By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
Of course those who decided to travel to your world were determined to do so as safely as possible, and so we took many precautions. Again, time was not really a consideration. We could take as much time as we needed to plan and prepare and it would have no impact on our fertility or mortality or practical mating choices.
So the first thing we did was prepare our bodies, upgrading them with a variety of technologies in order to ensure we would be able to live safely on the other side. Essentially all of us who came over to your world, myself included, are what you would call cyborgs. We have machines in our bodies which monitor every system, every organ, every possible health abnormality, with medicines and antibiotics ready to administer in the case of any kind of sickness. We have the equivalent of a brilliant medical doctor in the form of a robot brain monitoring us at every moment, ordering increased vigilance at weak points or areas of inflammation, more stimulation there where muscles have grown too flabby, monitoring intake and output and more.
Plus, for the carnivores, we had further enhancements. You have seen one of them—my teeth. For the time spent in your world, we realized that of course we would have to eat—and the diet of a carnivore is significantly more dangerous than the diet of an herbivore. I don’t mean that meat is bad for you and causes heart disease, though that can happen—we were more worried about the horns and the spikes of the prey!
Thus we developed new technology that allowed us to alter our teeth for a more omnivorous diet, but we made it so we could switch through different kinds of teeth depending on the situation and need. You haven’t seen all of the sets of teeth I can switch through—there are several more which I can use depending on what kind of plants are available to eat. Of course we also made modifications on our stomachs and other parts of the digestive tract to make sure that our bodies could make use of the food we were taking in.
We had other precautions as well. We built structures for safety against the weather and the animals so that we could mate, give birth, and raise our young in what amounted to semi-sophisticated dinosaur housing projects. Well, they became more sophisticated over time as we developed them, but I think I can safely say that even the first ones built were more comfortable than the floor of your garage. Though I guess I cannot blame you too harshly, given that your garage was never built for the living needs of an enormous alpha predator from a previous epoch.
We also paid attention to the places and the times we could attempt to make our families. Of course at first we just monitored the area around the hole between our worlds because it was the easiest, most directly available land where we could brood. And we could check, through manipulation of the portal, what kinds of weather events were going to be happening during any potential stretch of time before sending the time-traveling couples on their honeymoons. That way we could avoid ages and areas with lots of earthquakes and tornadoes and pandemics and so on.
With these and other preparations, we thought we were ready for any contingency, any problem that might arise.
But predictably… we were wrong.