"Nah, don't listen to him, Peter," Micky replied, squinting. The flying animal distracted him momentarily from looking for the time machine. Despite Mike's seemingly stoic nature, he sure knew how to tell a good joke. "You're seein' things, Mike. That's a quetzalcoatlus. See? The lack of the long crest and the wider wingspan?"

Leaning forward, Mike took a second look. "Ah can't quite— Oh, there, I see it now that it's got itself turned about. Sorry, Pete."

The blond boy shrugged. "Don't worry about it, Mike."

Davy added, "Yeah, from this distance— Wait a sec. Guys?"

Micky and Mike locked eyes for a moment, the surprise in them speaking louder than words ever could hope to convey. Then, as their current predicament finally caught up with them, everyone started speaking at once.

"That's a dinosaur!"

"Where the heck are we? WHEN are — "

"That can't be right! What if— "

"It's plain as day! Unless we're all dreamin'!"

"Micky, what did you do!?"

"No, no, I recognize most of these trees— "

"It's gotta be a trick. Maybe a kite— "

"Wait! Wait just a second!" Michael finally broke through the cacophony and brought the others to silence, although no one could help the uneasy glances they were still giving to their environment. "There's a way out, right, Micky? There's a way out? To get home. Micky? Home?" As he continued rephrasing the question, each iteration slightly more high-pitched and desperate than the last, all Micky could do was shake his head until Mike grabbed him by the shoulder and gave him good shake.

"The, uh…" Micky began, fingers tangling up in increasingly frizzy hair. "The principle behind only going FORWARD in time and not back is that… Well, according to theory, for time-related continuity, we would have somehow… I mean, an alternate— Intersecting timelines being what they are… Essentially we would have ensured that the time machine ended up where it needed to be for us to, you know. Get home."

"What're you sayin' Micky?" Davy asked, pushing between Mike and Peter and standing on his tip-toes so he could make a valiant effort at getting into Micky's face.

"Let's just say that we might be here a while." When met with the horrified looks from his housemates, he was quick to add, "But look on the bright side! We get to discover fire!"

Mike's arm twitched, just enough so that Micky, fearing that the Texan was going to smack him with his trusty blondewood guitar, backed up just enough on the incline to lose his footing entirely and stumble backward. With his momentum already adding to the fall, he did a handful of unintentionally acrobatic reverse somersaults and flips until he landed face first in the muddy river water in the shallow valley.

With his clothing soaked through and up to his shoulders in God-Knew-What, he attempted to push himself up, but the exceptionally slick muck caused his hands to slide out from under him again, and his whole front half submerged. Thankfully, that was about the time that Peter and Mike reached him and dragged him, sputtering and spitting, out of the water. When he'd caught his breath, he managed, "That was the worst-tasting mud I've ever had the pleasure of choking on."

Davy patted his back, asking, "You sample the stuff often, then?"

"Not if I can help it." Micky righted himself, sitting farther back from the water on a relatively dry patch of dirt. His chin hurt where he'd hit it on the river bottom, and his body didn't feel very good, either, having had a run-in with the rocks on the hillside. With dirtied hands, he attempted to clean the mud off his face, but only succeeded in smudging it around. "'m lucky I didn't get eaten by alligators or somethin'. Look." He gestured out toward the middle of the water, where two wide-set eyes were staring at them. The gaze was unsettling, evenly calm and unexcited by the goings-on of the four strange animals on shore. "Mike, it's your prehistoric cousin."

"Ha, ha," Mike replied, taking a seat next to Micky and balancing the guitar on his knees. Peter sat down on the other side of the waterlogged Monkee, while Davy remained on his feet, arms crossed. Despite the mud, Micky ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it out of his face. Their fearless leader sighed. "Well, we'll save the blame for later. Right now, we gotta figure out what we all're gonna do. We got no supplies, no know-how, and a guitar. What d'we do with that?"

The eyes in the middle of the river began to rise up, revealing a long, gaping snout full of razor-sharp teeth. As the creature unburied itself from the river's muddy floor, its body also rose above the surface.

It was the biggest crocodile any of them had every seen.

Standing on two legs, the bright green dinosaur made itself as tall as possible, which was quite a bit taller than even Mike was, staring down through eyes that lacked anything other than predatory hunger. It snapped its long, narrow snout, dribbling water and mud down into the river as it did so. A ridge ran down its spine, segmented by bone, although Micky couldn't immediately identify the species. Even so, it looked a good deal more graceful than the lumbering giants he'd always seen portrayed in books, and a whole lot more real.

It took a single step forward. "I dunno 'bout you guys," Micky said, "But I'm all for running!"

They scrambled over themselves to clamber back up the hill. Certainly the beast would catch up and tear them apart before they could make it to the safety of the densely-growing line of trees just past the hill's crest! The ground shook beneath them as the creature reached the shore and started up the incline after them, but after they reached some invisible boundary, the stomping ceased.

Micky looked over his shoulder just in time to catch an earful of the most epic territorial roar he'd ever heard.

Mike grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and hauled him the rest of the way up the hill. After a quick check to ensure everyone still had all their limbs, he motioned them toward the trees again, setting off at a decent clip himself. While it didn't seem like the two-legged crocodile felt like chasing them anymore, none of them really wanted to stick around to play taunt-the-dinosaur.

