Chapter 8
Hunting Season
"What do you mean 'there's no lunch'?" Percy asked loudly as he and the others stood in the inn, all hungry.
"Exactly what I said. There's no lunch. I haven't made any lunch." Louie said strictly, standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
"But why?" asked Kemeko.
"Have you seen the mess in the kitchen? All the dirt, dust and… unmentionables? No way I'm cooking anything in that! I've spent the last four hours trying to clean the kitchen, and it's still not enough to even have a glass of water in!"
"Fair enough, but what are we gonna eat?" asked Jack, his stomach growling.
"There's still some fresh food, vegetables and such that we brought here, feel free to take that. You can start a fire outside if you want to roast anything."
"Think you'll be able to make us dinner at least?" Bill asked.
"Maybe, but I'm not making any promises. However, if any of you would like to help me clean, we might just be done before then."
"Don't worry, Louie. I'll give you a hand." Tyroth offered.
"Much appreciated."
"Hey, is it just me, or is there something missing here?" said Cam.
"No, you're right, there is something missing, and it's not the food." said Barry.
"Yeah, it's… I think it's a certain degree of… whining." said Rose.
"Whining? Hold on a moment." said Tyroth, as he did a quick head count, and he quickly came to a conclusion. "Where is Rattletrap?"
"Uh-oh..." the others said almost in unison. The thought of the troublemaking rat being off on his own didn't sit well with them.
But they quickly got an answer to his whereabouts.
"Heee-eeelp!" Rattletrap's voice echoed from the outside, somewhere in the distance.
"Speak of the devil." Raphael said. "Wonder what he's done now."
A loud roar followed shortly, accompanied by heavy footsteps, also in the distance.
"What the hell was that?!" Sephie exclaimed, and everyone hurried outside to see what was going on, and they didn't believe their eyes.
Shortly after they had exited the inn, they saw Rattletrap running among the houses to the north, faster than he had ever done before, pale as a sheet and with terror in his eyes, and right on his tail was what was chasing him.
A giant, bipedal lizard with brown, tough-looking scales and ridges above its eyes, sharp claws on its feet and hands, and a large mouth filled with even sharper teeth.
"A DINOSAUR!?" people exclaimed, recoiling at the mere sight of the almost three metres tall and eight metres long reptile.
Another roar echoed throughout the village, accompanied by another cry for help from the running rat. Shaking off the shock, Tyroth instinctively leaped into action, taking to the air and heading straight against the beast.
The dinosaur was beginning to close in on the rat mutant, but its hunt was interrupted when Tyroth shoulder-tackled it on the side of the head. While it stumbled quite a lot from the sudden impact, it didn't fall over, but its attention was shifted from the rat to the red dragon.
As Tyroth landed some metres away, the dinosaur looked at him and growled loudly before roaring and charging at him. The massive jaws snapped at Tyroth, but he quickly sidestepped the attack and delivered a powerful punch to the side of its face.
Despite the punch, the dinosaur lashed back with its head, trying again to sink its teeth into Tyroth, but missed several times as the dragon kept jumping out of the way, taking what opportunities he got to attack again, whether that was by punching, kicking, or even a quick whip from the tail.
But eventually, there came an attack that Tyroth couldn't dodge, and he stared right into the maw of the beast as it attempted to bite his head off. It took great strength, but Tyroth managed to catch the jaws of death and hold them open, even though the teeth pierced the flesh of his hands and the force pushed him backwards.
Noticing that it couldn't bite down, the dinosaur was about to pull back when Tyroth countered, by breathing fire into the gaping maw. The scorching flames burned the entire mouth and partway down the throat, and made the mighty beast recoil and roar in great pain, furiously shaking its head from side to side in a futile effort to get rid of what was causing it pain.
That gave Tyroth the opening he needed, and drawing his large sword, Ryujin, he lunged forward and drove it into the dinosaur's neck, piercing it all the way into the throat, and the pulled it out again. Blood poured out of the wound and mouth of the beast, as its painful roar was replaced by a choking gurgle, and it collapsed on the ground, twitching as life began to leave the large body.
Once the dinosaur finally stopped moving, Tyroth dared to move closer and poke it with the tip of his sword, and got no reaction.
