Post by Cy Skywalker on Nov 18, 2005 13:10:05 GMT -5
I wrote this for pure fun. Seems it's part of my 'Future:' series, but those are all AUs of eachother anyway, or at least not in the same time of the future.
The familiar horizon was bright, with the yellow sunlight and slightest hint of red falling over verdant green treetops, purpling mountains, metal guard spires and honeycombed fences. The greensward lower held the majestic roots of those trees, and blacktop paths. Sayyina Arad crossed through the first fence and into the grassy enclose, and her companions Slypher and Skyler came after her, one to each side, and the gate closed on pneumonic hinges. Sayyina wore a brown dress and tan overcloak, protection not against weather but impact, and a few yellow nylon ropes were looped around her right shoulder. Her hair was brown with streaks of blonde, bushy and tucked under her collar. In face she was slightly fleshy but had a competent air about her, and an unshakable rationality in hazel eyes. The two that flanked her, pacing and gazing ahead with wide, intelligent eyes, were shoulder-tall Deinonychus, a pair.
Among the trees, oaks and conifers, grazed medium sized prosauropod Plateosaurus , ambling along rooting in the grass or rising up on their strong rust-scaled hind legs to pull down branched with their mouths or hands with clawed thumbs and wide joints for grabbing. Some of them snuffle-grunted as they moved, and some flies hovered around the less pleasant-smelling individuals. Sayyina clicked her tongue against her upper teeth and the two raptorine Deinonychus powered forward smoothly running with tail, hunches and shoulders even over the fulcrum of their legs. Their two outer footclaws dug into the soft ground with the switchblade inner claw held cocked back, and Sayyina admired their gait and speed to no end so that when she too began to trot it was in imitation of them, her back tipped forward and her hands tucked around her stomach, fingers curled back.
The larger raptor, the female, was Skyler, and her skin was woody brown with gray stripes all along her spine and S-curved neck, the expressive, thin feathers at the back of her skull showing a trace of metallic blue. Slypher, the more wiry, had a darker version of his mate’s coloring and silver-white feathers that curved out over his neck and also fringed his jawbones. Sayyina had seen their maneuvering many times before and now she knew her place in it and stayed behind as the raptors split their path toward the center of the lazing Plateosaurus herd.
The raptors’ body coloring worked just as it had in the forests of the past, camouflaging them until they burst from the shadows of trees. Plateosaurus scattered down-wind, hooting. They did not have the size to make a stand effective, as the larger sauropods did, so they were programmed by instinct to run on their four legs, away from the predators. Sayyina stepped a few paces aside as the dinosaurs stampeded past, trusting that Slypher and Skyler would be timing their speed as they timed their own, so that she could see--
There, the male Plate with a band around his neck, a band her father had placed when the reptiles were sleeping. The rope came fast off her shoulder and looped into a lasso that flicked out once and caught the wrong flank. She had given herself enough time. She stepped back, resettled, recast and moved forward immediately as the bright rope settled around the dinosaur’s neck, separating it from its fellows as they swerved away from the taut cord. the Plateosaur tossed its head and just her step prevented Sayyina’s arm from being yanked from its socket, but she had been taught to avoid that.
These dinos were not half so smart as the Deinonychs now trotting to a stop as the herd curved over the grass and resettled, but they were in a way tame, and the marked male bucked once then stayed quiet, looking at her with a dinosaur’s deep eyes. She always thought they had such deep eyes. Like they were looking at you out of the past.
Skyler, her ‘own’ raptor, came up beside her and breathed hot lizard breath in her ear. Sayyina patted her muscular shoulder. “Good run, me beastie.” Skyler crooned. Slypher fluidly came to stand beside her, and they watched as Sayyina went closer and closer to the Plateosaur, making it forget the predators at a distance in favor of the master in proximity. It still shook its head and hooted, and she tugged on the lead without further comment to it.
They ambled out, human and predators and Plateosaur, the raptors staying back still. Skyler pulled at the gate to initiate its closing.
the fairgrounds were muddy around the thin, deep-sunk stream, dusty in the partly paved roads, hot in the sun above the Ferris wheel and cool in the long barns. Sayyina and her mother slept in among the reptiles that moved and rustled their scales in dreaming sleep. This was the sauropod people’s barn, so proclaimed the wooden cutout of peeling green that hung above the high entrance. Therefore what was inside were the small prosauropods like Plateosaurus, whose health and disposition would echo that of their owner’s giant Apatosaurus kin. A buyer would know the obvious difficulties of rounding up an Apatosaurus and getting it into a van, so would check the conditions of their livelihood’s smaller relatives when deciding between farmers. Raptors of various species, colors and dispositions resided here with their human familiars. In the late morning, when the temperature reached the heat it would stay at for the majority of the day, the crowds had begun to spread through the fair and curiously raise dust on the sandy aisle of the barn. Raptor heads poked up from nests of hay and sand, scanning with fierce sharp eyes so that the people circled around them. Sayyina rested against Skyler’s side in her brown top and plaid pajamas. The raptor had been up since dawn but held her positions anyway, and the girl loved her for it. A Velociraptor across the aisle took off for the end of the barn with a message from it’s master’s wife, and Sayyina got up. Skyler came heavily to her feet as Sayyina poured orange juice from a thermos to a Styrofoam cup.
