A/N: So, I got robbed by what I thought was a friend, lost over $500 that was put back for this month's rent, had a severe anxiety attack at work and got sent home which means I've lost money off my next paycheck, and have been informed that my hours are most likely gong to be cut but that I could ask others for their (also cut) hours. So, here I am, riding my chemical calm, emotionally and physically drained, and marathoning Jurassic Park/World while my therapy dog makes a point of wandering past every five minutes and bringing me either a pillow, one of my stuffed sloths, or one of his own toys before herding my cat over to me so I can pet him without having to get up.
So, here's a Jurassic Park/World fic that has a theme I haven't seen to this degree yet.
Enjoy and take care of yourselves!
(For those worried, writing is my safe, creative self-care therapy because it helps me express emotions carefully and comprehensively through my characters without further risking my mental well-being with real people here and now. So, I'm not hurting myself further by writing this, but in fact working through my emotions safely. Thank you for the concern, though!)
Immersion Theory
Chapter One
First Contact
Kathrine Moore was absorbed in her book, ignoring the people around her as her Father's employees moved to-and-fro in the office. She had been sitting there for over an hour now, her suitcase at her side and her sturdy, thick-clothed backpack against her hip as the giant zoology textbook on her lap took her attention. It was the beginning of Summer Vacation, and she would be starting her senior year at high school once it ended. She'd been studying like mad, keeping her straight A's and her four-point-oh average, and it had all cumulated into what was happening next. A two-month Internship at InGen itself!
Her pulse raced at the reminder, her dark blue eyes glancing at the envelope she was using as a bookmark. Inside was her Internship Approval letter, the one she had been aiming to get since fifth grade, the one that was signed by Doctor Wu himself, informing her of her acceptance for their summer program. She was one step closer to achieving her dream job! If she kept to the plan, kept her grades high and her chin up, and proved herself capable and diligent during this Internship, then, upon graduation, she would have a guaranteed position in the very same lab that had re-made dinosaurs. One that would pay for her college studies, which would help her gain high positions in the lab. And maybe, one day, she could take those studies even further than even Doctor Wu had been able to.
Imagine it! She could bring back any creature that had fallen extinct! Re-new world-wide energy stores! End world hunger with cloning, or grow organs that would never be rejected because they would literally be the host-body's own organ! And, even if you ignored the sheer potential of the studies Doctor Wu had birthed, she would be allowed to work with the dinosaurs themselves. She would get to study them up-close and personal, learn their habits, see them in habitats that haven't existed on Earth for billions of years. And, one day, she would get to make them herself.
She just had to prove herself during this internship. Had to do as she was told, ask intelligent questions, and, maybe, she could corner some of the other, older interns and college students and gain a foot in the lab door after graduation that would help keep her ahead of the game. There were stories about how cut-throat job positions could be in the InGen labs. After all, everyone wanted what she did. They wanted to have a hand in creating dinosaurs, and Kathrine wasn't about to lose her only opportunity to do so.
So, here she was studying. She was studying the biology, environment, and behavior of various species, of their habitats, habits, food, and compatibility with humans. She'd studied mostly land-creatures, but had also paid attention to sea and aerial animals as well. Everything, every animal, from blue whales to African lions, bald eagles to alligator-snapping turtles, ostriches to domesticated dogs, no animal was not at least studied in a general way within all subjects. She'd lost count of the number of articles and documents she'd printed, high-lightened, and stored away about various animal attacks, laws, numbers in wild versus in captivity, everything she could get her hands on.
She would be ahead of the game. And, even if every other Intern was thinking the same thing, she highly doubted they'd done so to the same extreme that she had. After all, studying science and zoology and paleontology was one thing, but what would they know about how animals think? They'd brush that off, focus on chemistry and biology and computer science, all of which she had a decent level of knowledge in, but the animals themselves? They wouldn't be seen as living, breathing miracles, creatures with their own instincts and attitudes and reactions to stimuli. No, no, they would be 'assets'. 'Subjects' and numbers and 'specimens'. But not to her.
Kathrine knew that the other scientists would be focusing on the creation of the dinosaurs. On the Science. That was fine, she liked that as well, it was incredibly important. But they were so focused on the forest they lost sight of the trees. Each dinosaur that proved viable, each re-created species a step further into genetic research and manipulation. She wasn't diminishing the level of sophistication or importance of any of the studies.
