Because Dinosaurs... what other reason do I need?
Inspiration - Jurassic Park/World t-shirts all around.
Technically, it all started when Yuri wrote a paper on velociraptors for his doctorate thesis. But Yuri doesn't count that because he didn't actually meet his first dinosaur until years later, when he got a job offer in the mail from Ingen... which he, rather understandably, assumed was a hoax. But he called anyway, mostly because Judy was pushy. It turned out, however, that the phone number provided was a genuine Ingen number after all and, after Yuri hesitantly gave his name to the HR lady who answered, he found himself talking with Ioder Huerassien himself.
Which... wow. Okay, not a hoax.
By the end of the conversation, Yuri was talked into a face to face meeting the following day at a nearby coffee shop, since there weren't any local branches of Ingen within a reasonable driving distance for him. Then, the next morning, Yuri walked into the agreed upon Starbucks Cafe, ordered a cup of overpriced flavored coffee, and settled at a table with the young entrepreneur... where Yuri then proceeded to spend a good two and half hours explaining how he came to his conclusions about velociraptor socialization. He hadn't been grilled this in depth over his work since he had to defend his thesis to earn his PhD and he's a little surprised by just how many of the little details he actually remembers and just how much fun discussing his theories about dinosaurs really is.
But, eventually, Yuri can't stand the suspense anymore and he asks the obvious question. "Are you planing on creating a new raptor pack for Jurassic World?"
Ioder smiled easily, took a sip of his coffee, and then nodded affirmatively. "It's in consideration. We'd need a trainer for them, however... and we'd like to hire you for that position."
"We?" Yuri questioned. It didn't sound like Ioder was referring to his company.
"My cousin, Estelle, is in charge of the park itself and apparently she's already based some of the training of our more dangerous predators off your research on the limitations of pack theory. If she finds out I've managed to hire you for the raptor project - if you say yes, that is - then the first thing she'll do when she meets you is ask for your autograph... or try to hug you. I'm not really sure."
Yuri's a little wary about the idea of some stranger wanting to hug him because of his research - he hadn't considered his work to be something anyone would turn into a fangirl over - but he winds up agreeing anyway. It's a chance to work with real velociraptors, or as close as science can come to recreating them anyway.
They'll probably try to eat him one day (possibly even succeed), but the experience of raising and training them... so worth it.
After a little negotiating - not nearly as much as he'd have thought it would take - Yuri even gets Judy included in the job offer because she's the best co-worker he's ever had and if she finds out he got hired on to work with raptors and didn't at least try to get her included, she'd probably kill him herself... in front of the raptors, of course, in order to gain their approval as a superior predator.
Judy was a bit scary that way.
Estelle did not hug Yuri, which was a relief. She did, however, personally escort Judy and him to all the different dinosaur enclosures, introduce them to at least half the handlers on the island along the way, and then take them to meet the geneticist developing their 'strain' of raptor.
Rita Mordio was something else. She was... ridiculously young for a college student never mind a multiple PhD in the business of making dinosaurs. But Yuri managed to refrain from saying that out loud. Instead he went straight to asking what was going in the raptors aside from, well... raptors. When she started listing out scientific names, Yuri noticed that Estelle had a tell for when she didn't recognize a species and so Yuri would, absently, fill in the regular name for the species.
From the sound of things, Rita was using more bird DNA than lizard DNA, which made way more sense to Yuri than the original park's use of frogs and lizards. Feathered dinosaurs were way cooler looking than non-feathered ones, in his opinion anyway.
"More authentic, too," Judy agreed, making Yuri realize he'd commented out loud. "The original dinosaurs would have been feathered, after all."
"Exactly," Rita agreed, seeming to relax a little. "The other geneticists all want to pander to people's expectations of what a dinosaur should look like, but most people expect giant, cold-blooded lizards and that's just wrong."
