Prolougue: Bite of the Raptor
Everypony stood at attention as the loader rolled down the maintenance pathway with its cargo towards crew. This was nothing they had not all been through before, and their “business as usual” expressions made this plain; however, there was a clear tension in the air. Regardless of whether or not they had done this routine before, this was still very dangerous and they knew they had to be on guard: tasers out and at the ready should the need arise.
The night was hot and sticky. Everypony’s uniform clung to their fur in the humidity. Mist crept up from the still warm concrete structure behind them – reminiscent of a small prison yard in shape, with a tower at the far end looking down on it - through the spot lights that dotted its frame, and into the tropical night sky.
“Alright, Everypony, heads-up! Keep the dock clear!” the foreman shouted over the grinding gears of the rig as the cargo – a nine-by-nine-by-tweleve foot metal crate - was lowered into place along the track.
A large white and brown splotched earth-pony clad in a kaki uniform with a name tag that read “Romper: Park Warden” stepped to the front of the crowd; a stern expression written on his face. Going up to the crate he stared through gaps in the side and glared at its contents. He could see some movement and hear a low, raspy hiss within.
Romper always hated transporting this particular cargo. All the precautions taken and every armed employee at the ready never made him any less tense. This was in his mind the most dangerous part of the job. The pinto earth-pony snorted at the contents, and turned back the crew, and in a gruff, thick Trottingham accent said, “Pushing team, move up.”
Like a well-oiled machine, the crew quickly moved in and was on either side of the crate almost immediately upon his order.
“Keep tasers at the read-” Romper had begun to say, when a sudden savage scream erupted from the crate causing everypony to leap back, startled. It was terrifying noise that did not seem to belong to this world, and awoke a desire to flee in everypony. As everyone backed away, he bark, “Keep you places!”
There was brief pause, as Romper stared at the crate. For a split second he caught a glimpse of something: a yellow orb with a thin black slit staring back at him. His hair bristled, and he could feel himself clench his teeth.
“Alright, move back in, team,” he final ordered after a moment. The team was a bit more cautious this time, but they were right back at their original positions.
“Places now. And push!” the Trottingham stallion ordered, and the team began to push the crate along the track towards the large metal gate at the front of structure. No sooner had it started to move that another screech came from within, and the crate began to shake and rattle. There was a sudden loud bang from the front of the crate as the contents rammed forward into the door, causing the metal to flex outwards violently. Everypony stared in horror as the cargo backed up for another go.
“BLOCK THE OUTLET! MAKE SURE IT DOESN’T GET OUT!” Romper roared, as he galloped to the front of the crate to push back against to the door along with several other workers. Meanwhile, the pushing crew was still trying their best to move the crate close to the gate, if only to make sure there was less of gap for the cargo to escape from. As the contents slammed into the door a second time, the warden shouted, “WORK HER BACK!”
Everypony was upon the crate at this point, either helping to push or pull it along towards the enclosure – a task only made more difficult by the ponies pushing back against the already busted door to prevent the thing from completely breaking free – or jamming their tasers into any available gap in the crate to try and force it away from the door. Sparks flew from the crate as the tasers were prodded against a scaled surface, and another scream issued forth quickly followed by another loud bang as the contents propelled by desperation and pain slammed into the crate door a third time. This time the door gave way, and everypony that had been blocking was thrown forward and to the ground.
Romper rubbed the back of his skull where the metal had slammed against and could feel the bump already beginning to form. He had no time to worry about that, however: the door was open, and everypony was in danger. He wheeled around to look at the black mass that was the opening to the crate, and could just vaguely see the outline of a strange alien form: a bipedal, almost bird like stance, with expressive curling hands, and a large head with elongated snout, but most striking part were the bright yellow eyes that shown with a primordial malevolence. Before the figure laid a young earth-pony, barely even a stallion, still dazed and trying to pushing himself off the ground. Romper’s eyes darted between the figure in the crate and the young colt, while yellow eyes remained locked on the still dazed pony in front of it.
There was very little time to react. The colt finally managed to lift his head up, and froze in terror as his eyes looked with the thing staring down at him from inside the crate. The tasers were still going off – sparks illuminating the silhouette of the creature – though it didn’t even seem to care anymore. The yellow eyes narrowed into slits, rushed forward.
