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lukeoutbelow2012-12-03 12:10 am
joysweeper) wrote in lukeoutbelow2012-12-03 12:10 am
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This is an app I wrote for an au of Willhelmina Reilly/Green Knight (GK) from the Dinoverse series. It might have gone to edensphere.
CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Willhelmina Reilly/Green Knight (GK)
SERIES: Dinoverse
PERSONALITY:
Willhelmina "Mina" Reilly loved being recognized and impressing people, being and staying the center of attention. She felt that if she set her sights high enough, even if she didn't attain her goal she would at least achieve something worthwhile, and have something good to show for her efforts. She was overconfident and often took risks without considering the consequences of failure. For most of her life she would rush headlong into things after these lofty goals.
She tended to procrastinate on things that weren’t directly linked to those main goals, and while she liked most people and would try to protect smaller kids from bullies, this wasn’t entirely altruistic. It made her look good. She didn’t often consider more subtle consequences or how people who she called friend might think of her.
Mina went through character development. Though the above traits were mitigated, traces remain - she’s something of an overachiever, likes to be liked, and can be impulsive and cocky. She’ll always be an extrovert.
But she is more relaxed, now, and doesn’t have the same burning desire to be liked and impressive all the time. She’s come to prefer relatively few close friends to a vast circle of admirers, and stops to think more often.
And she’s found a pure thrill in relying on herself and, say, hunting from time to time.
In low moments, she thinks of her father, who she calls Briefcase Man, and imagines him giving her practical advise on the situation. She usually gets along well enough with her... companion, Green Knight. He’s a dinosaur.
The Green Knight is the name another human gave him; he had no concept of names until recently. But ensconced in Mina’s human brain, he is fully able to learn things that were beyond him before. He’s already figured out that speech is a kind of communication both like and more complicated than the body language, acro sounds, and smells he’s used to, he can understand concepts like names, and he wants to know more. He’ s begun to understand that things that talk are people, and they are not to be regarded as prey. But he is still very inhuman.
He’s something of a xenophile. New things are fascinating, and he is growing to appreciate the aesthetics of what might as well be aliens to him.
Although he is a predator, entirely willing to kill other dinosaurs to eat, GK has his own unwritten codes of honor and chivalry. He has a basic understanding of prey population ecology, knowing that overhunting is bad and it’s better to selectively kill. He does not kill for sport, and he kills cleanly.
Creatures he doesn’t regard as prey - originally other acrocanthosaurs, but he’s begun to understand the concept of ‘people’ - are not to be eaten, and should in fact be helped if they’re in trouble/danger. Unless they’ve already proven that they won’t help someone similarly without having a good reason.
GK tends to be somewhat cautious in his curiosity and is not territorial. If he doesn’t have to fight for something, he generally won’t. He’s not insensitive to what others feel or want, and tends to respect that.
However, he does tend to be rather distant from strangers and has a fairly reserved nature, though he’s not shy about showing affection to those who’ve gotten past it. Most of the time he’s content to let Mina act, but he can take over at will.
TIMELINE: Near the end of the last Dinoverse book, Dinosaurs Ate My Homework - after the M.I.N.D. Machine has flung them somewhere new, but before they ended up in some unfriendly version of New York City.
CANON+AU BACKGROUND:
Mina’s family was moderately wealthy and loving enough, but with three older brothers she grew up the center of attention. Her business-minded father, not sure how to relate to a daughter but trying his best, took her camping like one of the guys and gave her a lot of advice on anything he could think to tell her.
In school she quickly proved that she loved being in the spotlight and had a strong belief in her own ability to do just about anything she set herself to and worked for. Academic achievement, sports, a job, school-level politics, popularity... Especially popularity. By the time she was a senior in high school, she was a prime candidate for Wetherford High’s valedictorian come graduation.
It felt like everyone knew her, everyone was impressed by her. She counted a lot of people as friends, but the most notable pair were Lance, a buddy since grade school who helped her plan advancement, and Zane, a chubby class clown who got picked on a lot, and who she protected. Unbeknownst to her Zane sometimes resented how he felt like she took his agency away, and Lance was angling to depose her and become a social elite, someone who didn’t have to worry about popularity.
Months before the results of the school election were announced, there was an incident at a science fair where geeky Bertram Philips’ Memory INterpretation Device, or M.I.N.D. Machine, turned out to be a device that took people’s minds and hurtled them elsewhere in time and space into different bodies. Since they came back in what to outsiders saw as the same instant, and were concerned about sounding insane, the four that it happened to, Bertram included, didn’t tell the world that they’d spent weeks as dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous. Bertram did start writing stories about it, and a science teacher, Mr. London, became obsessed and secreted the machine into a storage room to repair it in secret. As far as Mina was concerned it was just a weird thing that had happened, not all that consequential now that it was over and no one had gotten hurt.
For two years running she'd been school president, and was confident enough in a third victory that she actually passed out fliers inviting people to a victory party before the results were announced. When someone else won Mina was too stunned to even make an outburst, but she felt betrayed by the student body, and was hurt by what she saw as a rejection.
