll admit, at first I truly did not care about anyone but the caldg expies in this story, but @hotwirrre proposed some cryptids to fill the main character slots and by god I have fallen in love with these three.

La Chupacabra has lived in the cryptid town (jayne floated the name hallowground which I'm probably gonna steal because that fucks like hell) since the nineties, when she was a reckless teenager draining every animal she could get her claws on. Got in real trouble with the local farmers and ended up being a pretty well known cryptid after being spotted by at least a dozen people in the span of a few months. She was humorously easy for Harigali's people to capture. One unguarded cow tied to a fence post with a few snares around it, and she was dangling helplessly before midnight. It's a miracle no civilians ever got her. Since joining the group she's taken on the name Valeria, which comes in handy when she's "in uniform" (disguised as a human via that little magic bracelet). Close friends are allowed to call her Chupes. She used to hate being "officially" called the goat sucker but now she just thinks it's funny. 

Valeria is one of Janus and Lily's most effective hunters because of her strength and speed, but god help her if she needs to do any smooth-talking or negotiation. As a bat-dog-monkey-thing, she subsists off of animal blood supplied by the Harigalis, who have connections in the meat packing industry. Honestly not a bad way to recycle some of the blood you get from slaughtering livestock. She'll always prefer it fresh out of the animal, but she'll take what she can get.

When she's not being sent on hunts (she gets sent on so many goddamn hunts she's getting too OLD for this) she spends her time napping, gnawing on the complimentary animal bones that sometimes accompany her blood deliveries, and bothering Lily for entertainment. Lily has tried many times to get her into various hobbies, but she lacks the patience and coordination for most of them. They aren't exactly friends, but given her love of eavesdropping and lurking in dark corners to watch gossip unfold, Val has become a lot less afraid of Lily and Janus than most of the other residents. Sure, they mean business when they threaten to skin anyone who blabs about the town's existence, but Janus also fawns over his wife like a lovestruck puppy, and Lily has a drawer in her desk that she only uses to stash cookies. They're still just people.

The Loveland Frog, who wants to take on a normal name but hasn't yet found one he likes (read: I haven't decided on this fucker's name but i KNOW it's gonna be something mundane. paul. greg. tony. etc), is the newest arrival to the cryptid town. He's been hopping around the wilderness evading capture since the seventies, and only recently got snatched up by Harigali's hunters. He was hesitant to leave the comfort of his nice little mud pit, but the stress of staying out of sight and dodging predators was starting to wear on him, and a safe place to settle down did sound nice. He's still getting used to his human disguise (talking is hard and five-fingered hands are so unwieldy and his skin feels so dry) and still trying to figure out the whole "living amongst other sentient life" thing. Making friends with Valeria and Dover has helped a lot, even if Val's antics and Dover's visions stress him out. Most things stress him out, really. He's just trying to stay in the bosses' good graces and resist his natural instinct to become a piss turret anytime he feels threatened. Which is often.

The Dover Demon, now known simply as Dover, has been with the town the longest out of the three of them. She's a unique case in that she actually sought them out and asked to join. There were a few reasons for this, all revolving around her ability to see into the future. Which would be a really useful skill if she could control it, and if the future wasn't constantly shifting, and if she was able to see more than a few seconds at a time, and if those few seconds weren't usually scenes of tragedy… You ever had SSRI-related brain zaps? Imagine that but every time you get one you see someone you know dying horribly. Or sometimes a cool dog you're gonna pet next week. But mostly the death.

It's a lot for one lady to deal with, so when she saw futures involving a network of creatures who were just as strange as her, she decided to cut out the middle man and just go find them. Now she's got plenty of friends and neighbors who always have her back when she's stuck between reality and the hypotheticals, and she's helped prevent a lot of potential mishaps. However the future vision also means Dover has. A difficult time. With many things. 