“SHOOT HER!” was all he Romper had time to say, as he scrambled to get up and pull the young stallion away. The employee didn’t have time scream.
Rain.
Rain, rain, and more rain.
Nurse Tenderheart let out a sigh as she stared out the window of the clinic. Tropical rain poured from the sky in vast sheets, and pounded upon what little she could see of the town. It had been nearly three weeks since she arrived in the little town of Bahay Anascolt, Coltsta Rica, and it had not at all been what she had expected. She had envisioned warm, tropical beaches, and quiet days of relaxation after enrolling in the visiting physician program back at the hospital in Ponyville. Instead it had rained every day since her arrival.
She had inquired with the local weather teams as to the need for the excessive rain. As it turned out, the town’s chief exports were the tropical fruits that grew in the fields and orchards in the surrounding area, and the rain was need to help them grow. So there she sat, listen to the water rush down the metal gutters and into the streets below.
Weather aside, Tenderheart truly did enjoy it here. Even if there was no sun to be seen, it was still quite and relaxing due to the isolation of the area, and the townsponies were just as friendly as those back home in Ponyville. Also, despite the isolation, the clinic was exceptionally well maintained and supplied, and the staff was just as intelligent and educated as anypony that would work back home.
It had been a particularly slow day, and she had finished the last of her duties that evening, so she had been told to take a break for a while. She looked up at the sound of hoofsteps coming down the corridor, and smiled as the clinic’s head physician (a mint green unicorn with a needle and thermometer forming an “X” for cutie mark) named of Dr. Sanar, walked by and he smiled in kind. As he passed by, Tenderheart turned back to the window when she heard the doctor stop suddenly. She looked back at him curiously; his ears were perked up.
“Do you hear that?” The unicorn asked.
“It’s difficult not to hear the rain, Doctor,” Tenderheart chuckled a little.
“No. Listen,” he said.
It took her a moment, but she finally caught it. Another sound mixed with the pounding rain. It was a slightly deeper rumble that slowly began to grow louder and louder until there was no mistaking its source: a griffon chaser – a new form of airship that used a serious of rotating propellers for lift rather than a balloon. The craft passed over the roof of the clinic and passed the window the two had been looking out of, its underside illuminated by the lamplights at the entrance to the building. It was dark outside, and the rain made it that much harder to see, but Tenderheart was able to catch some wording on the side of the vehicle as it turned sideways and began descending just outside the hospital.
“EquesGen Construction.”
That was the name of the company which had been doing construction on one of the islands offshore for some sort of resort. The company had been working for apparently five years already and had employed many of the locals.
Tenderheart was at a loss for words. What could be so important that anyone would risk flying all the way here from the island? The blue nurse pony thought.
Almost immediately after it had landed, uniformed ponies began jumping out of the sides shouting frantically and running towards the clinic. Then she saw the stretcher being brought out, with young stallion on it covered in a thick blanket.
“Get the ER ready, Nurse Tenderheart,” Dr. Sanar said as he galloped out to meet them.
Dr. Sanar now stood in the lobby talking with one of the stallions that had brought the injured pony in. He was a unicorn with a dark grey coat contrasted by his fiery-red mane. He wore a yellow rain slicker and a white and blue cap with “EG” written on the front. What he and the doctor were discussing Tenderheart could not tell; she was busy filing some papers on the new patient.
The colt had been wounded pretty badly, but they had managed to stabilize him and treat the injuries. He was currently in the ER unconscious and being tended to by one of the other doctors, while the head physician talked with the stallion.
Evidently the colt had been run over by a loader, but Tenderheart suspected that may not have been the case. The injuries were not congruent with those that would be inflicted by construction equipment. Dr. Sanar even questioned this after inquiring as the cause of wounds. The lack of any blunt force trauma or earthy contaminants hinted at this not being the result of being run over by an earth-mover.
Based on what she had seen of the injuries, this was more akin to an animal attack than a construction accident. Working in Ponyville she had seen a number of ponies come in to the hospital after going out into the Everfree Forest, and she knew what a mauling looked like. The lacerations and the ragged edges around the wounds all seemed to point towards an attack; however the red maned unicorn from the company was adamant that this had been a construction accident.
That wasn’t the weirdest part though. While being operated upon, the colt began to mutter things in his pain and drug induced state. He kept repeating the same phrase, over and over again, “raptor. Lo sa raptor.”
