Note: The PE memory is true, except it happened to me, and I was literally knocked unconscious. Stupid boy. Also the thing about allergies is true; my brother used to be allergic to cats to the point where he broke out in hives, but now he's fine. Stupid auto-immune system. Anyway, this is the looooooong talking part. I do so love filling in backstory, even when it's of my own invention.

Now that their plan was decided upon, they went about setting up camp for the night. The saddlebags held water, food, and blankets - only one per person, though, which meant they'd be sleeping on the dirt. Romana pooled their fire kits and started a small blaze. David sat back and watched her, feeling slightly inferior. He hadn't quite mastered the art of making fire without using a match, and the kits held chunks of flint and iron pyrite; Dinotopians, he'd been told, had been making fire just fine for thousands of years without the use of matches, so why go to all that trouble?

The skybaxes settled in with much wing-rustling and squawking, tucking their long beaks close to their chests. Pteradactyls frequently looked like big ducks. Big ducks with bat wings, vulture claws, and a demon's beak, David amended.

Dinner was a short, informal affair designed to conserve their food as much as possible. And, surprisingly, they had an actual conversation. It started when Romana asked if his asthma was still bothering him, or if he was fine.

"I'm not up for a marathon," he said, somewhat ruefully, "but then I never am. So yeah, I'm fine."

"What do you think brought it on?" she asked, frowning.

He shrugged. "Stress. Shock. I don't know. Usually it's just exercise that does it, but getting the wind knocked out of me... I guess that could've triggered it." He rubbed his throat and chuckled at a sudden memory. "You know, the last time that happened - the last time I got the breath really knocked out of me - was eighth-grade Phys Ed." Cyrus Crabb smacking him in the stomach with a cane wasn't the same thing.

" 'Phys Ed'?" she repeated, curious.

"Uh - Physical Education. It was a class in school." She nodded and he went on, "This kid - the biggest kid in the class, of course - in the middle of the game, he decided flag football was too boring, so he started playing tackle football instead."

"I gather the two are somewhat different."

"Yeah," he said, making a face. "In one you hit the dirt by accident, and in the other you get your face ground into it."

"Sounds violent."

He laughed. "It is. It's also the most popular sport in America. That and basketball and baseball."

"Now, baseball I've heard of." She didn't elaborate on that, but instead gave him a sympathetic smile. "I'm sorry you couldn't have been raised here, and not in the Outer World. You're exactly what a good Dinotopian student ought to be."

"Ah... thanks." He wasn't certain if he should be offended or pleased, and the conversation threatened to die an awkward death. Floundering for something else to talk about, he said, "So... um... tell me about your family."

"Tell me about yours," she countered, then added, "You know about mine already - I heard that you were asking Oonu about my mother."

"You did?" he asked, surprised and not doing a very good job of hiding it. "How?"

She shook her head, a small, odd smile playing across her face. "It's all right, I don't mind. But the point is, you've learned all that, and I know so little about your family, aside from the fact that both you and your brother are hopelessly enamored of my cousin."

Before he could stop himself, he blurted out, "You know that?"

The smile widened. "I think the whole island does."

He looked down, unaccountably embarrassed. "Wow. That's... that's humiliating."

Stratus made a noise that sounded suspiciously like laughter. Freefall followed it with an identical one of his own.

"Oh, great. Thanks, guys," David said, twisting around to look at them. "You're helping a lot."

Romana laughed, a light, musical sound that echoed off the rocks and into the night. David blinked; he couldn't remember hearing her laugh before.. "There's nothing to be embarassed about. Marion... is a special person. I don't have anything against her."

"Then why..." he started, then cut himself off when she raised an eyebrow. "Right. Me first." He took a breath and wondered where to start. The beginning, probably. "Uh, well, you know that Karl's my brother."

She nodded, a small smile still playing across her face.

"He's my half-brother, really," he went on. "My dad's second wife. My mom was his third, and they got divorced when I was ten. Dad... is not a bad guy or anything. He's just not the kind of person that should get married."

"I understand. Believe it or not, people get divorced on Dinotopia, too."

"Probably not the way Dad did," David said, feeling the familar sensation of anger and guilt rising up. "Karl and I were born seven months apart, and I'm older."

Romana took that in silently, then reached out and covered his hand with her own briefly, showing concern in her eyes. "That must have been difficult to learn."

