alternative title: the thing with feathers
pairings: none in this document, but it would have included Kaname/Sayu and future Tsumugu/Miuna (in this AU, they are the same age)
crossover: Dinotopia
notes: The original document was last edited in March 2017; I cleaned it up just a tiny bit because there were some things bothering me, so there might be slight differences between this version and the one I already posted to AO3. I have a lot of extra notes for this one! If you're curious about it, please feel free to ask questions~ I stopped working on it because I have no access to the original Dinotopia books or the TV show for research and proper worldbuilding, and it was a lot more work than I felt like doing ^^;
If you're unfamiliar with Dinotopia, just know it's a mysterious island somewhere in the middle of the ocean, a utopia for dinosaurs and humans, who live together in harmony. Shipwreck survivors have been known to wash up on shore, having been rescued by dolphins. It's a children's book series but it's SO good and the TV show is corny but also really good, so I recommend it if you like in-depth worldbuilding, beautiful art, and dinosaurs!
The storm crept up out of nowhere and had gotten so bad, so fast, Tsumugu hadn't had time to try and radio back in to Oshiooshi for help. He'd been trying to secure the mechanical arm that brought up the fishing nets when a particularly large wave had knocked his poor boat a good one, sending him over the side. Even though he considered himself a good swimmer, trying to stay afloat in a churning sea without any help from flotation devices wasn't going to be easy. That was before the next wave lifted him up and smacked him hard against the side of his boat, though. Blinding pain was the last thing he was aware of before he slipped under the water.
Tsumugu didn't expect to wake up again, but the sunlight streaming in from the window was too bright to ignore. He made the mistake of trying to sit up, only to immediately lie back down and curl up in pain. His head throbbed and ached and he groaned out loud.
"Aaah, are you awake?"
Tsumugu carefully shifted to face the direction he'd heard the voice coming from. In doing so, he managed to get a look at where he'd ended up. He's in the corner of a small, mostly bare room, on a bed that's more like a hammock and facing a door that looks like it leads outside. The voice belongs to someone who looks like they're about Tsumugu's age. The clothes they're wearing are strange- did he wash up on a foreign beach? They're speaking Japanese, though, so maybe he's just in a part of Japan he's never been to before.
"I'm awake," he said cautiously.
"Oh, good! You can understand me, that's going to make things much easier." The person stepped into the room and pulled a small cart in behind them. "I wasn't sure when you'd wake up but I think you're going to need something for that bump on your head. Here, sit up if you can. Drink some water." They handed him a glass of water and Tsumugu drank it carefully, draining it before handing it back to them.
"Where am I?" he asked then. "Is there a phone I can use? I need to call my grandpa." The person grimaced and made their way back to the door.
"Eeeh...well, it's going to be kind of difficult to explain," they said carefully. "Someone will be along shortly to check up on you, and she'll explain your situation better than I can. In the meantime, please don't leave this room. You're not a prisoner or anything," they added hastily after seeing the look on Tsumugu's face, "it's just that…it'll make things go faster if you stay here and wait. Please." With that, they left the room, closing the previously open door behind them.
Tsumugu sat for a minute and took stock of his surroundings. The room, as previously noted, was quite bare, with only a bed under the window and a table against the opposite wall. There were two chairs in the corner next to the bed, but other than that the room was empty. He was wearing the same kind of strange clothes that the stranger had been wearing- a soft long sleeve shirt and knee-length pants. His own clothes were missing and Tsumugu supposed they'd been taken away to be washed, if he was lucky. His fingers itched to check his phone but, he supposed morosely, that had been lost when he'd been swept overboard. Even though it had had a special waterproof case, one that he'd bought especially for use when he was out on the boat, he doubted it would have survived the storm.
Everything was rather quiet, and he was starting to get anxious when there was a knock at the door.
"Hello," said someone out in the hall, "may I come in?"
"Yes," he answered. There was a brief pause while whoever was out in the hall had a talk with someone else, then the door opened and another strangely dressed person entered the room. They set the basket they carried down on the table and turned to face Tsumugu.
"I'm Chisaki," they said. "What's your name?"
"Tsumugu Kihara," he replied. "Sorry, but where am I? The other person who was here earlier wouldn't tell me, and I lost my phone in the ocean."
"Ah," Chisaki said, starting to look uncomfortable. "Well...the town you're in is called Shioshishio. You're staying in one of the extra rooms at Umikami's shrine. There's really no easy way to say this," they groaned, "but...wherever it was you came from, you can't go back. Oh, I'm really not sure how to go about this, I don't want to upset you. You did hit your head pretty hard…"
Tsumugu tried not to sigh with impatience. He was starting to think that maybe he wasn't somewhere in Japan after all, but where on earth could he have washed up that he couldn't get back to Oshiooshi from? Chisaki rummaged in the basket they'd brought in and handed him a bundle of fabric, which turned out to be his clothes. There were large holes in his shirt that looked strangely like tooth marks, and his jeans were in rough shape as well. He held them close, the only familiar items he had in this strange place.
"I guess it would be easier to just show you," Chisaki mused. They went out into the hallway. "Uroko? Can you come here for a moment?"
Tsumugu listened as something walked down the hall towards the room. It made clicking noises, like a dog with long nails walking on tile.
"Tsumugu," Chisaki said, with their hand on the doorknob, "I'm going to introduce you to Uroko. He can explain what happened to you better than Hikari or I could have, I promise."
"Okay?" he replied with a faint sense of unease.
"Are you going to let me see him or not?" someone else asked irritably. Chisaki yelped as the door was yanked from their grasp and something barreled into the room. "Good grief, woman, don't just stand there like an idiot."
