The further up the trail led, the less discernable it became. Fresh snowfall over the unfamiliar woods made the trek difficult, and the townsfolk had little more than a passing idea of where the potentially cryptid-inhabited cave was. But Ford managed. He'd survived the snowdrifts of the Dimension of Ice for nearly four months, after all; a day hiking the in sunny, barely freezing temperatures could be a vacation, comparatively.

It was quiet. Snow and twigs crackled beneath their feet; occasionally, a small critter rustled somewhere amongst the trees. Usually, Stan's incessant chatter overpowered the anomaly tracker. The device's beeping made his brother's continued silence all the more pointed. Ford resituated the scarf over his nose and continued walking.

Anomaly 122 is some sort of mountain-dwelling, snow-and-ice affiliated cryptid allegedly living in the pine forests near the coast of the Hudson Bay. The locals have indicated that there is something frightening the hikers, somewhere deep in the woods, but none have mentioned the creature entering town or attacking large groups of people. Typical sorts of rumors, but, as previous research has shown, they're usually right. We'll be bracing the chill of sub-Arctic winter frost at some point today, whenever S decides to get ready. I'll be furious if we miss the precious daylight…

"We should be getting close," Ford murmured. Habitually, he glanced at the anomaly tracker on his wrist, despite its beeps making the same sentiment abundantly clear, even through the layers of coat and gloves that obfuscated it. "Maybe half an hour more?"

Stan didn't answer.

"Hopefully, the sunlight lasts."

Stan still refused to respond.

Though the disgruntled boots stomping through the snow nearby indicated that his brother still walked behind him, Ford spared a glance to check. It wouldn't be the first time a yeti had eaten someone following him and then stalked him until hunger struck again. This, fortunately, wasn't one of those times; Stan trudged behind him, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his new coat. He seemed to be focusing all his energy on ignoring Ford.

Sighing, the older twin returned his attention to the trail. "At least we both have flashlights this time, huh?"

Yielding no acknowledgement, Ford shook his head. His brother could be so petulant.

The creature, as far as the rumors would have it, seems to do little more than creep about the shadows and watch the hikers on the trails. None of the stories have indicated that it even wants to interact with humans, let alone cause them any harm. Of course, that doesn't mean that I've decided to go into the woods unarmed. Since our time in Hurricane, S has become far less insistent on the matter of not carrying firearms. I had every intention of arming myself again, regardless of his "permission," but it was nice to avoid another argument.

The sun well passed its zenith by the time the twins encountered the cave. It had been farther off the trail than any of the townsfolk had estimated and hidden behind a particularly dense thicket of evergreens. If not for his anomaly tracker's insistent beeping, Ford surely wouldn't have found it.

Ford approached the mouth of the cave first, cautiously investigating for any signs of danger. Some tracks, far too long and thin for typical woodland fauna, trailed from within; as they had been mostly covered by the previous night's snowfall, Ford couldn't identify them with any certainty.

Dauntless, he entered the cave. His boots clomped against the felsic flooring, his footsteps a metronome marking his movement. Hardly a dozen steps in, the sunlight ceased; Ford withdrew a flashlight from the depths of his coat, clicked it on, and surveyed the space.

It was empty, unsurprisingly, and spacious, with only a few stalactites forming near the walls. Ford proceeded deeper into the cave, watching everything but his feet, scouring the walls and floor for any indication of life. Whatever normally traversed through this area had claws; thin, shallow scratches marked distinct paths inward and outward. Curious trait for a docile creature.

Another light flicked on behind him. Stan's flashlight tended to mimic the movements of his own, perhaps in an effort to be helpful for the first time that day. Ford found himself smiling—for nearly locating and documenting another cryptid, and for the end of his little brother's tantrum—until the second light listed aside, eventually disappearing entirely somewhere behind him.

"Stanley, please." Ford sighed and glanced back to his brother. Stan in no way acknowledged that he had spoken; his light and attention focused near his own feet. As Ford made to question, he saw what had given Stan pause.

Fresh blood had pooled near a stalagmite; it wasn't a lethal amount of blood, but enough to imply significant injury. Some of the dark liquid had smeared, as though whatever bled out had been dragged away, and a few clawed footprints trailed deeper into the cave.

Carnivorous, if not omnivorous, and apparently non-hibernating. There were old bloodstains, but there were also many fresh ones, indicating that the creature had been recently active. Someone in town had indicated that, at this time of year, deer were common prey for human and animal hunters alike. Perhaps the creature stalks hikers and hunters, mistaking them for its typical food source?

