Page 2315

((The Mon/Wen/Fri Double -- page 2 of 2))
They spent the remainder of the flight discussing more hypothetical monsters that their reapers had mentioned. The only thing they knew definitively about the Beast of Lorent was that it had managed to avoid being identified despite Lorent's best efforts, so most of their proposed monsters were ones that could operate stealthily in one form or another.

At length, however, the conversation became more obviously about entertaining one another than it did about actually trying to discern what the creature might be. Among others, Hector brought up something called a jajarith, which was a kind of man-eating frog-beast that supposedly came from Qenghis, while Roman brought up something called a tomokooni, which was a freaky badger-like humanoid-creature that crept up on people while they slept and flayed them alive in order to wear their skin as its own.

They hadn't been competing, exactly, but after that, Hector decided that Roman had won. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to be so open-minded about the possibility of all these things existing, after all.

"Apparently," Roman was still saying as they were getting off the plane, "the jury is still out on whether or not a tomokooni can pass for a human being. Voreese wasn't too sure on that part. But regardless, I have to imagine that the Lorentian authorities would've noticed a bunch of flayed corpses lying around and told us."

"Y'know," said Hector, "everyone likes to talk about how great the power of the imagination is, but sometimes, I think it might be the most horrific thing in the world."

"Could very well be."

A small group of people were waiting for them on the tarmac--which Hector found a little surprising, considering how they'd changed planes at the last minute, but he supposed the pilot must've radioed ahead.