However, along with hercronies friends she planned a rebound, something that would draw attention back to her and force people to be impressed: talk Patience McCray, star basketball player and major tomboy, into getting a makeover and showing up on Lance’s arm. Patience was offended by the suggestion and punched Mina... and then Mr. London turned the M.I.N.D. Machine on. Mina, Patience, Zane, and Mr. London himself were all affected and sent to the Cretaceous.
Mina ended up in the body of a deinonychus who was in the middle of a large pack somewhere in what would become Oklahoma. Bertram contacted her from the present and told her that in a few days something big would happen where she was - what she immediately started thinking of as Ground Zero - and she had to stop it, and that the others would hopefully find her before then. Also there was an amber key around which would be important.
Mina instinctively tried to get in good with the leader and depose his lieutenant. She told herself that the pack would be at the center of anything that happened, though it was really her drive to be needed, to be at the center of every available social circle. Nothing she tried, from finding food to saving the leader from a rockfall, worked. She wasn't welcome, was barely tolerated.
So one cold night, when the others were dancing and she was lurking out past them, she stopped trying to get in with them and built a fire to warm up. This did impress the leader, who basked before it, but after most of the pack had fallen asleep the lieutenant and some others chased Mina through a small hole in a cave.
She was trapped in a chamber with a tenontosaurus three times her size who kept her from the exit, and tried to get it to let her go first by feeding it, then by making a torch and charging past it. From there she found herself in a great complex of tunnels, and eventually she found a herd of trapped tenontosaurs, pockets of natural gas, and small predators. After that, the lieutenant fell through that same hole with an injured leg and a broken sickle claw.
Mina named him Hook and got him past the guardian and to where he could eat his fill of salamanders and ratlike mammals. She also splinted his leg. He was friendlier now, or at least less hostile, but because she trusted him so little she had him stay close as she explored the tunnels.
Hook picked up on the markings she was making on tunnel walls to keep herself from getting lost, and saved her a time or two. They found their way into the tenontosaurus herd chamber and got separated - Hook ended up elsewhere in the caverns while Mina was wounded and swam through petroleum-tainted water to freedom.
Soon she found Patience, in the body of an acrocanthosaurus, Zane in a large sauropod, and Mr. London in a hypsilophodon. Zane had his body’s little brother around, and Mr. London had a gang of other hypsilophodons. They carried a key made of amber.
They talked at length, confirming that the cavern complex was potentially very explosive and that was why they all thought of it as Ground Zero. They believed that the big event would be the caves collapsing and killing the tenontosaurus herd. Mr. London showed signs of incredible immaturity and blamed Mina for the whole situation - he said that the MIND machine, reacting to her wishes, had cast them into a situation where she could be the hero again. Patience’s “boyfriend” GK, a native acro, showed up, and Zane was very annoyed when Mina immediately moved to protect him. Patience came up with a plan to make small bombs that would open the cavern and let the trapped dinosaurs out.
They travelled together a little ways until reaching the caves again. At one point, when she saw Mr. London trying to teach Patience how to dance, Mina jokingly asked if she could cut in and was rebuffed. Before Mina and the hypsilophodons went in, she spoke to Patience, who told her a little she hadn’t said to anyone about herself - that people left and never came back, but here she’d learned that sometimes they did. So this experience wasn’t all bad.
In the caves, Mina first took Mr. London aside and told him that she’d never wanted this, then made torches for both of them. The teacher took his native pals and went to place the bombs, since as small herbivores they didn’t scare the trapped tenontosaurs. Mina went looking for Hook, who she’d started to think of as a friend. Mr. London, done with his task after breaking the cave open and seeing the trapped dinosaurs escape, came to find her and confess to the two revelations he’d had - one, that it wasn’t Mina’s fantasy molding the situation, but his, and two, that Hook was the important thing here. They had to make sure he survived when the caves collapsed - he, having amber markings, was the amber key.
When they found him at a cave that now opened to the outside he went after Mr. London, but Hook stopped when Mina got caught under a falling boulder. He let the teacher escape and tried to help Mina, despite her crying out for him to leave her. Someone else, though, heard and came - GK. The acrocanthosaur chased Hook out to safety with a roar, then tried to get the boulder off of Mina - and then the cave collapsed and both of them died within seconds.
The Green Knight, G.K., was a thirty-nine foot long Acrocanthosaurus, an allosaurid with a raised ridge along his spine. In this ‘verse, acros form large clans around an original breeding pair; these are looser than wolf packs or lion prides, with members often hunting alone or ranging off for days at a time, but they are social. Males of breeding age leave their old clan and go looking to join a new one. Though they have ‘swinger’ phases as young adults, as they get older they become drawn to the idea of settling down with permanent mates.
GK left his first clan at around ten years old, when he was mostly grown. He spent a year roving around what would later become Texas and mating with ranging females, and then some months getting accepted into a new clan. A female of his age, the darling of the clan, courted him enthusiastically, but he was not receptive.