"I'd think breaking expectations about dinosaurs would prove to be a greater draw than getting a stereotype anyway," Yuri observed mildly, to Rita's apparent approval. "It sounds like your raptor mix should be more sociable, and trainable, than the old Jurassic Park raptors, or the ones still running wild on the island next door, but how much of a toning down are we looking at?"
"Um... well, they'll be smaller since we'll be using actual velociraptor DNA this time around." Rita paused, and the flushed a little. "Uh, well, little known fact, but the DNA used in the original park was actually misidentified as velociraptor when it was, in fact, utahraptor. Utahraptors were bigger and, most probably, more aggressive. I figured that out when I compared some of the old samples to the new ones and identified the differences." Rita shrugged, adding, "Dr. Garruda, however, died during the original park's implosion, so... there's no telling if it was an honest mistake or done on purpose."
Yuri nodded thoughtfully. "So these new raptors should, hopefully, be turkey sized?"
"That's the plan," Rita agreed. She pulled out a folder and handed it over to him. "This has a more in-depth look at my genetic selections for the raptors and why I picked which traits. If you've got any further questions, my email is in there. I may not check it as often as certain people might like, but I will get back to you."
"Thanks," Yuri replied sincerely, already flipping through and batting Judy's hand away when she tried to make him turn the pages faster.
"Okay, well... ready to see where your offices will be and the location where the enclosure will be set up. I'd like for you two to go over the enclosure designs with the architect so that any modifications to size and stability can be decided on before construction starts." Estelle started to lead the duo out, when Rita tapped her shoulder. "Yes, Rita?"
Rita blushed and looked away. "Never mind."
Estelle frowned, looking a little disappointed. "Ah... okay..."
Judy glanced between the two women speculatively and Yuri's sense of danger sparked. He just knew she was going to play matchmaker there. It wasn't any of his business, though, and hopefully Judy would let it stay that way.
The island's architect, who worked for the park itself instead of being an outside contractor, was a man named Raven Schwann. He'd designed over half of the park's buildings, and had a good handle on how sturdy the enclosure would need to be to contain the raptors. What he didn't get was a sense of scale.
The initial designs were too small by half, which Raven accepted, noting the info down for redesign even as he asked about why the raptors would need so much space.
Yuri decided he liked the guy when his reaction to Yuri and Judy's description of a raptor's running speed and hunting habits was a grin and 'cool' instead of nitpicking at the space requirements.
Next they moved on to the 'corral' design. It would be a place where the raptors would be enclosed for medical treatments. Some of it would have to wait to be implemented once they had an idea of the actual size of the raptors, but most of it could be constructed immediately, attached to one side of the main enclosure.
When the shop talk was done for the day, with Raven promising to have updated plans to go over with them early the following week, Judy started flirting with Raven in earnest. Rolling his eyes and wondering at her type, Yuri left them to it and pulled up the map Estelle had given him with the employee apartments, the 'grocery store', and the restaurant locations marked on it. He'd only seen his apartment long enough to drop his bags off in the front room, so he headed back to do a little unpacking.
Pizza was apparently deliverable even on the island (there were both Pizza Hut and Dominos to choose from), so Yuri was in the middle of hanging up his clothes in a surprisingly large walk in closet (Yuri didn't know what he'd do with all the left over space) when his doorbell rang.
As he was paying the pizza guy, Yuri noticed his neighbor, a handsome looking blue-eyed blond, come walking down the hall. Once the bill was settled and the delivery guy was leaving, Yuri set the pizza inside the doorway and proceeded to catch his new neighbor's attention. "Hi, I'm Yuri Lowell," he greeted.
"Flynn Scifo," the blond replied, reaching over briefly to shake Yuri's hand. "I've heard about you. You're one of the new raptor trainers. I'm still shocked they're going through with that, after all the horror stories from the old park."
"Yeah, I admit my first thought after hearing about this job, you know once I realized it wasn't a joke from one of my colleagues, was that the raptors were going to want to eat me at some point." Yuri grinned, "but it seemed like too good an opportunity to turn down. Working with real dinosaurs... this is literately a childhood dream come true."
