Something was watching me. I could feel the pressure of observation even before I fully woke up. It was a particular kind of staring that made your skin decide it’s too small. Not the vibe of a phone camera or a poster of Einstein with his tongue out across the dorm room, no… it was the stare of a hungry predator. Patient. Interested. Unnervingly tense.

  I opened my eyes.

  Large, silver, cheeky moon-orbs hovered inches from my face, reflecting the pale morning light rays leaking through the stained-glass transom. They were dilated like a cat’s. Warm breath fanned my cheek. The freckled fuzz around her skull-muzzle smelled like pine and old, wet stones.

  “Mornin’, Ashy.” Starshade yawned, exposing massive canines that could bite a human neck in half in a single snap.

  I flinched back. “Gah—don’t do that. Don’t—face hovering and staring—no! Gawd the teeth.” I shuddered.

  “Buuuut you look so peaceful. Like a chicken rotisserie. M’ trying to figure out where to bite first.”

  “What?!”

  “Just kidding.” She laughed.

  “Totally normal thing to say to someone you just reunited with after thirteen years. Do you have any idea how creepy that is?"

  “Don’t befriend a creepy critter and then complain ‘bout their creepyness levels.”

  I sat up, putting some space between us. My heart hammered like I'd mainlined espresso. Shady stretched out on the bed, tail swishing in slow, lazy arcs. She looked too comfortable in my bed. Like she owned it.

  “Have you been living here for the past thirteen years?”

  “Nah.”

  “So where…”

  “Places.”

  The feathery tail swatted me.

  "You're worse than a cat with zoomies at dawn.” I said, pushing the black, feathered tail out of my face.

  She propped herself on an elbow. "Zoomies? Please. I'm the picture of restraint. Could've pounced hours ago when I woke up."

  “I feel very pounced on and smooshed already.” I huffed, picking up my tablet. The screen showed a few notifications from Dax. He'd sent a bunch of AI generated dog memes. All big black pups with captions like "Who's a good omen of doom?"

  I smiled, momentarily distracted from the unnerving reality of my situation.

  "What's so funny? Share with the class."

  "Just a friend reacting to your glamour shot. Thinks you're a hellhound or something. Spot on, really."

  “How about a nice doggo lick?” She asked, opening her mouth to present a tongue that was far too long for reasonability.

  “None of that.” I shoved her face away by the muzzle like you’d push a nosy cat off a keyboard.

  Soft. Warm. Way too many teeth.

  “Such mean.” She flopped onto her back. “Where’s my breakfast?”

  “You paying?”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Right, neither cryptids nor imaginary friends have cash.”

  “Yep.”

  We migrated downstairs.

  The Clifford mansion was just an old, mundane house in the daylight. Oak banister worn smooth by ghosts of hands over the centuries, Victorian wallpaper doing that faded-roses thing, the massive, rustic kitchen smelling like dust bunnies and mold.

  No cold spots, no portraits that followed you with their eyes. Just a fridge that hummed and wobbled like it was planning to escape and a toaster that listed to port like the Titanic that just encountered the iceberg.

  The only highly questionable thing around was Shady. Still tall as fuck, imposing and curvy, like someone had tried to design a monster for a video game but kept adding "make it sexier and taller” notes until the art department had a collective psychological breakdown.

  The coffee maker gurgled to life, filling the kitchen with the blessed scent of caffeine.

  Shady hopped onto a bar stool. It ominously creaked and wobbled under her form but held. "This place hasn't changed much. Still drafty and dusty as fuck.”

  “Right, Miss critical cryptid.” I leaned against the counter, studying her. "Seriously though, what are you? And don't give me that 'whatever you want me to be' nonsense.”

  "What? It's a perfectly valid answer." She spun on the stool, antlers barely missing the hanging pots. "I mean, what are you? A collection of atoms? A consciousness piloting a meat suit? An electrical engineer with commitment issues?"

  "I don't have commitment issues."

  “Sure, sure.” She coughed into her hand. “Totally failing to commit to our BFF promise.”

  I glared at her, struggling to remember what I promised my imaginary friend thirteen years ago. Arriving at nothing specific, I pulled the carafe out of the coffee maker. Shady remained perched on the stool, legs folded under her like a dark and gothic flamingo. “Stupid sexy cryptid hallucination.” I grumbled.

  Shady tilted her head, large fuzzy ears rotating like radar dishes. “Really committed to this hallucination bit though, hum?”

  “Denial’s cheaper than therapy,” I said, pouring coffee into two mismatched mugs I managed to unpack—one that said “World’s Okayest Engineer,” the other featuring a glow-in-the-dark unicorn vomiting a rainbow. I handed her the unicorn mug.

  She studied it. “This is aggressively… dumb. Aight, dis’ my new emotional support mug now.”

  “You’re aggressively persistent at avoiding my questions.”

  “Dis’ kitchen’s smaller than I remember,” she avoided my comment, sipping from the unicorn mug.

  “Everything’s smaller now,” I said. “Except the utility bills. And you. You're too large. The hell kind of steroids do they feed you in cryptid land?”

  She ignored my jibe and leaned on the counter, chin in claws, watching my every move like a human resources manager auditing my technique. I pointed the phone at her. A very large dog stood with paws on the counter, licking the coffee rim while unnervingly staring at me. The divergence between my eyes and the camera was slowly driving me up the wall.

