I stared down from from my hanging place in the net, and the two armored figures stared up at me. One was considerably taller, at least a foot, and both wore a ruddy colored plate armor. The shorter's armor was splashed with blue, green, and scarlet, while the taller had only a horizontal black stripe across the face of their helmet. The shorter tilted her head, then jumped down off the back of the wolf, patting it's side. The wolf stopped growling and baring its teeth, though it didn't release the playing dead dinosaur, keeping him pinned against the ground. The taller one noticed and looked over to see that the shorter had dismounted and was walking towards me.

They groaned and probably rolled their eyes, though I couldn't quite see for proof. The tall one dismounts and grabs the shorter's shoulder. They say something to them, probably in a whisper as I couldn't hear. The shorter one gestures to the crested dinosaur, then up at me. The taller facepalms, creating a loud clicking noise almost like a wood block hitting another as their gauntlet connected with their helmet. They put their hands on their hips and look up at me. They shake their head and suddenly pull out a bow and notch an arrow.

I blink in surprise. They weren't holding it, and it wasn't on their back, or lashed to their hip. It just suddenly appeared from seemingly empty space. I blinked again in surprise and panic as I realize they've aimed it directly at me. I thrash around, trying to put myself in a less compromising position. "Don't shoot! Don't shoot! Please don't kill me, just cut me down and I swear I will run as far away from here as I can." I struggle some more before adding, "At least let him go, he didn't do anything, please."

They don't respond, the shorter looking between me and the taller worriedly. The taller shakes their head, then speaks. "Why should we believe that? How do we know you or your dilo aren't going to run off and get the rest of your tribe and come back after us?" I blink in surprise, honestly not expecting them to respond, or expecting the voice to be female and so hostile. I had kind of expected they would either just silently let me down and watch as I ran off, or shoot me without a word and that would be that. A moment of recovery later and I answer.

"I swear I don't have a tribe or anyone else out here, and I don't even know what a dilo is!" She lowers her bow, though not for suddenly having a change of heart. She gives me a look that from the tiny portion of her face I can see seems to say, how dumb could you possibly be? I take some offense, going over what I'd said and not finding anything in it that's particularly unintelligent.

"Nobody with half a brain wanders the Redwood forest alone and unarmed, and your tame right there under the dire wolf is a dilo you numbskull. Haven't you accessed it's inventory? It's name is pretty apparent in it." Okay, armor lady is seriously starting to get on my nerves despite me being in serious danger for my life.

"What the heck are you talking about? I didn't even know there was a redwood forest, I've been wandering around for two days trying to find somebody out here in this hellscape! And what do you mean access his inventory?" She gives me another look, though I can't quite tell whether it's another how stupid can you be look, or of simple confusion. The shorter speaks up now.

"Mister, did you wake up on a beach two days ago with a headache and a diamond in your arm?" Both me and the taller turn to look at them, who is also apparently a girl judging from their voice.

"Moth, I told you to stay quiet!" The taller hisses in frustration. The shorter, apparently named Moth, shrinks back but still stares at me, waiting for an answer. I nod.

"Yeah, I did. How did you know that? Have you been stalking me? Did you bring me out here?!" She shakes her head rapidly and holds up her arms defensively. I realized I had been shouting and winced, feeling a little bad for yelling at her unjustified.

"No no no no, I haven't done anything. That's how everbody on the island who wasn't born here gets here, including me and Shannon. So welcome to the Ark I guess mister." I sit there, hanging in the air, trying to comprehend what I've been told and come up with a response more intelligent than 'huh?'. While I do that, the taller, apparently 'Shannon', begrudgingly changes her aim and pulls back her arrow.

She launches it and streams through the air, hitting its mark with a thump and the sound of rope snapping. I panic and try to steady myself as the net containing myself lurches and begins descending at a rapid rate, not quite what I would be going if I was simply falling, but still considerably faster than I would have liked. I hit the ground with a loud thud that I'm pretty sure was mostly my skull striking hard soil. I either groaned or yelped, possibly both, and immediately sit up and clutch my head with my hands. "You had to drop me? You couldn't like, slowly lower me down or something?"

Shannon shrugs. "Probably. You still tresspassed on our hunting grounds." She gestures with her foot to the half forgotten meat block that my crested friend, who is apparently a dilo, had stashed in his makeshift nest. I get to my feet and brush the dirt off myself while rubbing the back of my head.

"I didn't hunt anything. I stole that from a carnotaurus kill. So if you want to go after somebody go after him." Both of them look at me in surprise and disbelief. They stare at me for several moments, making me uncomfortable and wondering what I said wrong or wierd. "What?"

