ic Back In The Day

[Fox]

"I'm afraid we can't," was Gaian Knight's reply, and the regret in his voice was genuine - as much as he truly, truly did not enjoy space travel, and as uncomfortable as parts of this situation made him, such a trip would have been an opportunity to learn so much - to answer a host of questions that they might never get another chance to ask. "We aren't diplomats, and our expedition is under some...difficult time constraints. Even for such an important event, we simply don't have the ability to visit your world, or take you with us to ours."

He paused for a moment, Will's earlier words and his own late-night pondering coming back to mind. "....though, if it's proof of intelligent life you're after, there is still the matter of the local indigenous people facing extinction. I wouldn't call them advanced, but they show the potential and are proof of the evolution of other peoples across the stars."

"Not to mention that it isn't really 'interfering' in their natural progression if they're about to have their progression cut short," Tiamat pointed out, earning a surprised glance from her partner - which, in turn, got an indifferent shrug back. "Letting people - or whatever - grow on their own is all well and good, but y'ain't really messing with the natural order if they're gonna die anyway and you have a good reason to step in."

[KnightDisciple]

"Hey, what about, like, making them take a nap?"

 

Most likely several heads turn toward Will as he steps forward, continuing with his idea.

 

"Like, what if you had some sort of thing that could help them all just kind of take a big nap while you move them? Surely you've found a few planets that could support them. You help them go to sleep for a long time. You load them up. Move them, maybe do some fancy engineering to make similar or identical homes. They'll probably freak out some, but I'm sure you could figure out how it has minimal cultural impact. Then they've got a safe planet to develop on. Give it time, maybe less time than you think, and they might end up peers with you guys."

 

It's not a very complete plan. But it's one full of hope and idealism, just like Will.

[Thunder King]

"You know...that's...that's not a bad idea." Mali said. "I mean, it could still not work at all, but if they were moved to a different planet adapted to their needs, maybe they could survive without needing us to put them up somewhere. I mean it's not perfect, but it's something." She said. She didn't entirely believe it could be done herself. She wasn't exactly a science expert, but Will's idea was at least sound to her. It was the closest thing to a solution other than 'let 'em die' she'd heard so far, at least.

[Avenger Assembled]

"We _could_ do it, Commander," said one of the aliens, who had introduced itself as 'Red', its mechanical voice hard to read. "It would be a simple matter to convert the matter-changer to handle living matter. We could render them into the Imageria until we find a planet with a compatible biosphere - their own expectations will let them rebuild a world around them until we find them a new sanctuary. Perhaps that gas-giant moon in the Green Sector."  

 

"...hmmm. All right," said Irdonozur, nodding his hair-snakes towards first the assembled humans, then his own people. "We will attempt this for the hunters that you honor, in the name of our friends of this place. But we must wait until the impending impact is more obvious to their eyes. A religious event that they will perceive as a death, then a rebirth in a new world, will be easier for their heirs to dismiss than a clear mystery. Red, Green, I trust you with this task - I will remain here with our friends to observe them as they observe the hunters." 

 

With the two aliens beamed back aboard their spaceship, Richard hmmed for a fast instant before commenting, "Well, I think the boy and I have an appointment with a T-Rex in the middle of the continent. C'mon, son, we've got a job to do!" And with that, in twin miniature sonic booms, the Cline men were off again to the heartland of North America. 

[Electra]

Paige stared blankly after the men of her family as they fled the scene at high speed, then looked around at the rest of the group. "Well!" she said with all the forced optimism of a camp counselor on a rainy day, "I guess we should decide what to do next. Gaian Knight, Tiamat, Crimson Tiger, would you all be up for a little covert observation of the dinosaur society? If Gaian Knight can give us a ride, I can conceal us from them, and we can get a better look and some footage as well. We should pay attention to what they're eating and using for clothes, that'll probably be important to setting them up in a new location." She took the memory chip out of her camera and handed it to Frank, replacing it with an empty one. "Might not be quite so depressing now?" 

[Fox]

"I'd be up for that," Gaian Knight agreed - and it was no sooner said than a trail of sand made its way in from the edge of the beach, pooling together into a hovering, circular mass that slowly smoothed over to sandstone. "Knowledge is never wasted, and I'm more than happy to help. Mind coming along and playing translator, Tiamat? Just in case they're talking about anything interesting when we fly by."