  "Wait, can you even drink coffee?" I asked. “What if cryptids are coffee-bean intolerant or something?”

  "If I die, you can tell everyone you were right about me being imaginary."

  "That's not how that works. If anything, I’d sell your corpse to the circus to pay the bills.”

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  “Uh-huh. I suggest you make me breakfast before I decide to eat you.” She aggressively chewed on the edge of the unicorn mug.

  The kitchen was a rather open concept design compared to my previous student habitations. Cabinets revealed themselves to be full of canned goods grandpa hoarded. I rummaged for a bit, procuring out a pancake mix and a pan. “Pancakes?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “What’s your policy on maple syrup?”

  “I am pro-tree juice.”

  “Seriously, why are you here Shady? Don’t you have like a dark forest to haunt or something?”

  “Saw Mothman George’s podcast. It's called 'Lampshade Talk.' Really illuminating stuff ‘bout Omnithornia. Basically, I said fuck this noise, I gotta check on how my bestie’s doing. Turns out you’re back home, yay!”

  "So Omnithornia’s real?"

  "As real as Bigfoot's OnlyFans page where she sells bottled tail fur to desperate idiots for 5.99."

  Oh she was definitely screwing with me. I typed a general description of Shady into CrawdGPT asking the LLM what the fuck I was dealing with.

  The AI replied with:

  Here are the cryptids/legends that fit your description best, ordered by likelihood of match to what you described (long tail, digitigrade legs, black claws, black fur, silver eyes, skull?like face, big antlers):

  I frowned and added the “Looks like a dog on camera”.

  The next reply was:

  “Ashy, stop being distracted with your dumb chonk-ass phone and make me breakfast, I’m famished,” the potential Wendigo, Black Shuck, or Skinwalker whined at me.

  The pancake mix was potentially made in the Civil War–era. I squinted at the “best by 200—” date on the smudged tag. It was probably fine. I wasn’t going to eat it. This was just a snack for my potentially imaginary best friend. She’d probably be fine. I’ve seen her lick rain puddles, eat random forest mushrooms and pinecones with zero issues.

  Shady finished devouring her coffee, hopped off the stool and prowled the kitchen, black nose twitching. I pointed the camera at her. On my screen, the “very good omen of doom” did the same with a wag. In real life, antlers grazed the pot rack and made the copper pans chime like a wind ensemble that hated me.

  “You want chocolate chips?” I asked.

  “What am I, eight?”

  I dumped a generous fistful in. “The way you behave, most definitely.”

  She pretended to scowl and then craned her head over the bowl, pupils swallowing silver. “Mm. Add cinnamon.”

  “You a cooking expert now?”

  “Heck no. Princesses don’t cook.”

  “Princesses wear frilly pink dresses,” I pointed out. “And diamond tiaras. Get your fairytale straight you unrealiable-as-fuck narrator.”

  “Eh. Left all that jank back home,” she replied. “Didn’t want anyone tracking me down to this lovely, albeit simply barbaric place.”

  “Barbaric? I’ll have you know we’re very advanced,” I shook the cinnamon. She bumped my elbow with her hip and the cap came off, aromatizing the batter into Christmas. “Perfect,” she said. “I decreed it thus, my barbarian Emperor.”

  I scowled back at her and played back the video I just recorded. The massive black dog walked across the kitchen. Above it, pots seemed to jiggle on their own as if moved by an invisible… something.

  I sent the video to Dax.

  [AshLawd ?_?]: you see those pots moving above the dog?

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: havin’ dinna w fam. One sec.

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: Ye. cool fx dude. Gonna make a ghost hunter vid for Instagram? AI genned or did you rig thm with one of those barely visible strings magicians use to make cards float?

  “Ashy, I’m going to take your phone away, the pancakes are gonna burn,” the Princess Monstress stated from my side, nearly making me jump.

  [AshLawd ?_?]: can u send the vid to a few frends and ask them wat they think? I’ve a very hungry dog badgering me

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: sur

  I put the tablet down, dedicating my focus to the cooking. I glanced at Shady’s reflection in the bottom of the stove. Dog legs. I leaned down. More dog.

  “What the fuck,” I stared at the reflection.

  “Ashyyyy! Pancakes.”

  “Are mirrors like an analog camera or something?” I asked.

  “Mirrors aren’t analog. They’re doors that forgot where they go.”

  “Not creepy at all.”

  “Don’t blame me for dimensional physics, Ashy. Stop being a distracted cat.”

  “Well excuuuuuuse me for being a little bit distracted by the fact that there’s a fucking cryptid in my fucking kitchen.”

  “Don’t swear.”

  “You swear all the time!”

  “I'm a girl. Girls are supposed to be rawd around the edges. Boys are smol, polite, cute, house husbandos.”

  “That’s not how it…”

  “You’re smol and cute and you’re currently cooking me breakfast. Therefore, argument won.”

  The pancake smoked. Shady stared at it with a distraught face. I contemplated if cryptids had reverse sexual dimorphism or something. Were male Wendigos smaller?

  “You flip it,” I ordered, picking up the tablet.

  “Wha—”

  “Flip the damned pancake, rawd woman.” I handed her the wooden spatula.

  The Wendigo girl accepted the spatula.

  I picked up the lopsided toaster, recording the reflection in the viewfinder of the tablet.