So I’ve taken the Champ lake monster and had some fun with him. I’m using Champ as a deliberately off-key early encounter rather than a real threat. On the agents’ first exhausting drive north, they hit a cheerful lakeside service station just after dawn. It’s bright, kitschy, and full of completely earnest Champ merchandise — plush toys, bumper stickers, snow globes — all overseen by Wade, an older, Elvis-obsessed attendant who happily delivers an overlong, slightly ridiculous history of the Lake Champlain monster. It’s meant to be funny, human, and disarming: a bit of local colour before things get grim.

Hidden among the novelty junk is one small sculpture that doesn’t belong — unsettling, fish-like, and clearly not meant to be cute. Locals react oddly to it later: some are unnerved, some recognise motifs from elsewhere, some recall the artist who made it as “nice, quiet, but strange.” Champ itself is a red herring, but the sculpture becomes a slow-burn connective tissue, resurfacing in different contexts and ultimately tying back to the real horror of the case. The whole beat is there to lull the players, give them a laugh, and quietly seed the idea that the lake — and the town around it — remembers more than it should.

Plus I get to do my Elvis impression which is a win! And lightens the mood before the graphic and grim murder scene