Raptor King (Alien Beast Kings 1)

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

He uses a similar tone to speak to me as he did with the dinosaur who was about to devour me. I feel like I’ve done something terribly naughty just by being here. Maybe I have. I’m not sure. I can’t quite take my eyes off the dinosaur he’s riding. Because, oh yes, he’s riding a creature with scales and three horns and a big, flared kind of scoopy thing at the back of its skull. It looks like a thoroughly mental rhinoceros.

Wait. I know what it is.

“TRICERATOPS!”

I proclaim the word like a victory. Meanwhile, the male looks down at me with those perfectly dark eyes, and I can’t say anything coherent. I was never able to talk to hot guys. I always got nervous and weird and started just sort of repeating random facts I’d heard in the hopes that they might find them interesting. They never did.

“You,” he says, “are not supposed to be here.”

“Yeah.”

That’s it. Just my small-mouthed agreement. I sound like an idiot. I wish I was wearing something more appealing, though dresses always looked weird on me. Or I thought they did anyway. I just wish I was coming to him with even half the raw animal sexual appeal he is coming to me with.

“Where did you come from?” He asks a reasonable question that I have absolutely no answer to.

It is then that it occurs to me that he speaks perfect English. And I do mean absolutely perfect, word for word, American English.

“How do you speak English?” The question emerges from me in surprise.

“How do you speak Reptilian?”

“Oh god, don’t tell me they're the same thing.”

“They appear to be the same thing. Most languages were standardized a long time ago. It’s easier.”

“It is?” I wonder about that, then I realize there’s just a whole lot of silence where words are supposed to be. “There’s probably going to be ramifications and implications…”

“Very possibly.”

He’s staring at me, in my kitty sweater and sweatpants and sneakers. What must he think of me? My hair is up in a scrunchie tie at the top of my head, and it’s been two days too long since I last washed it. This is not the way the heroine meets the hero in any of the books I read, or the shows I watch, or the songs I listen to. According to them, I’m supposed to be wearing a raspberry beret at the very least, the kind you find at a second hand store. Or I’m supposed to run full tilt into him with a stack of papers and then adjust the spectacles I don’t need as I thank him profusely for helping me up. Or I need to wear a red dress on a street full of grey people, and I need to distract the hero and help him realize that I’m actually just a sex program who can be taken over by agents at any… I have watched way too many movies, read far too many books, and internalized a serious amount of misogyny from music. I’m super conflicted, often confused, and always feeling somewhat inadequate no matter what I achieve.

“How did you come here?” He makes the demand again, more urgently this time. “I need to know. It is important. What did you do?”

“What did I do?”

I repeat the question as if he might know the answer, because I sure as hell don’t know. I feel like I just woke up. Except this is not my bedroom. This is not anybody’s bedroom. This is a dangerous, cold, unfeeling world full of danger.

His eyes narrow just a fraction, as if he is growing impatient with me. I have the sense I would not like it if he lost patience. I try to remember the last thing I remember. It’s all fuzzy inside my head. There’s a sort of lack of, well, everything.

“I don't know. I think the last I remember, I was at the bank trying to get a check to clear so I could pay my rent, and not get evicted from my place. It’s rent controlled, and that’s the only reason I can even afford to live in the city. Anyway, they asked me to come back to this room where I could speak to a manager. So I went back into the room they told me to go into…”

An hour earlier, or maybe twenty thousand years in the future…

I’m messing with my hair. It was down when I came in, but I’ve decided that tying it back might be a good idea. Slightly more professional. My hair has a tendency to be wild and head off in directions of its own accord. Think Orphan Annie if she threw herself into every bush between here and eternity. Tying it back makes it sort of poof out in a way I think looks full and satisfying, while keeping it out of my face.