Flynn laughed, the sound warm and pleasant. "I know exactly what you mean. I work with the pachyasaurs and there are times when I just stop and think 'holy shit, real dinosaurs, how did I get so lucky'." Gesturing to the door across the hall from Yuri's he added, "feel free to knock if you need help with anything."
Impulsively, Yuri said, "if you don't mind being bribed with pizza and the promise that I've got Call of Duty packed away in one of the easier to reach boxes, I could use help reorganizing the furniture in the living room. It's great these places come furnished, but it'd be even better if the couch weren't in the most awkward place possible."
"What kind of pizza?" Flynn asked, already walking over to come inside.
"Large supreme," Yuri told him, grinning and retrieving the box, then hurrying out of the way.
"Sounds perfect." Flynn grinned and Yuri felt his stomach do a little flip.
Sternly, Yuri told himself that Flynn's meltingly gorgeous smile just meant the guy was friendly. Judy might be okay with jumping into a new job and a new relationship all at once, but Yuri wasn't. So even if Flynn was interested - which he probably wasn't, Yuri reminded himself insistently - Yuri still wanted to actually settle in for a few months before engaging in something more complicated than friendships.
Of course... that didn't mean he couldn't appreciate the view.
Turned out Flynn had a girlfriend. Or at least a friend who was a girl and clearly desired to be his girlfriend. It wasn't really clear if Flynn was dating Sodia or on the cusp of dating her, but she was very territorial of Flynn and had quickly picked up on Yuri's attraction to him. She bristled every time Yuri and Flynn hung out together to play video games, which they didn't do too often, but regularly enough that Judy teased Yuri about having scheduled play-dates.
Yuri wasn't sure if he should ask Flynn about Sodia or not. The guy seemed uncomfortable with Sodia's possessiveness, but he never actually called her on it either. Yuri didn't want to step in on a touchy subject if he didn't have to.
Besides, the raptor eggs were in the incubators now, surrounded by thermal lamps and imaging scanners that recorded the development of the fetuses. Yuri was spending more time in the labs already, talking to the eggs and generally annoying, or maybe amusing, Rita with his insistence that it would be good for the development of the raptors to hear speech outside their eggs. Female raptors, he'd told her, would make noises fussing over their nests.
"You're not the raptors' mother," Rita had told him in exasperation, though a smile had tugged at her face.
"Trainer, adoptive parent, concerned guardian..." Yuri trailed off with a laugh before singing, "you say to-ma-to, I say to-mah-to..." then ducking as Rita swiped her clipboard at him.
"At least you don't sing off key," she huffed. "I can't wait for these girls to hatch, though, so you'll stop invading my lab."
"You'd have banned me if I were that annoying," Yuri teased back good naturedly.
"So... I've got a question for you. Purely hypothetical. But if..." Rita crossed her arms defensively, "if say, I knew someone who had a... a crush on Estelle... what advice would be appropriate for... encouraging that person to act on said... crush?"
Judy, Yuri decided, was going to be absolutely livid that she'd missed this in favor of inspecting the nearly-finished enclosure. He'd have to rub it in later.
"Well, considering that, non-hypothetically, I'm pretty sure Estelle has a crush on you," Yuri grinned, enjoying Rita's startled spluttering, "anyone who isn't you, hypothetical or not, doesn't stand much of a chance. However, if I were giving advice to you on asking Estelle out, then I'd tell you to just ask her out. Text her or email her first if you can't find the words when you're actually speaking to her, but all you need to do is ask and she'll say yes. Just... make it clear its a date. As in, actually call it a date, so there's no misunderstandings later. Because I'm pretty sure Estelle doesn't think you'd be interested in dating her, whether its because of the age gap, which really isn't that much, or because she just doesn't realize you're attracted to women, I have no idea."
