Jurassic World: Return to Isla Nublar – Chapter 22: Dodgson Reaches Nublar
A/N: As I promised, since I didn't have time to publish a chapter last week, I'm rolling right into Chapter 22. I've decided to devote much of this chapter to Dodgson's side of the story. This is because for the last few chapters, he hasn't really been mentioned much. However, Grant and Levine's groups will be in here a good bit of time as well. Please enjoy!
Disclaimer: I don't own anything related to Jurassic Park except the very characters I've made up.
Dodgson looked out the window of the Biosyn helicopter that was flying out over the Pacific Ocean. By his side was his sister, Halley, who was fast asleep already, and Howard and Baselton were sitting in front of him. (The chairs in front of Dodgson were facing the back of the helicopter while Halley and Dodgson's chairs were positioned toward the chopper's front).
Dangling below the helicopter on a strong chain was the vehicle they'd brought along for the trip.
"You sure that chain's not going to pop?" Howard asked.
"Positive," Dodgson answered. "You worry too much, Howard. You should learn to relax, take a 'chill pill'." Then Dodgson looked over at Baselton – even though it was three o' clock in the morning, he was already chowing down on breakfast. He happily smacked his lips as he slurped up the juices coming from his food. "What on earth are you eating?" Dodgson asked.
"Fried egg yokes covered in . . ." he paused, ". . . I think it's teriyaki sauce."
Dodgson grimaced. "You are absolutely disgusting."
"Oh come on! It's not that bad! You didn't even try them!"
Howard asked Dodgson, "So, what will we do once we reach the island?"
"I've already planned out the entire mission. Obviously we'll start off by getting unloaded, then we'll set up camp and begin looking for our first dinosaur nests. We should be finished with the entire mission within two days . . . including today." Dodgson yelled to the pilot up front, "How are those target readings on the USS Mars?" (He was referring to the beacon Halley placed on the USS Mars the other day).
"We should be coming up on the ship pretty soon, Dodgson," the pilot explained. "We're going to go a good ways around them to avoid getting too close to the ship so we're not detected. Then we'll use satellite readings to locate Isla Nublar."
Dodgson nodded. "Wonderful." He relaxed in his seat; this plan was working like a dream!
A while later, Dodgson's helicopter was still flying through the air when they began moving through a bunch of thick fog. He shook Halley to wake her up. She groaned loudly.
"Is it time to wake up already?"
"Uh, yes!" Dodgson told her.
Halley sat up straight. "Man, this fog's thick!" she said.
"You're telling me!" Baselton agreed as he continued eating his breakfast. "This fog's as thick as peanut butter!"
"You mean 'pea soup'," Halley corrected him.
"You eat what you like and I'll eat what I like–"
"We're approaching Isla Nublar," the pilot interrupted.
Dodgson's group smiled and looked out the windows and saw, appearing through the fog in the light of the new dawn, was the tropical island of Nublar. As predicted, much of what could be seen was mountainous and covered in thick tropical jungles – perfect habitat for dinosaurs and the perfect place for dinosaurs to build their nests and lay their eggs.
This is going to be terrific, Dodgson thought, all we have to do is land, unpack, set up camp, find some eggs and escape the island . . . if only it were as easy as it sounds! Maybe the carnivorous dinosaurs all went extinct so we won't run into them. He thought this would be rather unlikely, but if it were true, a lack of carnivores on the island would make this expedition a lot easier!
Grant, Dr. Sorkin, Captain Ryan, Taylor, Soldier #1 and #2 were all squished in one of the Visitor Center's ventilation shafts, trying to get some rest after the exhausting escape from the Troodon. But as the hours ticked by, there was much tossing and turning going; no one was sleeping well at the moment.
"I give up!" Captain Ryan exclaimed. "I can't stay asleep!"
"Me neither," Grant told him. "But we have to make the best of it. Don't think the danger's anywhere near over."
Dr. Sorkin sighed. "I sure hope the others are alright," she said.
"They probably are. Tim and Lex were tough kids. Then there's Levine . . . he's never battled dinosaurs before, but he's a tough guy too. Kailey is probably with the three of them, so I'm sure they'll all be fine."
"How long are we gonna be in this crazy-tight thing?" Taylor asked. "I can't sleep, I'm squished, I'll have a crook neck by morning . . . and if a dinosaur gets in here, we don't have any wiggle room to escape and–"
"Can you just stay quiet for a minute please?" Grant almost yelled. "Your whining won't help the situation."