Tiamat snorted, adjusting the tie that kept her hair back. "Can I fly in on my own wings, and declare myself queen?"

"You can fly on the disk, as a human, and tell us what they're saying."

"Fine," she replied, throwing her hands up in mock exasperation. "If you're going to be boring about it."

[Thunder King]

Mali had to stifle a grin at Tiamat's reaction to the situation, and nodded herself. "Yeah, that sounds cool." She said. If she got an opportunity to really see these dinosaur people in action, that would be an amazing experience. All of this was an amazing experience, really. When she put the costume on, she did not imagine that she would end up seeing real, live dinosaurs.

 

Of course, she wasn't upset about it at all.

Edited July 15, 2014 by Thunder King

[Avenger Assembled]

The dinosaur town was a frantic bustle of activity when the disguised visitors arrived, cameras and eyes both straining to their utmost to make out every detail they could of this place to better facilitate the rescue of the inhabitants. They might have expected to find them completely oblivious to their impending doom, but between the way the raptors themselves were darting about in the jungle below and the conversations that drifted up to Tiamat's ears, it sounded as though something was up.

 

"The shaman says the end time has come! We must all bring him fish to stave off the Great Burning!" Looking down, Tiamat and the others could see one dinosaur stopping to talk to another, spear negligently over his shoulder. Looking more closely, they could see it was their friend the Crab Hunter they'd met before, speaking to a fat-bellied dinosaur about his size who (upon closer inspection) wasn't fat-bellied at all, but had a front pouch occupied by something small and scaley and feathered!

 

"Oh, sure he does," said the female with a snort, "This is just like the big storm all over again..."

 

The dinosaur village was strange to humanoid eyes, but not so bizarre to someone with experience with reptilians and avians - with pairs like Crab Hunter and his mate living with very small young out in the jungle and with a central 'nest' building with many younger males and females, the dinosaurs were living like ravens or other birds rather than apes.

---

A few hundred miles away, Fast-Forward talked with great reassurance into a camera as he heard thundering footsteps fast-approaching. "That T-Rex may be fast in sprints, but I think we'll see Thoughtspeed is a whole lot faster. How you doing, boy?!" he called into the microphone that connected him to Will - and the camera on him as his son ran with full camera gear away from the charging king of the monsters.

[KnightDisciple]

A few hundred miles away, Fast-Forward talked with great reassurance into a camera as he heard thundering footsteps fast-approaching. "That T-Rex may be fast in sprints, but I think we'll see Thoughtspeed is a whole lot faster. How you doing, boy?!" he called into the microphone that connected him to Will - and the camera on him as his son ran with full camera gear away from the charging king of the monsters.

 

With his black helmet deployed, it was not possible for the cameras to capture Thoughtspeed's facial expressions. But they could capture his voice well enough.

 

"THIS IS SO AWESOME!"

 

The young man with speed enough for dozens was running at a pace just a bit faster than the Tyrant Lizard, the King of Dinosaurs. Though tempted to, he was not running backwards to taunt the creature. He was occasionally waving his arms to keep its attention, or bursting his speed to put a few dozen yards between them, stopping, and generally taunting the megafauna. 

 

"This thing is fast, but no way can it beat a car, let alone me! I almost feel sorry for it!"

 

His erratic, zig-zagging pattern as he led the creature on a merry chase showed clearly that "almost", like in most things, didn't really count for much here. 

Edited July 19, 2014 by KnightDisciple

[Electra]

"Huh," Paige murmured, "marsupial reptiles. I guess that particular evolutionary path died out right about here. I've never heard of a bird or lizard with a pouch." 

 

"They're all scared," Kelsey murmured, her boom mike loose and almost forgotten in her hands. There wasn't much to record anyway, except whatever Paige and Tiamat translated. 

 

"The whole village is near panic," Paige confirmed, her face tightening a little. "We'll have to hope they don't do anything crazy while our friends upstairs are still getting things ready for them." 

 

"Can we get closer?" Frank asked, peering over the edge of Gaian Knight's rock platform. "You can shield us, right? They won't see us even on the ground." 