Later, they walked alone the wide main pathway where the ceratopsians were displayed in little stalls with steel collars. The people were almost as interesting as the dinosaurs. Little kids ran between legs holding piles of cotton candy, teenagers stood in sullen groups--Sayyina caught sight of two specimens with spike blue hair and pierced faces--while serious dino salesmen prowled in gray or black suits, approaching the ceratopsian’s fat sides. They all made way for Sayyina because Skyler was with her, except for a girl riding a magnificent Styracosaurus male, who cleared the road with an effectiveness that Skyler couldn’t have achieved unless she began flicking her claws, and Sayyina was tempted to ask her to do that only rarely.
The Styracosaurus-mounted girl slowed. “Hey Sayyina!”
Sayyina did not recognize her face. The dinosaur she rode was a gray beast with small eyes and a yellow-splashed skull, yellow that spread up onto the many wicked black horns. It bobbed its head and the nose horn, two feet long, bisected the sun for a second. The girl wore denim and had green streaks jagged like lightning in her brown hair, and said, “remember from last summer? Someone’s Compy got out and we chased it halfway down the grounds. You have a pink and yellow cell phone and I never could find a cover to match that one.”
Now Sayyina recalled how she had hung on to that cover long after loud was popular because of the compliment, and how she had laughed as Skyler tore after the rogue Compsognathus from a dead stop in the shade, passing the humans in a second. She smiled up, infected by gregariousness. “What was your name again?” With her right hand she signaled Skyler to quit pacing and looking the Styracosaurus in the eye.
“Come on up, step like this.”
And so Sayyina sat on the broad ceratopsian back behind it’s woven blanket, balancing with her knees and her hand on the warm reptile flesh beside them. The dinosaur ambled into a turn and left that tight section of road to the humans who were beginning to get irritated. In slight reassurance to her own animal-mastery she called to Skyler in the whistling To-me signal the Deinonychs themselves used, and the predator trotted beside them calmly, her head sweeping back and forth as smells floated over the curve of her skull.
“I’m Laren.” said Sayyina’s old friend. “This is Turtle.” She patted her mount’s neck and the rack of horns tipped dangerously backwards as the Styracosaurus grunted its acknowledgment of recognition. Some of Sayyina’s pride at working with the ‘more dangerous’ Deinonychus faded. They had the intelligence to understand their own dangerousness. “I didn’t have him last time, because we’ve kept just females until this season.”
“Ours are sauropods really, and the raptors herd them. My dad is giving a demonstration on Tuesday.”
That afternoon they tramped around the fairgrounds and resettled Turtle along the river bank, where he could stand and eat the fresh grass, though too much, Laren said, would make him sick. Then he was prodded over to scoop up gravel to help digestion, and tourists coming in over the thin bridge gave him a wide berth, or at least the adults. The children stretched out their pudgy hands wanting to touch the Styracosaur’s long horns, and the parents pulled them back, maybe making of a lesson the two teenage girls wading in the stream near the ceratopsian and directly beside a lounging deinonych, who sunned her stomach and purred; minors were far too young to be properly maintaining such dangerous creatures as dinosaurs. Sayyina knew that Skyler was as content as her hunter/fighter’s spirit could allow her, and resisted splashing.
Laren splashed shining water over her hair and sighed. “it’s too hot!”
Skyler sat up and quickly got to her feet, levering with long ankles.
Sayyina dug about in her pockets and found a quarter or two, not enough. “I’ll see if mom will lend some money for an ice, howabout?”
“great.” Laren said, and waded back to the shore where her shoes sat just outside the shadow of the tip of Turtle’s tail. Skyler paced. Slypher appeared from around a fruit stand and they circled each other chirping and whistling greetings Sayyina could partly translate; she heard the signal for the current home from one of them as she bent to tie her sneakers over her cool, wet feet. The five of them, Turtle being led full and slow by his front horn, crossed the swath of grass and began on the dusty path that skirted the midway and main show areas. Sayyina thought she caught a voice from one of the old country-men at a table beside a grange eatery; “They’re so smart, these dinosaurs. Makes you wonder whose plan it was to bring them back. Certainly we could’ve lived without them.”
Sayyina was sure she couldn’t live without them. Laren said, “What was the name of the scientist who did bring them back?”
