A slight breeze blew, cooling the hot and humid tropical air around me and the suns rays felt warm and pleasant on my skin. The sand beneath me was cool on my skin and the sand of waves lapping on shore was soothing and peaceful. I stayed there, enjoying it for a while before my conscious mind really began to kick in. Where am I? A beach? Maybe? Why am I on a beach? I open my eyes slightly, the easiest part of my body to move at the moment and my senses are assaulted by what felt like a laser aimed directly at my cornea. I promptly slam my eyes shut to block out the offending burning sensation. I wait for what felt like ages, then slowly open my eyes again. The light isn't quite laser intensity anymore, but is still incredibly aggravating and uncomfortable. I force myself to stick through it, my eyes watering as discolored spots began appearing in my vision, but eventually my eyes adjusted enough that it didn't burn anymore. I blink several times to remove the tears gathered in my eyes and to drive away the spots from my vision. My vision is covered in a field of blue, so either I'm looking at a cloudless sky, or I'm looking at the bottom of something blue, though it's more likely that I'm looking at the sky.

I try to sit up, but my body is almost completely unresponsive, my fingers and toes being the only part of me to actually move. The tingling feeling of pins and needles climbs up my arms and legs and it's uncomfortable, but there's nothing I can do about it right now. I start to get some feeling back in my neck and I manage to lift my head to look at myself. For some reason, I'm not wearing a shirt or shoes, but thankfully I am wearing a pair of off-white shorts and a layer of sand. I attempt to sit up again and my arms respond this time, but I don't seem to have full control and my hand pushes clumsily on the ground to bring myself up with a finger curled up under it. I manage to get to my feet shakily and nearly fall back onto the ground, but I manage to keep upright. I steady myself as my limbs get all the feeling back into them and my balance is restored. Once I'm confident I'm not going to fall flat on my face I yake a look around at my surroundings.

Currently I'm standing on the edge of a swath of pristine sand bordered by a sea of sparkling crystal blue water and lush green forest. The ocean itself is calm and nearly flat, the tallest waves probably not exceeding my height, and it extended all the way to the horizon where it met the bright blue of the sky in an almost seamless manner as the sky reflected itself on the water. It was an absolutely beautiful sight and would have probably brought tears to a lesser person or a romantic, though I was neither of those and took a few seconds to appreciate it before moving on. The sand of the beach stretched maybe fifty feet from the water before it gave way to more solid dirt, massive sparce ferns, and tall skinny palm trees that towered overhead while casting down long shadows over the beach. A little way down the beach lay a pile of large boulders jutting from the sand erratically like a careless giant had dropped them by accident and never bothered to pick them back up.

I look back at myself and remember that I'm still coated in dried sand, and immediately seek to remedy it. I brush the sand from my shoulders and chest, then run my hands through my hair vigorously. A rain of sand falls in front of my eyes as I continually shake my hair until it thins and eventually stops entirely. I doubt that all the sand is free of my hair, but it's good enough. The sand on my arms is the next to go. I wipe the sand off my right arm first, but when I wipe my left I feel something hard and smooth that isn't my skin or the sand on it. Confused, I wiped more of the sand off to see a diamond shaped of a metallic material embedded in my arm just below the wrist. I stared wide eyed for a moment, stunned. I touch it with my other hand as if to prove it's really there, then begin to panic. I claw and pry at the object with as much strength as I dared, but it doesn't budge so much as a centimeter.

I'm interrupted from my attempts to remove the object by a loud hissing sound. I wheel around and see a pair of aggressive yellowish eyes staring at me from a particularly thick cluster of ferns. A number of dangerous animals run through my head, feral dogs, wolves, bears, and big cats come to the forefront of my mind. The owner of the eyes steps out of the ferns and it's obviously not even close to any of the carnivores I thought of. It stands at about three feet at the shoulder and is just shy of eleven feet in length, though most of it's length is tail. It walks on two legs like an ostrich or bird of prey and has a rather long pair of arms with four clawed fingers on its hands. It's birdlike neck is held erect and it's head is vaguely lizardlike in shape, but with a pair of crests stretching from the back of its skull to halfway down its snout. The creatures jaw has a deep notch in it a few inches from the end of its nose and long, glinting, spike shaped teeth protrude from its lips. It's neck seems to be covered in loose brightly color skin and it's back is bedecked in thin quills reminiscent of a porcupine's, and the rest of its body is covered in pebbly scales.

