Bruce let out a honk of agreement, and I double checked to make sure that I had my blades before walking back through the long hallway to the jungle valley. There were plenty of ferns guarding the entrance of my alcove, and the narrow corridor where I walked, but I kind of wanted to leave those there so that it would be harder for creatures to see my fire.
There were plenty of palm frond style bushes and trees in the next valley, and I went to work cutting them off before I threw them into a pile. I tried not to roam too far from the narrow passageway that would take me back to my nook and stegos, but I’d soon cut down all the palm fronds within twenty yards, and I only had two hundred or so stacked. I probably needed three times as much, so Bruce and I moved a bit deeper into the jungle.
As I moved to the next cluster of plants, I couldn’t help but feel a bit nervous about being on the ground instead of up on top of my stegos. I knew that I could tame dinosaurs, but there was still a chance something could sneak up on me and attack before I had a chance to react. Granted, I had Bruce here, and the big pteranodon didn’t seem wary as we went deeper in the jungle, but I would have still prefered to have my troodons or balaurs on patrol.
“Huh,” I said to myself as I looked at Bruce. “I just thought of something. I kind of called you from far away, and I didn’t even see Grumpy when I tamed him. I just kind of reached out through the river. You think there is something to that?”
Bruce tilted his head to the side and let out a honk of puzzlement.
“I wonder though,” I said. “Okay, hold on. Let me try something.” I closed my eyes and thought about mentally calling out to the area surrounding me. I didn’t really ask for help like I did when Grumpy came to my aid, instead I just kind of asked if there was anything out there which could come. I realized that my request might have been a bit dangerous, since it might not be good if it actually worked, but the jungle here was a bit dense, and I didn’t think something as big as a Utahraptor would be able to move through the brush without making a lot of noise.
But then I did hear noises from all around me, and I opened my eyes to see dozens of snakes, lizards, rats, and birds swarm around Bruce and I.
The pteranodon let out a honk as a longer boa-constrictor sized snake slithered underneath his legs, and the slithering reptile coiled up beside a group of fist sized rats.
“Shit,” I gasped as the horde of animals quickly came to rest in a well behaved group at my feet. There must have been a hundred of them, and they all stared up at me with interested eyes.
“Uhhh, wow,” I said as I studied the group. “I actually didn’t think that would work.” I suddenly worried that this idea might have screwed up my powers, so I opened my Eye-Q to see if I had somehow tamed all these animals. I didn’t see any of them on my list, and that made me scratch my head again. Was I actually in control of them? Or was this another side effect of my power? Could I kind of order them around temporarily? Was there additional steps to taming a creature? When I tamed the stegos a few hours ago, I had done it my usual way, but Bruce had been somewhat of a different situation, and Grumpy had just been a shot in the dark.
The jungle was completely silent, and the animals stared at me as if they were eager for my next command.
“Can you all stand over here?” I asked as I pointed to my right, and the horde of vermin quickly scurried, slithered, or flew over to the area where I gestured. Groups of rats and lizards were actually standing on top of the large snake now, but the larger reptile didn’t seem to mind.
“Hmmm,” I said as my heart slammed into my chest. I was starting to feel a bit of a headache coming on, and I wondered if working with the hundred or more animals at once was straining my abilities.
“Back over here, please,” I said as I pointed to my left, and the horde scurried over each other like a tidal wave of small bodies until they were organized where I had pointed.
“Damn,” I chuckled as I shook my head. “I’m like the pied piper or something.” The small creatures didn’t laugh, but Bruce let out a honk of approval.
“How can I make you all disperse?” I asked, but as soon as the thought entered my mind and I voiced the words, the various creatures scattered as if a bomb had been dropped. Bruce let out another honk of surprise as the small creatures dashed through his legs, and he flapped his own wings to keep himself upright so that he accidently didn’t step on them.
None of the animals attacked each other as they fled, which surprised me a bit, but then Bruce and I were alone and the sounds of the various birds returned to the jungle a few moments later. I checked my Eye-Q again, but none of the creatures had been added to it.
“Seems like I have a limited control over creatures,” I said to Bruce as I bent down to continue my work on the palm fronds. “That might come in handy someday.”
Bruce let out another honk, and the noise seemed to split my head open like an axe. The small amount of discomfort I had felt earlier was now a full-blown migraine, and I took a few deep breaths over the pile of palm fronds as my vision spun.
“Orrrr not,” I sighed as I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “That kicked the shit out of me. I might not be powerful enough to do it.”
Bruce gave a sympathetic honk, and I felt him rub his head against mine gently.
“I think I need a bit more of these,” I said as I gestured back to the pile at my feet, “then we are going to go back so I can crash.
I cut another stack of leaves, bound them together with some of the thinner vines, stacked it on top of the previous pile, tied those together, and then slung them over my back. The piles were bulky, but the leaves didn’t weight much at all, and I was able to carry them easily back to the first piles I had made, tie those together, and then carry the massive stack back through the rock alley to my campsite.
My headache had gotten worse by the time I returned to my fire, and I set the piles of palm fronds down beside the frame of my hut before I shoved my head into the spring water. The cold water refreshed me a bit, and I went back to designing a raised bed that I could sleep on.