One day when he was out roving, he started hunting a singularly unwary sauropod - Zane - who somehow screamed and talked in his head, though GK couldn’t understand the words, and made a hallucinatory blanket appear. GK bit it and might have left it alone after he got hit by its tail, but the weirdness of the encounter made him come back. The female who’d courted him showed up and roared a claim on the sauropod – and she also talked in his head. She was different somehow, not at all like the acro he’d known before. He nodded and left her to it, but stayed in the area, keeping downwind to spy on them for several days.
She – Patience - didn’t eat the sauropod, she stayed around it and its little brother and a smaller dinosaur, and medicated the wound GK had bitten into it. They travelled together and head-talked, and cooperated to fish a shiny object – a key made out of amber - out of a hole in the ground. She went away and ate carrion rather than the perfectly good prey in front of her.
A curious GK went in and stole the key from a rock they’d put it on, then left a clear scent trail back to the clan. Patience followed. When one of her sisters tried to body-slam her, GK intercepted. He watched Patience talk without comprehension and psychically share the image of the amber key; when that didn’t work she suggested getting something to eat, so everyone went fishing. The sister ended up sinking in quicksand, and the entire clan, including Patience and GK, worked tirelessly to get her out.
Well, that cinched it; she was something strange and new, but she was healthy and still adhered to acrocanthosaurus family values. GK liked her. He led her to a secluded place where he’d gathered a number of shiny mating gifts, including the key. Patience took the key, figured out what it meant, and gave a very confused answer, talking in his head all the while. He interpreted it as Not yet, I need to know you’d make a fine mate, I want to be part of a new clan center.
They snuggled all night until Patience woke him before a twister touched down near them. GK roared defiantly at it, not understanding that it wasn’t a living thing which could be warned away, until Patience convinced him to run. They got separated. Several days later, he found her again, this time with yet more company in the form of more tiny dinosaurs and Mina, a deinonych covered in gasoline. This time he stayed with the group and traveled with them, sleeping next to Patience.
When one of the tiny dinosaurs poked him he grabbed it but let go after Patience shouted at him; otherwise he never attempted to eat her friends and instead fed on carrion and small animals, like she did. He didn’t understand, but he did make the connection that she was protective of them because they head-talked, too. Some of them didn’t head-talk, but for her sake he didn’t hurt them. GK watched her dance with a head-talking hypsilophodon while head-music played and didn’t understand that either, but knew it was good.
When they reached their destination, a mountain with gasoline in its caves, he helped Patience guard the sauropods from the local raptor pack while Mina and the hypsilophodons went in. Patience tried to explain that she couldn’t stay with him. He understood a little, enough to pick up on the “no” part, and was saddened. He also sensed an impending explosion and mock-charged a set of juvenile deinonychs in order to get them out of the way.
The cave was opened, and Zane created an illusion of cars, trains, and jets, distracting the main deinonych pack so a herd of other dinosaurs could stampede out of a cave after a hole was blown in it. GK saw that Mina had been pinned under a rock inside and went to her, despite Patience trying to make him stop. They were both killed as the cave collapsed over their heads.
Because of their proximity and more or less simultaneous deaths, as the M.I.N.D. Machine took Mina’s mind back to his body in the present, it took GK, too, though it was several hours before he made his presence known in any way. He was too cautious to charge off in a strange new body in a strange new world.
Mina had, over the course of the adventure, realized that some of her friends really weren’t her friends, and started distancing herself from them. After school she was trying to unwind when she found that Patience had decided to come to that nearly forgotten post-election party after all. She was all gussied up, too.
Lots of people came to the party, including the kid who’d won the election. Which hardly seemed to matter to Mina, now, so she received him rather graciously. Lance did not come - Mina hadn’t expected him to, after their last conversation - and she found herself dancing with Patience. It was more fun than she’d have expected, and more natural, so when the song reached something appropriate to a slow dance, they kept dancing together.
GK surfaced and took control, nuzzling and rumbling at Patience and using the same proud jaw-showing gesture he’d greeted her with back in his old body. She figured it out and was happy - and kissed them, meaning GK-and-Mina. He didn’t understand this human custom, but thought he could grow to like it. Mina
Her body - their body, now - was slightly changed. She had some acro abilities now. It took some adjusting. Fortunately, GK stayed cautious and was polite, more interested in observing and learning than taking over her life.
A few days later, when Mina was preparing for gym class, they had a premonition of doom before something went wrong with the the M.I.N.D. Machine. It vanished, and things went weird. Dinosaurs showed up in the school, some of them with students’ minds, some of them apparently without. Swirling gray-black voids appeared. A trio of raptors cornered her in a classroom, one saying, “That’s the one. The only one who can stop it.” So they jumped into one of the voids.
This brought them to another world entirely, still in the same shared body. More precisely, it brought them to the Dinoverse, a utopia populated by a vast array of highly evolved anthropomorphic dinosaurs who had very advanced technology and no word for “sorrow”. Their appearance shocked and dismayed the janitor who found them. He gave them a cloak with which to hide themselves before they started wandering about.