“Thank you again doctor,” The unicorn from EqusGen said. “Normally we would have taken him to the hospital in San Horsé, but the storm was too bad to try and fly over the mountains.”
“It was no trouble at all, Mr. uh…” Dr. Sanar began.
“Oh, Ed. Regis Ed.”
“We were very much happy to help, Mr. Ed.”
“If there is nothing more need, then I suppose we must be heading back. We will alert his family, and pick him up when he has fully recovered,” Ed’s horn then lit up, and he levitated out a business card. “Do give us a call when he has woken up.”
“We will do just that,” Dr. Sanar replied, and with that the construction crew left into the still raining night. The mint green unicorn lifted up the business card, and read it: “Regis Ed – EquesGen, Inc. – Director of Public Relation.” He put the card in his coat pocket, and began to head back to the ER.
“Something doesn’t seem right here, Doctor,” Tenderheart stated as he was walking by. “I honestly don’t think this was a construction accident.”
“Nor do I,” Dr. Sanar replied in a serious tone.
“And didn’t that Regis fellow seem a little jumpy at first? Like he was guilty of something?”
“I understand you concerns; I share them as well. Right now, however, we have a very sick pony that needs our attention. We can worry about the truth of this whole ordeal after he has been taken care of.”
“Yes, doctor,” the light blue earth-pony answered. “I have one more concern, though. Back in the ER, the patient began to mumble something that made the staff seem very uncomfortable. Something about a ‘raptor’? What exactly is that?”
The doctor froze in place and thought for a moment, then responded, “They are called ‘hupia’ in the local tongue: faceless ponies that abduct foals in the night. They were said to live high in the mountains but have drifted to the offshore islands. They are greatly feared by the ponies here.”
After she had been relieved and sent home later that night, Nurse Tenderheart was struck by a moment of curiosity. She was sure she had head the word "raptor" before, or at the very least seen it somewhere. She went to the shelf of books at the far right of the little house she was staying in, and grabbed the dictionary in her mouth. After she placed it on the coffee table she flipped through it until she found the word she was looking for:
raptor \ n [deriv. of L. raptor plunderer, fr. raptus]: bird of prey
Chapter 1: On the Shores of the Inland Sea
The sun was beating down upon the dry desert landscape of the Badlands. Terra Soar gently brushed away the sand and dirt with her wing from her workspace on the rocky outcropping. She was a grey pegasus with a blue mane and tail with a grey-blue stripe in both, and copper dinosaur skull cutie mark. It was nearly a hundred degrees out; sweat dripped from her face and her nose was dry from inhaling the dust air. She didn’t really care, however. All her attention was focused on the six by six inch square in front of her.
It was difficult work for a pegasus pony (or any pony other than a unicorn for that matter), but years of practice had made her exceptionally gifted at using some of the finer tools of the trade. With her mouth she patiently used the dental pick to expose the fragile fragment of bone from the rock: a tiny jaw bone barely larger than one of her lesser covert feathers with tiny pointed teeth.
There was no mistaking it. This was the jaw bone of a young therapod, a meat-eating dinosaur. What this bone belonged to the grey pegasus mare could not say for certain, but she was certain this was a juvenile dromaeosaurid. The owner had died some 70 million years ago, and was only a month or so old based upon the size of it. If she was lucky and patient, she would hopefully discover the rest of the skeleton.
A complete skeleton of a baby carnivore! Just thinking about it got her excited.
“Hey, Terra.”
Terra wiped the sweat away from her forehead, and took a moment to look out over the dig site. The red-brown dusty valley stretched for miles before her. It always amazed her how much the land had changed since the time the creatures she and the rest of the team were digging up lived. As she looked out over the valley, she could see great towering conifers burst forth from the earth, as the tide from the vast inland sea swept through. Along the coast line, great reptilian predators stalked herds of hadrosaurs and ceratopsians as pterosaurs filled the skies. It was a truly breathtaking sight.
“Terra?”
As she looked down, she could see the great nest that had once been here covered in vegetation and mud, and with great oval eggs protruding out of it. She could see them move as the little creature inside began to awaken. Crackers began forming here and there. A chirping noise came from inside. Terra gingerly reached out a hoof toward the shell-
“Terra!”