"You stole a kill from a carno? On foot? How?" Moth asks

"Well, that idiot," I gesture to my pinned down partner, "apparently tried to steal from it and didn't do too well. So while the carno was chasing him, I snuck over to its kill and drugged a piece of it with those dark blue knock out berries. The carnotaurus came back and ate it, threw a little temper tantrum because he couldn't catch the dilo, then passed out. I cut some meat off the carcass and booked it out of there with the dilo before the carno woke up." They both looked rather impressed. "Also can you let him go, your wolf is giving him some pretty worrying looks." Moth nods and whistles loudly.

The wolf turns to look at her, then steps off of the dino. He remains motionless for a few moments later, still laying on the ground limply. Moth and Shannon look confused but I know what he's doing. He's playing dead and waiting until they let their guard down to bolt. The wolf itself tilts its head and bends down to sniff at it, when he suddenly springs to his feet with a loud screech and fully opens his frill. The wolf lurches backwards in surprise and both Moth and Shannon flinch too. The dilo turns tail and runs into the brush hooting.

I sigh and roll my eyes, then grab the meat bundle from the ground. I cut off a piece and toss it into the brush. A moment later and the piece of meat is tossed back with an indignant screech. He walks back into the clearing, glaring at me for daring to offer an uncooked piece of food to him. I raise my hands palms out and he huffs at my insolence, then walks over to me and nudges me so I'm standing between the others and his makeshift nest, then lays back down in it. Moth giggles quietly at the dilo, who glares daggers at her.

"How did you teach it to do that?" Shannon asks rather abruptly.

"Do what? Glare like that? He already did that when I met him." She groans and attempts to rub her temples, only to realize she can't do so through the helmet.

"No you numbskull, to play dead like that. I've never seen a dilo do that before."

I think it over for a moment before shrugging and grabbing my half spear off the ground. "He came with that too. I didn't teach him anything except that cooking food makes it taste better. Now he won't eat it raw. Guess I got a deluxe dino and broke it. Neat." I inspect the tip of my spear, rubbing the dirt off of it.

"Seriously? How long ago did you tame it?" This time I give her a look like the ones she's been giving me.

"I got here two days ago, which makes this is the third day I've been out here. He tried to eat me the first day, and he started travelling with me yesterday. So I guess I tamed him yesterday. Wow, it feels like I've been out here a lot longer." She nods before asking her next question.

"How did you knock him out? Did you drug it like the carno or did you use a club?"

"Why would I have knocked him out?" I gave her a puzzled look, and she returns a similar one to me.

"You have to knock out most dinosaurs then feed them while they're unconscious, dilophosaurus included. So how did you knock him out to tame him?"

"I never knocked him out. I fought him on the first day and beat him, then he ran off. Yesterday he killed one of those ostrich looking things and I kinda drove him off the kill. Then later that day I drugged the carno and stole some of its kill. He saw that I knocked out the carno and panicked. I gave him some meat, then he started following me around. Then last night a gang of tiny dinosaurs attacked us and we fought them off together. After I got caught in your little trap he didn't just run off so I guess he's pretty loyal."

She looked surprised and Moth probably would have too if she hadn't gotten bored of the conversation and started playing with the massive dire wolf a few minutes ago. The wolf was huge and knocked her around quite a bit while doing so, but it was obviously being gentle with her and the armor she wore prevented any accidental nips or scratches. She tried to wrap her arms around its neck to hug it, but her arms weren't near long enough to reach all the way around. It was quite cute, watching the huge canine playing with the tiny human like he was a puppy; it even rolled onto its back to allow her to rub its stomach.

Shannon abruptly raised her arm to look at her wrist, then pushed me aside to look at the dilo. He growled and shifted his position but didn't stand. However, I heard the telltale gurgle of priming venom, and apparently Shannon did too and kept a decent distance. She stares at him for a moment before blinking in surprise. She turns over her shoulder and calls out. "Moth, come over here."

Moth looks up from where she had been rubbing the bull sized wolf's stomach. She gave him a couple pats then ran over to her other companion. The wolf lay there for a moment, then realized she had stopped petting him and rolled back over with a disappointed rumble.

"Can you check his dilo for me and tell me what it reads? I don't think mine is reading right." Moth nods and hold up her wrist with the now glowing diamond shaped implant in it. She stares at the dilo for a moment as well, then speaks as if she's reading a script.

"Wild Male Dilo, gender: male. Huh, I've always wondered why it says their gender twice."

"I dont know but are you sure it says its wild?" Moth gives her an offended look.

"Yes I'm sure. I can read by myself."

"Why is a wild dilo following you around and not trying to rip you to pieces? Wait a minute, Moth, I think this is the dilo." She stresses the 'the' in her sentence as if its context didnt make it seem important enough.

