My eyes burned and watered, I had to wipe them before I could squint my eyes to check the time on my phone. We had worked researching into the wee hours of the night, then Tammy had woken me up with the tapping of her laptop keyboard shortly after eight. I had no idea where she was getting her energy from, even the three cups of coffee she had drank before noon couldn't explain the look of discipline and concentration on her face.

"Are you alright?" she asked without looking up from her screen.

"Umm…" I faltered, I had a hard time forming the sentence I wanted to say in my mind. "Yeah, just tired I guess."

She nodded and kept typing, never breaking her stride until she found it necessary to fix some mistake. "Have some coffee," she suggested.

"I'm not really a coffee person," I admitted, "it's kind of bitter and gross."

For the first time since we had started the research process, she snapped her eyes up from her keyboard and her fingers stopped in mid sentence. Her expression was something between horrified and sympathetic and she scrunched up her forehead in bewilderment.

"I know I asked before if you were actually a biology graduate," she said, "but now I have to ask if you were a college student at all."

"There are plenty of other drinks with caffeine," I pointed out. Tea, for instance, that's usually what I get whenever someone drags me along to a cafe. Or there's always a nice cold can of soda, really either option is much tastier."

"But it's not the same," she said with a serious shake of her head, "while true that it has the same effects on the body, but the feeling you get from coffee is just different."

"I would argue that tea is a much better experience. The L-theanine in tea leaves levels out the negative effects of caffeine in the body and makes for a more pleasant experience."

"Don't get me wrong, I know chemically, tea should be better, but there's some kind of social benefit and comfort from being a coffee drinker," she argued. "But, we're wasting time, more coffee for me anyway. I think there were some tea bags next to the coffee pot, if you'd like that instead, we've still got a while to go."

Last night Tammy had laid out a lengthy research collection schedule, she was in charge of taking data and condensing it into an easy to use form that we would eventually use to help us write an article or paper. My job was to scour various paper accounts she had brought with her along with the online cryptid forums for any information that might be useful for tracking down where the corpse had been found and where it might have ended up. Most of my time so far had been spent on translating forum posts from French to English and trying to make sense of the mixed up grammar. From what I could figure out, someone had heard a rumor that a body had been found not far into the edge of the forest, but when they went to move it, they realized it wasn't quite human. The account seemed a bit dodgy though, because the user never followed up on the post to answer any of the questions about where or what it looked like. Another user posted later that their father knew the man who found it and they were the ones calling it a centaur and added in the disappearing horns.

My heart sank as I realized that the evidence that there had been something found at all was suspect at best and definitely not scientific. I could find a single photo or sketch about the position of the body or location. One would think that if you stumbled upon something as astounding as an in the flesh cryptid, they would go crazy snapping photos for proof, especially in the smartphone era. I quickly began to wonder why we had even come on the trip at all, why fly to a foreign country where neither of us could speak the language and brave heatstroke daily for something that didn't have solid evidence behind it? I felt like a hypocrite, I had defended cryptid sightings and dodgy photos, but here I was in the field pursuing it and suddenly I was the skeptic.

"Not a lot of work going on over there," Tammy commented.

'There's not a lot I've found," I admitted. "There's hearsay and stories, but not a lot of concrete evidence." I couldn't keep the disappointment and skepticism out of my voice.

She nodded and paused her typing again. "I know what you're thinking and you're right, there's not a whole lot here, but I think something still happened. People tend not to get up in the morning and think 'boy, I think I'll make up a story about a centaur today,' something probably sparked the idea. Even if it wasn't a centaur exactly, might be some other cryptid. There are so many undiscovered species and other secrets in the depths of rainforests that all we need is a direction and I'm sure we'll find something worth reporting."

I shrugged, but nodded my head. She wasn't wrong, people usually had better things to do then sit around and think of making false reports. What would they even get out of it? I couldn't think of much reward, maybe there was some kernel of truth that we were missing.

"At the end of the day, if all we do is just classify a new species of tapir, well that's fine too, but you and I both know that cryptids are out there and it's just a matter of time before someone breaks the big story. If we don't pursue every chance we get, we'll miss out on the times when it would lead to a breakthrough."

"You're really passionate about this," I commented.

Tammy looked at me with a smirk. "Are you just now realizing this despite the fact that I've dragged you all the way here for the summer and am lying about why we're here to use university funds?"

