WHO Lovisa Jansen and Shuro Shimizu feat. Doc Malcolm WHERE Jurassic Park WHEN January 17th, late morning RATING TBD SUMMARY Everything goes dark STATUS Mini (Incomplete)
Shuro was hungry. They had let him into the kitchen at his insistence, but they were not entirely set up as a vegan-aware place to eat, at least, not if you were a mammal, and some how it seemed too ironic to eat food for dinosaurs, when he was sure at any moment he’d become food for dinosaurs.
After breakfast they’d been piled into jeeps to take a tour that everyone found very exciting except for him and Lovisa. Shuro had apparently gotten a reputation with the children as being a grump, and everyone else fancied him some sort of military mind. He got on with the lawyer, though.
He sat in the back of a jeep, next to Lovisa and getting tired of Dr. Malcolm’s earnest but insistent foretellings of doom. It was vaguely like a dentist yelling you how much this was going to hurt before he began to drill into your mouth. Shuro had tried to remain in the compound, but they had insisted he take the tour. ‘It was the whole point of the trip!’ Hammond had explained, happily. Shuro was just getting grumpier and grumpier.
Lovisa did not know what sound was annoying her most, the incessant rumblings of Shuro’s stomach on one side, or Dr. Ian’s insistence that he sit remarkably close to her. It was almost as if by willing her to sit on his lap he’d have better odds of convincing her the world would end. While the words that filtered through his flirty banter was far more interesting to her awakened scientific side than she would care to admit, the big-eared giant’s charm had zero effect on her. She reached in her satchel and pulled out one of the granola bars that she pilfered from the buffet table and passed it over to Shuro. That solved at least one problem.
”Did I go too fast? I go too fast. I did a fly by.” Malcolm stated plainly as he stretched out his arm in the finite space that was the back of the jeep. There was no other place for said arm to rest except for the back of the red-haired doctor’s seat. “I think I was saying something about how the odds of something terrible has increased by virtue of jeeps being driven from a control room. We’re in the hands of engineers, but I’m allowing myself to be distracted, your hair is it natural? Can I...confirm? For science, of course.”
Shuro looked over at the granola bar but raised his hand and shook his head. He’d read the ingredients, there was not much in there he wanted to eat. He looked over at Malcolm when he threw subtly right out of the window. Shuro wished a man so self-involved was not so correct. It almost made Shuro want to say something mean.
“Then why have you come, Dr. Malcolm, if this is such a bad idea?”
”It is natural, no need for inspection,” Lovisa uttered with a sigh, putting the offered granola bar into her bag before reaching behind her head to lift Dr. Malcolm’s arm from her shoulders. “Let’s stay in our own personal spaces, hmm? Surely you know that leaving the Jeeps to be controlled manually leaves a larger margin for human error. They must have chosen the lesser of two evils.”
Unfazed by Lovisa’s rejection, Dr. Malcolm merely stretched out his opposite arm and draped it over the rather neurotic appearing military man sitting next to him. “Are all military guys so jumpy, or is this just a you thing? I’m very curious.” He wouldn’t be such a genius if switching gears in any given moment was the slightest bit of a challenge. “Personal space, my dear Lovi, is relative. After all, when you get to be as tall as myself and this dashing young gentleman here, you take whatever space you can get.” He just liked to loom and impose. “I joined the tour because of how safe they insist the center is. The more confident they are that nothing will go wrong, the more likely they’ve overlooked something vital. I’ll take my chances and stick close to military personnel thank you.”
Shuro immediately removed Malcolm’s draped arm, rather aghast that it had been put there in the first place. He felt he had made it quite obvious he was not the sort of man one touched. “Yes well I hate to agree with you,” and he did, “but I don’t think the Park is very safe either. The environment is not rigid enough, there is too much room for human error and not enough of a safety net to catch those errors.”
He looked back out the Jeep window, as the vehicle came to a stop, and a pleasant, upbeat female voice over the intercom began to explain to them the eating habits of the Tyranosaurus Rex.
