She pulled the paper closer when Apple pushed it to her, so that she could better see it. "Well it certainly doesn't look like anything I've seen or read about," she admitted and pushed the drawing back to him.
"You think that's the same thing that was in the Sonnier dorm? Assuming any of the rumors are right, anyway..."
"I don't know," he said honestly. "This thing was pretty big, I think it would have a pretty hard time hiding in Sonnier for any amount of time," he laughed. "But..." he thought for a moment. "I do have a friend who saw something different, it's possible that there are other things out there."
"I feel like I'm missing a piece of the puzzle, you know?"
The thought that there were more things out there than what was in the dormitory made Sibyl frown. It was bad enough that one of them had been in her dorm. Now possibly different things all over campus?
"I know the feeling. Isn't Halloween when those two kids went missing? So maybe what you saw then was what got them. May or may not be the same thing that was in Sonnier."
"Yeah, and I saw this thing on Halloween," he said pointing at the paper.
It was still unsettling to know that there were at least two things running around on campus that no one knew anything about. "Do you think it's possible that our woods have some like... populations of animals that have been secluded enough to like... mutate or evolve away from the original animal?"
She let herself take a deep breath as she drummed her fingers against her cup for the moment. When she spoke, though, she leaned in closer to Apple and lowered her voice. "I suppose it's possible, yea. Evolution may be out depending on when this started; that's a much longer process. But we don't know how long these things have been around. I'd think if they were here sooner, there would have been more attacks and missing persons in the past. Doesn't mean they didn't migrate."
Sibyl paused to take another drink. "Mutation is always likely. Whether chemically by muggles, accidental probably, or magical."
Now this was going somewhere, Apple thought. It was great to get someone else's opinion on the animals he had seen and heard about. "Ooo," he said lowering his voice. "Maybe pollution or something," he said nodding. Apple was way into conspiracy theory so this was the type of thinking that was right up his alley. "Like... maybe they made a toxic dump in the woods and the animals got into it."
"But if it's magical..." he paused. "If it's magical someone would have to be held accountable, right?" He took another drink of his pumpkin juice and laid his hands flat on the table.
"Perhaps. Even toxic waste takes a bit of time. It's not like in the movies where you get hit with it and suddenly you're all mutated. It might not show any signs until it spawns." Sibyl again paused to drink a little more of her own pumpkin juice before going on.
"If it's magical, then there is someone to blame, yes. There aren't just patches of wild magic that a creature can bump into. It might have been on purpose by someone, or caused the backlash of a failed spell or something. The other option," she paused for another moment to chew it over. As if speaking it made it a solid theory. "Well, is cross breeding. That the creatures are a combination of two other kinds of creatures."
"That's true," he inclined his head in agreement with a little grin. "And you're right if that were the case we should have seen things much sooner, probably noticed changes in animal behavior."
He couldn't imagine someone doing anything like that on purpose, but then again... he had seen worse. Crossbreeding. Now that was a terrifying thought, but... "That makes sense," Apple put his drawing between them again. "Look, you can see like... different aspects of different animals. We thought at first that it was one of those horses," he showed her tracing the shape of the head and wings. "But I had never seen someone die, so we thought it couldn't be that, but if it was breed with something else..."
He took a deep breath. "Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself."
Sibyl looked again at the drawing when he pointed out a few details. "Thestrals, you mean. Creatures you can't see until you've seen death." From what pictures she'd seen of them, there were definitely similarities in the picture.
"It's still a logical enough theory. Really, all we have to go on right now are theories." The redhead gave a small shrug and moved to finish off her drink.
"Yeah! Thestrals, I can never remember that name," among other things, he admitted a bit sheepishly. "I can't quite place the other animal though if I were to hypothesize," here he looked at her feeling a little foolish. "I would say bigfoot. I wasn't even sure if that's really real though, you know?"
"You're right though, just theories. Can't really figure out too much without having the creature to study, right?"
The redhead gave an odd look to the younger boy for a moment, then turned her gaze back to the drawing. "Bigfoot?" Well, there were some similarities in the picture now that he mentioned it. It just seemed like a pretty far fetched guess.
"Exactly. So unless someone goes out and manages to catch something, we have no idea." Sibyl gave a small shrug.
"Right?" he laughed easily. He stopped and took a sip of pumpkin juice. "It's crazy."
"Anyways..." he tucked the drawing away again with a sigh. "I really want to go looking but it's not exactly the safest thing, right?" he shrugged. "Thanks for helping me pick my brain about this thing, it's been on my mind for a long time."