"True, but she's got a point," Ryan agreed with Taylor. "I don't think most of the dinosaurs that would give us trouble could fit in these shafts, but I also don't think it's a good idea to spend the remainder of the night here. If we're sore and have crooked necks, we aren't fit to escape dinosaurs. I'm going to continue going down the shaft and see what I can find. Maybe there's a bigger room further down."
Grant shrugged as he placed his fedora on his head. "Alright, but be careful."
So Ryan led the others further along the shaft, hoping to find a better place to rest. Pretty soon, they found a hole in the "floor" of the shaft that went down several feet.
"There's a ladder in the hole," Ryan explained. "So we'll climb down here and see what we can find."
The ladder extended downward about 30 feet and at the bottom, they found a small room with large box-like machines that had something to do with the Visitor Center's ventilation system. It wasn't the coziest place in the world, but it was better than sleeping in the ventilation shaft.
"Much better!" Taylor exclaimed as she lied down next to the wall.
Ryan smiled. "See what I told you guys? If it weren't for me, we'd be spending the whole night in that tiny shaft!"
Unlike the shaft Grant and the others were in previously resting in, the tree Levine, Lex, Tim and Kailey had climbed was a little more comfortable and they were sleeping peacefully . . . until Kailey woke up in the middle of the night. She looked down at the ground to make sure there weren't any Troodon still there: fortunately, she didn't see any.
This isn't how I intended this trip to go, she thought to herself. I thought we'd at least get to sleep in the comfort of the trailer tonight. Seems like we can't even do that! I hope the others are alright.
"Hey, you OK?" a masculine voice asked.
Kailey looked to her right to see that Tim had awaken too. "What's that?" she asked.
"I asked if you were OK."
Kailey nodded. "Yeah, considering I wasn't ripped limb from limb by those . . . those killers I'm fine."
Tim grinned understandably. He knew what she was going through, since this was her first time being trapped on a dinosaur-infested island. "I know exactly what you're going through," he told her softly. "This kind of reminds me of when we were stuck on Isla Nublar before. I was pretty scared too. I mean, my sister and I were sent out here expecting a fun-filled vacation at our grandfather's theme park. We never expected that things would go haywire."
"You were around eight years old, right? How'd you manage?"
"Well . . . I think I just kept a mindset that we'd eventually escape the island. Don't worry, I'm sure we'll all survive this."
Kailey looked into his eyes curiously. "How do you know?"
Tim shrugged. "I can just feel it."
"You think the others are OK?"
"Oh yeah. They're probably all with Dr. Grant – who, I may remind you, has successfully escaped from dinosaur-filled islands twice before. Grant knows these animals by heart, he's been studying them for decades. He knows what they're like. Dr. Sorkin too is a good person to get trapped on this island with – she helped recreate these creatures! She's studied the behaviors of the living animals and she knows much of the island well since she worked here. Yeah, there are no better people to be trapped here with than Dr. Sorkin and Dr. Grant. I mean . . . well, who better to get the others through Jurassic Park than a pair of dinosaur experts?"
Kailey let out a brief giggle.
"Well," Tim began as he settled back in his tree branch "bed", "we should probably get back to sleep so we're not tired tomorrow. Running for your life is no fun when you're tired."
"Yeah, goodnight."
"Goodnight."
As Kailey lied her head back down to rest, a million thoughts were running through her head. Is it just me, or does Tim like-like me?
The Biosyn chopper flew with haste over the island of Nublar. The island looked really beautiful in the morning light. Dodgson looked at his watch: 6:08 a.m. Now is the perfect time to start the mission, Dodgson thought. His heart beat furiously with anticipation. Just one dinosaur egg is probably worth millions . . . if not hundreds of millions!
"Where am I landing, Dodgson?" the pilot asked.
Dodgson frowned – this was one detail he had sort of forgotten about. He turned to Baselton. "Well what are you doing just sitting there? You've done the research. Where should we land?"
"Well, I would recommend the Visitor Center," Baselton began, "but it's probably not fit for a landing site and that's also probably a main focus for the Lexico team. Just any old clearing will do."
Dodgson shrugged and told the pilot, "Just find us a clearing to land in."
Finally, the helicopter landed in a clearing in the northeastern portion of the island and the crew unloaded their things. The clearing was rather modest in size and was surrounded by an open woodland.