One of those things is decision making. Even the most insignificant choice could put blood on her hands (or hooves) later down the line. What if taking the long way home means she'll be too late to help someone avoid stepping on a burr that will give them an infection in a week? What if not taking the long way means she'll be home too soon to help them? What if having toast instead of cereal for breakfast leads to someone smelling that toast and deciding to have some as well but they forget about it and burn their house down? What if playing music at 55 volume instead of 54 disturbs someone who's trying to sleep and they don't get enough rest and tomorrow they doze off while they're driving and crash their car?

All of those scenarios sound insane. But she saw them. She saw the burning house and the totaled car and the sepsis. The chance of them happening is greater than zero. So maybe she'll just have cereal for breakfast. And maybe she'll linger outside her house for a while in case someone needs help cleaning a wound. And maybe she'll play her music at 45 volume just to be safe. 

Just to be safe.

Talking is also difficult, and not just because her natural form is incapable of speech. Words can have so many different meanings to so many different people, and if she gets it wrong it could be the first domino in a line that ends with something terrible happening. She speaks slowly, carefully, and sparingly. Every now and then, when someone is about to take a seemingly innocuous course of action, she simply says "Don't." One thing you learn fast in this town: if Dover tells you not to do it, you don't do it.

Connecting with people is a struggle as well, because the more time she spends with someone the more visions they appear in. She's seen Valeria ripped apart by wolves, impaled by wooden stakes, caught in bear traps, seen Loveland smashed under eighteen-wheelers, pecked bloody by vultures, strung up to dry in the sun. Some of those were before she'd even met them. Sometimes she looks at them and has to un-grieve for a second before she can interact. When they can tell she's in a state like that, they try their best to look calm and happy and alive until she comes out of it.

that was a lot of rambling can you guess who my favorite is

And of course I've already talked about Janus and Lily but I can ALWAYS say more about those two.

They live miles away from the cryptid town in a big fancy manor, safely hidden from the creatures they're essentially farming. Everyone in town is strongly discouraged from trying to contact them outside of "business hours" (the time when Lily is in town conducting research or working in her office) and it's heavily implied that if you try to track down and actually visit their mansion, you aren't coming back from that. There's a general understanding that they've got something going on out there, and that it's best for everyone if the cryptids stay out of it. 

(Dover has seen glimpses of what she doesn't realize is the inside of that mansion. She tries not to think about those visions.)

Most days, Lily spends time in town studying the cryptids– asking invasive questions about their biology, observing their behavior, taking notes on how they move and act and interact with each other. New arrivals find it off-putting, but the older residents are used to it. They figure part of the reason they've been brought into town in the first place is so she can gather data, and they aren't wrong. Lily is endlessly fascinated by these entities and what their nature can reveal about the Earth's unexplained phenomena. She wants to learn all she can from them, first by conducting field research, and eventually by putting them under the knife. And thanks to her beloved husband, she'll easily outlive every one of them, so she's got all the time in the world to sit back and watch.

Janus has been around for a very long time, but he has never found someone who dazzles him quite like Lily does. She's fearless and brilliant and ruthless and beautiful, she observes their menagerie with such a fierce hunger in her eyes, she revels in the profane act of carving up the town's fallen denizens like a cryptozoological butcher, she gets a thrill out of watching Janus devour what remains of them when she's done... He is hopelessly and completely in love with her, has been since the day they met. She owes her unnatural longevity to Janus harvesting the magic of various immortal cryptids and essentially concocting a potion of eternal youth for her. Lily was already not really young when she started using it, so she'll be eternally fifty-something instead, but the point is that they get to be together for as long as that magic keeps working.

despite the human shapes, the cryptids' diets remain in line with their true forms, so hallowground's got some very specific requirements for food. dover's a frugivore, valeria is hematophagous, and leon's an insectivore. val refrains from wreaking havoc on the local wildlife most of the time because the blood supplied by the harigalis is good enough, but she does still sneak a critter on occasion.