"I think it's dead now, but we'd better keep our distance a little while longer, just in case." he said to the others as he backed away.
"Dude… I mean, I just… dude…" Michelangelo half stammered. "You killed a dinosaur!"
"I didn't even know there were dinosaurs here!" said Bill. "Why didn't anyone tell us?!"
"There's at least three different books on monsters and other creatures for the game, including angels, demons, extra dimensional entities, spirits, undead, and so on. Excuse me for failing to mention dinosaurs specifically." Tyroth responded. "Though, I never thought that dinosaurs would live in this region, I always imagined them preferring more tropical areas, like jungles."
"What do you think I thought!?" Rattletrap snapped, still trying to catch his breath.
"Are you okay?" James inquired. "No injuries or the like?"
"Other than being scared shitless, having my heart threatening to burst out of my chest, and almost being eaten, yeah I'm fine. Though, I could go for a new change of pants."
"I thought something smelled foul." said Vincent.
"Well you try to keep your bowels in check after coming face to face with a fucking dinosaur with too many, too sharp teeth!"
"Enough, Rattletrap." Tyroth said, trying to calm down the rat. "Take some time to recover… and clean up, then I'd like to know where you found your friend, among other things."
"No arguments from me."
"Just make sure you go downstream." said Louie. "I still need clean water to make the kitchen usable."
With was grumbling and cursing that Rattletrap headed to the beach to wash up, but there was one thing that he left behind for the others to deal with.
"Okay, so what do we do with that?" Sarah asked, pointing and the dinosaur corpse. "We can't just leave it like it is, it's gonna start to rot and stink if we do."
"But where can we bury it? The thing's massive." said Hacker.
"If I can come with a suggestion, I do have an idea." said Richard, which gained him the attention of all. "Not everyone is going to agree with me on this, but I think that we should harvest what we can from it."
"Harvest? You mean we should eat it?" Pandora asked. "Eat a dinosaur?"
"Basically, yeah." Richard continued. "I used to do some hunting back on Earth, and when our group managed to fell an animal, we made sure to let as little as possible go to waste, just like people used to do hundreds, and even thousands, of years ago."
"Like that bear-pelt you brought back almost thirty years ago." his wife, Erica, said. "I still can't believe you shot a bear of all things."
"It was either that, or let it eat one of the other hunters."
"Much like Tyroth killing this dinosaur." said Sharky. "Plus, I think choking to death on your own blood is a kinder way to die than what would follow if you actually ate Rattletrap."
"Jokes aside, I agree with Richard." said Donatello, taking a closer look at the dinosaur. "It would be wasteful not to harvest what we can from this animal. Now, I'm no expert on dinosaur physiology, but I would guess that this one weighs about two metric tons, and I think that about seventy percent of that is meat, skin and organs, so we'd get almost a ton and a half worth of food from it at most, and for all of you that didn't follow; that's a lot."
"If we can take care of it all." said Tyroth. "We don't have fridges and freezers here, and unless Devina is willing to constantly keep the meet frozen with her ice based magic, we will have to find a way to preserve it before it spoils."
"Actually, I got an idea for that." said Devina. "Sure I could use my magic in a pinch, or to give us more time to work on this, but there's another solution. I checked the barrels down in the cellar of the inn, and they were filled with salt, salt that we can use to treat the meat."
"Preserving with salt, excellent idea!" Donatello said, and his mind started working. "I don't think we'll be able to salt everything, but it will help us with a good portion of it. And there are other ways to preserve the meat too, such as smoking or drying it. If we do all of these things, I think we can save most of the meat."
"And we could use the skin too." said Nick, pointing his thumb over his shoulder. "I mean, we did find what looked like a tannery. Surely we can use dinosaur skin to make leather too, right?"
"I don't see why not. They used to use crocodile and snake skin back on Earth." said Monalisa.
"And even fish skin, or so I've heard. But I guess skin is skin." said Bill.
"Then we need people working on this as soon as possible." said Tyroth. "Anyone skilled with blades, and that feels comfortable with it, is welcome to help skinning and cutting up this thing into manageable pieces that can be treated. And while we're at it, we need someone that knows what parts to keep to supervise it all."