Before hopping back into the chopper to return to the mainland, the pilot asked, "So, when I am picking you guys up?"
"We should be finished with this mission by around noontime tomorrow," Dodgson answered.
"Alright, see you guys then!" With that, the pilot turned the chopper on and flew up into the air. He was soon out of sight.
The three others in Dodgson's group turned to Dodgson, waiting to hear the plan for the mission. Dodgson said, "So, as I said in the helicopter, first we're going to set up camp . . . somewhere."
"You don't even know where we're setting up camp?" Halley asked in shock. "You said you'd 'already planned out the entire mission' and you don't even know where we're–"
"Hush!" Dodgson snapped. "I'm trying to think. Just give me a sec."
Howard went over to the jeep they brought and looked in the back to see two medium-sized metal containers and three larger metal containers (which he knew were for the eggs they were going to collect). He opened both of the medium-sized containers and found there to be only one rifle! Why in the world is there only one gun in here? he thought. Howard found this fact quite horrifying. "Hey, Dodgson!" he yelled. "Why is there only one gun in here?"
At that moment, Halley burst out in laughter. "Honestly, Dodgson? You brought one little gun? I'm telling you, we're going to be dead if you don't plan better–"
"First of all," Dodgson began to explain, "it's not a little gun! It's a big game hunting rifle, thank you very much."
"But you only brought one! There are four of us and if we get surrounded by multiple dinosaurs, we're going to be dead meat!"
"For your information, Halley, I have everything under control. We won't be needing guns on this mission because I have a little device that's going to be of much better effect than a mere gun." After going over to the jeep, he extracted a small metal box-like object with a nozzle on the side of it. "We have this baby!"
Howard turned as white as a sheet of paper, Baselton gasped and Halley continued laughing, but this time it was louder and more hysterical.
"Are you kidding me?" Howard asked. "A box? You'd rather have a box than more guns?"
"You're too funny, Dodgson!" Halley exclaimed in between her laughing.
Then Dodgson grinned slyly and turned the nozzle to "on". Suddenly, a loud screeching sound emitted from the box; it was so loud that Baselton, Howard and Halley instantly covered their ears! Birds from a nearby tree took flight to escape the sound. Finally, Dodgson turned it off. "This is a sonic device and the volume is on low," he said at last.
"Yikes! That was low?" Baselton asked. "But that's a perfect contraption for warding off dinosaurs! Dinosaurs have very sensitive hearing and that sound will definitely drive them off!"
"My point exactly. Well, I think I see a path in the forest over in that direction. We'll drive over there until we find something."
About half an hour later, Dodgson's group (Dodgson was the one driving) found themselves driving along a heavily used pathway, probably by the large sauropods when they needed to cross the forests.
"So what exactly are we looking for, Dodgson?" Howard asked, looking nervously through the trees in case a predator decided to stalk them.
"Well, I'm not exactly what you'd call the 'dinosaur expert'," he answered. He turned to Baselton, "What am I looking for? We're not here to sight see, you know."
"First, we need to locate dinosaurs, obviously," the scientist answered. "Otherwise there definitely won't be any eggs! But I thought we were setting up camp first."
"We are, we are. I'm just kind of trying to piece this mission together a bit. There's a lot going on here!"
"Why don't we set up here?" Howard asked as they drove into another clearing. This one was much smaller than the clearing they landed on the island in – Dodgson thought it was the perfect place to set up camp.
"Alright," he said, stopping the vehicle. "Don't take too long, because we're here for one reason and one reason only: we've got to save Biosyn from going under!"
Lex was in a light sleep when she thought she heard the sound of a light cooing sound. I wonder what that is, she thought. She slowly opened her eyes and saw sitting on the branch in front of her were a pair of clawed feet – two of the three primary claws on each foot were on the branch, while an enlarged one was held up off the ground . . . and it was sickle-shaped!
"Yikes!" Lex yelped as she looked up in fright and saw a small feathered creature with a raptor-like body, but it had four wings and a plume of feathers on its head. The creature squawked and backed up a few steps in surprise. This was not the Velociraptor she might have originally feared – it was only a harmless Microraptor. (Well, harmless to humans anyway!) Oh, Lex thought, it's only Microraptor. I guess that's what I get for being chased by Velociraptors last night.
With a final caw, the Microraptor went out to the edge of the branch, opened its front wings, leaped off the branch, extended its "leg wings" and glided swiftly through the forest. Lex watched it until it was out of sight.