It stalks towards me slowly, moving it's head and shoulders side to side as it did so. I take a step back in fear and the creature suddenly rears up and the skin on its neck springs forward into a frills. It shrieks and makes a gargling sound, then spits a glob of thick greenish slime at me. On reflex I jump to the side, allowing the projectile spit to sail past my shoulder and splatter harmlessly on the sand behind me. The creature seems to frown despite not changing its facial expression, and does a half step half hop towards me, it's frill partially retracting. It flares it's frill again, hissing and making that disgusting and terrifying sound. It makes to spit at me again, but in a stroke of brilliance or idiocy, I run up to it and punch it in the jaw, sending it's second shot careening away uselessly.

I try to kick it in the shin, only to have it made painfully obvious that unlike a person, it's legs aren't held directly under it's body, so instead I've kicked it in the knuckle, which only makes it angrier. It pounces onto me, sending me backwards onto the sand. I grab it's snout with one hand and hold it's jaw shut, and with the other I attempt to keep its flailing claws away from my body. The creatures struggles and hisses any time it can open its mouth, and tries to slash open my chest incessantly, but it's not incredibly heavy, so Ican just barely manage to keep it out of range. It realizes this and raises one of it's clawed feet to try and slash me with. I grab one of its arms and roll sideways, pulling it with me since it was off balance from standing on one leg. It slams heavily on the sand and I hear the air forced out of its lungs. I scramble to my feet and it attempts to do the same, but I'm on my feet before it is, and I body check it in the side, knocking it over again. I bring my foot down on the side of it's head, pinning it to the sand. It thrashed for a moment before falling limp.

For a moment I panic and think I've killed it, before realizing it's chest is slowly rising and falling. I lift my foot slowly, half expecting it to lunge up and bite several of my toes off, but it lay there still, playing dead. I step back look it over, noting the various nicks and small scars across it's body. Most of it's body is a dark bluish teal, while its back is a more greenish color, and it's stomach is a caramel brown. The crests on its head and it's neck frill is a bright orange color, and the quills on its back are vibrant crimson along with its hands and feet. It's obviously a dinosaur, despite the impossibility of it being one. I know I've seen it before but I can't recall the name for the life of me. I crouch down, having momentarily forgotten it was playing dead and that I didn't have impunity to look it over. It leaps to it's feet and screams that blood curdling cry, then darts off as fast as it can back into the forest, nearly tripping over itself in it's desperate attempt to flee. While it does that, I scream in surprise and fall back onto my behind roughly, thinking it was attacking me. I laugh breathlessly and lay back on the sand, my heart beating a mile a minute, though my lungs weren't pumping near fast enough to get oxygen to my body.

I lay there panting for several minutes before I cant ignore the hot sun on my face any longer and I get up. I check myself over for any injuries I missed in the heat of the moment and find a number of small cuts on my arm, probably from the dinosaur's quills. Luckily for me though, none of the quills are actually lodged in me. Assuming they were like a porcupines, they would be nigh mpossible to get out by hand. Considering though that the dinosaur's quills would have to be modified feathers, and not spiky hairs, they probably wouldn't be very similar in structure, though what do I know, maybe they're nearly identical, but it doesn't really matter.

I dust the sand off myself once more , then check my surroundings again. I don't know where I plan on going, but I can't stay here on the beach and just wait to get rescued. The dinosaur is bound to come back here again eventually, and I don't want to be sitting out here in the open or asleep when it does. After a moment of debating whether to travel along the edge of the coast or to go into the jungle itself, I make my decision and stride into the ferns without looking back, hoping I had made the right decision.

Aside from the giant ferns the undergrowth was nearly non-existent, and the trees were branch less palms that left plenty of space in between one another, so travelling through it wasn't difficult. Truth be told, it wasn't much of a jungle as my first impressions implied, but regular woody trees began to mingle with the palms, and the ferns were steadily being replaced with large leaved plants with woody stems that I didn't recognize. I kept going for what felt like ages, though it couldnt have longer been longer than thirty or forty minutes until I came to a clearing where I stopped to catch my breath and cool off from the tropical heat. Vines hung down from nearly every branch of the exceptionally large tree I sat under, their lengths growing low to the ground before climbing back up to coil around another branch. The ground was mostly bare soil, though a few patches of grass had sprouted where light manage to reach the canopy. My footprints show up clearly in the soil and I track my own path through the undergrowth when I catch a glance of another set of tracks. They look like an oversized set of thick toed bird feet, and I realize to my terror that they belong to the dinosaur from the beach, or at least another dinosaur like it. I look around in a panic and pick a direction other than the one the dinosaur tracks took and the way I came, and take off running through the brush for probably a hundred feet before I realized that it was causing way too much noise if I'm trying to go undetected and I slow to a halt. I remain perfectly still and listen for several tense moments, though I heard nothing aside from the quiet drone of insects and the occasional far off groan of some large animal. Satisfied that I hadn't summoned my own killer, I continued, though at a much slower and cautious pace.

