Chapter Eight-Career Choices
With no girlfriend, I focused my time on science. During my junior and sophomore years, I discovered I enjoyed studying dinosaurs.
I began to work towards a degree in Paleontology.
I studied hard and soon became one of the top students in my class.
During grad school, I met Terrance Smite. He and I became study buddies and he worked just as hard as I did for his masters. We were friend, but we were also rivals.
When used each other as our extra motivation. When he would do a paper on a specific period, I would do the same period. When he got a B, I would get an A. And vice versa. We did battle like this often. While I did not take our competition personally, he did.
It would always anger Smitty when our instructor would praise me instead of him or use my work as a prime example of how a study should be down and not his.
It would be after grad school would I realize how much Smitty resented me.
When I decided to go for my doctorate, I met Dr. Anton Mercer. He was one of the top men in the our field. He was also a wealthy man. He always looked intimidating but he was a kind man.
He took me and Smitty under his wing. He taught us everything he knew.
We were his best students and when Dr. Mercer was offered the head spot in an experiment to resurrect dinosaurs from old fossils he wanted to bring one of his best students. In fact, he could only take one of us.
Unfortunate for Smitty, I was chosen. Dr. Mercer, who now allowed me to call him Anton, believed that I was perfect for the position. He later told me that Smitty wasn't picked because he was too competitive and too aggressive. He felt that Smitty would have hindered the experiment. But at the time I did not know why Smitty wasn't picked.
I was excited and promised I would do my best and I lived up to my promise.
We were to work on an secluded island. Only a handful of us was to work there. There were fifteen of us, excluding Anton, there were seven other doctors, Dr. Julius Reed, Dr. Harrison Moore, Dr. Leigh Li, Dr. Kevin Rodgers, Dr. Franklin Prince, and Dr. Norman Marks. The other seven people in our party were the doctors' assistances, Rachel Lee, Carol Hunter, Marshall Samson, Christopher Michaels, Henry Jones, Harold Clarkson, Matthew Long, and myself.
We spent most of our time working. We experimented with any fossil we could find. For the most part we were successful. We were able to harness dinosaur DNA inside gems, humanoid creatures, mechanical machines.
At first, our research was for the greater good, but after a year and half of work things changed.
Anton discovered a mysterious old piece of amber. Inside that amber was Mesogog and because of this ancient being's influence our research became darker. Everything, with the exceptions of four gems, were corrupted.
It would take another year before I realized how deep Mesogog's influence had dug in our work.
END OF CH. 8