They were able to sense the M.I.N.D. Machine and homed in on it, though they were interrupted when the gray-black voids appeared and swallowed up some of the dinosaur people. These had apparently been happening for a while now; the people called these the Vanishings and had no idea what was causing them.
When Mina and GK found the machine in a lab, they were greeted by the scientist Jae’Dee, who wasn’t shocked by their appearance thanks to the fact that he’d been seeing humans on the machine’s screens for weeks. He was a gentle, intellectual saurian version of J.D., a thug from Wetherford. Working together on the machine, they discovered that M.I.N.D. Machines linked different realities. Scientists in a reality full of violent conquerors had built one and were trying to spread and destroy what they did not conquer.
They decided to send messages to some of the other people manning M.I.N.D. Machines, including a set of other teenagers from Wetherford High who’d been cast back in time along with the machine Mina and GK were familiar with. Basically they just explained the situation and told them to fix the machine.
Some days later Mina and GK found that Jae’Dee had contacted J.D., who was among the students stranded back in time, but a void had appeared during that communication and taken his mother and part of the machine. They fixed it in time to receive J.D. and come up with a plan. They guided him into the machine, where he merged with whatever it was that powered it, and fixed things.
But at the end, a portal opened that Mina and GK fell into - and found themselves some where and when else entirely.
ABILITIES:
Mina’s body was that of a pretty and reasonably fit but otherwise average seventeen-year-old girl. When the M.I.N.D. Machine added GK, though, things changed a little. Just as dinosaur bodies occupied by humans are slightly anthropomorphized, Mina’s body has been slightly acrocanthosaur-ized.
It’s largely subtle changes. Their senses are different - they have something of an acros’ finely tuned sense of smell, letting them pick up things like species, biological sex, and health from the scent of something they’re tracking. It’s fine enough to let them smell when emotions change. It’s not as keen as GK’s sense of smell was in his old body, but it’s certainly more than human. They also have an enhanced sense of hearing, and can monitor the heartbeats of beings close by. Small movements are also much easier to see.
They can run, jump, and move silently considerably better than Mina was able to do on her own. GK is better at each, but Mina could close the gap by practicing. They’re somewhat stronger than Mina used to be, but it’s well within the bounds of normal humanity.
Thanks to GK, they have a poorly defined ‘danger sense’ - they feel alarm in the few seconds before something potentially lethal happens and get a general inkling of the direction, if it has a direction.
GAME INFO
EDENSPHERE NAME: Jade / Jaw
BIRTHDAY LOG:
DREAM:
They were in a cave wracked with tremors. Little bits of the ceiling rained down and bounced. The rock was cracking, crumbling.
She was pinned under a rock, lashing her limbs and tail and head, straining to move it or creep out from underneath, but it didn’t move. It was crushing her scaly borrowed body into the stone. She gasped open-mawed for breath. There was an acrocanthosaur out over there, looking down at her. She knew him, knew his scent. < Run! > she said, and the word came out as a snarl.
There was a deinonychus struggling under a boulder over there. When he inhaled, he could smell that she’d been injured. Normally he would leave - it was dangerous here, he knew it - or bite the raptor’s head off; one chomp and her suffering would be ended, plus he’d have a meal. But he knew this raptor, and he knew the way she spoke in his head.
The acrocanthosaur strode up to her, the tremors each footstep created lost in the greater rumbling of the earthquake, leaned down, and shoved the boulder with his great face. It rocked - and the ceiling collapsed. Rocks pummeled her body and pressed down with ever greater force as she was buried.
He was dying. Too many bones were broken to let him hunt, but he would be spared starvation. Each breath was was difficult and painful. Rock dust was filling his snout, his throat. Not long now - and yet in the darkness, among the rumbling of the stone, there was a sound like lightning, and a feeling of lightness.
They rose, even though there was nowhere to go, out of pain, out of their bodies, light and ephemeral. Human voices cried out - and there was her voice, urgently saying Just remember, we’re all connected. Everyone and everything is connected. And nothing happens without a reason. Nothing. Figure out the reason for all of this, and you’ll figure out what to do to make things right.
And then they were small, and soft and scaleless, and carried themselves upright - they were human. They were what she was supposed to be, but they’d lost their balance and would have fallen on their flat human face if a hand hadn’t caught her.
It was four-fingered and covered in dry scales, but had no claws. “Kindness is welcome,” the dinosaur said. He was long-necked and had a supple face that was creased in a concerned expression. When they inhaled they smelled saurian but also rosewater and the white linen he wore.
He turned away when they were back on their feet. They tried to turn towards him, but a gray-black void appeared, and they were falling again. “Jae’Dee, wait!” she shouted through their mouth. It was too late.
JOURNAL SAMPLE: Well, it looks like this works. Hi, everyone! I’m sure I’m glad to meet you.
I guess Jae’Dee would give the wrong impression. Call me Jade for now, okay?
