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| Watch the Branches; A bit of concept fiction for Jurassic Split | |
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| Topic Started: Feb 17 2013, 03:01 PM (181 Views) | |
| TAXESbutNano | Feb 17 2013, 03:01 PM Post #1 |
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I'm going back to basics.
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A small, fluffy heterodontosaur scratched its beak, dislodging a small piece of dirt from it. It peered quizzically around at the environment, checking for its own safety, and looking at one section of trees for a bit longer than the others. Then, when it decided it was safe, it began to bark to a rival, challenging it to a fight. Johnathan had been watching the little animals for hours now. The little poofhets were just like rabbits, with oversized back legs and having too much fluff for their own good. At warmer times, he would have had to avoid the area because of the abundance of large predators. However, it was winter, and the herds of saurothere had left hundreds of hatchlings to grow up, further from the colder southern reaches of the continent. This meant rich pickings for the carnivores, and so both animal and observer were in relative safety. Of course, if there was a source of potential danger in the vicinity, the poofs would run back to their burrows, and he would kick out the chemical deterrents. One such incident was when a mother tyrantfang had stayed in the area for a bit, and the juveniles in tow had been chasing the little animals endlessly. A researcher to the end, he stayed to do science. He'd noticed that if a hole became overgrown, it was abandoned until the opening caved in, at which point the animals seemed to remember they could get out that way and remade the hole again. It was the start of the observation season, and so John had decided that he'd figure out why the animals did this. This year he was in luck, as a number of holes had been abandoned. The first, and most obvious, thing to do was to analyse the plant life nearby. It was unlikely it would be caused by trees, due to the length of time it would take for them to make a sudden change to the environment. The main focus was in smaller, weedy plants and shrubs and the animal life within them. Nothing of interest came up. It was generally the same parasites waiting for a poofhet to wander over them as in any other burrow, and there weren't any traces of chemicals that could cause the change. A motion-sensitive camera outside a burrow had failed to give any conclusive answers either, and so the best idea was to simply watch the animals and see if anything interesting came up. His focus had changed from the male to a young female travelling with her mate and young. Winter was a good time to raise a family, for the same reasons as it was a good time to poofhet-watch. The little group walked towards a burrow, with a little grove of fairly chunky young trees outside. However, on some unknown queue, the male looked up just as they were entering the burrow. And then it let out an alarm call, reserved for actively hunting predators of extreme danger. And the entire warren of heterodontosaurs fled to a burrow. Johnathan ran over to the burrow where the male had called, and looked up, retracing the line of sight that the animal had made with his back pressed close to one of the young trees. The larger canopy trees looked like they could hold a mamraptor, which were known to be man-eaters on a fairly regular basis (probably due to the ease of knocking a man over). There were no signs of movement, but without warning, there was a sudden and nightmarishly-loud screech of a mamraptor's pounce. Johnathan span round, and then there was nothing. His pulse was racing. Nothing was moving in the forest, and there were absolutely no traces of any predatory mammalians. Not a single twig was moving, there were no creatures nearby, or sounds of a kill. There had just been the screech, and nothing had resulted from it. Was it some form of mimicry from another species? He walked backwards, back into the tree, and hit his head on a bulge in the bark. The tree recoiled. With no warning at all, the grove had been transformed from a group of rather chunky trees into a pack of nightmarish creatures, straight from one of the C'thulu mythos. They were all flashing with bright red and black stripes, the trunk revealed to be a long shell covered with a skirt of flesh. Branches had become tentacles surrounded with bony suckers which in turn became jointed legs, and the tree that John had collided with was explosively exhaling, obviously in pain from the sudden hit to its main eye. The others were whistling, high, a sound that pierced the researcher's eardrums. From under the earth, the poofhets were screaming, a choir of aggression in a place where they couldn't be touched. And Johnathan ran. Johnathan was one of the lucky ones. Many people had disappeared in the forest, and the blame had gone to mamraptors and young tyrantfangs. However, after this encounter, the scientific community were quick to figure out that many deaths were not vertebrate in nature. No, the most terrifying killers of the forest were the slender trees. |
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9:24 AM Jul 11