AN: I'm so sorry I haven't updated in so long! I've just been so busy! Anyway as you already know it's Kaitlyn here with another chapter of everybody's favourite Fossil Fighters marine biology story. Actually, I think it's the only one . . . nonetheless, thank you all for reading and reviewing, and as always Fossil Fighters isn't mine.
"Oh my gosh," panted Dina, sitting bolt upright in her sleeping bag, clammy fingers clutching at the fabric. Her eyes flicked to her reflection in the shiny, shiny floor, and she grimaced. She was never a pretty sight in the mornings, but after this dream, she looked absolutely terrible, with wide eyes and not a drop of blood in her gaunt, drawn face.
"What?" asked Pauleen, who always looked like she'd stepped out of a shampoo commercial in the mornings.
"I dreamt," said the ginger in a shaky voice, "that Jaewon and I both grew up to become famous and then we had a meeting where he turned into a bug and ate my face."
"Oh my gosh," said Pauleen, then, "who's Jaewon?"
"Jaewon," Dina replied, tucking her legs beneath her and fumbling about for a hair band. "You know, that kid in our fourth grade class who always tried to stick worms up people's noses."
"He's in my class," Rupert piped up from Dina's chair. Said girl, who wasn't the brightest in the mornings, either, and hadn't the slightest idea which members of the crew she hated and which ones she did mani-pedis with, scrambled to the seat next to the cat-eyed heir's perch and widened her eyes.
"Does he still stick worms up people's noses?" she wanted to know.
"Yeah," said Rupert idly, taking advantage of Dina's oblivion and putting his feet up on "her" dashboard. "He did Todd a few weeks back."
Pauleen looked apalled. "And you didn't intervene?"
Rupert shrugged nonchalantly. "I couldn't have. I wasn't even there at the time; I was in detention."
"For what?"
"Sticking worms up people's noses."
Even Dina, who barely knew her own name at that moment, shook her head. Rupert sucked in his cheeks and awkwardly said, "So . . . Dina. Your gran was pretty cool."
Her eyes flicked from the dark eddies of water outside their reinforced glass windshield to the book in Rupert's hands, and her jaw dropped. "Hey!" she said. "That was my prize from the box!"
"Well, maybe you shouldn't have been careless and left it out!" he shot back, clutching the journal to his chest like a petulant child with a "borrowed" doll.
"Maybe you shouldn't take things that aren't yours!"
"Everything's mine!" Rupert paused for a moment and furrowed his eyebrows. "Uh, I mean, maybe you should learn to share!"
They glared at each other, cold yellow eyes locked onto colder brown ones. They stood still for a moment, teeth gritted, and fists clenched, before Dina lunged for her great-times-four grandmother's journal and Rupert spun out of her reach, leaving her to ram into the wall headfirst. He, in turn, stubbed his toe. She stuck her tongue out at him.
Pauleen ambled off to fall back asleep with her face suspiciously close to Todd's. It was going to be a long morning.
Dina noted that she had been having a lot of those lately.
It turned out that Rupert, fortunately for his ego and unfortunately for Dina's own, had been right, her grandmother had been cool. Felicity-Jane had been the assistant to the navigator on Captain Woolbeard's ship ("So it was his boat!" a triumphant Todd had shouted, but that part of their adventure was starting to feel forgotten), but her job consisted mostly of scaring any slackers into doing their work doubly efficient for half their salary and keeping prisoners in line with the multitude of muskets and knives that she kept in her skirts.
According to her diary, the Scatterly persona Felicity-Jane was madly in love with was a prisoner she tended to be a "wee bit nicer" to, but the Fossil Fighters, giggly though they were, had practical mindsets and ended up shutting the diary and opening a few of the more official-looking journals, whose spines were straight and whose pages, though clearly dog-eared and covered in glue, paper clips, and spilled ink, were all present, lined up neatly and colour-coded in some manner.
Dina lifted the cover and flipped past the first few pages of ownership clarifications and "if found please return to"s until she reached a full-colour, gruesome picture of a large mosasaur, resplendent in bright green ink, tearing apart the seemingly lifeless body of some other unfortunate marine reptile.
"Ew," said Pauleen. The others heartily agreed.
"What is that thing?" asked Todd. Dina flipped back to the cover again and squinted at the spidery writing on the little title sqaure.
"It's called a Tylosaurus," she pronounced after a minute.
"Tylosaurus proriger. Discovered by Edward Drinker Cope in 1872 but some say it was discovered at an earlier date. Predatory marine lizard from the late Cretaceous period," said Rupert almost immediately, as if someone had pressed a button or pulled a string in his back. Dina furrowed her eyebrows at him.
"How did you . . . " she began, but Rupert just shrugged aside the comment, saying, "Sorry, I can't help it, I always end up doing that."