ASPIRATIONS: What happened to GK and Mina - well, “Will” - in canon is rather fucked up, but canon doesn’t seem to realize it.
I’ve always wanted to play a character with a split personality. GK is usually quiet and cautious when confused, so I imagine poor Mina wouldn’t even be aware of him for a while.
edensphere.CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Willhelmina Reilly/Green Knight (GK)
SERIES: Dinoverse
PERSONALITY:
Willhelmina "Mina" Reilly loved being recognized and impressing people, being and staying the center of attention. She felt that if she set her sights high enough, even if she didn't attain her goal she would at least achieve something worthwhile, and have something good to show for her efforts. She was overconfident and often took risks without considering the consequences of failure. For most of her life she would rush headlong into things after these lofty goals.
She tended to procrastinate on things that weren’t directly linked to those main goals, and while she liked most people and would try to protect smaller kids from bullies, this wasn’t entirely altruistic. It made her look good. She didn’t often consider more subtle consequences or how people who she called friend might think of her.
Mina went through character development. Though the above traits were mitigated, traces remain - she’s something of an overachiever, likes to be liked, and can be impulsive and cocky. She’ll always be an extrovert.
But she is more relaxed, now, and doesn’t have the same burning desire to be liked and impressive all the time. She’s come to prefer relatively few close friends to a vast circle of admirers, and stops to think more often.
And she’s found a pure thrill in relying on herself and, say, hunting from time to time.
In low moments, she thinks of her father, who she calls Briefcase Man, and imagines him giving her practical advise on the situation. She usually gets along well enough with her... companion, Green Knight. He’s a dinosaur.
The Green Knight is the name another human gave him; he had no concept of names until recently. But ensconced in Mina’s human brain, he is fully able to learn things that were beyond him before. He’s already figured out that speech is a kind of communication both like and more complicated than the body language, acro sounds, and smells he’s used to, he can understand concepts like names, and he wants to know more. He’ s begun to understand that things that talk are people, and they are not to be regarded as prey. But he is still very inhuman.
He’s something of a xenophile. New things are fascinating, and he is growing to appreciate the aesthetics of what might as well be aliens to him.
Although he is a predator, entirely willing to kill other dinosaurs to eat, GK has his own unwritten codes of honor and chivalry. He has a basic understanding of prey population ecology, knowing that overhunting is bad and it’s better to selectively kill. He does not kill for sport, and he kills cleanly.
Creatures he doesn’t regard as prey - originally other acrocanthosaurs, but he’s begun to understand the concept of ‘people’ - are not to be eaten, and should in fact be helped if they’re in trouble/danger. Unless they’ve already proven that they won’t help someone similarly without having a good reason.
GK tends to be somewhat cautious in his curiosity and is not territorial. If he doesn’t have to fight for something, he generally won’t. He’s not insensitive to what others feel or want, and tends to respect that.
However, he does tend to be rather distant from strangers and has a fairly reserved nature, though he’s not shy about showing affection to those who’ve gotten past it. Most of the time he’s content to let Mina act, but he can take over at will.
TIMELINE: Near the end of the last Dinoverse book, Dinosaurs Ate My Homework - after the M.I.N.D. Machine has flung them somewhere new, but before they ended up in some unfriendly version of New York City.
CANON+AU BACKGROUND:
Mina’s family was moderately wealthy and loving enough, but with three older brothers she grew up the center of attention. Her business-minded father, not sure how to relate to a daughter but trying his best, took her camping like one of the guys and gave her a lot of advice on anything he could think to tell her.
In school she quickly proved that she loved being in the spotlight and had a strong belief in her own ability to do just about anything she set herself to and worked for. Academic achievement, sports, a job, school-level politics, popularity... Especially popularity. By the time she was a senior in high school, she was a prime candidate for Wetherford High’s valedictorian come graduation.
It felt like everyone knew her, everyone was impressed by her. She counted a lot of people as friends, but the most notable pair were Lance, a buddy since grade school who helped her plan advancement, and Zane, a chubby class clown who got picked on a lot, and who she protected. Unbeknownst to her Zane sometimes resented how he felt like she took his agency away, and Lance was angling to depose her and become a social elite, someone who didn’t have to worry about popularity.
Months before the results of the school election were announced, there was an incident at a science fair where geeky Bertram Philips’ Memory INterpretation Device, or M.I.N.D. Machine, turned out to be a device that took people’s minds and hurtled them elsewhere in time and space into different bodies. Since they came back in what to outsiders saw as the same instant, and were concerned about sounding insane, the four that it happened to, Bertram included, didn’t tell the world that they’d spent weeks as dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous. Bertram did start writing stories about it, and a science teacher, Mr. London, became obsessed and secreted the machine into a storage room to repair it in secret. As far as Mina was concerned it was just a weird thing that had happened, not all that consequential now that it was over and no one had gotten hurt.