"Morning, Lex," said a voice from behind her. She looked back and saw Richard Levine using his laptop computer.
"Morning, Levine," she returned. "Isn't it a bad idea to be wasting the computer's power?"
"No. It's solar powered! As long as the sun shines the computer will have plenty of power to last us for a long time. Before you woke up, I was condensing all the information from the three computer memory chips onto one chip. That way all the information is easy to find. I've also sorted everything by date."
"Wow, you've done a lot!"
"Yeah, I've been working pretty much since dawn."
Lex nodded and looked over at Kailey, then at her brother – they were both sleeping soundly. "What do you think we should do now?"
"Well, first I'm going to finish up with these files, then we'll climb down from this tree and after that . . . we should try locating the others."
"Good idea. By the way, when you were talking with Dr. Sorkin last night, she didn't really give us much information on those True-oh-saurus."
Levine smiled. "You mean 'Troodon'."
"Yeah, that too. But she didn't really explain much about them. And the little bit she did explain was during static. Do you think you could try to find some more information on them. Based on what Dr. Sorkin said that we could understand, it seemed as if it was a very dangerous species."
Levine nodded. "Alright, I'll do that."
Grant's group got up and stretched as they prepared themselves for a new day on Nublar.
"Where do we go from here?" soldier #2 asked.
Dr. Sorkin looked toward the far side of the room at a large metal door. "We could always go that way."
"I guess it would help to know where we are in the building first before we go exploring," Grant suggested.
"I'm not going back up that ladder, into the shaft and into the Visitor Center," Ryan proclaimed. "What if those dinosaurs are still in there."
"Then let's see what's behind the door and find another way back to outside," Taylor said, trying to make the adults hurry with their final decision. The others shrugged, since they didn't exactly have a better idea. Dr. Sorkin walked over to the door, pushed the handle downward and opened the door . . . outside the door was a long, dark hallway that was rather extensive either way from what she could see. She looked back at the others, and then on a power handle on the wall.
"I think this hallway is a part of the tunnel network," the female scientist said. "These tunnels are quiet extensive across the entire island and were built to make it easier to transport things without going outside."
"Wait . . . so we can reach outside through the tunnels?" Ryan asked in surprise.
"Yes. You can get almost anywhere in the park through these tunnels."
"Great! I guess we've found a way out of here!"
"But it's incredibly dark out here. See that handle on the wall over there? I need someone to charge the power enough to bring the lights down here back on."
"Sure." Ryan walked over to the handle. "What am I supposed to be doing with this thing?"
"You've got to pump the handle a couple of times in order to get a charge; it's large, flat and gray."
Ryan tried to move the handle, but it refused to budge.
"Oh never mind! I'll do it!" Ryan moved out of Dr. Sorkin's way and after popping the handle up, she began to pump it up and down repeatedly. "One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . ." A little red light appeared at the top of the handle. Dr. Sorkin smiled. "Great, it's charged." Then with a mere flick of a light-switch in the hallway, the entire tunnel was suddenly lit up. Now they could navigate along this route to reach the outside and perhaps find the others.
"Wonderful," Grant acknowledged. "Now all we need to do is get out of here. Are you positive that we can get outside through these tunnels?"
"I've done it only a million times before when I used to work here."
Grant turned to Ryan. "And none of your radios or satellite phones are working?"
"Nope," Ryan answered. "They're all fresh out of power."
"Alright then, let's get out of here." Led by Dr. Sorkin, the group left the room they had been previously sleeping in and began walking sown the hallway to the right.
A/N: So, what did you guys think about the Troodon and Anurognathus? The Troodon are not from any Jurassic Park movie, but from Jurassic Park: The Game. As many of you might already know, there's supposed to be a "scary, new dinosaur" in the upcoming Jurassic World film according to both the director and Jack Horner, the dinosaur consultant for the movie. They haven't given us any details about the scary creature yet except that you will want to leave the lights on at night after watching the film and that it hasn't appeared in any other Jurassic Park movie. Of course, this stirred some hot speculation among JP fans including myself, and many believe that the new animal is a Troodon. Others believe that it's another creature; perhaps a pterosaur (which technically isn't a dinosaur at all) such as Anurognathus. This is why I decided to add both of these creatures into this story . . . but as you'll see in later chapters . . . these aren't the only terrifying dinosaurs you'll see in the story that InGen told no one about!