"Well, let's see what Granny has to say about these Tyler Saurus Pro-somethings," Pauleen suggested. The others agreed with her again and Dina filpped past the drawing, sitting back in her chair and reading the first journal entry aloud.
It was what she'd expected. The first few lines were notes on the Tylosaurus akin to what Rupert had precisely said: that the mosasaur, an animal similar to the monitor lizards of today, had terrorised the seas of the late Cretaceous period and eaten a great many unfortunate plesiosaurs. There were a few crossed-out names for what Dina supposed was the Tylosaurus the journal starred, but she payed no mind to it, knowing that Edward Drinker Cope had been a brief prisoner onboard Captain Woolbeard's ship and assuming Felicity-Jane had been talking with him.
The next pages bore a map. Like the drawing of the Tylosaurus it was done up in ink colours too bright to be accurate, and like all the maps Dina had ever seen from the 1800s it was not entirely geographically accurate either. However it was obviously a map of the Caliosteo region. The map had a large red X marking a coast of sorts slightly north of the Bottomsup area. In spidery writing it proclaimed the spot the X marked was "important" and also "secret."
There were a few more entries like the first, and the gang was getting a bit bored, when they came across several torn pages and angry, all caps writing saying,
"Oh, stupid Cope, and stupid, stupid, stupid Nigel Scatterly! I work myself near to death to find the stupid Tylosaurus (a horrible name) and as soon as the dig is finished they take everything and pass the discovery off as their own. I am going to murder them. That lizard is my discovery! If anybody finds this journal, see to it the truth comes out."
This sparked quite the discussion. Dina reckoned it was a ruse and Rupert just critiqued Felicity-Jane's handwriting. Todd was all over it. And Pauleen, for once, was thinking rationally: if it really was true, the map must have been to the dig site. The earth couldn't have shifted too much in two hundred years, and Bottomsup Bay's currents weren't strong enough to do too much lasting damage to the area.
"Just think," she stressed. "There still ought to be more fossils there, she said so in the notes. There's never been a Tylosaurus Dino Medal before; if we bring a complete fossil to the National Fossil Centre they can probably make one. And you know what happens to people when they bring in fossils for new Medals? They get rich."
"Ooh," said Dina. "Rich is good."
"It is," Pauleen agreed. "So let's try and be rich, you guys! We have a map. I don't think it'll take us long to get to the site marked on it."
It actually did take the gang quite a while to get there, but it would later be decided that was entirely the fault of a lack of gas, an incompetent driver, and a shortage of food. For even though the driver was very competent, if her boasts were to be believed, and the gas would have definitely gotten them within walking distance of the X and they still did have some canned vegetables left, none were about to admit they may have been wasting their time with a project they'd gotten out of a diary. So Dina was held responsible and they spoke no more on the matter.
The dig site was barren. Desolate. The scrubby forest they could see on the horizon seemed to have thinned out miles away from the cliff where they stood and after those sorry trees there wasn't a speck of vegetation to be seen. Just rocks, rocks, and more rocks.
"Look at it this way," Todd suggested with a weak smile. "Most of those rocks probably have fossils in them!"
Rupert shot him a withering glance. "But does it have the kind of fossils we're looking for?" That wiped the smile right off Todd's face.
Dina shoved them away from each other. "Shut up, you two— hey, what's that?"
"What's what?" Pauleen wondered. Dina cocked her head and listened intently. After almost a full minute, she heard it again: a faint yell and a clatter of metal on stone.
"That," said Dina.
"Oh," said Pauleen.
They all gathered up their things and set off down the cliff, in the direction of the noise. Rupert supplied them with a great many disturbing theories as to what the noise may have been and seemed to find great pleasure in watching Todd go paler and paler with each one.
He was in the middle of one about an evil schoolteacher-turned-clown when the same yell interrupted him, only far louder and clearer this time. Dina stiffened and looked over the cliff to pinpoint the origin of the noise . . . to see more guns than she could count pointed right back at her!
"Um, guys," she stammered. "I . . . we . . . look," she finished, and when they did Pauleen fell dead away in a faint and Todd vomited on Rupert's shoes. The white-haired boy's jaw, already slack with shock, fell even more. He stared at the purple-clad people with guns and his expression grew scared.
"Who are these people, rich boy?" asked Dina in a shaky undertone. "You seem to recognise them."
He swallowed. "Remember how that paper mentioned the BB Bandits?"
"Yeah?"
"That's them."
AN: Le gasp! Why are the BBs there, what do they want, and why can't I write. Um. I don't know.
I hate to say it but my life is super duper hectic right now, and I think I have to put this on break! I don't want people to have to wait so long just to get a boring chapter like this. I'd rather put time and consideration into my writing. So I'm pressing pause for a while. I'm very sorry.
Er . . . Katie out.