"The one who chased out all the other dilos off the east beach or that one who stole your boot?"

"The first one. We recognized him because he looked all gross and bloody all the time. He's got all that red on his face and his hands and his quills are red too. I really think this is him. How did you not get eaten alive by this god forsaken dinosaur and how is it not trying to do that right now?" Her last sentence is aimed at me rather than the younger girl and I'm caught off guard.

"I uhh, have honestly no idea. I kicked his butt, shared some food with him and he saw me knock out a carno. I think he's trying to make a truce to save his skin. A kind of I help him, he helps me, I don't kill him, he doesn't kill me sort of thing. And why is he cursed or whatever?"

"That dilo has killed two people, that me and Moth know of, on separate occasions. We found both of their bodies on the beach with their throats ripped our and dilo venom all over their face. Neither seemed to have actually hurt him, so how did he not kill you, and why hasn't he? He's a maneater." I'm shocked by this and look wide eyed down at my companion.

I have basically been living with a murderer. But I also pinned and beat said murderer in a kind of fair fight. I thought I was in serious danger when I saw him kill the ostrich creature, now I know that I'm apparently one of the luckiest men alive. I can't imagine how I would have survived if he attacked me yesterday morning or at the carno's kill. I stared down at the dilo, who stared back with his reptilian eyes, giving me that now familiar glare.

"I... well... I don't know how to respond to that. I guess I'll have to keep feeding him well then and hope for the best huh? I've already been traveling around with him since yesterday afternoon and he isn't any less of the bratty and proud dinosaur now than he was then. If anything, that just makes him even cooler than before." He hoots at me, almost as if he was deigning to thank me for the compliment. Moth giggles again while Shannon rolls her eyes.

"You do know you could just tame him the normal way. A quick knock out, stuff some meat in his inventory, and next thing you know he's bound to you and won't turn on you if he gets bored or hungry or cranky." I shrug and check my spear tip again, having nothing better to do with my idle hands.

"He's already loyal to me and all. I don't really need to. If he gets knocked unconscious at some point I probably will, but what exactly do you mean by inventory?" Shannon stares at me for a moment to see if I'm kidding, then face palms when she sees I'm not.

"Just when I was starting to think you weren't an idiot. Your inventory. Tou access it with your implant. Everything out here has one, people and dinos alike. What did you think we were doing when we looked at our wrists and at the dilo?"

"I had no idea what you were doing and I still don't know what you're talking about. My implant hasn't done anything, like at all since I've got here." She looks at me with disbelief and raises her own implant up to her face again. She looks at me, though it's more like she's trying to look through me than actually at me.

"What the hell? You don't have a marker. Have you been wandering around here doing everything by hand without your implant?" I nod slowly, not understanding what she was getting at. "What are you? The luckiest man alive or something?" I shrug again, which is probably becoming my most used gesture in this conversation.

"People have survived for hundreds, if not thousands of years without modern technology. Rome was one of, if not the most successful empire in history, and it was majorly pre-modern. I guess that makes me Rome." She doesn't say anything for a moment before sighing and muttering.

"Why do we always get the idiots and bad poets?" I frown and nearly make a snarky come back, but decide against it as she grabs my wrist and starts fiddling with the implant in it. She compares it to hers and they're identical, no nicks, scuffs, scratches, or smudges apparent on either. She raises hers up to her face and it glows like it did before. Then she forcibly raises mine up to my own face, but nothing happens. Her helmet hides most of her face, though it's apparent that she's frustrated and runs her fingers over its surface and abruptly a quiet click resounds from under her digits. Her eyes widen slightly and she raises my arm up to my face as I'm beginning to get uncomfortable with how close she was standing. A bright light suddenly shines in my eyes from the diamond implant and the world disappears.

I shout in surprise and jerk backwards. I stumble backwards and nearly trip over the red handed dilo's tail, though he whipped it out of the way at the last moment with a hoot of alarm. I do however trip on the stone I forgotten about. My skull connects with the ground once more and I respond very similarly as to how I did when I fell from the net. My hands clutch my head and I screw my eyes shut with a groan. Through gritted teeth I ask, "What, was that?"

Shannon doesn't respond as she too busy laughing along with Moth. The dilo huffs at my clumsiness and noses at the meat block before grabbing it with his teeth and putting it back into his nest. Shannon, after getting over her fit of laughter, answers my question. "That, was your inventory. Everybody, and everything, on the island has one of them like I said before. Apparently you weren't curious enough about the thing wedged in your wrist to actually activate the thing."

She offers me a hand to help me up but I wave her off, standing without any assistance needed. I rub the back off my head to remove the ache and brush a dusting of pine needles and dirt off my back. I look at my implant, which is now a more flush red, having been noticeably a little duller before. "So do I just raise it up to my face then?"