“I don’t remember his name. Maybe there were a few of them. It’s not taught regularly, yet.”
The familiar horizon was bright, with the yellow sunlight and slightest hint of red falling over verdant green treetops, purpling mountains, metal guard spires and honeycombed fences. The greensward lower held the majestic roots of those trees, and blacktop paths. Sayyina Arad crossed through the first fence and into the grassy enclose, and her companions Slypher and Skyler came after her, one to each side, and the gate closed on pneumonic hinges. Sayyina wore a brown dress and tan overcloak, protection not against weather but impact, and a few yellow nylon ropes were looped around her right shoulder. Her hair was brown with streaks of blonde, bushy and tucked under her collar. In face she was slightly fleshy but had a competent air about her, and an unshakable rationality in hazel eyes. The two that flanked her, pacing and gazing ahead with wide, intelligent eyes, were shoulder-tall Deinonychus, a pair.
Among the trees, oaks and conifers, grazed medium sized prosauropod Plateosaurus , ambling along rooting in the grass or rising up on their strong rust-scaled hind legs to pull down branched with their mouths or hands with clawed thumbs and wide joints for grabbing. Some of them snuffle-grunted as they moved, and some flies hovered around the less pleasant-smelling individuals. Sayyina clicked her tongue against her upper teeth and the two raptorine Deinonychus powered forward smoothly running with tail, hunches and shoulders even over the fulcrum of their legs. Their two outer footclaws dug into the soft ground with the switchblade inner claw held cocked back, and Sayyina admired their gait and speed to no end so that when she too began to trot it was in imitation of them, her back tipped forward and her hands tucked around her stomach, fingers curled back.
The larger raptor, the female, was Skyler, and her skin was woody brown with gray stripes all along her spine and S-curved neck, the expressive, thin feathers at the back of her skull showing a trace of metallic blue. Slypher, the more wiry, had a darker version of his mate’s coloring and silver-white feathers that curved out over his neck and also fringed his jawbones. Sayyina had seen their maneuvering many times before and now she knew her place in it and stayed behind as the raptors split their path toward the center of the lazing Plateosaurus herd.
The raptors’ body coloring worked just as it had in the forests of the past, camouflaging them until they burst from the shadows of trees. Plateosaurus scattered down-wind, hooting. They did not have the size to make a stand effective, as the larger sauropods did, so they were programmed by instinct to run on their four legs, away from the predators. Sayyina stepped a few paces aside as the dinosaurs stampeded past, trusting that Slypher and Skyler would be timing their speed as they timed their own, so that she could see--
There, the male Plate with a band around his neck, a band her father had placed when the reptiles were sleeping. The rope came fast off her shoulder and looped into a lasso that flicked out once and caught the wrong flank. She had given herself enough time. She stepped back, resettled, recast and moved forward immediately as the bright rope settled around the dinosaur’s neck, separating it from its fellows as they swerved away from the taut cord. the Plateosaur tossed its head and just her step prevented Sayyina’s arm from being yanked from its socket, but she had been taught to avoid that.
These dinos were not half so smart as the Deinonychs now trotting to a stop as the herd curved over the grass and resettled, but they were in a way tame, and the marked male bucked once then stayed quiet, looking at her with a dinosaur’s deep eyes. She always thought they had such deep eyes. Like they were looking at you out of the past.
Skyler, her ‘own’ raptor, came up beside her and breathed hot lizard breath in her ear. Sayyina patted her muscular shoulder. “Good run, me beastie.” Skyler crooned. Slypher fluidly came to stand beside her, and they watched as Sayyina went closer and closer to the Plateosaur, making it forget the predators at a distance in favor of the master in proximity. It still shook its head and hooted, and she tugged on the lead without further comment to it.
They ambled out, human and predators and Plateosaur, the raptors staying back still. Skyler pulled at the gate to initiate its closing.
the fairgrounds were muddy around the thin, deep-sunk stream, dusty in the partly paved roads, hot in the sun above the Ferris wheel and cool in the long barns. Sayyina and her mother slept in among the reptiles that moved and rustled their scales in dreaming sleep. This was the sauropod people’s barn, so proclaimed the wooden cutout of peeling green that hung above the high entrance. Therefore what was inside were the small prosauropods like Plateosaurus, whose health and disposition would echo that of their owner’s giant Apatosaurus kin. A buyer would know the obvious difficulties of rounding up an Apatosaurus and getting it into a van, so would check the conditions of their livelihood’s smaller relatives when deciding between farmers. Raptors of various species, colors and dispositions resided here with their human familiars. In the late morning, when the temperature reached the heat it would stay at for the majority of the day, the crowds had begun to spread through the fair and curiously raise dust on the sandy aisle of the barn. Raptor heads poked up from nests of hay and sand, scanning with fierce sharp eyes so that the people circled around them. Sayyina rested against Skyler’s side in her brown top and plaid pajamas. The raptor had been up since dawn but held her positions anyway, and the girl loved her for it. A Velociraptor across the aisle took off for the end of the barn with a message from it’s master’s wife, and Sayyina got up. Skyler came heavily to her feet as Sayyina poured orange juice from a thermos to a Styrofoam cup.
