As the sun began its descent, Tristan hastily worked to prepare what meat he had managed to cut away from the bison carcass.

Many other creatures had made their presence known while he had butchered the fallen bovine. Surprisngly, many were practically unchanged from their ancestors - there were creatures he recognized as big horn sheep, turkey vultures, coyotes, wolves, and even black bears. Others had changed only marginally, such as pronghorns who had developed new varieties of antlers. What had really been a surprise, though, were the arthropods. Someone seemed to have decided that the goliath bird-eating spider would be the new standard for arachnid body sizes, because he'd seen a few scorpions and tarantulas that large wandering around, hunting either insects, rodents, or each other. Tristan was mildly thankful that Terence had squished a gigantic camel spider for him - those things were ugly, and one of the few beasts that even the elder Saurus sibling had trouble loving.

So far, there had been no major incidents with the wildlife - a black bear had briefly tried to contest the carcass with them, but Terence had easily scared it off, though not before throwing a few bones at the ursid so that it would have something to be distracted feasting upon. Carrion vultures had also circled overhead, but now were feasting upon the pieces of flesh Tristan and Terence were not interested in. Snakes had occasionnaly slithered by, but they were more interested in feasting upon smaller fare. For now, at least, Tristan could focus on building shelter.

He'd managed to find an area with enough tree cover for Terence to rest under, and had prepared a tent for himself, but how long that shelter would be viable was up in the air - he wasn't sure if he had arrived in the middle of summer or winter. In some deserts, it was hard to tell the difference between the two on a good day. He felt like it was summer, but he wasn't completely sure.

Idly, Tristan wondered how long it would take his friends, family, and coworkers to realize that he was gone.

He hoped they'd already figured that out by now...

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Lucas played the camera footage.

Then he rewound it and played it again.

And again.

The results were the same.

After the gravity of the situation finally dawned upon him, the teen turned to look at the various people assembled by him, all of whom had seen the footage.

"...So, to summarize what we just saw, Tristan and Terence wandered into the portal maintenance bay, got into a fight with racoons, and then got sucked into a portal to an unknown time. Does anyone refute that?"

No one did.

"Okay, we're all on the same page. Now," and as he said this, Lucas turned to look at Nigel, "what do we do next?"

"Everyone who has computer experience, head over to the maintenance center. There's a couple of computers there that keep track of destinations we go to. The recent portal opening messed up the coordinates a bit, but we should be able to decrypt it with everyone we have. Everyone who has a broad reference pool for paleontology, join up with them once the computer team has finished finding the coordinates and figure out what our primary hazards will be for rescuing Tristan. Everyone else...return to your other duties. We cannot afford to panic - Tristan needs us. Now let's get moving."

The teams quickly dispersed, with Lucas joining the Computer Team to begin examining the data available to them.

Of course, he still had his own questions. "How did the most recent portal screw up the computer system? Shouldn't it be EMP proof if it works with magnetic anomalies?"

"It's because the portal opened while it was under maintenance," answered the Hispanic man known as Ramos. "The portal computer is programmed to lock away any portal that aren't opened intentionally so that, say, you guys don't end up getting chased by giant birds when you're looking for giant bugs. It keeps the coordinates, it's just that they're registered in the black box behind some extra encryption."

"And getting that opened is hard?

"Nope," replied an oriental woman by the name of Lin. "Getting it opened should be easy. The hard part will be actually understanding the data - portal entries stored in the 'black box' don't have any text references, so we'll have to compare it to existing, know portal entries and use those to figure out where your brother and his tyrannosaur companion went."

"I see. Well, let's get cracking."

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Willow paced back and forth around the exhibit, wondering where Terence had gone. The basal ornithischian and his alvarezsaur companion had briefly cleaned Terence's mouth early that morning, but their gigantic friend had been torn away from them by the humans, and he hadn't returned for some time. The duo normally wouldn't be worried, but Terence normally wasn't gone this long, which had been enough to put the duo on edge. Where had their friend gone?

Nearby, Jane was also pacing about, as was Matilda, Sue, Stan, and the two giant squamates that liked to mooch off Matilda. All were united in their discomfort over losing their cherished family...well, except for the lizards - those two were just trying to figure out why Matilda was so uncomfortable.

All of them hoped things would get better, and soon.

XXXXXXXXXX

The rat wandered through the strange cave that he had found his favorite toy in. Said toy had started doing weird things after he had rammed the back part back into the main body. Somehow, it had started flying and making funny sounds. Maybe there were things in the cave that would tell him why it did that.

After much searching though (which included walking over a lot of bones left there by cave predators), there was nothing that he discovered that revealed why the weird rock was now moving. Disappointed, the rat made its way back to its nest within the great cactus, though it would take some time to reach home.

As it was about to leave, though, the rat noticed something laying off in a cave corner. There, unnoticed by wandering cave predators, was a dead vole. The creature showed no signs of illness or injury, and indeed, neither of those were the cause of death - it had died of a heart attack.

The vole wasn't something that the rat wanted to eat. But there was something else at its nest that might want that.

Thus, with little hesitation, the rat snatched the carcass and made a break for it.

XXXXXXXXXX

About an hour later, the sun was nearing the horizon, and the rat was a last upon the outskirts of its nest. It was almost home.

As it was about to continue onwards, though, an eight legged form descended from a nearby tree. It's body was black, barring a red, hourglass shaped marking on its abdomen.

This was a female spider, a descendant of the black widow, though this one was far larger. And it was staring at the rat.

It was also holding a fruit in its pedipalps.

The rat offered up the vole to the spider.

The spider offered up the fruit.

The exchange was made swiftly.

Before either creature could enjoy its meal, though, a strangle sound filled the air. When it did not cease, the spider and the rat decided to follow it, until they found the source.

It was, surprisingly, the creatures the rat had seen earlier, the smaller of which was doing something funny with a stick and a log.

Yet as the rat looked over the mammal messing with the wood, it found that it could recognize the body before it...well, so to speak.

While it had never seen a creature with this kind of body shape, said body shape looked a lot like what he would expect of the creatures whose bones littered the cave he had found the rock in...

XXXXXXXXXX

AN: The plot thickens!

Read and Review! This is Flameal15k, signing off!