Terminal Love in Loveland

Dating apps were already a nightmare. Now imagine your date is literally a cryptid with a taste for riverside romance. Becca’s asking the real question, but do you really want to know the answer?

🎥 Click play to meet the team—and find out what happens when love gets amphibious.

Read the full story below! ⬇️

Ever since the cryptid sightings started trending on TikTok, I’ve been documenting every weird profile my roommate matches with. My hands are shaking as I add the forty-seventh red flag to the spreadsheet. The screen casts an eerie glow across my dashboard as I huddle in my car next to the "Lilly Pad", a new restaurant that opened up next to the Little Miami River only a few months ago.

Through the rain-streaked window, I watch Becca laugh at something her date says, looking like she is trying her best to ignore how his skin seems to ripple in the neon light. 'Bio: ribbit,' I type mechanically. 'Skin: filtered(??)' My cursor hovers over the location cell, and I force myself to write 'River' even though what I really want to type is 'BECCA GET OUT OF THERE.

At work, I'm responsible for preventing Tesla engineers from crashing their AI models. I already deal with enough chaos there, and I'm barely keeping up. My nerves are so frayed that I can't even watch WALL-E being crushed without breaking down, wanting to run around screaming, "What's it all about?!" like a neural network having an existential crisis. But now, I'm crouched in my car, using my emergency spreadsheet time to document the cosmic horror show unfolding in Loveland, Ohio. All because my roommate decided to match with someone whose red flags I meticulously tracked in Excel.

Just last week, Becca brought me soup when I was debugging a particularly nasty AI hallucination that kept me up for thirty-six hours straight. "Even supercomputers need a reboot sometimes," she said, tucking a blanket around my shoulders. That's classic Becca—always taking care of everyone but herself. Maybe that's why she can't see the warning signs I see.

Red Flag #3 glared from his profile: "Seeking my amphibious queen 🐸." Red Flag #22 screamed danger: riverside rendezvous, always within leaping distance of water. And Red Flag #48? His ominous declaration of "metamorphosis in progress." Yet Becca dismissed my concerns, her laugh now punctuated by an unsettling ribbit.

I did what any self-respecting tech worker would do: filed a Jira ticket with the police. Officer Williams actually showed up—probably because I included a burndown chart of local disappearances.

Now I'm hiding behind a tree, documenting everything in my Notes app, while Officer Williams lights up the river with his flashlight.

10:58 PM: Multiple entities by the river. Look like a failed A/B test between humans and frogs.

11:02 PM: Tongue length estimated: 1.5 meters with 5% variance.

11:39 PM: Skin behaving inconsistently with normal dermis metrics. (Not getting any closer to confirm.)

Officer Williams makes a rookie mistake: never get close to an unvalidated data set. Their tongues shoot out like failed startup trajectories, wrapping around him before I can shout "abort sprint!" The wet smack of his body hitting the water and the sickening hiss as their tongues reeled him in made my throat bulge like a frog's vocal sac.

I leap out of there like a poison dart frog fleeing a predator. My Tesla autopilot has never handled a curve faster.

The next morning, I'm holed up in a diner, posting my findings on Reddit: Loveland Frogpeople have pivoted to full SaaS—Spawning as a Service. They're all over dating apps now with bios like "Just a hop away!" and "Ribbit for a good time." My favorite: "Disrupting the human form factor."

I'm analyzing the data when the waitress delivers my food. Her eyes bulge like glossy marbles under the fluorescent lights, and her skin glistens with a slimy sheen. My tuna melt smells swampy, and she was croaking the whole time, a guttural growl that made her throat blow up like a ballon. At the counter, a girl extends her impossibly long tongue, wrapping it around her ice cream cone and slurping noisily, never lifting a finger.

I'm done. This is crazy. I need to get back to my color-coded, horror-free life. I've blocked amphibian content on all socials and have a 50-point plan to avoid water forever. Also, if anyone needs a roommate, I have an opening. Apartment is spotless, cleaning supplies organized by pH level. No frogs.

When I get home, Becca's at my kitchen island, still wearing her Patagonia vest. She's using her sideways mouth to eat my color-coded sticky notes.

"Hey," she says, sounding like a Teams call underwater. "Ready to onboard to Loveland's most dynamic pod—"

A wet thud cuts me off before I can scream. Her tongue unfurls like a metric graph gone wrong. A tingling sensation ripples through me when I hit the ground, like a thousand tadpoles wriggling beneath my skin. My phone beeps:

"Plus one to the pod! 🐸 #TeamGrowth" - @BeccaSmith

"Excited to welcome our newest member to the team! 🐸 #AmphibiousSynergy" - @megan_chen