Terra jumped a little in surprise, the Mesozoic landscape snapping back into the desert valley of the Badlands. “Agh! Gosh darnit Buck! What have I said about sneaking up on me when I’m in ‘the zone’?” The pegasus mare said, berating the brown earth-pony stallion good naturedly. Buck chuckled in response. He was about average height for a colt but very lean, with a dirty-gold mane and beard, and wore tan and brown khaki shirt and a dusty leather hat. On his flank he bore four different animal tracks for a Cutie mark: A tiger print, and crocodile print, an ox print, and an eagle print.
“Just wanted to give you a heads up, the team’s almost finished with the excavation,” Buck smiled. “We should have most of it exposed by the time the group gets here.”
“That’s great hear. I really appreciate all the help you’ve been on the project,” Terra said, smiling back. Despite not having much education in paleontology itself, he was very knowledgeable about prehistoric fauna and had proven to be a hard and diligent worker and supportive friend.
The two of them had met almost ten years ago in Coltown, just north of Canterlot, and had become good friends since then. Since then, the two had worked together on several digs throughout Equestria, gone on adventures around the world, and even finished their education together. Terra had just gotten her doctorate in paleontology, and he had received his masters in zoology a few years ago. She was now the proud curator of the Coltown Field Museum and professor of paleontology at the University of Canterlot, while he had been made head keeper at the Manehattan Zoo. Sadly this meant that their rarely saw each other anymore, so every opportunity she had Terra would invite Buck on one of her expeditions and in a like manor he would send he VIP passes to the park.
“Speaking of helping,” Terra began.
“Uh oh. I don’t like sound of that.”
“When the group arrives, you are going to stick around and talk to them about what we are doing here, right?”
“Ugh, do I have to?”
“Oh come on, it won’t be that bad. Besides, I have a very important meeting, so I won't be around for the first few minutes, and I really need you to give them an informative experience.”
“But there are going to be fouls in the group.”
“And?”
“You know how I am with children,” Buck said with an unamused expression.
“Oh, you’re fine,” she said, good-naturedly hitting him in the shoulder. “Besides, you said you liked talking to kids.”
“One-on-one, sure, but you put a bunch of them in a room and they enter a piranha like state: wreaking havoc and touching everything with their grubby little-this isn’t funny Terra!” Terra apparently disagreed, as she was doubling over with laughter.
“Come on, please do it?” Terra finally said after her fit of laughter, and put on her best puppy-dog expression. Buck was the kind of pony that put on a tough front, but inside he was a marshmallow; he stood no chance against the pouty face – she knew it, and he knew it.
“…Fine. You win! Just stop with the eyes!” Buck broke like a glass pane. Terra’s expression immediately changed, as she gave him a great beaming grin. Despite himself, he couldn’t help but smile back.
“Hey you two!” came a voice from above them. Sky Rocket, a tan pegasus with a messy blond mane and tail, and mutual friend of theirs from Coltown. “Just thought I’d give you guys a heads up: that group is almost here. I just saw the dust trail over the ridge there. Should be here in about five minutes.”
“Thanks for the heads up, Sky. Tell the crew to set up the GPR equipment,” Terra called back.
“Done, and done!” Sky replied, and bolted back to the base camp at the bottom of the hill.
“Now remember: This is a very important group. Princess Twilight is going to be there for our meeting, and I want to make a good impression so please be polite and behave yourself,” Terra said turning back to Buck.
“When have I ever not been well behaved?”
“Remember the office chair incident?”
“…In public. When have I ever misbehaved in public?”
“Buck.”
“Okay, okay. I promise to be on my best behavior.”
Finally having gotten a promise out of him, Terra smiled. “Would you mind fetching some of the students, and telling them to bring a tarp up here? I don’t want to lose any of the progress on this nest.”
“No kidding? You actually found a nest?” The earth pony stallion looked like a foal on Hearth’s Warming morning.
“Maybe. At the very least I’ve found part of a hatchling therapod which is almost as good.”
“Terra, that’s fantastic!”
“Just think about, Buck: we may finally be able to prove that these were mindless, vicious reptiles, but thinking animals that cared for their young!”
“This is amazing! I’ll be right back with the tarp.”
“Afterwards, just head down to the bus stop. I want the two of us to greet the group when they arrive,” Terra called as Buck descended to hill to grab some of the students. He nodded in affirmation, and continued on his way.
