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Role: Cryptid Analyst, FDG Zoological Anomalies Division

Background:
Samantha Coates—Sam to nearly everyone—has been chasing the unexplainable since she was a teenager. In 2014, while visiting her grandmother in Wiltshire, she wandered into the woods behind the cottage and saw a figure: antlers like a stag, eyes like river stones, and limbs that bent too fluidly. She snapped a photo. The file existed. The frame was empty.

That moment never left her.

She went on to earn a degree in zoology, focusing on animal morphology and behavioral drift in isolated populations. But in her private work, she tracked reports of cryptids, hybrid sightings, and folkloric beasts. Many proved to be hoaxes. Some didn’t. The Institute took notice after she independently compiled a dossier on the “Wiltshire Walker,” linking it to fae breach zones on three continents. She joined soon after.

Skills:

• Trained in zoological classification and aberrant morphology
• Specialist in cryptid taxonomy with cross-reference to folkloric entities
• Highly proficient in witness interviews, environmental tracking, and speculative faunal reconstruction
• Maintains a private field journal of “seen-but-unproven” entities

Sam has an uncanny ability to tell when someone is lying—or when they’re telling the truth about something no one else believes.

Personality:
Analytical, skeptical, and quietly intense. Sam doesn’t chase fame or answers—she chases patterns. She’s careful with her words, quick with her assessments, and unafraid to follow a trail into the dark. Prefers fieldwork to meetings. Keeps backup batteries for every kind of recording device. Her sense of humour is dry, but her belief in the strange is unwavering.

Motive:
To prove that what she saw was real—and that the world holds more than just the known. Sam isn’t interested in capturing cryptids. She wants to understand why they’re being seen, why they vanish—and who’s letting them through.