Rita stared at him, gaping in shock. After a long moment, she sat down on the nearest chair, still staring at him.
"You should blink," Yuri advised her. "You'll dry your eyes out at this rate." Humming softly, he turned back to the raptor eggs and went back to fussing over them while Rita processed everything.
"She has a crush on me?" Rita finally squeaked.
"Ah, the main processor has rebooted," Yuri murmured to the eggs with a grin.
Yuri knew it was late, but this was the first chance he'd had and... well, hopefully Flynn wouldn't mind having someone knocking at his door just after midnight to share some good news.
Flynn opened the door to reveal himself in a worn tank with pajama pants slung just a little low on one side. He didn't have the slightly disheveled look of someone who'd been sleeping, though, which was good. He did look a little worried though, probably because of the manic grin on Yuri's face.
"The raptors hatched!"
A smile lit up Flynn's face and he gestured for Yuri to come inside.
"I'm sorry to bother you so late, but I just... I had to share with you. The eggs were rocking this morning when I went in to the lab and by the afternoon six of the eight eggs hatched. Two of them never so much as twitched, but the other six..." Yuri grinned. "I've been looking after them all day and now that Judy's taking a turn..."
"I wasn't asleep yet, so I'm glad you decided to stop by. When do you have to be back tomorrow?"
"Noon," Yuri told him. "I'm so wired, I don't know how I'll be able to sleep, though."
Changing the subject back to the raptors, he rambled, "they're so small. The first one to climb out of her shell had these purple stripes that reminded me of this dog I used to have with really unusual fur, so I named her after him. Repede. Judy named the second one out Ba'ul. We've also got Donna, Pharaoh, Kitsune, and Rose."
"Sounds like Rita got into the naming for Donna and Rose," Flynn observed, putting on a kettle for tea. "She's a Doctor Who fan, so she likes to name the dinosaurs after the Doctor's companions."
"I had wondered," Yuri admitted.
"Do you like Chamomile tea?" Flynn asked, "it'll help you unwind and get some rest. You'll need it, baby dinosaurs are like baby birds. When they aren't sleeping, they're starving and bratty about it."
"Chamomile's fine," Yuri told him. "Thanks for putting up with me," he added.
"Oh, I want to hear all about it," Flynn told him, rejoining him on the couch while waiting for the water to boil. "Repede was the first one out of the shells, you said?" Yuri nodded to him. "Tell me all about her."
Later, after drinking his tea and keeping Flynn up way too late with stories about Repede's first steps and her first pounce, taking out a piece of ground meat with ferocious gusto, and the first time Repede looked up at Yuri and crooned at him... well, eventually, Yuri fell asleep with his head pillowed on Flynn's shoulder. He didn't notice things fingers carding gently through his hair or the slightly off-key humming as the blond smiled in enjoyment of the raven-haired man's presence.
Yuri woke up the next morning around ten, cocooned in a blanket on Flynn's couch, and a note on the table asking him out to breakfast the following morning as a date.
Grinning, Yuri penned an acceptance and then headed back to his apartment. He supposed that answered the question about whether Flynn was dating Sodia since Flynn wasn't the kind of person who'd cheat.
She'd probably flip once she found out, but... Yuri couldn't bring himself to care. He had baby raptors and a date with Flynn.
Life was good.
Rose was the first to get sick. She was the first to die, too.
Flynn held Yuri all night as he cried. First generations of a new type of dinosaur tended to be unstable and didn't often live long after hatching, if they hatched at all. Yuri had known this, but getting hit with the reality of it...
The morning after Rose died, Donna and Phaeroh were sick too.
Repede and Ba'ul were the last to get sick. Yuri wasn't sure who told Flynn, because he couldn't spare the time. He had to stay and be there for Repede. He didn't want her to be alone and Judy was doing the same for Ba'ul... their first two raptors and, at the moment, their last ones too.