”My biggest concern,” she started, then paused as her eyes narrowed at the shortened version of her name. “It’s Lovisa, if you must.” Sighing, she continued. “I largely doubt they have the variables controlled as much as they claim. The genetic sequences they gave me clearly would give credence to that fact, but...” Science had been her least favorite subject, followed closely along by math, but ever since they had arrived on this island Lovisa discovered she possibly had an innate talent for it. When the pre-recorded voice cut off mid-sentence, she craned her neck to glance up at the ominous stormclouds overhead. “What now?”
”If I had to make an educated guess, it would have to do with the paleontologists getting out of the jeep in front of us. In theory this lovely tour should resume once they return, but I bet the engineer in the control room has shit himself.” The mathematician said as he took off his sunglasses and wiped them on his shirt. “Isn’t it lovely, stuck in front of the T-rex pen, at mealtime, in what looks to soon be terrible weather. Would you all like to hear the odds of how badly this will end for the three of us?” Malcolm chuckled as he perched his shades back on the bridge of his nose.
Shuro did not need to hear the odds. He unbuckled himself and looked over at Lovisa. He knew he was normally very good at figuring out what to do in emergencies. He was the son of Thoth, he was a Navy SEAL. And yet, knowing a T-Rex was about to come after them, with them completely unarmed, left him almost at a loss for what to do. He blinked a few times, swallowed, looked out the window at the oncoming storm. “There are flares in the back, right?”
”There should be an emergency kit in the trunk,” Lovisa mused aloud, then unbuckled her seatbelt. Taking full advantage of her petite size, she climbed over the seat to crouch in the trunk area. She pulled away the carpeted floor covering to extract the camo green case that had the park’s emblem pressed on the front of it. With a relieved sigh, she opened it up and began to take a quick inventory of the contents. “We have 8 by my count.”
”Oh, sure. The first thing we should do while sitting in a three to four thousand pound jeep is to look for the incendiary devices. How about guns? Do we have guns? Even better would be a way to get these damn jeeps off the tracks so we can get out of here. Getting out of here would be the best option here, don’t you think?” Malcolm began to suggest in a rather rapid-fire monotone. “Or we could just, get eaten, and pray it happens quick.”
Shuro pushed Malcolm’s voice out of his head. It wasn’t kind of Shuro, but Malcolm was not as living and breathing as he seemed. He was fictional. Shuro and Lovisa were real demigods trapped in a book. Malcolm could get eaten if he wanted to. It didn’t mesh well with Shuro’s military training, but that’s where they were.
“The T-rex is attracted to movement,” he told Lovisa authoritatively. “We can use the flares as distractions, but mostly we should just remain absolutely still once it gets here. Grant will look after the children, we need to stay still and wait for the others to come with a car.”
”I’m not sure how good a shotgun would be against a T-rex,” Lovisa pointed out to the mathematician as she handed over the kit to Shuro. She did not, however, return to the backseat since it was providing an excellent space away from one Dr. Malcolm. As the rain started to fall and the island was blanketed by darkness, she had a feeling it would only be a matter of time before the beasts learned they were free from their cages.
There was a long stretch of silence as the wind and rain built into a furious storm that battered and shook the vehicles. Eventually there was a rumbling and shaking that could not be blamed on the hurricane. “I hate the be the bearer of terrible news, but unless we’re also experiencing an earthquake. I think we have a...” the mathematician fell silent, for once in his life completely speechless as he pointed a finger at the gigantic lizard looming over the fence. “Not good, not good, so not good.”
Shuro’s heart stopped for a moment, actually seeing the thing. He swallowed hard, and blinked a few times, but otherwise tried not to move. “Stay calm,” he said, inwardly thinking how all of his training left him unable to cope with this. Enemy helicopters firing down at him, sure, but not a T-rex. A real one. A real enough one.
“Just stay calm, and still, and quiet.”
The children started to scream in the jeep ahead of them.
Lovisa had lowered herself into the bed of the trunk and remained as still as she possibly can, but she feared the loud pounding of her heartbeat against her ears would eventually heard by the dinosaur itself. Outside, the crunch of metal intermixed with the shrill screams of children could be heard. She wanted to hiss at them to do something, but found herself paralyzed in her little space.