The bed was much less complicated to make than the fort. I dug four post holes using the shorter stick and used a rock to hammer them into the ground, and then I inserted four sticks that were about three feet long. They ended up sticking two or so feet off the ground. While I worked on splitting the palm fronds in half, I burned holes into four thicker beams that I intended to use as the bed frame. I got about half way done splitting all the palm fronds by the time the holes were burned, and I lashed cross beams as support slats across the rectangle so that it kind of looked like our gate door. Once that was all done, I set the frame on top of the posts I’d just hammered into the ground inside of my hut. The holes I had burned in the frame allowed only a few inches of the legs to pass through, and I made a few adjustment cuts in one of the holes to widen it a bit so that the bed was level.
“The plan is that I tear this whole thing down tomorrow morning, and then bring it with me,” I said to bruce as I laid some palm fronds on the bed for padding. “It will probably take me an hour or so to do, but it will save me a bunch of time every night.”
Bruce let out a honk of approval, and I stepped back out of the skeleton of the hut and returned to splitting the palm fronds. When I finished with the task, I took a three stack of the half leaves, and crammed it into the space between the vines that I had threaded through the posts. If I expected a storm, I might have tied the thatching to the vines or posts, but I wanted to pull them all down tomorrow morning, and there wasn’t really any wind coming into the nook where my camp was. I quickly moved in a circle to fill the bottom row of the hut with the leaves, and then I moved to place the next row of leaves above the first.
By the time I finished covering the sides and roof with palm fronds, the sky was dark, and I was working only by the light of the fire. It was a bit difficult to get the thatching in the top parts, even with the ladder, but I figured I had done a good job with the hut.
�
�I’m no Trel,” I said to Bruce after I took a few moments to admire my handy work after I had sipped some water from the stream, “but I think it looks great. Might take me a bit longer than an hour to tear down. Hell, it’s bigger than my own hut back in my fort. Once we get home, we can make it a permanent part of our camp. What do you think?”
Bruce gave me a honk of agreement, and I turned back to the entrance where Mike D, MCA, and Ad-Rock were grazing on some ferns.
“I’m going to head to bed guys. We’ve got a busy day tomorrow, so you all should get some rest too.”
Mike D let out a low pitched note, and then MCA and Ad-Rock repeated it.
“Yeah,” I yawned, stretched my arms over my head, and then turned back to my fort. “Been a long ass day, and I didn’t sleep last night. I’ll just wake up with the sun. You all let me know if there is a problem or any--”
A bright light filled up the narrow circle of sky above my nook, and I threw myself to the ground as a reflexive move. For half a moment, it seemed like the canyon walls were on fire, but then I realized that it was an orange colored teleportation pillar setting down somewhere near my position.
The powerful beings who had abducted me were dumping another survivor on Dinosaurland.
I jumped to my feet and lifted my head up to the sky to try to figure out exactly where the light came from. It was a bit hard to tell, but it seemed as if the light was coming from the north; in the direction of the river.
Then I saw another color light up the sky. This one looked blue, and it was a bit fainter so I guessed it was over toward the northeast; in the direction I had just come from.
In the direction of the spinos.
“Ahh fuck,” I sighed as I wiped my face with the back of my hand. Then I looked over to Bruce, and the pteranodon gave me a quizzical look.
“Hey, man, I’m the one who named you after Batman. Don’t give me that look. It’s time to go do some hero shit.”
Chapter 3
I ran out the narrow fern-covered gap that separated my camp-nook from the stegos and jumped up on MCA’s back. The stego let out a note of annoyance, that Mike D and Ad-Rock echoed, but then the three of them began trotting through the oak trees and toward the river.
My guess had been right about the location of the orange pillar. It really did look like it was coming from the shore of the river about a half mile away, but I couldn’t really see the position of the blue pillar since it was on the opposite side of the cliff wall on our right.
“Come on, stay up,” I hissed at the orange pillar in the distance. I didn’t know exactly how the alien techno-magic worked, but it seemed that the light faded as soon as the person stepped out of the initial circle that they were teleported inside of. If whoever it was could just stay still for a few minutes, I’d be able to see exactly where they were.
But then again, so could everyone else in nearby Dinosaurland.
“Pick up the pace boys,” I urged, and the stegos moved from a trot into a canter.
I heard Bruce honk from over my head, and I saw a flash of movement above the oak tree canopy as he flew toward the orange light. I opened my mouth to call out to him, but I kind of didn’t want to scream through the night air at him. I figured that the pteranodon was pretty smart, and he’d probably figure out that I needed him to keep an eye on whoever was coming out of the teleport pillar.
Both the red and white moon were out, but they will still low in the sky. There was enough light for me to steer the stegos around the various oak trees, but that could have also been because my cyber-eyes were giving me better vision.
After about thirty seconds of riding the stegos through the trees, I heard the river up ahead. The glow from the orange pillar was getting brighter, but it was off to the right a bit, so I figured that I would need to follow the shore up river to the breach spot between the two valleys before I saw the exact landing spot.