For two years running she'd been school president, and was confident enough in a third victory that she actually passed out fliers inviting people to a victory party before the results were announced. When someone else won Mina was too stunned to even make an outburst, but she felt betrayed by the student body, and was hurt by what she saw as a rejection.
However, along with her
Mina ended up in the body of a deinonychus who was in the middle of a large pack somewhere in what would become Oklahoma. Bertram contacted her from the present and told her that in a few days something big would happen where she was - what she immediately started thinking of as Ground Zero - and she had to stop it, and that the others would hopefully find her before then. Also there was an amber key around which would be important.
Mina instinctively tried to get in good with the leader and depose his lieutenant. She told herself that the pack would be at the center of anything that happened, though it was really her drive to be needed, to be at the center of every available social circle. Nothing she tried, from finding food to saving the leader from a rockfall, worked. She wasn't welcome, was barely tolerated.
So one cold night, when the others were dancing and she was lurking out past them, she stopped trying to get in with them and built a fire to warm up. This did impress the leader, who basked before it, but after most of the pack had fallen asleep the lieutenant and some others chased Mina through a small hole in a cave.
She was trapped in a chamber with a tenontosaurus three times her size who kept her from the exit, and tried to get it to let her go first by feeding it, then by making a torch and charging past it. From there she found herself in a great complex of tunnels, and eventually she found a herd of trapped tenontosaurs, pockets of natural gas, and small predators. After that, the lieutenant fell through that same hole with an injured leg and a broken sickle claw.
Mina named him Hook and got him past the guardian and to where he could eat his fill of salamanders and ratlike mammals. She also splinted his leg. He was friendlier now, or at least less hostile, but because she trusted him so little she had him stay close as she explored the tunnels.
Hook picked up on the markings she was making on tunnel walls to keep herself from getting lost, and saved her a time or two. They found their way into the tenontosaurus herd chamber and got separated - Hook ended up elsewhere in the caverns while Mina was wounded and swam through petroleum-tainted water to freedom.
Soon she found Patience, in the body of an acrocanthosaurus, Zane in a large sauropod, and Mr. London in a hypsilophodon. Zane had his body’s little brother around, and Mr. London had a gang of other hypsilophodons. They carried a key made of amber.
They talked at length, confirming that the cavern complex was potentially very explosive and that was why they all thought of it as Ground Zero. They believed that the big event would be the caves collapsing and killing the tenontosaurus herd. Mr. London showed signs of incredible immaturity and blamed Mina for the whole situation - he said that the MIND machine, reacting to her wishes, had cast them into a situation where she could be the hero again. Patience’s “boyfriend” GK, a native acro, showed up, and Zane was very annoyed when Mina immediately moved to protect him. Patience came up with a plan to make small bombs that would open the cavern and let the trapped dinosaurs out.
They travelled together a little ways until reaching the caves again. At one point, when she saw Mr. London trying to teach Patience how to dance, Mina jokingly asked if she could cut in and was rebuffed. Before Mina and the hypsilophodons went in, she spoke to Patience, who told her a little she hadn’t said to anyone about herself - that people left and never came back, but here she’d learned that sometimes they did. So this experience wasn’t all bad.
In the caves, Mina first took Mr. London aside and told him that she’d never wanted this, then made torches for both of them. The teacher took his native pals and went to place the bombs, since as small herbivores they didn’t scare the trapped tenontosaurs. Mina went looking for Hook, who she’d started to think of as a friend. Mr. London, done with his task after breaking the cave open and seeing the trapped dinosaurs escape, came to find her and confess to the two revelations he’d had - one, that it wasn’t Mina’s fantasy molding the situation, but his, and two, that Hook was the important thing here. They had to make sure he survived when the caves collapsed - he, having amber markings, was the amber key.
When they found him at a cave that now opened to the outside he went after Mr. London, but Hook stopped when Mina got caught under a falling boulder. He let the teacher escape and tried to help Mina, despite her crying out for him to leave her. Someone else, though, heard and came - GK. The acrocanthosaur chased Hook out to safety with a roar, then tried to get the boulder off of Mina - and then the cave collapsed and both of them died within seconds.
The Green Knight, G.K., was a thirty-nine foot long Acrocanthosaurus, an allosaurid with a raised ridge along his spine. In this ‘verse, acros form large clans around an original breeding pair; these are looser than wolf packs or lion prides, with members often hunting alone or ranging off for days at a time, but they are social. Males of breeding age leave their old clan and go looking to join a new one. Though they have ‘swinger’ phases as young adults, as they get older they become drawn to the idea of settling down with permanent mates.
GK left his first clan at around ten years old, when he was mostly grown. He spent a year roving around what would later become Texas and mating with ranging females, and then some months getting accepted into a new clan. A female of his age, the darling of the clan, courted him enthusiastically, but he was not receptive.
One day when he was out roving, he started hunting a singularly unwary sauropod - Zane - who somehow screamed and talked in his head, though GK couldn’t understand the words, and made a hallucinatory blanket appear. GK bit it and might have left it alone after he got hit by its tail, but the weirdness of the encounter made him come back. The female who’d courted him showed up and roared a claim on the sauropod – and she also talked in his head. She was different somehow, not at all like the acro he’d known before. He nodded and left her to it, but stayed in the area, keeping downwind to spy on them for several days.