But, if you were going to, say, create a new breed of dog, there were behavioral and medical issues you should consider. You want to make a large dog with medium-length fur, with a deep chest and long tail and broad skull, you had a lot to consider. There was the health issues, such as hip dysplasia, kidney issues, spinal mutations, ocular diseases, life-spans. Then there was the amount of time you'd have to put into decided which breeds to use, then each of their medical issues, and then the compatibility of the breeds.
Then, there was behavior and instinctual issues. A border collie tends to herd and chase small animals and children, for example. This instinctual response, mixed with, say, the anti-social and aggressive instincts of a Tibetan mastiff, would create a sort of… hyper-aggressive herding mentality. A larger dog with a severe dislike of strangers, extreme territorial issues, and the need to chase and herd things. The potential for injuries was very high.
Now, taking that same analogy, and applying it to dinosaurs, you gained a much… Grimmer, potential of disaster. They'd gotten a glimpse of it, in nineteen-ninety-three at the original park, and that incident in San Francisco in ninety-seven and the fall-out of public relations as a result. Hammond had been a Visionary, Doctor Wu was ambitious, but neither of them considered the dangers of their dreams, and people died.
Kathrine's mother had been one of the many Lawyers that persecuted InGen for their negligence and the lives it cost. Her father had been one of the Lawyers hired to defend them. In the end, it's what caused their divorce, and made Kathrine interested in dinosaurs. Before then, before the screaming fights, the viciously cold shoulders, the slammed doors and thin-lipped expressions, her parents had been her inspiration. She'd wanted to be a Lawyer, just like them, in fourth grade. And, within a single summer, she had dedicated herself to understanding the creatures that had torn her family apart, at first with the desire to destroy them from the inside out, but now…
Now she loved them.
They were animals. They had no idea the devastation, the loss, they caused. They were just following their instincts, reacting to stimuli that humans had no idea how to counter fully in this day and age. It had been human error that had caused the deaths of innocents, not animal malice. Greed, ignorance, ambition, pride, all these things had caused those incidents.
And, if she studied, focused, learned, about those instincts and reactions, she could better prepare and prevent them from occurring again. And, human error? Logic could manipulate greed, explanation could educate ignorance, proof and in-depth study could re-aim ambition, and carefully modulated praise could sooth pride. Once human error was prepared for, it was the animals one had to take into consideration. And that's what Kathrine was doing.
"Kat?" A gentle voice called softly, and Kathrine paused her mental ramblings in order to look up, one finger automatically going to her spot on the page that she'd last been at (an anatomical depiction of a king cobra, namely the list of muscles that caused the hood to flare). Standing in front of her was Saundra Fione, her fathers secretary, the same small smile on her face that had been there for years when dealing with Kathrine. "Your father is sorry, but—"
"But he can't see me off," Kathrine finished, a bemused smile on her lips as the secretary nodded apologetically.
"Something came up in the case he's defending," she told the teenager gently. "However, he's given me leave to accompany you to your plane."
"That's fine," Kathrine told her, well used to her father's schedule. She'd only seen her mother twice this last year, once on Christmas and again on her birthday, but that had become par the course since the divorce had been finalized and she'd moved in with her father in fifth grade. "I'm ready to go, if you are?" She added, gesturing at her backpack.
"Of course," Saundra told her, smiling. "I already had the car pull around in front for us," she added; Kathrine nodded and got to her feet, carefully using her acceptance letter to save her place as she went. Once her textbook was safely packed away, Kathrine got to her feet.
"Lead the way," she offered the older woman, absently reaching up to tug on her ponytail to make sure none of her light brown hair had escaped. Saundra chuckled softly and did so and, like many other times in the past, Kathrine turned her back to the door leading to her father's office and followed his secretary out of the building.
Her future was waiting, and it wasn't behind that perpetually closed door.
()()()()()()()()()()()()
The plane she's on is small, a thirty, maybe forty-person seater, with nineteen other passengers, no Flight Attendant, and a pilot whose English was passable at best. Luckily, his Co-Piolet spoke more than enough to get safety measures and updates across. Kathrine was vibrating in her seat, clutching her sturdy pack to her chest as she stared out the window at the open ocean. They would be going to the lab on the recently leased Site C, a small island several miles away from the InGen owned Isla Sorna and Isla Nublar, safely kept away from all actual dinosaurs save for a single trip to Nublar mid-summer in order to witness the construction and early access to the new park that was being built, Jurassic World. They would, hopefully, be allowed to witness the Hatching Labs, or at least the Coding Sites, but, until then, they would be on a small island called Pajarito, or 'Tiny Bird' if her Google Translate worked right… It did sort of look like a bird, if you tilted your head properly while looking at it on a map, but, well…
It wasn't nearly as interesting as the Five Deaths were.