Ford lost track of time in the darkness, walking slowly toward the back of the cave, where the potential cryptid must have nested, trying to find anything noteworthy in the emptiness. A faint, sharp smell hung in the air, something passingly familiar that he couldn't identify through the thick scarf wound around his face. Sounds resonated loudly: the anomaly tracker beeping fast, their footsteps thudding against the rocky floor, water dripping somewhere outside the range of their flashlights, Ford's voice echoing with the occasional comment. Stan's silence stood all the more poignant against the repeated sounds.

"This cave reminds me of the one I lived in during my stay in the Dimension of Ice."

Stan said nothing.

"Odd that we haven't heard the creature." Ford spared a glance back. When it became apparent that Stan was still adamantly avoiding his brother's look, he rolled his eyes and returned his attention to the path illuminated by his flashlight.

If they could still see the sun, Ford imagined that it would barely be peeking over the horizon. Ford watched the shadows carefully, seeking some sign of the creature—skittering movement, eyes peering out from the darkness, anything, really—but to no avail. Only the shadows of the stalagmites shifting as the light passed over them and the occasional dark stain. He wondered how deep the cave went, where this cryptid could possibly be hiding in the vacuous space, where his brother's flashlight had gone—

"Stanley?"

There was no answer, only the muffled beeping from his wrist and a distant dripping.

Ford frowned. "Stanley?"

When, again, he received no response, Ford scoured the cave with his light. Frustration and anxiety welled in the back of his throat, escaping him as a strangled, guttural noise. "Stanley, this is no time for your shenanigans—"

"Hey, Sixer." Stan's call was in no way urgent, fearful, or even amused. If anything, it was a little bit too loud, but otherwise completely uninterested.

Ford's flashlight flicked immediately downward. Amidst the old blood coloring the area, Stan knelt on the ground, more than a few paces to his right, his attention squarely focused on the cave wall and a tighter collection of scratch marks.

"Perhaps you'd like to warn me next time you disappear into the darkness." Arms folded, Ford moved toward his brother, stopping behind him. "I refuse to let you make a habit of this nonsense."

Again, Stan completely ignored him, instead gesturing to the words etched on the low part of the wall; in his hand was a blue baseball cap that Ford was reasonably certain wasn't his brother's. Ford leaned closer, placing a hand on Stan's shoulder to steady—

Stan yelped, jerked aside, and dropped the flashlight. When he realized that it was only Ford, he swore, loudly. "Shit, Ford, how about you give a guy some warning, huh?" His breathing slowed to its usual pace and his hand released its death grip on his heart. "Sneaking up on me in a dark cave—lucky I didn't have a damn heart attack…"

Ford blinked. "What are you talking about? I'm the only thing making any noise!"

"You're gonna have to speak up, Sixer, I can't hear a—oh."

"Oh?"

For the fourth time in the last minute, Stan ignored his brother. He instead stripped his gloves off, resting them on the ground beside him, then did the same with his red cap. He finagled with a piece in his ear; when he spoke again, he no longer shouted.

"You were saying?"

Ford balked as he watched his brother bundle up again. "Was that—what was—Stanley, is that why you've been ignoring me all day?!"

"Have you been talking all day?" Stan shrugged and retrieved the flashlight. "I was wondering why it was so quiet. Say anything interesting?"

"How long has your hearing aid been off?!" Ford's shout shook the cave.

"I dunno. I guess I didn't turn it on when we went into town."

"Of all the childish—"

Stan waved off his brother's rant. "Yell at me later, Poindexter." His flashlight dipped downward, again illuminating the words on the ground. "Come see if this note makes any sense or if we need to be worried about some kind of lunatic hiding out down here."

Still fuming, Ford knelt beside him. He redirected his attention to the scratches. Messily carved with an unsteady hand, the words were almost illegible; after a few moments, Ford managed to interpret the marks: My brother is not a monster. He frowned.

"It could be anything, I suppose," he mused, his outrage quelling instantaneously. Quietly, he considered the message aloud. "Though we are a fair distance from the trails, it's not inconceivable that the message would be left by a hiker or a hunter, but why? And when? To what end? There must be some particular circumstance to have prompted such a comment. Even in an advanced state of madness… The handwriting, if one could consider it as such, doesn't appear to have the usual ticks of mania—the letters are shaky and malformed, but each is deep, purposeful, and the strokes tend to move in the same direction…"

"So, what?"

Ford shook his head. "There's not enough information to draw any sort of conclusions. Most likely, it's irrelevant to our research."

