Chapter 2: Duck Debates and Other Breakthroughs

By the next morning, I was armed with coffee, eyeliner, and the certainty that today, finally, something would happen.

“Equipment check,” Elliot announced as if we were about to storm Normandy instead of sit by a lake. He spread his notebook, a cracked thermos, and what looked suspiciously like a pocket calculator across the grass.

“That’s it?” I raised an eyebrow. “This is your mighty arsenal against ancient evil? A notepad and a math toy?”

“It’s a scientific calculator,” he corrected, scandalized.

“Yeah, and my phone has Candy Crush,” I shot back. “Which one do you think the monster’s more afraid of?”

He squinted at me like I’d just insulted Newton personally. “The Loch isn’t afraid,” he said stiffly. “It’s an apex environment.”

“Cool,” I replied. “And I’m an apex predator of sarcasm. Guess who’s winning this food chain?”

He gave me the side-eye. “What did you bring?”

I held up my phone triumphantly. “The most powerful weapon known to mankind: a front-facing camera.”

He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You can’t document serious anomalies with a selfie stick.”

“Correction: I can document everything with a selfie stick. If the Loch burps, I’ll capture it in 4K, slow-mo, with a crying filter if necessary.”

“This is why science doesn’t trust influencers,” he muttered.

“And this is why influencers don’t trust science,” I shot back. “Too many dudes with calculators pretending they’re not just glorified number enthusiasts.”

Elliot ignored me, scribbling something in his notebook like the water was giving him life advice.

“What are you even writing?” I leaned over.

“Baseline observations,” he said. “Temperature, stillness, wildlife patterns—”

“Translation: ‘Dear Diary, today the lake continued to be a lake.’ Riveting stuff, Elliot. Pulitzer material.”

Elliot’s pen froze mid-scribble. “You don’t understand. This could be a controlled breakthrough.”

“Controlled?” I laughed. “Elliot, you couldn’t control a Roomba in an empty room. If the monster shows up, you’ll be the guy yelling about pH levels while it eats your calculator.”

He stiffened. “Proper record-keeping is the foundation of discovery.”

“And proper ring lights are the foundation of going viral,” I countered. “Which, by the way, I don’t see you bringing.”

“You can’t expect me to lug around studio equipment in the field.”

“First of all, this isn’t ‘the field.’ It’s a lawn by some water. Second, you can’t expect me to film cinematic terror without a tripod. Do you know how shaky my hands are before coffee? My footage looks like a found-footage horror film even when I’m reviewing lip gloss.”

“So you admit you came unprepared,” Elliot said, smug.

I narrowed my eyes. “Don’t you dare. You’re sitting here with your sad calculator pretending you’re NASA, and I’m unprepared? Please. At least my phone can order us pizza if we get bored.”

“This isn’t about pizza,” he said, exasperated.

“Everything’s about pizza,” I corrected. “Pizza is modern currency. Pizza buys loyalty. Pizza is why empires rose and fell.”

“Ridiculous,” he muttered.

“You know what’s ridiculous?” I pointed at his thermos. “That coffee. It tastes like betrayal and wet socks. If the monster shows up, it’s going to leave out of sheer disappointment.”

Elliot closed his notebook with a snap. “We need a structured plan. Observation windows, environmental controls, synchronized logging—”

I cut him off. “Elliot, sweetie, the only window I care about is golden hour. And it’s in three hours. Until then, my viewers aren’t getting content that makes me look like a half-dead raccoon. Priorities.”

“This is science, not performance,” he said.

“Wrong. This is performance science,” I corrected, flipping my hair. “A revolutionary new genre where I look hot while I tell your methodology to go to hell."

He sighed. Loud. So loud.

Hours passed. We argued about gear, about methods, about whether or not ducks counted as “wildlife phenomena” or just “ducks being ducks.” At some point, Elliot tried to measure water temperature with a kitchen thermometer he swore was “field standard.” At another, I nearly convinced him that the Loch monster only appeared to people with at least ten thousand Instagram followers.

But at the end of the day, nothing got filmed. Nothing got studied. Nothing got done.

As the sun dipped lower, Elliot finally said, “We’ll have to delay proper exploration. Without a tripod, your footage would lack stability, and that would discredit the entire investigation.”

I gasped dramatically. “You’re right. A mystery like this deserves the steadiest of cameras. To march into the unknown without a tripod would be… irresponsible.”

We nodded solemnly, united for once in our ridiculousness.

For a fleeting second, I imagined some local kid watching us from the village, whispering: “Mum, why are those two weirdos arguing with the lake again?” And the mum sighing, “Don’t look at them, love, they’ll never leave.”

And with that, we packed up again—two self-proclaimed explorers of the mistery of the Lake, thwarted by the tragic absence of three sticks of aluminum.

Day two: defeated by photography accessories.