Anyways, upon reaching Pajarito, they would begin working in the lab, learning about the science behind the genetics and cloning. They'd had to sign some NDA's before they'd even stepped onto the plane, which had been interesting for her to read through thanks to her upbringing. They were going to get into the nitty-gritty details, study the length of codes and numbers behind every piece of study that went into even a single strand of DNA extracted from Amber, going back to the very first from nineteen-eighty-two. She couldn't wait to get her hands on the print-outs for that. She hoped she could get a hold of some diagnostics for the first successful cloned dinosaur, and the unsuccessful ones as well…
"Excited?" A voice asked behind her; Kathrine blinked, glancing away from the window to look over her shoulder. The young man sitting behind her was smiling, looking amused and indulgent as he looked her over. He was older than her, a college intern like literally every one else on the plane but the pilots. He was very dark skinned with short black hair and warm, dark brown eyes.
"Very," she responded with a grin. "Aren't you?" He offered her a large hand and a wink and a chuckle.
"Jordan Michaels, biochemistry major," he told her cheerfully; Kathrine took his hand and shook it firmly.
"Kathrine Moore, high school student," she replied; his eyebrows shot up and he gave a low, impressed whistle.
"Damn, I thought you looked young but not high school young," he mused, shaking his head. "You must be damn smart then. I had to write a couple dozen papers on the theories about how InGen's chemistry and cloning process work to get spot on this plane! How'd you get in?" Kathrine is relieved he doesn't sound offended that she was there, merely impressed and interested, something she really appreciated.
"I won a science fair project in two-thousand-one revolving around theoretical chemistry dealing with the additional DNA added to the recovered Amber information," she informed him sheepishly. "I was in the eighth grade, and it was given an honorable mention in a science magazine… I've won multiple awards and fairs since then, all honored in magazines and two referenced in major scientific journals, and have gotten several acceptance letters to multiple ivory-league colleges despite the fact that I have another year in high school…"
"Ho-ly shit," Jordan mused, expression deeply impressed. You said Kathrine Moore, right?" He asked, digging out his laptop; Kathrine nodded, blinking at him. "Unless you happen to have any of those papers on you, I'm going to look them up really quick," he murmured; Kathrine flushed then grinned at him.
"Have fun!" She chirped, turning back around at his chuckle. Her companion distracted, Kathrine quickly pulled out her textbook again, flipping it open to where her Acceptance Letter rested, and once more allowed herself to be absorbed by the book. Scattered around her, her fellow Interns either conversed with one another or read their own books. One man, the oldest of them in his mid-thirties, was fast asleep with noise-cancelling headphones on, the young woman in the seat in front of him listening to what sounded like Brittany Spears cranked up to the point that Kathrine could just barely make out the lyrics from her own seat, six rows away.
Settling in, Kathrine once more began to read, and let the world around her fade away.
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
"Boys and girls, we're approaching the Islands at this moment," the Co-Pilot's voice announced over the static-y speaker, making Kathrine look up from where she'd been discussing genetic theories with Jordan and another intern, a scrawny red-headed man with large glasses and freckles, named Roger Tylons, who was a chemistry major. She'd just been taking notes on the redhead's suggestion that using Iguana DNA could promote regeneration in the dinosaurs if placed in the correct sequence of the Gene Matrix.
"Already?" She mused.
"Time flies when you're having fun," Jordan joked, the three of them shifting back to sit in their seats.
"If you are not buckled, you should get that way quickly, please!" the Co-Pilot announced cheerfully. "There will be some turbulence as the thermals around the Cinco Meurtes are very strong! If you have loose luggage, secure it to either your person or an empty seat! No one wants to get brained by a loose book, ha ha!" Immediately, Kathrine made sure her pack was completely closed and her personal items all accounted for inside, before buckling it into the empty seat beside her. If the turbulence got really bad, the last thing she wanted was for her own books to bash her in the ribs if she'd worn it.
