So I watched Jurassic World and I'm HYPED. I thought it was a great movie, but there wasn't nearly enough Mamma Chris and Raptor fluff. Fixing that here. Is basically a little prequel to the movie, concerning the raptors and their alpha.
Chapter 1
It was nearly one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the goddamn research facility, and even though they had at least twenty engineers walking around, no one thought to fix the air conditioning.
Yeah, it had been a long week for Owen Grady, ex-Navy Seal and current 'Raptor Behavior Specialist and Trainer'.
The biological engineers had produced four perfectly oval eggs. After the first round went horribly wrong, the eggs were looked after constantly, if not in person, then with a camera. So, that was why Owen had been staring at the eggs for quite a while, and that was probably also why they seemed to be staring back at him. He rubbed his eyes, but his sight still wouldn't focus back. Owen had volunteered to monitor the eggs for two reasons:
1. He was the 'Raptor Behavior Specialist and Trainer' and had no actual raptors to specialize and train right now.
2. It was very important that the baby raptors saw him as their 'mommy', because that made it easier to train them and become their alpha, which was the end goal. If he could be here when they hatched, he could imprint on them.
He did feel a little like a caged animal, certainly when the park opened and the tourists could pass through the hallways of the research facility, watching everything from the other side of the glass. They wanted to give him a headset so he could play tour guide, but that wasn't really his thing. He didn't really know a lot about dinosaurs and he wasn't feeling like sharing baby names.
It took a whole army of scientist to create these eggs, to revive this extinct species, but all the tourists would care about were gonna be their names and when they were gonna hatch.
Every couple hours, a scientist, or biologist or whatever would come in, wearing latex gloves and a lab coat. He'd walk up to the incubator and turn the eggs around. After three visits, Owen asked if he could maybe take over, and the doctor, named Hu, explained thoroughly what he had to pay attention to. So from that moment on, Owen turned the eggs himself.
That was also where it went wrong the first time round. Not all birds turn and toss their eggs around in their nests, and in all the other cases it went right. It was stupid, trivial that no one thought of it before it went wrong. The first three eggs never moved until they started hatching, and the raptors inside showed severe deformities. Two of them never even made it out of the egg. The third one missed a couple of toes on his claws and his right foreleg was glues to his body. Owen had started bonding and training with him immediately anyway, to ensure he was mentally healthy, might he make it through those vital first weeks. Raptors are pack animals and bringing up pack animals alone is a dangerous thing to do, even when the beast has never known any better.
Vic Hoskins, leader of the iNGen security project, proposed to 'get rid of the thing'. He said it with this awful neglect, even hate towards the hatchling, as if he blamed the beast for being born all wrong. He proposed to kill the raptor the same way you would kill a tumor or a fever, because you'd have to get rid of it before it spreads. Also, nobody would want to see an imperfect dinosaur, and the little raptor would be useless for the training schedule because of his limp.
But, because they had hired Owen for the training, he made the final decisions concerning the raptors.
He'd named the little thing Alphie and spent as much time near him as he possibly could. The mutated raptor did cause some rise in visitor rates, and he got stronger every day.
But after a few weeks, reality caught up on Alphie and Owen. The raptor seemed to have trouble breathing, and after a short examination (by a slightly wary biologist), they concluded that his lungs stuck together like thighs to plastic chairs.
Owen wanted to fight. There was a whole research facility! Doctors and medicine and money galore! Surely they could do something?
The scientists and biologists and doctors told him they had done everything they could, but there was no way to save little Alphie. Owen bought none of that, but he had to give in, he couldn't do it himself.
Needles were useless on dinosaurs, their skin was too thick to penetrate with such a thin and delicate prick.
That was why they still used live ammo, until they would find a needle strong enough to go through the thick, rubbery skin, but not so big and sharp that they would cause the dinosaurs excruciating pain.
Even though Hoskins offered to do it for him, Owen would not let anyone near Alphie. He would do it himself. It was his call to keep Alphie alive. He should be seeing it through to the end.
Bullet to the brain, and all would be over in a split second. Owen Grady was a former Navy SEAL. He'd been deployed three times and had seen many friends and enemies die in battle, or fighting their injuries in a makeshift hospital. He was a seasoned, hardened man, a veteran, but saying goodbye to this stupid little animal felt like a punch. In the face. With a brick.
Pulling the trigger wasn't the hardest thing. Owen was used to pulling triggers. He could turn everything off and do it with the same automatism as eating, or walking. But looking Alphie in the eye, seeing that he was hurting, breaths labored, and simultaneously seeing trust and hope, nearly broke his heart.
Owen Grady stroked Alphie's grey green scales, scratching the soft spot underneath his misformed right foreleg one last time, before he put the gun to the poor baby's head.
He swallowed. Grady, you're a big guy. Shit happens, so get a grip.
Click. Safety off. He cocked the gun.
Softly, he squeezed the trigger, still stroking Alphie's legs. The Raptor was snoozing, eyes closed, completely trusting his 'mother'.
Owen was glad he'd put a silencer on it, because the recoil was bad enough to deal with. Alphie went limp in his arms, the way he'd go limp when he was sleeping, completely relaxed. Owen put the dinosaur down on the grass and unloaded the gun, stuffing it back in his backpack.
He wrapped Alphie in a blanket that he had brought for that purpose. Hoskins then entered the small paddock, and demanded that Owen handed the raptor over for section.
It disgusted Owen a little bit, but he let Hoskins take Alphie away anyway. It was just a body. What was he gonna do, put it in the ground?
He let the PR-team know about the deceased Velociraptor and left for his cabin on the outskirts of the island.
And now he was standing here again, in the goddamn, hundred degree research facility, waiting eagerly for the new 'asset' to start hatching. The eggs were boring, all the same grayish color that reminded him of wet cardboard and newspapers.
He yawned. Ensuring that these raptors would hatch in a warm nest with someone to look after them made spending all his time here worth it, even thought he was longing for a breath of fresh air, and maybe even a cigarette. He quit smoking years ago, but being cooped up in here for so long made him long for a drag of nicotine again.
Coffee helped big time. When he decided to quit, right after he returned from his third deployment, he would buy himself this huge Starbucks Frappuccino with so much chocolate he couldn't even taste the coffee any more, but he would only treat himself on days where he hadn't compensated his craving for nicotine with eating. So every time he wanted a smoke or when he got food cravings, he'd get himself coffee to remind himself that on his way back home he was going to get a huge ass Frappuccino and it helped him through the day.
Owen turned his back to ask if they could bring some coffee up, when he heard a cracking noise behind him.
There was a fracture on the egg on the left, only as thin as a hair. In movies, hatching was always over in a split second. The little baby animal makes a crack in the egg first and then violently bursts through the shell mere seconds later. In reality, a regular chicken egg can take up eight hours to hatch. It took Alphie nearly fifteen hours. He hoped these raptors were stronger and would break their eggshells faster, but he had no idea.
Owen turned back around again and pressed the call button.
"Hatching has begun," he said casually. "And can someone please bring up a double shot espresso?"