Later, they walked alone the wide main pathway where the ceratopsians were displayed in little stalls with steel collars. The people were almost as interesting as the dinosaurs. Little kids ran between legs holding piles of cotton candy, teenagers stood in sullen groups--Sayyina caught sight of two specimens with spike blue hair and pierced faces--while serious dino salesmen prowled in gray or black suits, approaching the ceratopsian’s fat sides. They all made way for Sayyina because Skyler was with her, except for a girl riding a magnificent Styracosaurus male, who cleared the road with an effectiveness that Skyler couldn’t have achieved unless she began flicking her claws, and Sayyina was tempted to ask her to do that only rarely.
The Styracosaurus-mounted girl slowed. “Hey Sayyina!”
Sayyina did not recognize her face. The dinosaur she rode was a gray beast with small eyes and a yellow-splashed skull, yellow that spread up onto the many wicked black horns. It bobbed its head and the nose horn, two feet long, bisected the sun for a second. The girl wore denim and had green streaks jagged like lightning in her brown hair, and said, “remember from last summer? Someone’s Compy got out and we chased it halfway down the grounds. You have a pink and yellow cell phone and I never could find a cover to match that one.”
Now Sayyina recalled how she had hung on to that cover long after loud was popular because of the compliment, and how she had laughed as Skyler tore after the rogue Compsognathus from a dead stop in the shade, passing the humans in a second. She smiled up, infected by gregariousness. “What was your name again?” With her right hand she signaled Skyler to quit pacing and looking the Styracosaurus in the eye.
“Come on up, step like this.”
And so Sayyina sat on the broad ceratopsian back behind it’s woven blanket, balancing with her knees and her hand on the warm reptile flesh beside them. The dinosaur ambled into a turn and left that tight section of road to the humans who were beginning to get irritated. In slight reassurance to her own animal-mastery she called to Skyler in the whistling To-me signal the Deinonychs themselves used, and the predator trotted beside them calmly, her head sweeping back and forth as smells floated over the curve of her skull.
“I’m Laren.” said Sayyina’s old friend. “This is Turtle.” She patted her mount’s neck and the rack of horns tipped dangerously backwards as the Styracosaurus grunted its acknowledgment of recognition. Some of Sayyina’s pride at working with the ‘more dangerous’ Deinonychus faded. They had the intelligence to understand their own dangerousness. “I didn’t have him last time, because we’ve kept just females until this season.”
“Ours are sauropods really, and the raptors herd them. My dad is giving a demonstration on Tuesday.”
That afternoon they tramped around the fairgrounds and resettled Turtle along the river bank, where he could stand and eat the fresh grass, though too much, Laren said, would make him sick. Then he was prodded over to scoop up gravel to help digestion, and tourists coming in over the thin bridge gave him a wide berth, or at least the adults. The children stretched out their pudgy hands wanting to touch the Styracosaur’s long horns, and the parents pulled them back, maybe making of a lesson the two teenage girls wading in the stream near the ceratopsian and directly beside a lounging deinonych, who sunned her stomach and purred; minors were far too young to be properly maintaining such dangerous creatures as dinosaurs. Sayyina knew that Skyler was as content as her hunter/fighter’s spirit could allow her, and resisted splashing.
Laren splashed shining water over her hair and sighed. “it’s too hot!”
Skyler sat up and quickly got to her feet, levering with long ankles.
Sayyina dug about in her pockets and found a quarter or two, not enough. “I’ll see if mom will lend some money for an ice, howabout?”
“great.” Laren said, and waded back to the shore where her shoes sat just outside the shadow of the tip of Turtle’s tail. Skyler paced. Slypher appeared from around a fruit stand and they circled each other chirping and whistling greetings Sayyina could partly translate; she heard the signal for the current home from one of them as she bent to tie her sneakers over her cool, wet feet. The five of them, Turtle being led full and slow by his front horn, crossed the swath of grass and began on the dusty path that skirted the midway and main show areas. Sayyina thought she caught a voice from one of the old country-men at a table beside a grange eatery; “They’re so smart, these dinosaurs. Makes you wonder whose plan it was to bring them back. Certainly we could’ve lived without them.”
Sayyina was sure she couldn’t live without them. Laren said, “What was the name of the scientist who did bring them back?”
“I don’t remember his name. Maybe there were a few of them. It’s not taught regularly, yet.”