 

"I don't know," Paige replied, looking uncertainly towards Gaian Knight. "I could keep the shield up, I don't know if it's a good idea?" 

[Fox]

Gaian Knight looked down at the village with grim curiosity, though not so grim as it had been - the knowledge that so much of this was going to be wiped out was awful, and the unknown fate of the inhabitants was...well. Better than dying, at least. That had been the idea. "I'd rather not get too close if it can be helped," he admitted; he at least tried to oblige by giving Frank and a couple of the other onlookers dips in the edge of the platform to look down through so that they didn't have to lean out over the edge quite so uncomfortably far.

Catching people with rocks worked, but he'd been told it wasn't an amazingly comfortable experience.

"If we have a specific reason to get closer we can, but if possible I'd much rather rely on, say, camera zoom. They're already pretty worked up, and I don't want to risk making that worse. Plus, we don't know a whole lot about them still," he added thoughtfully, frowning. "Something the crab-hunter said...."

He trailed off, but Tiamat was happy to pick the thought up for him. "Yeah, caught that too," she agreed, still keeping an ear on the chatter below for any interesting bits. "False prophets end up right by coincidence all the time - had a couple fortune tellers predict my own whims and raids right a couple of times, heheh - but it sounds like that shaman is either really lucky, or they're packin' some real ability. Didn't plan on something like that."

[Blue Rose]

Sam mostly keeps her own council on the matter as she studies the situation. After a while, she ventures an offer.

"I could get in closer. Wouldn't be any problem to veil myself fro-" She cuts herself short and closes her eyes, as if she heard something.

"Scratch that..." she says in a more worried tone. "There's something in there." She points to the central nest. "Some real juju. And if I can sense it from here, it's probably pretty serious. Those prophets might not just be making lucky guesses. Some good scrying might see through any attempts to get close."

[Electra]

"Huh, so someone down there is wielding actual magic," Paige said with a thoughtful frown. "It might be a risk we have to take. If they have enough magic to realize what's happening to them while they're being transported, they could panic or cause some serious upheaval in this society. I can keep cloaking us with a 'don't notice me' effect that might keep them from being interested enough to try to scry us. If we were closer, do you think you could tell exactly what kind of power they've got?" she asked Sam. 

[Blue Rose]

Sam considers the question a moment, "Maybe," she waffles. "I'm not an expert, but I could try..."

Information is always a good thing, but she's not a fan of taking risks off of maybes. Normally, she'd consider it an essential part of casing the mark. But...

She looks at Tiamat.

It may have been a joke, but... it works.

"I think you should fly down and declare yourself a goddess," she says plainly. "It seems like it has the best shot at working." She offers the rest a look that just dares them to challenge her plan.

[Fox]

"What?" Gaian Knight's head spun back toward Kit, the brow above his goggles furrowed in concern. "That was a joke - you can't seriously-"

He cut off, casting a concerned look Tiamat's way - and for good reason, it seemed. His redheaded companion was grinning ear to ear in an expression more suited to a shark than a woman. "Hahahahah. I like you, kid. Your plans sound fun," she admitted - complimented? - and for a moment her crimson eyes seemed to burn with fire. "Y'might want to run it by me, though; I'm all for becoming queen of the lizard people, but all that's gonna do is draw a lot of attention and make some of the humans distressed. What else y'got going that you need that flashy a spectacle for?"

[Blue Rose]

"Goddess, not queen," Sam corrects, then shoots a glance at Gaian Knight, "And yes. I am serious."

Though she's as amused by the thought as anyone, she keeps her voice level, calm, and professional, to keep full gravity on her idea as a well-considered proposal.

"Think about it. We aren't saving them if they don't cooperate, and we can't exactly go up to them and be honest. But if Tiamat goes down there, big and mighty and terrifying and something they can relate to more than the weird shaved monkeys, we have a voice. And every culture we know of on Earth had gods, so they can fit it just fine in their own world. So, Tiamat commands they gather, so that she can save them from certain doom sent by something dark and mysterious, our spacey friends beam them out, and when they wake up, they know their new goddess saved them and go about rebuilding. It's as seamless as we're going to get."

