Author's note: Welcome to my latest story! I don't plan on this being one of my longer fics, but it will set in motion an ongoing story arc that I hope to use in future works. Thanks for everyone for reading and please review, follow and favorite if you like it!

July 28th, 2018

Kirkland, WA

Ford always felt uncomfortable in restaurants, even in a "casual" lakeside one with $40 steaks and $15 cocktails. He hated spending money on things as frivolous as fancy food. He didn't like dressing up or shaving with an actual razor blade (burnt stubble would just raise questions that non-family members wouldn't understand). And he didn't like the inevitable stares and whispers whenever someone noticed his polydactylism.

Nonetheless, it was a nice summer day with an old friend with some tantalizing information about an old mystery. Even the food he'd ordered, a fillet of sole with red wine, wasn't bad, though he found it obnoxiously overpriced. And that made up for any awkwardness.

He watched Pauline Dietrich, now in her early fifties, sitting across from him, scarfing down shrimp tacos with a marked lack of elegance. She looked the part of a film noir femme fatale, with her faded blonde hair, a pinched, severe face and an alluring dark dress, but these were offset by her harsh Chicago accent and trucker's vocabulary.

"Did you ever wonder what would have happened if...?" Ford asked, unable to finish.

"If you hadn't vanished into another dimension for thirty fucking years?" she completed the thought, licking some sauce off her chin. "All the time, Ford. But I figure it's not doing either of us any good to think about it."

"Were you ever married?" he asked hesitantly, tapping his fingers on the table.

"Once, or twice. Who keeps track? You know how it is. You meet a guy who says he was abducted by the same alien creatures as you, you bond, you have hot sex, then you get married. Before you know it he's chasing you around the house with a handgun claiming that you're an extraterrestrial pod person."

Ford stared blankly at her, not sure if she was joking or not.

"Anyway...yeah, that didn't work out. But I got a decent alimony payment out of the deal, so it doesn't bother me."

"Well, I would say an accusation of being a pod person isn't grounds for divorce," Ford argued. "Certainly such disputes and misunderstandings could easily be cleared up through careful, reasoned dialogue..."

"You would think that, but not really," Pauline said. "I don't know what the aliens did to Brad, but...he was not right in the head. Careful, reasoned dialogue was beyond his capabilities."

"That's not unknown, though it isn't necessarily common. People experience all kinds of traumas..."

"Sure, I had headaches and nightmares and weird flashbacks and Missing Time as a result of my experiences all the time. But that was different. I didn't hurt anybody as a result. I don't wish Brad any harm, I hope he got better, but I couldn't live with it. And I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't insinuate that I'm some kinda bitch for not standing by him."

"I'm not insinuating anything," Ford said defensively. "I'm in no position to lecture anyone about relationships. Even before the Portal...it wasn't exactly my strong suit."

"Yeah, you're right. You thought Arby's in the back of a van was a hot date."

"Hey, where else can you get a cheap roast beef sandwich?"

"My fridge."

Ford smiled at this, happy that they'd recaptured some of their old repartee, despite not seeing each other in decades. He and Pauline had known each other off and on through the years, attending UFO conventions and alternative science expos. And for a brief time, a few months not long before Ford's disappearance, they had been a couple.

Pauline, originally from Palatine, Illinois, was an alien abductee who'd been taken at least four times by aliens in her childhood, first at age nine, most recently at age seventeen. Or so she claimed. Ford didn't see any reason to doubt her, though her stories often seemed rehearsed and excessively detailed, down to her recitation about the weird implant scar near her bellybutton. Either she was authentic or a really, really good faker. Ford was intrigued by her stories and her boisterous personality, and they started dating.

She often claimed to be traumatized by her experience, but Ford didn't see much of that, aside from her nightmares during the times they slept together. Which were uncomfortable (they were more night terrors than regular nightmares, complete with screams and thrashing and grabbing), but preferable to being alone. Something had definitely gone wrong with her, something which her wild, shaggy haircut and tough girl attitude could only hide so much.

Mostly they'd broken up because Pauline didn't much care for the sciency side of her experience. Or Ford's handling of it, anyway. He asked her endlessly about the abduction, forcing her to recite details she'd gone over a thousand times, whether at home or in car rides or over dinner or even, to her chagrin, in bed. At first she was flattered by the attention, then she quickly grew bored and frustrated by the interrogations, especially coming from her boyfriend. After awhile, it seemed that Ford regarded her more as a specimen than a significant other or even a person, and his charms faded for her.

And so they broke up, after Ford came over to her place and asked to see the implant, which she claimed to have kept in her bedroom. A shouting match and a coffee mug thrown at Ford's head ended their relationship.

And he disappeared shortly afterwards, having made no effort to apologize or reconcile with Pauline. Ford thought about her often, though she was very, very far down his list of regrets.

Pauline, having gotten in touch with McGucket, gained some loose idea of what happened, but didn't care enough to follow up closely. Though for some reason, she thought about him a lot. Maybe a guy you date when you're young seems a lot better than the jerkoffs and jackasses you date when you're older.

And yet here they were, thirty-five years later, not quite reconciled but already comfortable with each other, brought together over a random call and a mutual interest in the Strange.

"You contacted me about the Snallygaster," Ford said. "What made you think of me? How did you even know I was back in this dimension?"

