Raptor King (Alien Beast Kings 1)

“Faster dinosaurs.”

“What?”

“In my world, we transported ourselves with dinosaurs, but they were long dead and had turned to oil. They were exceptionally fast.”

“That sounds implausible.”

“A potato motor!”

* * *

Rex

I am worried that the exposition chest has broken her. This is what it does. It tells you things which make you utterly furious. It takes away your sense of peace. It makes you believe that you are being persecuted while you live in paradise. It tells you the truth, but the truth is useless and maybe even toxic.

“Potato motors are a thing. And they could be the beginning of our own industrial revolution!”

I have come to accept my place here now, but Kristine cannot. She will have to throw herself against the reality of the situation until she is bruised and broken and able to accept it. I will have to ensure that she survives. That has always been the deal.

Her eyes brighten suddenly. “I’m going to the top of the tower to look for clues.”

She runs up the ladder as fast as her hands and feet will take her, and makes a great show of peering around at the world.

“What the fuck is THAT!”

She is pointing to something gleaming in the distance, where the world starts to turn gray with gathering clouds. There is something sparking there with a bright and unnatural light.

“I’ve seen that before,” she said. “I never thought anything of it, but now I do. That structure looks like it was manmade. Or alien made.”

“How can you see anything? All I can see is a light. It could be anything…”

“It’s a transmission tower, I bet.” She looks at me with a light in her eyes I have not seen before, an intensity which will not allow this, or me, to rest. She turns as if she’s about to try to run to it, and I am forced to grab her by the wrist to stop her.

“I have told you. You may not leave this compound without me. Your bow is not ready, you have not mastered riding a dinosaur, and…”

“We need faster dinosaurs,” she insists, barely listening to me at all. This human of mine is full of ideas, and few of them are sensible.

“The faster dinosaurs tend to be the ones who eat meat. We are made of meat, and they know it.”

“Then we need prey dinosaurs who are also fast. They have to exist.”

“Why? Because you want them to?”

“Because niches. There have to be horse dinosaurs. There has to be a dinosaur equivalent of a horse. I mean, bigger than the tiny horses that are actually horses. I mean the horse version of dinosaurs.”

She’s babbling.

“I don’t know if that is true.”

“But you believe the asshole chest is the pillar of all truth? No. There are horse dinosaurs. I know there are.”

She slides down the ladder all the way to the ground floor and goes rushing out into the compound. This is what I feared. The exposition chest gives what feel like answers, but aren’t. It gives a strange kind of hope which leads nowhere.

“Bigger, faster, stronger dinosaurs to hunt down the one that makes the chest talk…” she’s muttering to herself in a way which makes me a little concerned she’s losing what one would call the plot. Assuming there was a plot to begin with, which is a big assumption, considering where we are.

My mount, Tyche, leans her big head out of her enclosure and gives Kristine a mournful look. No female wants to hear she is to be replaced by a smaller, faster model. “It’s okay, old girl,” I tell her. I still love you.”

She makes a grunting sound and goes back to eating fronds. Nothing much bothers Tyche. She’s a tank, and as much as Kristine might want a faster dinosaur, I don’t think she’ll get a better one than my Tyche. This girl is reliable and steady, and she’s saved my life more times than I can count.

“It could take years to catch, raise, and train a horse riding dinosaur.”

“I’ve got nothing but time, motherfucker!”

* * *

Kristine

He gives me a hard look, and I immediately apologize. “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean that in the insult sense, I meant that in the fuck yeah, gonna get this done, sense.”

“I am glad you are motivated,” he says. “But all is not as it seems, and…”

“I’m going to keep going until all absolutely is as it seems,” I tell him. I’m going to find out what the fuck is going on, because I can tell you now, I am not a chaos bringer.”

“Yes. You’ve arrived here after committing a crime in your own world and you now intend to tear this one apart in order to discover the root cause of all the strangeness. That sounds like the actions of a chaos bringer to me.” He pauses, and smiles. “And I do love you for it.”