His mother had flatly denied it; his father never mentioned it. But it was hard to disagree with the facts as laid out by the divorce decree, the marriage certificate, and the birth certificate. "Yeah, it was," he said, choosing to leave it at that. "So anyway, we didn't spend a lot of time together, growing up. But every summer, for Dad's birthday, he would haul us both out on trips. Somewhere new every time. Let's see... I think we hit all the continents except Antarctica."

She leaned forward, clearly absorbed. "You've seen the entire world?"

"Most of it, yeah, I guess."

"It must be fantastically big. I can't even imagine."

"It's pretty big. And it's different, too," he said, warming up to the topic. "No city is exactly the same. I remember when we went to Rome - St. Peter's Basilica, the streets, the people... and then the next year, we went to Calcutta, and there were a lot amazing buildings and people there, too, but it was all different. You know? The basic stuff was the same, but the details were unique."

She nodded. "There are differences between Proserpine and Chandara, and Culebra is a world of its own. Not quite the same scale, I suppose, but I understand."

Romana was quick, he had to give her that. Of course, she had the added advantage of coming from a family with dolphinbacks; Arthur Denison would've shared much about the Outer World.

"Great-grandfather used to say it was a good thing that he'd traveled the world for two years before he shipwrecked here, or he'd have died of shock," she said, apparently reading his mind. She smiled again, a sad, sweet smile. "But I'm interrupting. Go on."

"Well... what else is there to talk about?"

"Your mother?"

His mother... an image immediately came to mind: a small, quick-moving woman with a cigarette in her hand or in her mouth, full of energy, always worrying about the latest fashions, always with the same anxious look in her eyes. "My mom... there's not a lot to say about her." He shrugged. "She raised me. That's pretty much it."

Romana nodded slowly, clearly hearing everything he wasn't saying. "I don't suppose you had any pets?" she said, with a note of forced lightness.

"Just some fish, and a turtle. I was allergic to anything with fur until a few years ago, and feathers, too."

"I had a dimorphodon," she said. "And a skybax whose wing never developed properly. Tilt couldn't fly, so he played with me. We made quite a pair."

"I bet." He looked at her, trying to imagine a little girl scampering around the rocks of Canyon City, playing games with a full-grown skybax, and found it to be less difficult than he'd thought. "So now you know about my family."

"Moreso than I did before, yes." She tapped her fingers against her knee, uncomfortable. "Is there anything in particular you want to know about mine?"

David hesitated for a moment, then went for it. "What happened between you and Marion?"

Romana exhaled, chuckling a little. Her uncomfortableness seemed to increase, but she kept talking. "That's a story, yes. Do you know our family history?"

"Just that Rosemary's your aunt," he said, and decided to limit it to that.

She nodded. "My cousin, actually, but it always sounds so silly to call her that when she's old enough to be my mother. Marion and I have the same great-grandfather, but different grandparents. Arthur Denison married Oriana Nascava. Rosemary is their granddaughter, the only child of my grandaunt - another Oriana. She married Mayor Waldo - well, he wasn't mayor then, but you understand - and they had a daughter, Marion. My father was five years older than Rosemary; my brother and sister are thirty years younger. I'm the baby of the family. I was... unexpected," she added, giving him a slightly nervous smile.

"Growing up, I don't know what happened, but Arthur and Almestra - Almestra especially - came to dislike Rosemary, and her mother. At Grandaunt Oriana's funeral..." Romana swallowed. "Things were said. Things that wounded both sides. And later, after Mother died, they said more things. When you and Marion showed up in Canyon City, I hadn't seen her since we were both toddlers. I don't think she recognized me until I gave my name."

So he wasn't the only one with a hopelessly dysfunctional family. That was reassuring. And it did explain why Marion had been less than kind in her remarks toward Romana.

"Hold on, I have a picture," she said suddenly, and before he could say anything in return, she stood and crossed over to the saddlebags, rifled through one pouch, and withdrew what looked like two objects.

Pictures. He didn't have any pictures of his family. Not that he especially wanted any, and anyway, his mom was the only one who hadn't wound up on this island anyway.

She returned, settling crosslegged onto the thin dirt next to him, and handed him a small, fist-sized picture in a heavy gold frame. "Great-grandfather painted this on their wedding day."

