Chapter 1: Inventory
Warning: This fanfiction contains spoilers for both Jurassic World and Season 3 of RWBY, as well as scenes of considerable dinosaur-related violence. Read at your own peril.
Note: Jurassic Park and Jurassic World are the rightful property of Universal Studios, Legendary Pictures, and the late Michael Crichton. RWBY is the rightful property of Rooster Teeth and the late Monty Oum.
Personal Log of Dr. Henry Wu, January 3rd, 2016
It has been over a week since the escape of Project Ares Template Specimen B's (Binomial nomenclature: Indominus rex) on 12/28/15 and the subsequent destruction of Jurassic World. Simon Masrani, CEO of Masrani Global, is deceased; Claire Dearing has risen to take his position, and is currently playing damage control to desperately try to salvage the company's reputation after Specimen B's 'field test'. So far, the extent of the damage to the park's public image has been predictable; while the Indominus was never directly seen, the escape of the park's pterosaurs, as well as the fact that all of the park's attractions are now either dead or running wild and the death of Mr. Masrani, has been more than enough to send the park's name crashing down into the mud. I doubt that Masrani Global will ever be able to escape the shadow that Specimen B's rampage has now cast over it. Already, various groups opposed to the park's existence are using the Indominus' escape as a basis for countless arguments that Jurassic World is "A crime against the rightful nature of life and death, as well as a warning for our crimes against Mother Nature." Fools: the only difference between Specimen B and a domestic dog is that the former was created through methodical science instead of centuries of inbreeding.
I myself am now comfortably located in a small but well-funded laboratory located on an island within the Philippines purchased by my employers-which island it is, I have not had the time to find out; hurriedly making sure that the embryos I managed to take with me has taken up the vast majority of my time, as did analyzing the data provided by Specimen B's rampage.
The results were, put lightly, extremely promising: Specimen B's physical and mental capabilities have far exceeded my initial expectations. Despite having never seen the world outside of its paddock in its life, the subject killed dozens of assets many times larger than it, including a fully-grown wild specimen of Ankylosaurus, outsmarted and destroyed an entire regiment of security forces sent to recapture it, turned raptor trainer Owen Grady's pack of Velociraptor antirrhopus nublarensis against him, and successfully held its own against a fully-grown and highly experienced Tyrannosaurus rex, only being stopped when it was dragged into the lagoon by the park's resident mosasaur.
Based on my calculations and data gleaned from observations of Specimen B's rampage via security footage, the template model displays incredible strength and durability, as shown by Specimen B killing a 6-ton Ankylosaurus by flipping it onto its back and snapping the neck, prying open the closed 40-foot-tall solid steel doors of its paddock with little effort, dispatching five fully-grown Apatosaurus, each weighing almost a dozen times more than it, within seconds, and slaughtering more than half of the park's other herbivores in the gyrosphere valley; the bone-crushing bite of tyrannosaurs and the hatchet-like strikes of Giganotosaurus proved to be an extremely dangerous combination. The subject also withstood being hit directly in the face by said ankylosaur's tail club, as well as being shot with thousands of rounds of live ammunition, including shots from a helicopter-mounted minigun, and several bites from the park's T-rex without serious injury, no doubt due to the incredibly tough osteoderms provided by its abelisaur genetics and the regenerative capabilities of its cuttlefish DNA. Its speed is also impressive: while Specimen B was clocked at over 30 mph within its enclosure, it proved capable of attaining much greater speeds, as proven by its traveling the distance between its isolated paddock and the park proper within minutes.
But even more impressive was the specimen's capacity for stealth and its intelligence. Despite having no idea how the monitoring equipment around its paddock worked, Specimen B managed to completely fool its pen's security in a complex bid for escape, and later figured out the nature of its tracking implant, made the connection that clawing it out would render itself undetectable by park security, and used the detached device to set an ambush for the security detail sent to recapture it in conjunction with its camouflage abilities. It also learned to perfectly mimic and perfectly understand the meaning of the commands and calls used by Mr. Grady's partially trained V. a. nublarensis pack within minutes of hearing them for the first time, essentially ousting Grady from his position as alpha of the pack and turning his animals against the security forces. Needless to say, this ability to act as an alpha of a raptor pack would prove invaluable if template models are to be deployed alongside trained V. a. nublarensis, greatly reducing the chance of a pack going feral.
Despite this promising data, however, I must ultimately consider the template model a failure, unsuitable for deployment in military situations.
While Specimen B displayed extremely formidable physical capabilities, it also displayed extreme aggression and strong solitary inclinations, killing and devouring its older sibling at only a few months of age and attacking everything on sight as soon as it escaped, having no doubt lost its mind in its cramped, lonely enclosure. Needless to say, this would make templates extremely dangerous to soldiers on both sides of a conflict; should an Indominus turn on its handlers, I doubt anything less than an air strike would be able to destroy it. It took a fully-grown T-rex, a raptor, and a gigantic genetically modified mosasaur to kill Specimen B, and it wasn't fully grown and had less than 24 hours of combat experience. A mature, trained specimen would be far, far worse. The problem soon takes on an economic aspect when Specimen B's behavior towards Owen Grady's raptor pack is considered: when Grady eventually managed to get them back under his command, the specimen attacked the group without hesitation as soon as it realized that the smaller dinosaurs were not following its orders. Trained raptors deployed alongside an Indominus would likely be killed immediately should they fail to complete an order-a phenomenal waste of the time and resources required to raise specimens of V. a. nublarensis and wreaking havoc on the elaborate pack hierarchies that the species is known to form.