She – Patience - didn’t eat the sauropod, she stayed around it and its little brother and a smaller dinosaur, and medicated the wound GK had bitten into it. They travelled together and head-talked, and cooperated to fish a shiny object – a key made out of amber - out of a hole in the ground. She went away and ate carrion rather than the perfectly good prey in front of her.
A curious GK went in and stole the key from a rock they’d put it on, then left a clear scent trail back to the clan. Patience followed. When one of her sisters tried to body-slam her, GK intercepted. He watched Patience talk without comprehension and psychically share the image of the amber key; when that didn’t work she suggested getting something to eat, so everyone went fishing. The sister ended up sinking in quicksand, and the entire clan, including Patience and GK, worked tirelessly to get her out.
Well, that cinched it; she was something strange and new, but she was healthy and still adhered to acrocanthosaurus family values. GK liked her. He led her to a secluded place where he’d gathered a number of shiny mating gifts, including the key. Patience took the key, figured out what it meant, and gave a very confused answer, talking in his head all the while. He interpreted it as Not yet, I need to know you’d make a fine mate, I want to be part of a new clan center.
They snuggled all night until Patience woke him before a twister touched down near them. GK roared defiantly at it, not understanding that it wasn’t a living thing which could be warned away, until Patience convinced him to run. They got separated. Several days later, he found her again, this time with yet more company in the form of more tiny dinosaurs and Mina, a deinonych covered in gasoline. This time he stayed with the group and traveled with them, sleeping next to Patience.
When one of the tiny dinosaurs poked him he grabbed it but let go after Patience shouted at him; otherwise he never attempted to eat her friends and instead fed on carrion and small animals, like she did. He didn’t understand, but he did make the connection that she was protective of them because they head-talked, too. Some of them didn’t head-talk, but for her sake he didn’t hurt them. GK watched her dance with a head-talking hypsilophodon while head-music played and didn’t understand that either, but knew it was good.
When they reached their destination, a mountain with gasoline in its caves, he helped Patience guard the sauropods from the local raptor pack while Mina and the hypsilophodons went in. Patience tried to explain that she couldn’t stay with him. He understood a little, enough to pick up on the “no” part, and was saddened. He also sensed an impending explosion and mock-charged a set of juvenile deinonychs in order to get them out of the way.
The cave was opened, and Zane created an illusion of cars, trains, and jets, distracting the main deinonych pack so a herd of other dinosaurs could stampede out of a cave after a hole was blown in it. GK saw that Mina had been pinned under a rock inside and went to her, despite Patience trying to make him stop. They were both killed as the cave collapsed over their heads.
Because of their proximity and more or less simultaneous deaths, as the M.I.N.D. Machine took Mina’s mind back to his body in the present, it took GK, too, though it was several hours before he made his presence known in any way. He was too cautious to charge off in a strange new body in a strange new world.
Mina had, over the course of the adventure, realized that some of her friends really weren’t her friends, and started distancing herself from them. After school she was trying to unwind when she found that Patience had decided to come to that nearly forgotten post-election party after all. She was all gussied up, too.
Lots of people came to the party, including the kid who’d won the election. Which hardly seemed to matter to Mina, now, so she received him rather graciously. Lance did not come - Mina hadn’t expected him to, after their last conversation - and she found herself dancing with Patience. It was more fun than she’d have expected, and more natural, so when the song reached something appropriate to a slow dance, they kept dancing together.
GK surfaced and took control, nuzzling and rumbling at Patience and using the same proud jaw-showing gesture he’d greeted her with back in his old body. She figured it out and was happy - and kissed them, meaning GK-and-Mina. He didn’t understand this human custom, but thought he could grow to like it. Mina
Her body - their body, now - was slightly changed. She had some acro abilities now. It took some adjusting. Fortunately, GK stayed cautious and was polite, more interested in observing and learning than taking over her life.
A few days later, when Mina was preparing for gym class, they had a premonition of doom before something went wrong with the the M.I.N.D. Machine. It vanished, and things went weird. Dinosaurs showed up in the school, some of them with students’ minds, some of them apparently without. Swirling gray-black voids appeared. A trio of raptors cornered her in a classroom, one saying, “That’s the one. The only one who can stop it.” So they jumped into one of the voids.
This brought them to another world entirely, still in the same shared body. More precisely, it brought them to the Dinoverse, a utopia populated by a vast array of highly evolved anthropomorphic dinosaurs who had very advanced technology and no word for “sorrow”. Their appearance shocked and dismayed the janitor who found them. He gave them a cloak with which to hide themselves before they started wandering about.
They were able to sense the M.I.N.D. Machine and homed in on it, though they were interrupted when the gray-black voids appeared and swallowed up some of the dinosaur people. These had apparently been happening for a while now; the people called these the Vanishings and had no idea what was causing them.
