By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
I felt fatigued and frustrated as I stood there in the garage, trying to think. But Warbell had said he had left me something. Something that explained everything. Did it explain the criminal activity he had done? What camera had he been talking about?
Then it hit me, and my face must have shifted three shades of red and pale in the space of a minute. The bug I installed! Had he known he was being recorded all this time and he never said anything about it? I had installed a camera in the wall, hidden from view, pointed directly at where Warbell slept. I got out my tools, dismantled that section of the wall, and was stunned to find near my old video camera a journal. On the journal were written the words, “To Wal. Please read as soon as you can find the time. Maybe over a breakfast at Seven Degrees of Bacon. Questions answered!”
I sat down on my couch with the biggest mug of coffee I could find, then flipped open the book and started reading. The handwriting was surprisingly readable—better than mine. It looked like someone was trying hard to write as perfectly as possible.
Dear Wal,
I don’t really think you deserve this explanation given that you have been spying on me secretly for some time, but nevertheless neither am I entirely comfortable with having lied to you from the beginning—or at least having aggressively bent the truth. When I first met you, I told you I had slept from the age of the dinosaurs until your present time. That was not strictly true. It’s actually much more complicated than that.
The true part was that I had come from a different and far away time, and it is difficult to say exactly how far away because of the nature of my world. You see, while dinosaurs died off on the planet earth you know many years ago, they did not completely perish from the world, or at least not the earth as I know it.
This will be rather confusing I am afraid, not least of all because even the mightiest brains amongst the saurian kind have not been able to solve the riddle of what exactly happened. However, suffice to say I and many other dinosaurs who were living on the earth you know many years ago were one day suddenly and inexplicably transported out of your world and into a different world of a different nature.
I am trying to choose my words carefully here, because myself and the others, we did not really leave the earth, though we did not realize what happened at first. We awoke in a very strange, mostly unmoving world, and at first we thought, I suppose, that this was an alien world—insofar as we could process what was going on at all at the time. You see, when the event happened, dinosaurs were not able to talk. That came later. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I remember that time. When my mind was not so developed. The world was frozen, but not with snow and ice. Frozen in time. The plants and animals, lakes and mountains, valleys and fields—all these things remained. But they were frozen, immobile. We could move about, but we could not interact with most of the world around us. Essentially we were caught in a moment of time, with the entire world frozen unmoving mid-moment. We could see plants and animals and more in the world, but they were like immobile statues. If we came across a dinosaur still existing in your time frame, he would be caught in the middle of a movement, sometimes impossibly balanced up on his toes, or paralyzed in the midst of chewing on a delicious leaf, or a million other actions. We could climb on him, bite him, run full-bore into his side, but not cause the slightest change in his posture. These dinosaur statues caught in time did not even have a scent. It was a neutral, sterile world.
But not entirely. Of course we could move and roar and so on. And along with ourselves, large amounts of plants, rock, and water—among other things—had come through into the frozen world as well and could be interacted with. Whatever it was that suddenly transported us into this frozen moment had also transported unfrozen materials as well. However, this state of affairs took us some time to figure out.
Nobody knows what caused it, but many theories have been suggested. Perhaps the impact of a meteorite ripped the very fabric of time. We don’t know.
Thousands of dinosaurs were saved from extinction, but only to awaken in a bizarre world which we could not begin to understand… at first. That changed, however, as our minds began to develop in surprising ways, all because our bodies did not function like they used to, either. While our bodies were not frozen like most of the world around us, there was still…
Well, we were very peculiar dinosaurs indeed.