"Ready for some head-banging time?" Jordan asked her cheerfully; Kathrine chuckled, a nervous roll growing in her stomach as the plane began to tremble. "Just remember, if you vomit, it better be in one of the little plastic bags in front of you or it's gonna go everywhere!" Immediately, Kathrine bit back a gag, shuddering as she instinctively swallowed. She was a sympathy puker, even the idea of throwing just made her stomach roll. "Easy, kiddo, easy!" Jordan quickly said, mildly alarmed as he set a large hand on her shoulder. "Deep breaths, okay? Go ahead and grab a baggy, just in case…" Kathrine nodded weakly, breath shaky as she reached into the small pocket on the back of the seat in front of her, pulling out one of the small, yellow baggies bundled up inside. They could only hold about a liter each, but that would be more than enough for her.
"Get ready, girls and boys!" the Co-Pilot called, the static of the intercom getting worse. "It's gonna be a bumpy ride, ha-ha!"
"Regular comedian, this guy," Roger complained, just before the whole plane began to violently shake. Kathrine's breath left her in a hoarse whoosh as she clenched her hands around her belt, knuckles white and flimsy yellow bag crinkling. Her head was jerking no matter how hard she tried to brace herself, body yanking roughly in every direction as the plane swooped down and up while it shook.
"W-what-t-t- th-the h-hell-ll?!" Jordan managed to loudly stutter out as the shaking rose in violence. Kathrine was gasping for air while trying not to grit her teeth, eyes stuck wide open out of fear. This, this didn't seem like it should be normal turbulence! She'd been on planes before, none of them shook like this!
Suddenly, there was a bone-rattling explosion, a concussive force strong enough to toss them all violently forward and to one side, immediately gaining startled screams. A plume of fire roared into being from the side of the plane opposite of Kathrine.
"HOLD ON!" Jordan roared as Kathrine screamed, terror flooding her as the plane began to jerk and dive. A hole opened up near the front of the plane, where the explosion was, and the tearing wind sent hair and loose items flying violent as everyone's screams rose in fever pitch. Jordan's hand clamped onto her shoulder with a bruising strength that somehow managed to pin her back against the seat better than any bracing she could have managed. Now, now her eyes clenched tightly shut, tears of fear falling down her face. She wished she had the strength to reach up and grab Jordan's hand, but her hands were too tightly clenched around her belt to even think of it, the tough material cutting into her palms painfully.
Between what felt like one moment and the next, the plane plummeted…
And slammed into the sea.
A/N: I hope you all are enjoying this so far and are having a far better day than I am.
TIMELINE: (This will only appear from now on when it's been updated with information dealing with Kathrine. All Kathrne info is Underlined)
1982 – DNA Extract from Amber Mosquito by InGen. Isla Nublar is leased by InGen for 99 years. Becomes Site A.
1984 – First prehistoric animal brought back to life. Kathrine's Parents start dating.
1985 – Isla Sorna & Archipelago leased by InGen for 99 years. Isla Sorna becomes Site B.
1986 – First dinosaur cloned on Site B (A Velociraptor). Kathrine's parents get married.
1988 – Construction of Jurassic Park begins. Kathrine Elizabeth Moore is born June 7th at 8:42 PM to Justin Moore and Amanda Moore (previously Collins).
1990 - 1992 – Troodon's are bred but are later killed off, both Sites.
1993 – First JP Movie happens (June). Deconstruction of Original Park begins (November). Kathrine is five and in Kindergarten. Site B closed down (December).
1997 –Second JP Movie happens. Kathrine is nine and in Fourth Grade. John Hammond dies (December)
1998 – Kathrine's parents' divorce over opposing representation in the above issues; she moves in with her father. She's just about to enter Fifth Grade. This is when she starts obsessing over dinosaurs and InGen. Masrani Global takes over InGen.
1999 – Spinosaurus illegally bred on Site B. Kathrine is in the Sixth Grade, top of her class.
2001 – The Third JP Movie happens. Kathrine is in Eighth Grade. Her scores are starting to get attention. She wins science fair with chemistry project dealing with theoretical dinosaurs.
2002 – Jurassic World construction begins. Kathrine is in Ninth Grade and has won four more Science Fairs and two Competitions. Scouters begin to take notice.
2003 (Summer) – Kathrine gets her Acceptance Letter from InGen to Intern over the summer. The beginning of this fic.
2005 – Jurassic World Opens
2012 – Indominous is being created. Integrated Behavioral Raptor Intelligence Study Project begins.
2015 – First JW Movie happens.
2017 – Mount Sibo declared an Active Volcano. Dinosaur Protection Group Created. Lilly the Mosasaurus escapes to the sea.
2018 – Indoraptor being planned (Mid-year). Second JW movies happens (Late-year)