"Yeah, you just kind of have to look directly at it and be within a certain range, so just raising your arm's the easiest way. It's pretty simple and self explanatory when you're inside it." Shannon explains and Mother nods in conformation before going back over to the dire wolf, who looked quite pleased about it.

I take a deep breath and raise my arm up to my face again. The bright light, which is oddly tinted blue despite the reddish glassy ring on the implant, shines into my eyes again, and I resist the urge to flinch. A second later and a blue screen of sorts replaces the world. There's a large rectangular box shape fillled with smaller consecutive cubes that takes up most of the left half of the screen, with a much smaller one similar to it beneath. The right is dominated by what appears to be a 3D model of myself, or at least 3D image. It's detailed even to the minute, showing every nick and small bruise on my skin and even the newly added teeth marks on my shorts. I note that I have dark brown hair and a small cleft in my chin. Though both of these seem readily apparent to me, if you had asked what I looked like before now I feel like I couldn't have told you anything other than I was a guy and light skinned. I think I look German, but I'm not entirely sure as my memory isn't serving me very well.

On the farthest right of the screen there's a list of values, with 'day', 'time', and '°[C]', grouped together. Day is obviously how long I've been here, with a three next to it. Time is probably the time of day, reading 13:08 I recognize it as military time, making it one 'o eight in the afternoon. I don't realize what the 'C' in parenthesis means immediately, before realizing it's temperature in Celsius. I don't really know how Celsius converts to Fahrenheit exactly, but it reads nineteen degrees. Below it, separated by a blue bar, lists: health, oxygen, food, water, weight, melee damage, movement speed, fortitude, crafting speed, and torpor. Health reads 92 out of 100, food is 62 percent of 100, water is 51 percent of 100, weight is 0 percent of 100, and melee damage, movement speed, and crafting speed are 100 percent, while fortitude and torpor are both zero. It's almost like a video game, and with a simple name like inventory, this is really starting to feel like one.

I lower my arm and blink as the world returns to normal, the blue screen fading quickly from my vision. The world was back to normal and I could see again. Shannon stood there, her arms crossed, the dilo still lay in his nest, and Moth was sitting up against a tree with the dire wolf attempting to sit on her lap. "Well that was... wierd."

"Tch. Congrats, you can now do what everyone else can do and usually can do from the first day."

I groaned and waved my hand at her."Thanks for ruining the moment."

She grinned beneath her mask and answered simply."You're welcome." She straightened herself up and grabbed the used net from the ground, coiling the rope it hung from around her hand. Then she walked over to the dire wolf and Moth, who both lifted their heads to look up at her. "Come on, its time to head out. We have two more traps to check and one to fix." Moth nodded and patted the wolf's neck. He stood with a groan and allowed the two girls to climb onto his back, Shannon in the front, to steer I suppose, and Moth hanging on behind, her arms wrapped around Shannon's midsection. Shannon pressed her heels into the wolf's sides, not hard, but enough to put pressure, and the great mass of toned muscle that was the dire wolf started forward. He was maybe fifteen feet away when Shannon abruptly turned and tossed the in need of repair net at me and shouted back at me, "You better hurry if you don't wanna be left behind out here!" I catch the mostly coiled net awkwardly, most of it hitting me directly in the face.

It registers with me what she said a few seconds later and the fact that I'm not currently following them. I snatched up my half spear that I had dropped when assaulted with the net and grab the bundle of meat out from under my dilo companion. He hoots in surprise and his frill springs open. He prepares to give me a vocal lashing for the sharp movement so near his face, only to realize that I'm already sprinting through the undergrowth half blinded by a surprisingly heavy net. He stands quickly and moves to follow, but hesitates and looks between my quickly disappearing form and his nest. Decidedly, he grabs a pile of the fibers in his claws and takes off after me, hooting and screeching and barking what I'm sure would make a sailor cringe if he could speak.

A/N:

Well, that was certainly something. I'm not quite pleased with this chapter, but I feel like this is a pretty good way to introduce our characters Moth and Shannon. I hope you liked them, as I'm not sure their personalities have come through very strongly, but we will get character development as we go on.

Hopefully I'll be able to work in some backstory for the two in the upcoming chapters, but don't hold me to it as I don't fully know it myself and I'm still working out details. Our main character finally has access to his implant, which to be absolutely honest I had forgotten was thing for a few chapters. My bad.

I hope you enjoyed the chapter, let me know what you thought of it, any burning questions you have, and of any horrible grammar errors, and have a great day, night, or whenever you're readings this. Or don't, it's entirely up to you and I can't tell you what to do.