"Trolls." Cuppy would later claim back home.

"Excuse me?" Richie asked as he heated up a pot of water to make black tea.

"Trolls. In the sewers." Cuppy expanded upon his initial statement.

"That's your big revelation from the grade school urban legend echo chamber? Fucking trolls?" Richie asked, disbelieving.

"Hey, don't shoot the messenger." Cuppy shrugged. "That's the big talk in the locker halls between classes. Station Bay has a great big sewer network, it turns out, one that hasn't really been reworked or had its design updated in several decades. There's more than enough room down there, and with renovations finally starting, lots of tunnels and passageways have been abandoned or sealed off."

"Renovations?" Richie asked.

"Yeah. There are two main kinds of sewers - storm drain sewers, where rain and flood water collect, along with runoff and greywater from things like kitchen sinks - and sanitary sewers, where pee and poop go." Cuppy explained.

"How sanitary. Your point?" Richie asked, somewhat impatient.

"Well, newer cities keep them separate, cause there are a lot of ecological issues from building them together as a single system. I did some reading on it at the City Hall public information library. For example, if it rains too much, the pipes get backed up and overflow, and the stormwater - along with icky raw sewage and other pollution - floods back out of the storm drains and screws everything up." Cuppy said.

"Gross." Richie shuddered, grimacing as he imagined walking through a street flooded up to his ankles in a slurry of human waste.

"Yeah. So, newer codes don't really permit engineers to make those kinds of combination sewers anymore, but older historic cities like Station Bay are exempt cause of how impractical it is to gut the system and remake it from the ground up. It's like a hollow earth or egg, with the streets being the outer layer of the shell everything is built on top of. You crack the egg, you risk collapsing everything inward. Giant sewers like this one are basically structural foundations." Cuppy went on.

"So no one's eager to remodel the city's plumbing, what about it?" Richie asked.

"Weren't you paying attention? No one's been down there for anything bigger than minor patchwork in over fifty years." Cuppy said.

"More than enough time for things that creep and slither to make their nests, is that what you're saying?" Richie asked, the concept finally clicking.

"Bingo." Cuppy clicked.

"But why trolls?" Richie asked.

"You know that game, Telephone? You tell someone a story, then they tell a friend, and then they tell a friend - so on and so forth, with the original story changing a bit more each time. By the time you get to the end of the chain, a bunch of stuff gets lost in translation. Everyone at the school knows a guy who knows a guy who was playing by a storm drain when they saw glowing eyes in the dark, or has a dad who does maintenance work down below who got stalked by a big shaggy monster peeking around corners."

"So, alleged cryptid sightings that all tie back to the sewer?" Richie asked.

"Like your giant albino alligator." Cuppy suggested.

"No, not like my gator. That was different, took place in one of those shifting magic tunnels. That was the same day the spook in the cloak with a hole in his hood where a face should have been directly attacked my psyche. He said some cryptic shit about those spaces. I wasn't so sure about it back then, but now I think he was hinting at those places being kind of, like, alive in a way. Conscious, or at least sensitive to conscious beings. Being in them is like being in a half-waking dream, a lucid dream if you can figure out how they work -"

"Like the cereal killer?" Cuppy asked.

"Like the cereal killer, yeah," Richie explained. "But if you can't quite figure out how they work or how to control them, they can still read you. The tunnel wasn't a sewer till I thought about it being a sewer. Then the alligator showed up. That place picked an image from my subconscious and made it real, that's what I think now. The ghost I fought and destroyed in the forest was like that too - he got stronger and closer to being real and alive when he plucked a bad memory from my mind, and swallowed it like a fucking protein shake. The same mechanism helped me beat him too, when I made myself believe that the rusty junk bat I had with me was King Arthur's literal Excalibur."

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Cuppy nodded thoughtfully, mulling it all over. "The ogre you dreamed about the other night, the one who smashed up the park storage circle - he was real, right?"

"Seemed pretty solid to me. It's not just me being wary of the fog banks too, some shady guys went out of their way to mark them off and keep people out - or keep something else in. Something like that ogre." Richie said.

"What if you aren't the only one who can conjure up nightmare monsters on accident?" Cuppy asked.

"What do you mean?" Richie asked.

"Well, for you it was a sewer gator, then your kidnapper. For the swordswoman you saw in your dream, it was a Japanese-style ogre. The kids in school are claiming it's trolls. Maybe something's taking the monsters people think about and making them real. Sewers are dark, dank, spooky places that nothing would really want to live in, but they fascinate people because of that. Stories spread, like Telephone games, and lesser things like that ghost eat those ideas and grow stronger. Maybe there are monsters in the sewer because people think they are, and it's a vicious cycle." Cuppy said.

"A negative feedback loop." Richie put it together succinctly.

"Only question is which came first - the doors, or the things that come out of them." Cuppy concluded his theory.

"Whatever the case, monsters aren't the only things using these gateways. I walked through a couple of them, and it sounds like you probably came out of one too." Richie said.

All of a sudden, that idea struck Cuppy like a bucket of heavy icewater. He didn't like it, but he didn't understand exactly why yet.

"Yeah…" he mumbled noncommittally.

Richie didn't take notice. "And the killer can use them too. He's taking advantage of the chaos to attack and kill his victims. To use them as precisely as he does, he must have mastered the trick of bending those tunnels to your will, instead of them making you their bitch."

Cuppy was rifling through his travel pack again.

"What've you got there?" Richie asked, confused.

Cuppy withdrew bright yellow rain slickers and boots from the backpack's depths, followed by a couple gas masks.

"Travel garments." Cuppy answered.

Richie was blank-faced as he put two and two together. Trepidatiously, he asked the question he didn't want to hear the answer to.

"For?"

"Exploring the sewers for answers." Cuppy confirmed Richie's concerns.

"Oh no." Richie protested.

"Come on, a little spelunking won't kill ya." Cuppy said.

"Oh no." Richie said.

"Aren't you curious? Let's go bag us a few trolls." Cuppy said.

"...oh no." Richie groaned.

"Come on." Cuppy grabbed him by the back of his collar and started dragging him to the backyard.

"I'm not going in the sewers." Richie said as they crossed the boundary of the back porch.

"Sure you are." Cuppy said, suiting up.

"I don't wanna." Richie said.

"Sure you do." Cuppy said, locating what he was looking for - a grate cover over a concrete square shaft in the grass, dropping down into darkness. They could hear water trickling and echoing inside.

"Why are we going in the sewer? I've got enough spooky shit to deal with." Richie bitched.

"Adventure." Cuppy said, slipping his tiny fingers in between and around the lid bars, straining with all of his compact might to lift the cover free of the storm drain.

The petite boy finally managed to pry the cover off, face turning red with a held breath, arms and legs trembling.

Richie sighed. "Here, lemme help you with th-"

Cuppy's grip slipped, and the heavy cover dropped on Richie's foot.

"Motherfucker!" Richie yanked his foot out, clutching at it tightly, falling backward onto his ass, banging his tailbone on the lip of the back porch ledge in the process.

"Oh, whoops. Uh, sorry." Cuppy scratched his nose.

"I'm gonna throttle your scrawny neck, puppet boy!" Richie growled, holding his foot with one hand, and the small of his back with the other.

"Gotta catch me first." Cuppy shrugged, strapping his gas mask on. He then pencil dove down the sewer shaft, a protracted "Wheeeeeee!" echoing up from the depths he plunged through.

Richie, incensed, followed suit.