[Thunder King]

Mali had to admit, the plan had a certain degree of logic. It also had a certain degree of insanity, but they already ran clear past sanity when they started trying to save marsupial magic lizard people from 66,000,000 BC. They were a psychic, a magic thief, a magic rock master, a dragon, a speedster with his head in the 80s and his (admittedly cute) goofball son who was currently playing with a Tyrannosaurus Rex. All that and an ordinary teenage girl with a penchant for punching and kicking.

 

Mali shrugged. "I admit, it's not a terrible idea. But I'm no expert on dragons, or magic, or marsupial dinosaur people. I have to ask if anyone has any better ideas."

[Electra]

"Nope, nope, nope, nope," Paige cut in, a look of faint horror on her face. "We absolutely are not starting a brand new dragon-based religion among the dinosaur people. There is no possible way that will ever lead to anything good. Saving these guys is good, saving them so they can wipe each other out in a war over what kind of dragon their god is and what kind of ritual sacrifice she prefers would be very not good. If they're going to cook up religion, let them do it on their own. I still think Crimson Tiger and I can just drop in on them and see what kind of magic they're using without causing any fuss at all. If not, I think we should leave them alone entirely and just run the risk that there might be some panic. It's got to be better than what would happen if Tiamat went in, shock and awe style." 

[Fox]

"God. Queen. God-Queen," Tiamat dismissively defended, before turning to Paige with a look that was quite possibly genuine hurt. "And I'm hurt!" she said, even her accent shifting to something a bit more proper and slightly British. "You think my reign would be such a violent one? I'm not interested in sacrifices; my brief reign would be benevolent-"

Gaian Knight had his head in his hands. "Tiamat."

"-and kind, the wisdom of centuries guiding my subjects to a better future-"

"Tiamat."

"-without sacrifices, other than maybe a simple donation of precious metals and gems as a tribute to my own glorious--"

"Tiamat. No. Just...just no."

She sniffed, crossing her arms and screwing her face up into an amused pout. "No, of course not," she sighed. "Heaven forbid I have any fun."

[Avenger Assembled]

Sneaking into a dinosaur village's center structure was a new experience for both Crimson Tiger and Hologram, but as Tiamat and Gaian Knight, and their civilian escorts, zipped away and out of immediate eyeshot of the dinosaurs, it seemed like the best course of action - it was certainly the most exciting, as wearable cameras recorded swaying branches and crashing reptilian feet as they entered the mudbrick and thatch-roofed structure. The floor beneath their feet was dirt and well-tracked, worn smooth by what must have been thousands of dinosaur feet over the years. They passed small rooms covered by leather or palm-leaf drapes as they went, catching glimpses of beds like nests and scattered animal bones, with neat holes dug in the corner of every room.

 

In the center of the building, at the heart of a knot of swaying dinosaurs too thick to immediately approach, was an altar made of rough island stone, its cracked and pitted surface stained with blood - most likely from the raw meat that was being heaped at the feet of its master! The shaman might have been ridiculous in another context with his giant fish headdress (obviously the head of some now-gone species) and the long cape of feathered scales he wore around his neck, but there was power in that short, muscular body all the same. Careful about reading his mind, Paige could nonetheless hear the emotion in his voice as he addressed the followers, the song he sang of hissing barks and growls making them follow along like a congregation with its amens!

[Thunder King]

Crimson Tiger was not sure what she was looking at, but she was amazed all the same. They were quite clearly an ancient dinosaur people, fully capable of speech and with a social structure. It tugged at her heart strings a bit. She agreed that saving them was the better notion, for she was always taught that life, all life, is sacred. However, if nature had dictated that these people should die, should they save them?

 

What if they already had saved them? What if fate brought them here, to this place, at this time to be the deliverers of these people? Erase all evidence of them, remove them from known history, and set them up somewhere else. She decided that, ultimately, if they were supposed to succeed, they would. If nature decided these people were to die, they would die regardless of intervention.

 

She didn't speak, because she didn't know enough about what Hologram was doing to know what she could and couldn't do to stay hidden.