But someone told Flynn because he came into the lab, bringing food with him and sneaking Raven in too (who went straight to Judy). Then, when everything he'd brought with him was distributed, Flynn settled beside Yuri and introduced himself to Repede.
The baby raptor seemed to soak up the attention, lifting her head and peering up at the blond before shoving her snout under his hand for petting.
"She likes you," Yuri told him, leaning into the arm Flynn had put around his shoulders for comfort.
"She's pretty," Flynn said, obligingly petting the demanding raptor.
That night, the raptors fell into a natural, unlabored sleep and were clearly better in the morning. Their appetites returned and, out of a litter of six hatch-lings, only two survived.
The second set of raptor eggs were six eggs, of which only three hatched. But these three - Noishe, Martha, and Lambert - didn't fall ill after hatching the way the first group did, leaving Yuri and Judith with five raptors total to move into the enclosure once they'd determined the group big enough to leave the lab space.
The raptors were friendly, almost ridiculously so. Much to Flynn's dismay, Yuri took to going into the enclosure whenever he liked, training the raptors in person instead of from afar and even keeping a chair in there that he could sit on while reading to the raptors since the dinosaurs, particularly Repede, seemed to like Yuri's voice. Judy took her cues from Yuri and would also treat the enclosure's entrance as a revolving door.
It took convincing Flynn to go on a picnic in the enclosure with him for Yuri to show the blond that all the raptors, not just Repede and Ba'ul, were friendly and far more interested in eating their sandwiches than eating the humans. In fact, Flynn was amused to realize that Noishe was rather afraid of everything except her fellow raptors and the human trainers. He somehow found himself petting her soothingly when some noise from outside startled her into hiding behind him.
Yet, despite Yuri's rather undeniable success with the raptors, there was a growing unrest regarding the raptors. Someone had leaked the velociraptors existence to public and all the news stations, journalists, and popular news bloggers were dragging out all the interviews of the survivors of the first park. Then his name got mixed up in the whole thing and, much to Yuri's dismay, his supposedly sealed juvie record was leaked online. He'd gone through a brief klepto phase after his parents death and gotten into a few fights. None of it had continued past turning fifteen and getting adopted by Niren, but it had happened and he was kind of embarrassed by having it all dragged back out. It was irritating to have all his hard work as an adult dismissed by ignorant assholes just because he'd screwed up a few times as a kid.
After talking things over with Estelle, and the legal department, however, Yuri found himself slated for interviews of his own which was... daunting, really. He hated doing interviews. He much preferred doing a little blogging of his own.
So, I've backed off talking about my work since taking my new job at Ingen these last several months. But with recent developments as they are, I've gotten the okay to discuss my job and I've decided to do something I never thought I'd consider... I'm going to de-anonymize this blog.
My name Yuri Lowell and I train velociraptors. I dare anyone to top that because there's absolutely no job I can think of more awesome.
With that out of the way, I want to clarify a lot of misconceptions that have sprung up in the past few weeks thanks to the raptor stuff getting leaked last month, well before our raptors were supposed to get their first press release. First and most important is that unlike the previous raptors, these are actually made from velociraptor dna. Despite being called velociraptors, the original park's raptors, and thus our neighboring island's raptors, were made from utahraptor DNA. In other words, they were not velociraptors. Jurassic World has been open about that fact since the park opened and raptors weren't even on the table then. Yet most reporters insist on misrepresenting the facts when it comes to the velociraptors and have practically ignored for years a rather interesting story on how Dr. Garruda may or may not have purposefully used the wrong DNA when creating the utahraptors for Jurassic Park.
At any rate, you may be wondering why it matters whether the velociraptors are made of genuine, grade A velociraptor DNA instead of utahraptor DNA. Well, what's the difference between a schnauzer and a German shepherd? Velociraptors are smaller than utahraptors and have a slightly slower top speed...
Naturally its in the midst of the media blitz that Estelle springs on them a surprise visit from one of the paleontologists who visited the original park and was nearly eaten by the utahraptors. Also some irritating chaostitian who was also at the original park, but was nearly eaten by a T-rex.