The environment is surprisingly bare, the jungle being endless reiterations of the same ferns and shrubbery and trees. Occasionally a flowering vine adds a splash of color to the green, and I walked past a single massive boulder a while back. Otherwise this is really bland and rather boring, and if I couldn'tturn and see the ferns I had disturbed behind me, I would probably think I was walking in circles. Out of the blue, or green, a pair of massive dragonflies with wings at the very least two feet across zoomed towards me and circled me in a hovering fashion. Their bodies were covered in glittery and shiny chitin, and their heads were mostly two huge eyes and a monstrous insect mouth. They hovered there in the air, observing me with their expressionless eyes, then speed off again. I shuddered and watched them go out of sight before I continued on. While the dinosaur was clearly more dangerous than the insects, they unnerved me far more than the dino did. At regular size, insects are kind of creepy but I'm okay with them; when the creepy buggers are bigger than most birds though, they're downright mortifying. Though having a giant insect as a pet does have a certain appeal to it when I think about it. Guard dog? Why not giant venomous guard scorpion or guard spider? Though I imagine that training or catching one would be pretty difficult. The idea still stands though, assuming there are other giant insects, and that I don't get eaten or mauled by a dinosaur.

Up ahead, I see something through the trees. I move forward with greater purpose. Hopefully it's something other than creepy bugs that can break this monotony and boredom. Huh, I'm in hostile dinosaur territory and giant dragonfly territory and I'm bored. Wow, I'm actually impressed at my own capacity to be bored in this situation. I break forth from the underbrush and nearly stumble on the uncluttered ground. I stand in what I first though might have been a clearing, but a massive field of knee height grass stands before me, and towering over it, giant dinosaurs.

I recognize a few kinds of them immediately. A herd of at least a dozen surprisingly prickly looking parasaurolophus wander about, browse from the trees on the edge of the forest, or lay hunkered down resting. Dotting the field scarcely were the bulky forms of triceratops, who seemed to be much more on edge than the hadrosaurs, checking their surroundings and sniffing the air often. Lithe dinosaurs that resembled ostriches but much less feathery skirted around the larger dinosaurs and darted across the open space, sometimes stopping to snap at something concealed in the grass. A few bat-like creature with long tails perched on the backs of the parasaurolophus. However one was adamantly trying to roost on the back of a triceratops, which wanted no part of it, and shook itself vigorously whenever it landed to rid itself of the pest. It flit around it's head, dodging easily whenever the triceratops flicked it's head in an attempt to stab the tiny creature with its huge horns.

I watched their antics for a while, until I realized I was having trouble seeing. I blinked several times and realized that the sun had nearly set without me noticing. I debated for a while whether sleeping out on the plain among the herbivores or in a tree would be safer before deciding that I'd rather not get trampled in my sleep. I climbed up one of the trees with some difficulty, but I managed to pull myself up. I climb up to a large crook in one of the branches and nestle into it as comfortably as I can, and I begin to nod off when I slip to the side. I panic and grab onto the branch for dear life, then readjust myself so I'm balanced again. I ponder how I should prevent myself from falling, then take notice of the vines hanging from the branches around me. I yank one down and loop it around the trunk, then tie it snugly around my waist. Then as an extra precaution, I tie a loop in it as best I can and stick my hand it to it. Satisfied that my vine system would save me from falling, I lay back and drift off into an uneasy sleep.

A/n:

Well that was the beginning of my very first fanfiction. Anybody who reads this, I hope you enjoyed and please leave a review, and let me know if I've made any major mistakes grammer wise or continuity wise. If I get some support or at least vague interest in this story I'll keep working on it because Ark has a disappointing lack of fanfictions for such a great game I want to remedy that. Have a great day, night, or whatever time you want, or don't, as I can't tell you what to do.

Edit: whenever a chapter has a warning of blood and mildly grisly scenes, that will almost always mean that there is a descriptive fight scene or a dinosaur or character being injured in an exceptional way, I will try to keep everything under M rated however, so no worries