With a click of the mouse, the report was submitted.

Tristan sighed. His English project was finished, leaving him free to enjoy the rest of the night in peace.

The park having very good Wi-Fi was a godsend. Tiberius seemed to be well aware that his children would not want to work at the park for the summer, only to be forced back home by school, so he had taken the liberty of enrolling them in online classes, a kindness he had also extended to Tristan's friends. As long as they passed those classes, they could stay at the park as long as they wanted. Though, he was unsure that everyone else's parents had been kay with that idea, despite the fact that Tiberius had assured his son they were onboard with it. Food for thought, it was.

With the report submitted, and a little bit of time to kill before going to bed, Tristan decided to indulge in one of his few guilty pleasures. He quickly typed in a web address and hit the enter key. A moment later, text appeared on the screen, accompanying a web page.

Cryptid Watchers

Tristan smiled as he read the text. Time to see what had happened since he last signed on.

For the most part, nothing new. Apparently there were some reports saying that Mokele-mbembe had been spotted again in the Congo, though the video attached to the 'sighting' was clearly a fake. Stateside, someone was trying to organize another hunt for bigfoot, a mission Tristan felt would be unsuccessful.

For the most part, Tristan wasn't really a believer in Cryptids - they were beasts that were likely to be fictitious, after all, and if they were, scientists would probably have found them by now, using satellites or other modern instruments. Climate change, and mankind's own recklessness, meant that now, there was nowhere left for large animals to hide.

Well, almost nowhere.

Still, while Tristan did not believe most cryptids to be real, most did not mean all. Some creatures did seem reasonable enough for animals that could evade detection by mankind to this day, and some might still hide in the few mountains and forests left that remained untouched by mankind. For those few, Tristan was willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

Suddenly, a new 'news-flash', if one could call it that, appeared on the website's news-feed. It appeared that a new story had showed up. A cursory examination revealed that it was about someone named Ian Tanner. Tristan remembered he had been in the news a year ago, supposedly positing a claim that a carbonized-Tyrannosaurus skull had been the result of the animal being killed by a prehistoric dragon, which, supposedly, was a type of highly advanced scansoriopterid dinosaur. Apparently, he had just dismissed a video showing what was supposedly a real-life dragon, claiming it to be a fake.

Tristan had to agree with him there - the video was clearly a fake. At the same time, though, he was willing to give Tanner's hypothesis on living dragons to be true - it wouldn't be too unbelievable anymore, given the fact that scansoriopterids really did look like dragons. Of course, how they could breath fire, or get as big as Tanner was proposing, was a question that needed to be addressed. Oddly enough, the scientific community, who had initially dismissed his idea as ridiculous, seemed to now treat it with indifference.

Well, there was one way to see if he was right...

Tristan quickly dismissed the thought - even if dragons were real, the odds of the group encountering one were slim, to say the least.

Still, it was a possibility Tristan was willing to believe. For now, anyway.

Turning his attention back to time travel and cryptids, Tristan began to think over a theory he'd had since his first encounter with time travel:

Many cryptids had descriptions similar to those of prehistoric beasts. Mokele-mbembe matched up with sauropods, Bigfoot and Yeti with the Gigantopithecus, and the Loch-Ness Monster with plesiosaurs. Some had claimed that these were relic populations of extinct species, but the differences in habitat and time between where those cryptids lived and where the species they were said to resemble lived made this unlikely. The time portal, though, offered a more plausible solution.

It wasn't completely impossible for a time portal to occur naturally, especially since, according to some information Nigel had given to him, at the request of his father, it involved magnetism. This meant that it was entirely possible for there to be naturally occurring time portals. Expanding on that idea, it was entirely possible that creatures could have wandered through these portals and become trapped in the relative past or future. These oddities could, potentially, explain the existence of cryptids. Well, some of them, anyway.

Of course, to validate that hypothesis, he would need to find one of these time portals and gather evidence proving his claims. That would require both time, planning, assistance, and a lot of luck.

Maybe he should consider seeing if his college had a Conspiracy Club?

No, that would attract all the wrong kinds of attention, and make him look like a crazy teen. It would probably be better if he just asked his friends and siblings, who had ample reason to believe him, to help with his mission. Additionally, should they actually validate his hypothesis, he would be working with people who had experience dealing with prehistoric creatures, meaning that they would know how to react when confronted with one and minimize the risk involved for both parties.

Some people would call him crazy anyway, but they hadn't travelled back in time to rescue dinosaurs, with their first mission being one to rescue a tyrannosaur and a ceratopsian. or been hit by a Frisbee thrown backwards through time by their own father.

And, besides...

Neither of those events had been his first experience with time travel...

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AN: Going to update this and Inside Their World a few more times before I update the main story again, so enjoy!

Read and Review! This is Flameal15k, signing off!