It was a dinosaur. A dinosaur like the ones he'd seen in movies, except not as big- only about as tall as Chisaki. Tsumugu wondered for a second if he was still dreaming, if this was some sort of really bad drawn-out joke, right up until the dinosaur poked him in the forearm with one curved black claw. It hurt, so Tsumugu decided that it had to be real, after all.
"Manaka? She's the one who brought you in- she lives near the reefs, see, and picks up stuff now and then to bring in. Uroko says that she says the dolphins were the ones who really brought you in, but I didn't see any when I was out that day, so-" Shun kept up a steady stream of chatter as he rowed out towards a small island a ways out in the bay. Tsumugu shaded his eyes with a hand and stared out at the water. Something large and dark was lurking a few feet under the boat. He tried not to let his anxiety show- he was still having a hard time adjusting to the fact that there were dinosaurs everywhere, now, and that surely extended to under the ocean water, too.
There was a small dock that extended into the bay, and Shun tied the boat up before climbing out of the boat and extending a hand towards Tsumugu. He politely declined it and helped himself out of the boat with ease. Shun shrugged and led Tsumugu out to the end of the dock. Tsumugu didn't bother to try and hide the fact that he was staring at his surroundings, though there wasn't much to look at. Even the plants here were so different from the ones he was used to.
"There's not much here except the dock and a launch. Sometimes during the summer the kids'll come out here to swim and Manaka's here to keep an eye on them, but that's about it. She followed us in, did you see her?" Shun asked.
"Was that her, under the boat, then?"
"Yeah!" Shun beamed. "She's on the smaller side for her kind, so try not to be too scared, alright?" Tsumugu nodded. Shun tapped a short sequence out on the dock with his foot and Tsumugu watched as Manaka rose gracefully out of the water.
He'd seen dinosaurs like her before in some of the picture books he'd read as a kid- they were called plesiosaurs, maybe? Tsumugu stepped back unconsciously when Manaka met his eyes. Hers were unnaturally bright blue-green, like the shallows of a tropic sea.
"Hello, Manaka!" Shun said. "I brought Tsumugu over to say hi. He's the one you found out in the reef a few days ago, remember?"
"Does she understand us?" Tsumugu asked Shun, who was looking at Manaka with a smile on his face.
"Oh, she does," he said quickly, "but she doesn't have the right vocal cords to speak our language. Uroko and Miuna- you haven't met Miuna, she's not here right now- they've been working on a sign language of sorts with her, since she can't use the written language here either. You can ask Miuna more about it when she visits in a few days, if you're interested."
Manaka snorted and bumped the dock with a flipper.
Miuna shook his hand quickly before turning back to the cart's trunk and pulling out a large satchel. She dropped several other bags to the ground before heading towards the dinosaur pulling the cart. Tsumugu watched with no small amount of interest as Miuna thanked them and slipped an amount of coins into the box around the dinosaur's neck. After that, Miuna turned to him again.
"Sorry about that," she said. "You must be Tsumugu! I'm so glad to finally meet you- I heard about you when you were brought in, Chisaki sent a messenger right over and the news spread like wildfire. Everyone wants to meet you," she said teasingly when she noticed the stunned expression on Tsumugu's face.
"Meet me?" he asked, stooping to pick up a few of Miuna's bags. She'd already settled the satchel across her back and gestured for him to follow her with the rest. They headed back along the path towards the village.
"Of course! No one's washed up from a shipwreck in decades- well, no one alive, anyways," she replied. "The last ones recorded were a pair of brothers and their father, back when my mother was just a kid, so you're going to be kind of a big deal around here for a while."
"I don't know how I feel about that," Tsumugu murmured.
"If it gets to be too much, Hikari's dad will make sure you're left alone. Have you met him yet?"
"Hikari? I have, I met him when I woke up."
"His dad. He's pretty big, hard to miss. I guess you haven't?"
"I haven't really talked to anyone other than Shun and Hikari yet," Tsumugu admitted. "It's been a little...overwhelming."
"I can't imagine what it's been like for you," Miuna said quietly, looking over at Tsumugu with pity in her eyes. "If there's anything we can do to help you adjust better-"
"I'll be fine," he cut her off.
"Still," she said, undaunted by the sharp tone in his voice. "I can at least show you around the village later, if that's okay? If you haven't been given the tour already."
"...That would be nice," Tsumugu replied.
Miuna led him to a building he assumed was her house, or at least the place where she lived when she came back to Shishio since she'd told him she didn't live with her parents anymore. He left the bags where she instructed him to, and then waited on a bench outside. She came back out in a different outfit and with her hair tied up in twin loops pinned to the back of her head.
"How much of the village have you seen?" Miuna asked him as they walked back to the main road.
"Not much," he told her. "I'm staying at the shrine, I've walked to the, uh, cart stop, and I've been out to the island. That's it, really."
"Oh, then you haven't seen anything at all! I'll show you where everything is~"
Miuna was an enthusiastic tour guide. She led him around the village for a few hours, pointing out the different places and introducing him to some of the residents that were out and about at the time. Tsumugu was startled to find out that Hikari's father was, in fact, a dinosaur- one of the larger ones, with a bony club at the end of his tail. They passed by the shrine so Miuna could say hello to Chisaki and Uroko.
When the sun was just beginning to set, Miuna asked him if he remembered the way to the town hall. She had a smile on her face as she asked, so Tsumugu tried his best to recall the roads he needed to take to get there. As they walked, she talked to him about the classes she was taking at the school in the city. It was interesting to hear about, especially since she seemed to be taking classes similar to the ones he'd been enrolled in at his own university back in Japan.
The town hall building was larger than most of the buildings in the village, though it was still smaller than most of the buildings Tsumugu was familiar with.