"You were in the paper about that business with Preston Northwest," Pauline reminded him. "Glad to see you're using your nerd powers to do some good. One fewer shit heel in Washington, the better, I say. But it made me wonder why the hell you hadn't gotten in touch with me, if you've been back all this time."

"So...is there a Snallygaster?" Ford asked suspiciously. "Or is this all a pretext to...?"

"To get into your pants?" Pauline scowled. "Ha! Don't flatter yourself, Fordsy. You were a stiff three decades ago and I can only imagine three decades jerking off in the Multiverse didn't make you any more virile."

"Don't call me Fordsy," Ford muttered. The nickname reminded him of someone far less pleasant.

"But no, I have a friend who lives in DC and they wrote me about a recent sighting of this Snallygaster thing. It was a legend I was dimly aware of from my UFO days, but I never thought it was real. Just seemed like one of those weird old wives' tales or folk myths that gets passed down by the gullible."

"I've always wondered that myself," Ford said thoughtfully. "I try to keep an open mind about paranormal phenomena and interdimensional beings - I've seen so much weirdness in this dimension alone that I'm not about to reject anything out of hand. But so much turns out to be hoaxes or fakes or misinterpretations of perfectly natural phenomena and animals that it's hard not to be discouraged."

"Yeah," Pauline said, passing him a newspaper clipping. "Though this seems pretty concrete to me."

Ford skimmed the clipping, which had a blurred picture of a huge, flying creature flying towards the camera. The headline read:

SNALLYGASTER FOUND?

Maryland myth flies again

"You know the Snallygaster, I assume?" Pauline asked.

"Yes, it's supposed to be a dragon or a flying serpent that lives in rural Maryland and West Virginia. Supposedly dates back to German colonists who gave it its name. Supposed to be half-reptile, half-bird, with a sharp beak, weird tentacles and a piercing, supersonic scream. Feeds on people and livestock."

"Sounds pretty out there to me," Pauline said.

"Yeah, but I've seen stranger things out in Gravity Falls, believe me. Heck, my brother and our niece and nephew found a whole nest of petrified dinosaurs under an old mine!"

"Remember that convention we attended in, was that December 1981?" Pauline prodded. "They had a lecturer from INFO blather on and on and on about the history of this thing and tying it together with all these weird dragon and serpent myths from the Mid-Atlantic states. Something about a serpent in western Pennsylvania so big it ate a one-room schoolhouse, or all those giant snakes in Gettysburg...all manner of strangeness. Gets swept under the rug because of Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster, but no less common."

"I'm guessing that's why you thought of me?" Ford asked, still suspicious, still looking at the clipping.

Pauline sighed and heaved her shoulders, playing with her necklace.

"Maybe you were a little right...I did want to see you again," she admitted. "And I guess this gave me an excuse. Still, imagine if you could catch this thing and prove it was real! It would be the find of the century."

"I might not go that far," Ford grumbled. "I mean, I shut down an apocalypse a few years ago...But, this certainly piques my interest. You know a way to a man's heart, Pauline."

"Guess I'm still good for one thing, if nothing else!" she said. "Maybe we can even work together!"

"I'd like that," Ford said. "Could always use a partner, especially an old friend."

"Plus you'll need someone to keep you grounded when you aren't out there chasing beasties."

"I do perfectly fine on my own," Ford insisted. "But you've got yourself a deal."

And the two of them shook hands across the table. Ford smiled, happy at the opportunity to track an elusive beast and rejoin an old friend. At the very least, he thought, it would be a change of scenery.

As their dinner wrapped up, a boyish thirty-something man across the way handed the waiter his credit card. He studied the couple and took some notes on a napkin, which he slipped into his pocket. As soon as the waiter returned, he excused himself and went into the lobby to make a phone call.

"Yes, she is here," he said. "Just like we expected. She's in contact with Stanford Pines."

"Pines?" a gravelly voice barked on the other end. "That name sounds familiar."

"There are two twin brothers, both of whom live out in rural Oregon. One is kind of a huckster, and probably no threat to us. The other - this man - is a scientist who specializes in abnormal, supernatural kind of stuff."

"A crank then?"

"Very much so! But cranks sometimes stumble across things that they aren't meant to see, too. And unlike other people, they keep digging. And we can't rely on people knowing that they're cranks and dismissing them when they find stuff."

"Especially not...Shit, this is the guy who brought down Preston Northwest, right?"

"I believe so. Makes him even more dangerous."

"Hmm." Silence on the other end.

The man at the restaurant watched a small boy run past his feet with his frantic mother in pursuit, apologizing as she scooted past. He nodded and smiled indulgently as he waited for a response from his contact.

"All right," the answer finally came. "Keep an eye on him. We don't want people like these to know what we're working on."

"Understood."

"We're trying to rewrite the entire history of the United States, and we can't have some flying saucer fanatics standing in our way. If they can expose a small-time swindler like Northwest...well, we don't want to worry about what they could do with something that's actually important."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Keep an eye on those two. This Smelly Gas thing is just the sort of wild goose chase that should keep them occupied while we prepare. Keep them investigating as long as you can. Throw them a bone, help them out, whatever. Just make sure that they stay busy while we do our work."

And the phone hung up. Just as the call ended, the man spotted Ford and Pauline exiting the restaurant. He ducked into a corner as they passed...it wouldn't do him any good if they recognized him here, before he returned to Maryland where he was needed.

There was important work to do. And if he needed some kind of weird flying dragon to help, so much the better.