"You mean organs, sinew and so on." James said, receiving a nod from Tyroth. "Well, I guess that falls to me then, since I am a doctor and all, though I must admit that my studies of anatomy never covered animals, especially not extinct ones."
"Just do your best, doc. That's all anyone's asking."
"Excuse me for asking this, but can we even eat a dinosaur?" Vincent asked. "And I don't mean ethically. We don't even know how it tastes."
"Does it matter? We need the food, and meat is meat." said Jack. "If it stands between eating weird meat and starving, I'll go for the meat nine out of ten times, even if it would be wolf meat."
"And as for how it will taste, you just let me worry about that." said Louie, rubbing his palms against each other. "Once we're done cutting up this thing, and the kitchen is clean, I'll do some tests with the meat, see what I got to work with."
"Alright everyone, that's enough standing around." Tyroth said, cracking his knuckles. "Grab something to eat if you're hungry, otherwise, we got work to do."
It took several hours, but through hard work and combined efforts, they successfully dealt with the dead body. It wasn't easy, but they managed to flay the massive body, resulting in a large amount of good quality skin that they would tan later.
With some pointers from both James and Louie, the meat of the body was cut and divided into various pieces, ranging from fillets and chops to breasts and hams, or the equivalents at the very least. The many organs inside the body were put aside for later, though Louie was pretty certain that after some proper cleaning and preparations, he could use them for food as well.
Sinew, teeth and claws were collected together with smaller bones that seemed to easy to turn into tools, or at least items they could use for trading with others. Though they would use all the bones for something, even the largest ones, as soon as they were properly handled.
It was late in the afternoon when the Mutopians were finished, though they still continued to work with treating large portions of the meat. Thin strips of meat hung from large racks that had been both found and constructed, left to dry in the warm weather.
Luck had continued to be on their side, as they had found a small smoke house on one of the outer farms, where they started to smoke a good chunk of the meat, also in thin strips, while most of the rest was put in the salt filled barrels in the inn's larder.
"We're gonna be eating this for months!" Barry said excitedly. "No worries about having to starve for us."
"And with all the crops we've got here, I think it will stay that way for quite some time." said Cam, giving Barry a fist-bump.
"I can't believe we were able to scrap next to everything of those huge bones." said Raphael as he washed his hands and sais in the stream. "And I can't believe that I actually used my weapons as kitchen utensils."
"Welcome to being a Mutopian." said Kate. "We've always had to use what we can find, and we can't afford to start being picky now."
"No, I guess you're right." Raphael said, putting his blades back in his belt. "Sure, we've scrounged and scavenged a few things back in New York, especially Donnie, but not on the same scale as you guys."
"And we got a whole lot more of that coming up, man." said Moe, giving Raphael a pat on the shoulder. "But I just know that we'll be able to turn this place into a really gnarly home."
Later that evening, once the kitchen was finally clean, the Mutopians were treated to a dish they had never tasted before, dinosaur and vegetable soup, and maybe it was the thought of a properly cooked meal that appealed to them, but it tasted better than they expected, a testament to Louie's skill as a chef.
But as the others enjoyed their meal, Leonardo approached Tyroth.
"Tyroth, could you come with me for a moment?" the blue-masked turtle asked, and the dragon obliged, following him to a room in the back of the inn, where he saw that Splinter and George were already waiting for them.
"Okay, now you've gotten me curious. What's up?" the dragon asked.
"Well, you see, my son, the three of us have been talking." George said, stroking his long white beard.
"And we have come to a decision." Splinter continued. "We want you to become our new leader."
"I'm sorry, what?!"
Rattletrap survived, though I'm not sure the same can be said for his pants, but what do you expect if you run into an Allosaurus (smaller than a T-Rex with longer arms). But yeah, dinoaurs are a thing in DnD, but if there's something I've learned from palying another game, ARK, it's that they can give a lot of food and hides, something our heroes are taking advantage of.
And the elders really dropped a bomb on Tyroth at the end. What are your thoughts on that, and his for that matter?
I guess this will be the last update from me for this year, so let me wish you all a Happy New Year from my little dungeon! Cheers! :D