"And this?" Stan held the baseball cap out to his brother. "It was just sitting there in the blood."

Ford took the hat and cast a cursory glance over it. Faded, worn, entirely unremarkable, the cap yielded no indication of its origin or the purpose of its presence. He handed it back to his brother. "Irrelevant, as far as I can tell. Perhaps related to the message on the wall, but unimportant to our investigation."

His hearing aid! Off, all day! What would have happened had we been separated? S is clearly developing a habit of disappearing during our investigations—what if I had been injured in his absence? He would have had no idea! One argument and he endangers us both with his petulance! What would have happened if he hadn't heard…?

The sharp smell had become more potent, though its identity remained elusive. Deep within the cave, the path split: the path to the right seemed to descend, while the path on the left ascended. Ford considered the different directions. There was precious little information for him to use in his extrapolations; he wasn't even positive that the creature they sought was a cryptid. He had enhanced the tracker's weirdness sensitivity in Potters Springs, after all. They could, for all he knew, be chasing a particularly curious fox or a day bat. (This dimension had day bats, didn't it? Other than the eye bats indigenous to Gravity Falls, of course.)

He ignored Stan's impatient noises—tapping foot, disgruntled hems and haws—as he weighed the options. A solid plan would prevent them from endlessly wandering through this foreign cave until overcome by darkness and death. His brother was just so short-sighted…

In his frustration, Ford became acutely aware that he was being watched. He scoured the shadows for the eyes he felt upon him, his flashlight flitting erratically, until it landed on the source of his paranoia.

It shouldn't have been alive in that emaciated state, a humanoid creature with no musculature to hold the bones together. Its ashen, papery skin nearly camouflaged it against the cave wall, but its eyes glimmered green in the light. The cryptid remained crouched, eyeing the twins with suspicion, waiting for an indication of their intent.

"Fascinating."

Ford's awe was barely a breath, but it was enough to prompt the creature to scream and run on all fours into the darkness. The reverberation shook the cave. Ford didn't notice; he sprinted after the cryptid.

The right pathway dropped abruptly about a dozen yards deep. Ford managed not to break stride, though he still struggled to keep pace with the cryptid. For its skeletal build and unnatural stride, it moved with impressive speed and agility. It disappeared around a corner.

Ford fell with a clamor, hard, when he attempted to follow. Fortunately, the floor beneath him hadn't disappeared for long, only allowing him to fall a few feet onto shifting piles of small stones. He pushed himself to his feet; after taking stock of himself (nothing more than a few bumps and bruises), he investigated his surroundings.

As the light surveyed the space, Ford realized that he had been hasty in his assessment of the flooring. At least, amongst the assorted skeletons, he realized what the sharp odor accompanying the creature was.

Stanley would not help me escape from the pit of human remains until I swore to admit that I made a poor decision in chasing blindly after the creature, and that I was terribly misguided in my conjectures that the cryptid was docile. Though I refuse to acknowledge wrongdoing on the latter assertion—everyone I spoke with in town insisted that the creature had harmed no one! I had expected to encounter some sort of carnivorous deer or forest spirit—something easily manageable!

In addition to refusing to allow me to continue my research (honestly, you fall into one pit of decaying bodies and skeletons one time, and all of a sudden "it's too dangerous" for further study), S ranted and raved the entire trek back into town about how "irresponsible" and "reckless" this endeavor has been. The nerve! Two hours of this lecture, from a man who, in the last three months, has broken into at least 4 different buildings on as many occasions, gotten into a loud brawl with a half dozen drunken sailors, thrown himself headlong into the jaws of a sea beast, assisted a group of minors commit a felony trespass—among dozens of other criminally insane acts that would fill the rest of this volume.

When we finally returned to town, some hours after dark, his tune changed drastically. Over dinner at the local diner, S became particularly belligerent over the fact that we simply left the creature in the cave. He was furious at the idea that we could just allow a monster to continue to stalk the mountains here. It was like his frustrations in Hurricane—and just as annoying. He was absolutely insistent that we return in the morning to slay the creature.

(Of course, I couldn't agree, necessarily, to return for the sake of killing a little-documented cryptid, but I wasn't going to fight over returning to the creature's cave. All the sketches I've done of it are from memory, but something hasn't been captured right. I don't think it looks properly…frightened. Strange, certainly, but it seemed genuinely afraid when I encountered it.)