[Electra]

Hologram nodded approvingly at Crimson Tiger's silent movements as they walked through the dinosaur village. There were times, she had to admit, when having a ninja on your side came in handy. The less noise she had to muffle, the better. ~Let's circle the room while they're all focused towards the center,~ she suggested telepathically, ~get some footage of this ritual.~ Lifting her handheld camera to supplement the wearable camera's footage, she carefully made her way around the circle as the dinosaurs sang and swayed, finally coming to a stop behind a pile of what might have been nesting material. With a wave to Crimson Tiger to stop for a moment, she closed her eyes and concentrated, slipping over the fevered emotions of the saurians and into the consciousness of the shaman.

 

Paige was startled for a moment at his level of awareness; for a moment she worried he might have noticed her intrusion. She "held still" as best she could, and he quickly went back to concentrating on his song. It helped that the information she wanted was not buried deeply in his mind, it was something he was thinking about anyway. She was relieved to note that he was pleased at the coming rescue from the sky, which meant he probably wasn't going to poison the people against it or fill them with fear. That was a good sign. Her relief was short-lived, however, when she read further and learned the source of the shaman's information. 

 

~Richard!~ she called out mentally, stretching her perception across the continent. ~Time to get back to camp, we've got new problems. There's another player involved in this game, some kind of being that lives in magma lakes and knows what we're trying to do with the aliens... and sees it as some kind of liberation. I think we need to check it out.~ Opening her eyes, Paige beckoned to Crimson Tiger to follow her out the door, sending her and the others the same information as she went. 

[Avenger Assembled]

Meanwhile, up in the sky, Tiamat closed her eyes for an instant and had a flash of insight.

 

When the Great Darkness had come and the others had died, she had fled deep into her lair with her most precious treasures and slept for an age, protected by mighty spells of unimaginable power that bound the rocks to her. But when she opened her eyes, the rocks had been bound too tightly and she was trapped! She could dream her way into the minds of those who lived on the surface and live through their savage hunts, but few had minds worth thinking about until the last few eons. The hunts of her thinking children had not been as good as her own - but they had been hunts all the same, and their sacrifices were welcome.

 

She had sensed the great skyrock and mourned the death of her children above - but now they were being taken to a better place, and that was good. Now that they would be leaving, she could break free from her self-made prison and walk the world again...

[Fox]

It took Gaian Knight a moment to realize something was wrong - by the time he realized Tiamat was being too still and quiet, she'd opened her eyes back up.

They were not even remotely human. She made an awful sound, some kind of low, challenging hiss emanating from a throat far too deep to fit in a human neck, lips curling up into an unfriendly smile under terrible, slitted pupils. It was the kind of gaze mammals had long since learned to avoid, and it always creeped him out. "T...?"

She turned look at him, pulling herself - and her guise, for that matter - back under control after one long moment of full-on predator mode. "Hmmm, haha. Sorry. That...took me by surprise. Hope you're eavesdropping, Hologram, but I hope you weren't listening just then, too."

She flexed, running a tongue along her teeth as if to make sure they were still flat and monkey-like. "So! She's right, there's...something here. She's...old, I think. Whatever she is, she fled underground to survive and got stuck; she cares a lot for the lizard people, here, and now that they're gonna be okay she wants to be free again. Also, I think she's in my head a little," she added, as a careful afterthought. "Whoever or whatever she is, she's probably rocking some pretty good magic to survive this long; if I tried it, I'd be stuck hibernating, not sending dreams out to the surface-dwellers. Tread carefully."

Gaian Knight just stared at her for a moment, which earned him a shrug. "....well. Alright, then. This trip is just full of surprises, isn't it?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"Wait, who now?" Richard exclaimed, both in his head and out loud enough to get his son's attention as they paused in their filming of the Tyrannosaurus pack. He set down his camera and reached into his jacket pocket. He read out loud, again for Will's ears and Paige's mind, "'Ghorummaz the...'a serpentine dragon of stone and fire whose fiery breath is magma itself, Ghorummaz is mother and father to the dragon lines of Earthly magic and the Four Greek Elements. Ghorummaz is mother and father of storms and earthquakes, and the binder of darkness...' Well, he sounds like a gnarly dude!" He closed the 19th century book, thinking briefly about all the extra years the hand-written pages were seeing in his care, and added, "Nothing in there about him being 65 million years old, either! Jeez." 

 

Slipping the book back in his pocket, he turned to Will and said, "Okay, evidently there's a dragon god under the islands and we need to get back and find out what's going on. Let's go."