Then the orange glow went out and I hissed with annoyance. We hit the beach a few moments after the light went out, and I directed MCA, Mike D, and Ad-Rock to push eastward on the shore. I could sense Grumpy’s presence in the water, and I commanded him to drift back up stream just in case we needed a bit of help to rescue this survivor.
Bruce honked above us as we rounded the cliff corner heading east. The sound sounded like a bit of a warning, and as soon as I got a good look at the beach where I suspected the orange teleport beam had landed, I realized why Bruce was concerned.
There was a lone figure on the beach some hundred yards from us. The figure looked female, and she wore what looked like a long black dress, but it was somewhat hard to tell because she was covered in fire.
Or maybe she was actually made of fire.
Her long vermillion hair danced down to her ass as if it was alive. Fire seemed to dance at the end of her fingers, and her eyes glowed an intense green. She saw the three stegos, and as I rounded the corner she turned to us with a sneer on her face.
Then she gestured outward with her right hand, and a whip of flame sprang out of her hand with a gunshot-sound.
“I come in peace!” I shouted as I commanded the stegos to slow their canter.
“Where am I?” she shouted in return as she took a step away from me. She might as well have been a walking campfire for how bright she burned, but I couldn’t really make out the details of her shape and features from our distance.
“It’s a different world,” I shouted. “People across the galaxy, or maybe even the universe, are being kidnapped and brought here to survive.”
“Did you take me?” she growled, and her whip hissed as it dipped into the river water. A bunch of steam came up from the water, and then she flicked the whip free so it twisted on the sandy beach.
“No,” I replied. “I was kidnapped too.” I raised my hand to point past her. “See that blue beam of light behind you? That is someone else being placed on this world. There are all sorts of powerful creatures on this planet called dinosaurs, I want to help you, but I also want to help them. I don’t mean you any harm--”
“If you come close to me, I will destroy you!” she shouted, and then she took a step back into the water, and it steamed as if her skin was incredibly hot.
“Look, I don’t want to hurt you, I just--”
“What?” she gasped as she jumped away from the water. “Water! It flows faster than lava!”
“Yeah,” I said, and I realized that she might not have rivers on her world. “I want to help you, so you need to wait--”
“I don’t need your help!” she shouted as she flicked her whip and turned her head from the water so she could glare at me. “I want to go back to my world. Did my enemies do this to me? Are you working for Te’fanna?”
“I don’t know this Te’fanna person. Can you wait here? I want to try to get to that blue--” as I spoke, the light pillar turned off. I guessed that it was another half-mile up the river, but now the chances of saving whoever it was had just diminished.
I still wanted to try through.
“No,” she growled. “Send me--”
“Just stand there!” I shouted as I directed the stegos to hug the side of the cliff on the outskirts of the beach so we gave her a wide berth. “I’m going to come back so we can talk more.”
“No.” She snapped her words and then cracked her whip. “Send me back to my--”
“I have to go!” I shouted, and then I kicked MCA, Mike D, and Ad-Rock into a run so we could get around her. We were a good hundred yards away from her on the other side, but I had no idea what the woman’s physical attributes or powers were. For all I knew, she could have teleported to me and then roasted me alive with her touch.
“Wait!” She seemed to realize that the stegos and I were actually running away from her, and I glanced over my shoulder to see her jog behind us.
“I’ll be back!” I shouted, and then I turned back around to focus on our rush toward where I had thought the blue pillar was.
If the woman’s body was really
that hot, then I figured that a predator would probably think twice about eating her. At any rate, she was a bit hostile, and I didn’t want to waste precious time trying to put her at ease when there was someone else that was in danger.
We made it about two, maybe three hundred yards upriver before a horrific roar echoed across the canyon. I’d heard the sound before, and I knew exactly what it was.
Spinosaurus, and it sounded like it was most definitely coming from upriver.
Were the powerful apex predators going toward where the blue pillar of light was? Were they already there? I couldn’t quite guess how far away the spino that issued the bellow was, but I knew that I’d narrowly escaped them earlier this day some six or so miles upstream.
It probably wasn’t worth risking my life for whoever had come in the blue teleport pillar, but I hated the thought of leaving someone alone to get eaten. I pondered the predicament for a few seconds while the stegos continued their trot, and then I remembered that I had a pteranodon in the air.
“Bruce,” I called up into the night sky. “Fly up the river and let me know if you can see whoever came through the portal. If you think we can get to them in time, give me a honk. If they are too close to the giant dinosaurs with the fins on their back, then come back and give me two honks.”
Bruce let out a honk, and his dark form blocked out the red moon for half an instant as he flew upriver. I was as bit unsure if I should keep my stegos moving in that direction, so I decided to slow them down to a walk while I turned back behind me.
I had put about a quarter of a mile between me and the woman with the flaming hair and whip, but she was still jogging toward me on the beach. She was a pretty bright beacon, and the light from her hair, eyes, and body reflected off the river water and bounced off the side of the canyon with a loud orange glow.
Two honks sounded from up above, and I felt Bruce’s wings blow past my hair as he swooped down.
Tamer- King of Dinosaurs 5 Page 4