The issue of escape becomes even more dire, however, when the template's intelligence and stealth capabilities are considered. As Specimen B proved, the model is more than intelligent enough to evade detection, and tracking devices would be of little assistance. It's also entirely possible-in fact, more than likely-that a 'feral' Indominus would take any trained raptors into the wild along with it; considering the fact that V. a. nublarensis, like all of the dinosaur species I created 20 years ago, can change gender in a single-sex environment, said pack could quickly breed to plague-like proportions.
The final issue, however, resides not in the model's aggression or intellect, but in its size. A 50-foot-long carnivore like Specimen B would have been had she grown to maturity would require an enormous amount of meat to survive; while this wouldn't be a problem for a multi-billion-dollar theme park like Jurassic World, the sheer scale of feeding large numbers of Indominus models, particularly in the field, provides a logistical challenge that simply cannot be worked around. Hoskins once suggested modifying the Model A to be but a fraction of the size of Specimen B, but such a suggestion is, put simply, impossible-reducing the template's size that drastically would require the restructuring of its entire anatomy, greatly reducing the strength and durability that made Specimen B so dangerous in the first place.
All is not lost, however. Specimen B was hardly the first hybrid that I have ever created, and she is far from the last. My employers will no doubt be disappointed in the unviability of the Indominus model, but I do not refer to it as a 'template' for nothing.
Several months before Specimen B's rampage, I began work on four new 'models' for Project Ares at Hoskins' request; now that I do not have Masrani or Dearing looking over my shoulder, I, as well as with the resources provided by my employers, progress on their genomes can be made in earnest. All four strains utilize the genetics of the Indominus as a base (How ironic; a creature built from the genes of dozens of species being used as merely a stepping stone!), but instead of the template's far more generalist capabilities, each variant is specialized for use in specific missions. Unlike the original plan for the Indominus units, mass production won't be necessary for the new strains; only one or two would ever be needed at any given time, greatly reducing the amount of resources required to keep them alive. While I managed to acquire the majority of the genetic material I need to complete the four strains before my escape from Isla Nublar, several key components had to be left behind in the Hammond Creation Lab. No matter; my employers had already dispatched a team to recover the samples before I had even landed on the island that I am currently typing from.
I must admit, it is amazing just how far Biosyn has come from its days of lurking in Ingen's shadow over two decades ago.
Welp, bet you lot didn't expect something like this, now did you? Needless to say, this was born from my current writer's block with Bloody Evolution, but writing this thankfully shouldn't take up too much of my time, what with summer vacation coming up.
Anyway, the story itself was born of this really weird idea that I had one day, which I refuse to spoil at the moment, the fact that there was an appalling lack of Jurassic World/RWBY crossover fics on this site. (I've seen a RWBY/JP one, but it's, but very bluntly, not very good.), a particular challenge on Twitter called #buildabetterfaketheropod, and the notion of sequels to Jurassic World.
I really loved Jurassic World, despite its many, many inaccuracies, but a lot of hardcore dinosaur fans got their feathers in a bunch at the fact that the film's dinosaurs aren't very accurate; not having feathers on the raptors, for instance. Another target of their rage was the Indominus, which many proclaimed to be 'boring' and 'unoriginal'. Frankly, I'm of the opinion that you can't really make something that's a hybrid of closely-related animals really look unique, but that's a rant for another day. Anyway, the challenge was basically to make a scientifically accurate dinosaur monster that was 'better' than the I-rex, and feathernazis were on that like flies on dung. Unfortunately, though, it seems that to them, 'better' and 'more accurate' are synonyms: half of the entries were basically feathered, downgraded versions of the Indominus, while the other half were basically scaled-up versions of real dinosaurs. As someone who draws monsters himself, I was decidedly unimpressed. This story has my take on the challenge, with my own personal touch.
Also, it's been confirmed that we're going to get at least two more Jurassic Park films, as well as the fact that it's going to have various companies making their own murdersauruses (murdersauri?). This got me thinking: what's a company that's been a known rival of Ingen since the very start and has vested interest in making their own dinosaurs? Biosyn, of course! Given the fact that Masrani Global bought Ingen, it's not too much of a stretch to assume that Biosyn has undergone major change as well. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they were the ones behind the whole scheme in JW-they've had moles in Ingen since the very beginning, and that was when Ingen was putting enormous amounts of pressure on them, and they're quite notorious in the novels for shady dealings.
Anywho, leave a review if you have an idea for the story, have a question, or just want to say that you like this story, and maybe leave a favorite if you want! This is GlarnBoudin, signing out!