Lloyd Irving and Zelos Wilder, each authors of their own best selling novels about their survival of the park (Irving's was fairly factual and full of fascinating information on the raptors, which Yuri had later used as a major reference for his papers on raptor socialization; Wilder's read like an action adventure thriller but with more chaos). So on the one hand, Yuri was absolutely thrilled to meet them. Wilder was no more irritating than Raven and Yuri was fairly inured to that these days, but Irving was one of Yuri's heroes.
So it was pretty disappointing to realize that Irving not only wanted the raptor project shut down, but the raptors either euthanized or released on the neighboring island to die incredibly painful deaths when the other predators found them and ripped them to pieces. Well, that was an over exaggeration. Irving didn't actually want the raptors to die in pain, but he didn't seem to understand that was what the result of taking his tone-deaf suggestions to heart would entail.
That was all before Irving even saw the new raptors, though the man's stubborn opinion remained even after Yuri explained the velociraptor vs utahraptor dna mixup and clarified, half a dozen times, whether Irving was talking about their actual velociraptors or the old park's utahraptors, trying without any success to nail down the actual difference in the man's mind.
So, Yuri felt he should be excused his recklessness when, upon finally arriving at the enclosure, Irving saw the physical differences between the raptors he remembered and the new ones in the enclosure and maintained that he was thoroughly unconvinced the differences made... well, a difference.
"This must be why people should never meet their heroes," Yuri finally snapped. "They innevitably turn out to be morons." Then he opened the outer door to the enclosure, walked in, lowered that door and, ignoring the shouts of dismay from the guests and Judy's manic laughter, opened then inner door, walked into the interior of the enclosure, and whistled for Repede.
Covered in gray and purple feathers, Repede was a gorgeous sight to behold and Yuri settled into the chair he kept hidden inside the enclosure, greeted his favorite raptor with glee, and then started reading a ridiculously bad bodice-ripper romance that Judy had promised would make him laugh at least once a chapter. He read it out loud, of course, for the raptors to enjoy and kept up a running commentary about how truly ludicrous the excuse plot for all the sex scenes were. He passed an hour that way, as the other raptors came and went - each demanding petting before moving on - before finally leaving the enclosure.
Wilder and Irving were still there, Zelos having been giggling over Yuri's choice in literature and adding a few choice comments of his own while Lloyd stayed completely silent. Yuri gave Irving a hard look.
"Now, are you going to concede that you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about when it comes to the new raptors and the safety problems they represent or are you going to continue making an ass of yourself?"
Lloyd rather sheepishly apologized and started asking about the feathers. Yuri ended up forgiving the man later that evening when he found the paleontologists blog updated with a post about having come off as a complete twit to someone he rather now respected... and needing to update his book with information regarding the velociraptors having actually been utahraptors because Dr. Garruda had been even more of an idiot than he'd believed.
Some idiot had opened the raptor cage.
By 'some idiot', Yuri means Sodia.
She'd been intending for the raptors to attack and kill Yuri and then be put down, the whole thing written off as faulty code in the gate system.
Her first mistake was thinking the raptors would ever harm Yuri. Her second mistake was forgetting about the damn cameras. Her third... well... she forgot about Judy.
Scary, scary Judy.
Yuri had been more bemused than anything, corralling his girls back into their paddock then stalking off to find Judy in order to pull her off her victim. Sodia was then taken away by security.
Later - much later - Yuri, Flynn, and the others get called in and allowed to see the video of Sodia's confession, as taken by security. Flynn looks betrayed the whole time and Yuri wishes he could do more than just hold him, but its all he can do for the moment and he just hopes its enough.
Later, arms wrapped around Yuri's shoulders and gripping him tightly, Flynn mutters, "I'm so glad those raptors decided you're mommy."
It's probably inappropriate, but Yuri laughs anyway.