"Well, yeah, I guess… I am just not used to people sincerely listening to me. Usually I get on the topic of bigfoot or yetis and everyone spaces out. Friends… family… no one has ever taken my career goals seriously."

"Unfortunately, we have to be careful whom we let in on our true motives. I got a PhD without ever uttering a word about it, that's how I ensured I actually got it. I would have never written something like you did for your final and turn in it, that's career suicide in the biology world." Tammy hit save on her document, then closed her laptop. "Why did you do that? You had to know it was a bad idea."

My shoulders slumped forward slightly. "I was tired of writing about the same things over and over again. How many times am I going to have to reiterate that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell in increasingly complex terms. I know it's more complicated than that, but I want to actually discover things and make real scientific history. I guess I got impatient and I tend to be impulsive when I get impatient."

"Impulsive enough to spend hours of effort on an in depth and cross-referenced academic paper," she said with a nod of her head. "I get it, I really do, but you're going to have to learn to bide your time. There's a reason why even the word 'cryptid' is a joke in itself, people jump into investigation and research about it without grounding any of their claims in the reality of science first. If we want the scientific community to accept and welcome us, we have to speak their language."

"That's exactly why I went into biology," I agreed. "Everyone thought I had started to give up my love of strange and exotic creatures, but I just want the skills to study them in earnest."

"I was much the same," she said, "I was obsessed with fairies when I was a little kid and that manifested into all sorts of mythological creatures over time. I just couldn't shake the idea that the ideas for these creatures had to come from somewhere and I wanted to find out what was the spark. Eventually that led me down the rabbit hole from myths to cryptids and I haven't looked back since." Tammy looked towards the clock, then stretched her legs out and her arms wide over her head. "I think we've done enough to get a lunch break, I have to call one of my contacts anyway."

After a lazy lunch of a granola bar I had forgotten that I had even packed, I lay snoozing in and out of consciousness in the nap I so desperately needed. I should have gotten up and gone back to working, but Tammy hadn't returned from making her call, so I didn't feel any social pressure to make me sit up and do it. By the time she did come back, I was too far gone to react to her entrance in the room.

"The reception here sucks," she muttered under her breath.

Tammy walked around the room doing the awkward holding her phone over her head move to try to find a signal. She started stuttering her steps as she got closer to my side of the hotel room until she stopped just in front of the window. With a frustrated sigh, she brought the phone back down and typed in a number.

"Hello, this is Dr. Tammy Phillips and I'm calling in regards to an interview you did with a local paper."

I had begun to stir more awake and let out a big yawn.

"Well, I know that you did-"

Whomever she was talking to was getting louder on the other end of the phone, it sounded like a man's voice with a very thick accent.

"Why would a paper lie?"

The man replied something I couldn't make out, but Tammy's face exploded into a red flush of anger.

"Same to you sir!" she bellowed into the phone, then yanked it away from her face and smacked her finger against the button to end the call.

"Who was that?" I asked, much more awake now.

"That was supposed to be our best lead, but apparently 'the papers are fake and I should keep my fat American face out of things I don't understand.'" She huffed and crossed her arms over her chest. "I know he was hiding something, why would he get so offended about wanting information about something you already told the media?"

"Maybe someone told him to keep quiet?" I suggested.

Tammy looked at me, her anger transforming into an expression of thoughtfulness, though her cheeks stayed staind a bright pink. "You could be on to something," she admitted, "that might explain his abrupt anger. But who would care enough about a story that most people are going to roll their eyes at and not believe anyway? Maybe, there is something to this story."

Together, we doubled down on researching the newspaper the article had originally been published in and found that it was from a small town right outside the edge of a vast area of largely uncharted rainforest, the perfect setting for an unknown species to hide in. Piecing together the information we knew from the article to a map of the area led us to a couple likely spots where the body would have been found, one of them just outside of a construction site for a new home.

"Lots of people walking around, clearing out the area for the backyard maybe," Tammy suggested," I think the construction site is a definite possibility."

"Plus the construction sounds might have been odd enough for someone or something to investigate."

Tammy hummed under her breath and swiped around the area of the map we were looking at again. "Why would something go there while wounded or dying?"

"Try to get help?" I offered. "Or someone killed it?"

"Now that's an interesting theory," Tammy said with a nod, "but we'll need to find a body, photos of it, or something to confirm. Re-pack your bags, we're heading out tomorrow for this town, we've already let this case sit cold for too long. It's time to get our hands dirty and stir up some trouble in the name of science."