They reached the forest, where Peter doubled over, his hands brushing against the ground to steady himself so he could catch his breath. Davy leaned heavily against a tree, looking backward through the foliage to catch a glimpse of the retreating dinosaur. "Bloody tyrannosaurus rex or somethin'," he muttered. "Coulda had us for dinner."

Micky had no qualms about lying down on the ground on his back, looking up into the canopy, gasping. "No, not a tyrannosaurus. Too small."

As everyone tried to get their heart rate back to normal, no one spoke for quite a while. The forest was by no means silent, though, with strange grunts and chirps - and the occasional roar - keeping the boys on edge. At the moment, it didn't look like they were about to have a run-in with anything else, but they were all aware that they weren't alone.

"Well, if it wasn't trying to eat us, I think it would have been awfully pretty, for a dinosaur," Peter finally said, settling down in the undergrowth and drawing his knees up. Micky could tell that his voice was strained, though, but a brush with huge, reptilian teeth would do that to anyone. "That emerald green and those yellow spots on its side… Just seemed different than what I imagined."

"They've been updating the books," Micky said.

Mike, who'd been pacing back and forth between a couple trees, joined the others on the ground. He plucked a couple strings on the guitar, apparently just to make sure it still worked, before gingerly setting it against the tree on which he was leaning. "You know a bit about these things, Mick?" he asked.

Micky nodded. "Yeah, I was all about dinosaurs when I was a kid. But, I mean, I don't know 'em all. That one that just chased us was too small to be spinosaurus, but it kinda looked like it. Maybe a baby." That seemed likely. It was also just as likely that they'd just stumbled upon a completely unknown species, given the rate at which new varieties were discovered. He couldn't say much more other than the fact that he knew it wasn't a tyrannosaurus. "We could still see the ol' king of reptiles, though," he added with a look around. Despite the odd trees and foliage, there were a few trees he recognized - ones that only appeared near the end of the Mesozoic era.

"No thanks," Davy grumbled.

"Look," Mike said. "Let's talk about that missing time machine of yours for a sec."

With a humorless laugh, Micky dropped his head so that his chin rested against his chest. He remained in that position until Mike cleared his throat in an attempt to pull some answers out of the person responsible for their trip through time. On one hand, the time machine actually worked - this was amazing. On the other… "This… is a mess. There's no other way to put it," Micky said. "The thing wasn't even designed to go BACKWARD for a lot of reasons. First and foremost is the fact that it didn't appear here with us. Let's be honest, if we'd gone forward in time and lost it, I would have been able to build another one, easy."

"Easy, he says," Davy said, chuckling. "Micky, some of the things you manage…"

"But there's another problem," Micky noted.

"You mean like food? I'm starving," Peter whined. "And I think the more I think about the fact that there's nothing to eat around here, the hungrier I get!"

"What ARE we gonna do about food?" Mike wondered to himself.

Davy, finally rested, got to his feet and brushed himself off. "Well, I'm sure if we go up the river a bit, we can find clean water, and probably some fish. There's fish around, yeah, Mick?"

"Yes, but I really think you should listen— "

"There's lots of plants around," Peter added. We should be able to find something that isn't toxic."

"HEY!" Micky yelled. For a moment, even the forest became quiet, but the silence only lasted for a couple seconds before the creatures around them started up again. "Listen. We gotta be careful not to do anything here that's gonna affect the future. We could create a paradox, like, 'if you kill your grandfather here, you can never be born' type of thing."

"My grandfather ain't a tyrannosaurus, Mick," Mike said.

"See, that there's the problem!" Micky got to his feet, anxiously pacing. "If we go fishing, we could, I don't know, kill and eat the first fish that was supposed to crawl up on land, so its evil uncle fish gets there instead and there's all that evolution stuff that happens and we get home only to find that humans walk on their hands and have six eyes."

"Considering there's dinosaurs, ah think that ship's already sailed," Mike said. "You can't see the harm in fishin', can ya? The critters around here probably do it all the time. If we just make sure we don't do anything crazy like start building hotels, I don't think we're going to affect the future much at this point."

While that was probably true and the odds of any one of them affecting the future in any significant way were exceptionally low, it still stuck in the forefront of Micky's thoughts. Comic books said quite clearly that one just didn't mess with the past - it was asking for trouble. Even so, it didn't make sense that they could do any significant damage at this point in time, unless they managed to kill one of their early ancestors. "Okay… Okay, no interaction with any proto-primates and we should be fine." By this time, there would be a few mammals, if Micky remembered correctly. As long as they didn't cause harm to any of them, their future would certainly be secure.

Probably.

"Look, we're prob'ly safer deeper into the forest," Mike said. "Can't see anythin' that big livin' in these trees, an' if we run into any of the smaller ones, we should be all right. We'll just kick 'em."

"No, no wait— " Micky started, but since Mike was already moving off and the others were following, he didn't have the chance to point out that there could be quite a few dangerous tiny dinosaurs, as well. Still, odds would have to be in their favor since the run-in with the large reptile they met in the river, because only so much could befall any one person on any one day.

Really.