The picture was not the stiff, formal portrait he would've expected from a good Victorian man like Arthur Denison. Instead, it was rendered in a few quick brushstrokes, a sketch with oil paints, and its fleeting nature reminded him a little of Monet and the other Impressionists.

In it, the bride was wearing a white dress, her cloud of red hair scarcely contained by a crown of daisies; the groom was wearing an old-fashioned black suit and held himself with military bearing. It could have been a picture from any American wedding in the twentieth century, except the person standing behind them, apparently conducting the ceremony, was not a person at all but a triceratops with a broken horn.

"They look happy," he said. And they did. The joy fairly radiated off of the canvas, a testament to the skill of the artist. Still, it was probably the most inane thing he could've said.

"They were. Every day." She smiled at the picture, fond and wistful and sad at the same time. "That's one of my clearest memories of them."

"What are the others?"

"Mostly, Mother telling me to pick up my toys."

He chuckled appreciatively, remembering all the times he'd been yelled at for leaving something in the middle of the stairs where "someone could fall and break their neck!"

"This is one of Arthur and Almestra," she said, leaning across him to set a small, unframed picture on top of the wedding portrait, and all of a sudden the most important thing in the world was the way the side of her body came into contact with his. The padded cotton uniforms didn't entirely hide her soft curves, or the heat she was giving off that was all the more noticible for the chill desert night.

But just as abruptly, he kicked himself. This was not a good road to go down. Romana was acting like a normal person for the first time in over a week, and if he started channeling Karl it was only going to ruin things. Besides, he wasn't interested in her. He was interested in Marion.

"Almestra painted it, years ago," Romana was saying.

"Oh yeah?" he said, pulling his thoughts back out of the ionosphere. "It's good."

He hadn't even glanced at the picture yet, but apparently she didn't notice. "She burns the ones that aren't. Arthur fusses at her for wasting the canvas."

This picture, done in a slightly more formal style, showed a man and woman in their late twenties standing side-by-side, clearly siblings. Just as clearly, they were the children of the couple in the wedding portrait; Almestra had wild auburn hair that mimicked her mother's, and Arthur had the same square jaw and even features of his father - and great-grandfather, if David remembered the self-portrait in Arthur Denison's World Beneath journal accurately.

Seeing the strong resemblance, he realized that Romana's pale, fair-haired appearance was nowhere in evidence in her family tree. "You don't look anything like them."

She shook her head. "I'm adopted."

He'd heard that explanation offered as a joke so often that for a second he almost laughed. Then he caught the look on her face. "Seriously?"

"People die unexpectedly and leave behind children, even on Dinotopia. I'm just now seventeen. Arthur and Almestra are old enough to be my parents," she added.

"Jeez, when you said you were the youngest in the family, you weren't kidding."

"I never joke," she said, looking down at the ground. "About anything. I thought you'd realized that by now."

Something in her tone told him that she really wasn't joking now, and he needed to be careful how he replied. "I did. But I thought that was, you know, only for stuff like flying."

"Unfortunately, no," she said. "That's Chaz's influence, Arthur says."

He sat up a little straighter. That was right - Kiyoshi'd said that Romana had been raised by Chaz after her parents died. "You were orphaned twice."

She said immediately, "And raised with loveeach time. I'm really very lucky."

He tried to wrap his mind around that viewpoint, so typically Dinotopian, and was only partly successful.

"I'm not the only foundling Mother took in," she went on, scratching out something in the thin sand. "Once she retired from riding, she went home to the hatchery and adopted a little stenonychosaurus."

"Oh?"

"He lives in Waterfall City now, and has a painting of her on his wall," she said, still scratching.

The pieces clicked together - embarrassingly slowly - and he said, "You're talking about Zippo?"

She nodded, her eyes still fixed on whatever she was doing with the sand. "It's not a very good painting, but Almestra wasn't around to do better."

"Are you related to everyone on Dinotopia?"

"It's an island, David," she said, with a tone of weary patience. "Everyone is related to everyone."

He pressed on, "But you don't know who your parents were?"

Her hands stilled, and she looked at him with a level gaze. "My parents were Will and Sylvia Denison. I am their daughter."

He didn't know what to say to that, so he said nothing. Instead, he carefully handed over the paintings of her family. She took them and stood, erasing what she'd scratched out with one foot as she did so, but not before he saw the outline of a skybax and the footprint letters ROMANO.

That had to be a mistake in translation on his part, because why would Romana misspell her own name?