You stay, I stay
Disclaimer: none of the characters are mine, but belong to Impossible Pictures™.
Note: contains spoilers for the official series.
Middle Cretaceous, 106 MYA
"Captain," the voice of Helen Cutter could, probably, kill a small dinosaur from two hundred paces away, "this is getting annoying. I am positive that you may not care about my plans, whatever they are, but I can also assure you that I do not care about yours. Please leave."
"Helena," Tom Ryan replied, watching how the face of the anthropologist turned time traveller did not twitch. "I told you before – you go, I go. You stay, I stay."
"Why?" Helen said, as she shifted her position on top of a tree. "What for did you travel so far on such a flimsy excuse after me? What value do I contain for your personal history?"
"You saved my life," Ryan said simply, "remember?"
Late Permian, 250 MYA
This is my end, Ryan thought simply, I just never thought that it will look like this.
The gape of the future predator reeked. Just moments ago Ryan was discharging his own weapon at the monstrous animal – and had missed. The scattered gunfire, caused by Ryan's bout of nervousness, was about to prove his own undoing, as the monstrous animal was about to deliver the fatal bite.
A very large crossbow bolt struck the future predator in the torso, sinking in deep, and causing it to roll away from Ryan, clearly dying.
"What are you waiting for? Run, you fool!" Helen swore, as she retreated, still holding onto her discharged crossbow.
Ryan looked around, saw that the giant gorgonopsid had finished feasting on the future predator's young and now was sniffing around and looking in their direction, and followed suit, deciding that discretion is the better part of valour, this time.
Middle Cretaceous, 106 MYA
"So, I did save you, though I know not why," Helen admitted. "What of it?"
"That makes two of us, I suppose," Ryan nodded sombrely, "but save my life you did, and I owe you. Plus, Ms. Brown has told me often enough that I could use a vacation, so here I am. Where are we going next?"
"Well, I'm staying right here, while you have a choice: go back or go into that carnivore's stomach," Helen responded in a particularly "colorless" tone of voice.
Whether or not the linguistic combination "military intelligence" is an oxymoron, Ryan was quite capable of quick thought and/or action: within moments he had joined Helen on her tree. "What carnivore, where?" he added as an afterthought.
"There," Helen spoke, still placidly.
And Ryan saw it. A meat-eating dinosaur, similar to the ones in Cutter's pictures, with a rather tiger-like coloration and a hungry look.
"Looks rather like the allosaurs I saw in the Late Jurassic time period," Helen continued to narrate, "but quite a bit smaller, I confess." She turned to Ryan. "Do you still really think that following me around will be worthwhile? Because I'm pretty sure that it is not."
"Maybe," Ryan said, thoughtfully eyeing the prehistoric beast that balefully eyed them in response. "Maybe. But nothing ventured nothing gained and all that. Where will we go from here?"
End