When Mina and GK found the machine in a lab, they were greeted by the scientist Jae’Dee, who wasn’t shocked by their appearance thanks to the fact that he’d been seeing humans on the machine’s screens for weeks. He was a gentle, intellectual saurian version of J.D., a thug from Wetherford. Working together on the machine, they discovered that M.I.N.D. Machines linked different realities. Scientists in a reality full of violent conquerors had built one and were trying to spread and destroy what they did not conquer.
They decided to send messages to some of the other people manning M.I.N.D. Machines, including a set of other teenagers from Wetherford High who’d been cast back in time along with the machine Mina and GK were familiar with. Basically they just explained the situation and told them to fix the machine.
Some days later Mina and GK found that Jae’Dee had contacted J.D., who was among the students stranded back in time, but a void had appeared during that communication and taken his mother and part of the machine. They fixed it in time to receive J.D. and come up with a plan. They guided him into the machine, where he merged with whatever it was that powered it, and fixed things.
But at the end, a portal opened that Mina and GK fell into - and found themselves some where and when else entirely.
ABILITIES:
Mina’s body was that of a pretty and reasonably fit but otherwise average seventeen-year-old girl. When the M.I.N.D. Machine added GK, though, things changed a little. Just as dinosaur bodies occupied by humans are slightly anthropomorphized, Mina’s body has been slightly acrocanthosaur-ized.
It’s largely subtle changes. Their senses are different - they have something of an acros’ finely tuned sense of smell, letting them pick up things like species, biological sex, and health from the scent of something they’re tracking. It’s fine enough to let them smell when emotions change. It’s not as keen as GK’s sense of smell was in his old body, but it’s certainly more than human. They also have an enhanced sense of hearing, and can monitor the heartbeats of beings close by. Small movements are also much easier to see.
They can run, jump, and move silently considerably better than Mina was able to do on her own. GK is better at each, but Mina could close the gap by practicing. They’re somewhat stronger than Mina used to be, but it’s well within the bounds of normal humanity.
Thanks to GK, they have a poorly defined ‘danger sense’ - they feel alarm in the few seconds before something potentially lethal happens and get a general inkling of the direction, if it has a direction.
GAME INFO
EDENSPHERE NAME: Jade / Jaw
BIRTHDAY LOG:
DREAM:
They were in a cave wracked with tremors. Little bits of the ceiling rained down and bounced. The rock was cracking, crumbling.
She was pinned under a rock, lashing her limbs and tail and head, straining to move it or creep out from underneath, but it didn’t move. It was crushing her scaly borrowed body into the stone. She gasped open-mawed for breath. There was an acrocanthosaur out over there, looking down at her. She knew him, knew his scent. < Run! > she said, and the word came out as a snarl.
There was a deinonychus struggling under a boulder over there. When he inhaled, he could smell that she’d been injured. Normally he would leave - it was dangerous here, he knew it - or bite the raptor’s head off; one chomp and her suffering would be ended, plus he’d have a meal. But he knew this raptor, and he knew the way she spoke in his head.
The acrocanthosaur strode up to her, the tremors each footstep created lost in the greater rumbling of the earthquake, leaned down, and shoved the boulder with his great face. It rocked - and the ceiling collapsed. Rocks pummeled her body and pressed down with ever greater force as she was buried.
He was dying. Too many bones were broken to let him hunt, but he would be spared starvation. Each breath was was difficult and painful. Rock dust was filling his snout, his throat. Not long now - and yet in the darkness, among the rumbling of the stone, there was a sound like lightning, and a feeling of lightness.
They rose, even though there was nowhere to go, out of pain, out of their bodies, light and ephemeral. Human voices cried out - and there was her voice, urgently saying Just remember, we’re all connected. Everyone and everything is connected. And nothing happens without a reason. Nothing. Figure out the reason for all of this, and you’ll figure out what to do to make things right.
And then they were small, and soft and scaleless, and carried themselves upright - they were human. They were what she was supposed to be, but they’d lost their balance and would have fallen on their flat human face if a hand hadn’t caught her.
It was four-fingered and covered in dry scales, but had no claws. “Kindness is welcome,” the dinosaur said. He was long-necked and had a supple face that was creased in a concerned expression. When they inhaled they smelled saurian but also rosewater and the white linen he wore.
He turned away when they were back on their feet. They tried to turn towards him, but a gray-black void appeared, and they were falling again. “Jae’Dee, wait!” she shouted through their mouth. It was too late.
JOURNAL SAMPLE: Well, it looks like this works. Hi, everyone! I’m sure I’m glad to meet you.
I guess Jae’Dee would give the wrong impression. Call me Jade for now, okay?
ASPIRATIONS: What happened to GK and Mina - well, “Will” - in canon is rather fucked up, but canon doesn’t seem to realize it.
I’ve always wanted to play a character with a split personality. GK is usually quiet and cautious when confused, so I imagine poor Mina wouldn’t even be aware of him for a while.