Before our discussion could become too heated, an older man, who had apparently been eavesdropping on our admittedly loud discussion, interrupted. He told us quite a bit about the wendigo (the notes are beside the drawings, opposite, if S allows me to keep them), but the most impressive thing he managed to do was end Stanley's childish insistence: when Stanley commented, again, that we ought to kill the creature, the man told him that it would be a fruitless endeavor. "The wendigo always returns. At least this time, it tries to leave us be."

(I did find his emphasis on "us" curious…)

The Stan o' War II bobbed in the harbor. Two lamps illuminated the small space: one above Stan's bunk, where he passively read through a well-worn book, and one at the desk, where Ford scribbled in his journal, alternately writing and drawing. Occasionally, Ford stole furtive glances at his brother, as if worried that Stan would peer over his shoulder at any point to protest what had been put on the page. When the complaint didn't happen (truthfully, Stan seemed completely unaware of his monitoring), Ford clicked his pen a few times and returned to his work.

The longer he wrote, the deeper his frown became; the deeper his frown became, the more frequent his glances became; the more frequent his glances became, the more his right eye hurt. Ford noticed none of his observational ticks until Stan snapped at him.

"What, Ford?"

"Hm?"

Stan huffed. "You've been writing about me since we got back."

"That's…" Ford coughed and glanced at his journal. "Not, uh, necessarily true."

"You're a terrible liar." Scowling, Stan lowered his book. "I get it, you're still mad about the journal. Sorry I'm ruining your research." He shook his head. "But I'm not wrong."

"Stanley—" Ford bit back the venomous response. Sighing, he crumpled in his chair. "Forget it. Just—just forget it. We're not having this argument again."

"No, of course not." Without acknowledging whether his brother noticed, he turned off his hearing aid and returned to his book.

Ford said nothing and continued sketching. He still couldn't get the wendigo's eyes quite right.

The Stan o' War II bobbed in the harbor. Early morning light shone into the cabin, progressively eliminating the need for the single desk lamp Ford had turned on hours ago. It had been a long night.

He'd been having more of those since their trip to Hurricane. Something seeped its way into his subconscious (something, as if he didn't know precisely who it was that still haunted him); sleep hadn't eluded him so conspicuously since his last visit to the Nightmare Realm. Ford's greatest wish was that he had something better to occupy the nighttime hours. There were only so many things he could do without waking his brother, only so many times he could read the same few books, only so much he could write.

"Ugh, why did you keep that thing?"

Ford groaned. He hadn't heard his brother stir. "For study," he answered into his journal.

Stan met his sigh with an equally disdainful huff. "Seriously, Poindexter?"

"It's from a possessed animatronic," Ford explained, curt. His brother had never been a particularly pleasant person in the mornings; he was torture when he woke up in a foul mood like this. "I'm curious if it shows any evidence of that. Maybe it's still possessed; who knows?"

"Yeah, that's impressive, a possessed ear from some ratty costume that's been rotting for twenty years." He could hear Stan rolling his eyes behind him. "Fascinating entry for your diary, there."

Turning over the once white bit of plastic in his hand, Ford forced himself not to rise to his brother's bait. He hated when Stan instigated him first thing in the morning. "It's not a diary, Stanley—why don't you find something to occupy yourself instead of hovering over me?"

Stan scoffed and shuffled away. His irritable footsteps stopped only a short distance away—their boat didn't provide enough space for effective storm-offs.

"It's like you want us to get caught," his brother lectured from the kitchenette. "Between the whole fucking confession you wrote in the journal and the damn trophy you took from the scene…" The angry rummaging in the cabinets ceased for a moment, shortly followed by the sputtering of their overworked coffee maker. "I don't know what space jail was like, but if it's anything like regular jail, I can't see why you're so excited to go back."

Ford scowled and threw his journal shut. Patience, especially when it came to his brother's antagonizing, had never been one of his gifts. "It wasn't a confession, Stanley, it was merely documentation of the supernatural phenomena we encountered." Frustrated, he tossed his pen at the table, for good measure. "And it's not a trophy, it's a sample for my research."

"Yeah? Well, in the hands of a prosecutor, that 'documentation' becomes evidence." Two ceramic mugs clanged against the counter and the cabinet slammed shut. "And in case you don't remember, I'm a dead man and you have a storied criminal record."

"Frankly, I'm shocked that you remember that."

A hot mug dropped onto the table beside him. Stan said nothing and left the cabin.

Ford sighed and picked up the mug, ignoring the liquid that had sloshed over the brim and onto the table. He sipped at the coffee, noting the stains on his papers. It was bitter.