Chapter 6: Shell-Shocked Conclusions and Other Unmentionable Discoveries

By the sixth morning, the vibe had shifted. No eyeliner. No coffee. No notebook. No gadgets. No “holy trinity” or “sacred data.” Just two idiots trudging toward the Loch in silence, pretending the mist wasn’t staring back at us.

I hadn’t even charged my phone to 100%. Ninety-two percent. Do you realize what that means? In influencer terms, that’s basically walking into battle without armor. And yet—I didn’t care. That’s how rattled I was.

Elliot was no better. No tubes, no thermometers, no frog census. Just his pale face and the same jacket he’d been wearing all week, hanging on him like the embodiment of defeat.

The silence between us was unbearable. Which meant, obviously, one of us had to break it with sarcasm.

“So,” I said casually, like my knees weren’t shaking, “on a scale from one to ‘wetting yourself in public,’ how brave do you feel today?”

He shot me a look. “Braver than someone who didn’t even apply her eyeliner. You look… unarmed.”

I gasped. “Unarmed? Excuse you, my eyeliner is a weapon of mass seduction. But fine. Let’s talk about your courage, Mister Gadgetless. Did the Loch scare you out of batteries?”

He sniffed. “I simply decided to minimize variables. A pure observational approach.”

“Right. Translation: you’re terrified and forgot how to science.”

We went back and forth like that for hours. Every step toward the Loch, another jab.

“Your hands are shaking.”

“No, they’re… calibrating tremors.”

“Your lips are blue.”

“It’s the temperature.”

“You screamed louder than me yesterday.”

“That was a controlled vocal test of resonance.”

“Uh-huh. Sure. Very macho.”

The truth? We were both petrified. But pride is a hell of a drug.

When we finally reached the shore, it looked… different. Again. The mist had pulled back just enough to reveal something we hadn’t noticed before.

A cave.

Nestled against the rocky edge of the Loch, black and yawning, like a mouth that had been shut every other day and was now daring us to step inside.

We froze.

“That wasn’t there before,” I whispered.

“Fog concealment,” Elliot muttered. “Perfectly explainable.”

“Perfectly explainable?” I snapped. “Elliot, I have walked this exact soggy grass in heels and sneakers and slippers and everything in between. That cave did not exist.”

“Or,” he said, eyes gleaming nervously, “perhaps it manifests intermittently, triggered by atmospheric—”

“Stop. Don’t even. I swear if you try to turn this into another Fibonacci frog situation, I will push you into that cave myself.”

But we both knew what we were going to do.

We walked toward it. Slowly. Bravely. Stupidly.

Inside, the air was damp, echoing with low, guttural sounds. The kind that vibrated in your ribs. The kind we’d heard every night by the water. The kind that had made us think something vast and monstrous was lurking beneath the Loch.

My throat tightened. “This is it. The ghosts. The monster. The thing that’s been trolling us.”

Elliot’s face was pale but determined. “We must document it. Stay calm. Observe.”

We rounded a bend. The echoes grew louder, bouncing off the slick cave walls until they sounded inhuman. Groans. Rumbles. The soundtrack of nightmares.

And then we saw it.

Two river turtles.

Locked in what could only be described as… marital activity.

Shells colliding. Flippers flailing. Producing sounds so disturbingly guttural they ricocheted through the cave like demonic opera singers.

I stood frozen. My brain short-circuited.

Elliot, meanwhile, gasped like he’d just solved the unified field theory. “Of course! The vibrations! Their resonant frequency propagates through the water, altering barometric pressure, disturbing the microclimate, even misleading my instruments! Serha, this explains everything—the anomalies, the ripples, the resonance! It was never the Loch itself. It was—”

“Shut. Up.” My voice cracked.

“—the turtles. Their—”

“Don’t. You. Dare.”

“—mating rituals!”

I screamed into my hands. “Oh my god! I spent six days terrified of… turtle sex?! Do you know how humiliating this is? My followers will eat me alive. I can’t—no, I won’t—document this. I’m erasing the entire Loch saga from history.”

Elliot was still scribbling in his notebook with manic delight. “Remarkable. A breakthrough in herpetology! The implications for acoustic ecology—”

“Elliot,” I hissed, jabbing a finger into his chest, “if you ever mention the words ‘turtle,’ ‘sex,’ or ‘cave’ in my presence again, I will ruin your life in ways that will make Fibonacci look like a bedtime story. Are we clear?”

He swallowed. “Crystal.”

We stumbled out of that cave like survivors of some absurd war. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us looked back.

By the time we reached the car, I was fuming. “Six days. Six days of mud masks, humidity, amphibians, fog, and near-death experiences. For turtles. Turtles! I am officially retiring from mystery-hunting. From vlogging. From life.”

Elliot, buckling his seatbelt with trembling hands, murmured, “Still… quite a discovery.”

I shot him a glare that could have set him on fire. “Say one more word and I will livestream your funeral.”

He shut up.

We started the engine. The Loch shrank behind us in the rearview mirror, mist curling like it was laughing at us.

Day six: concluded by turtles. Life: concluded by embarrassment. Career: concluded by sheer humiliation.

We never came back.

And if Elliot values his existence, he never will say the word “turtle” again.