By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
My mate was a fine tyrannosaurus, Wal. She really was. Her name would probably sound something like a ululating vigorous razzberry to you, but names… when a name is attached to someone you love, even a name that sounds like that becomes beautiful. She was kind and compassionate. She was funny, too. She could almost pronounce her name via flatulence after she came to your world—eating the food here really did a number on her digestive system.
Okay, maybe I am exaggerating a little bit. But really just a little. It helps me to try to laugh when I remember her because she often made me laugh. I don’t want to forget the laughter. You see me smile now a lot, but that smile was something that she taught me.
We were what you would probably call newlyweds when we came to Final Pumpkin. Yes, our chosen honeymoon was Final Pumpkin. The reasoning was simple—the portal between our world and yours is directly over Final Pumpkin, in the airspace above the city. Many dinosaurs decided to live here. That’s why you can find so many dinosaur footprints around the city now. That is also one of the reasons why you can find so many of my footprints as well. I also traveled back to dinosaur times to stomp around and create some fossil footprints in the right time period just to trick you and my eventual subjects, but I will explain the mechanics of that trick in due time.
Razzberry and I didn’t choose any of the dinosaur eras for our honeymoon, though. We chose a time where there were large mammals, but no predators anywhere near as large as us were living in the area, so we felt pretty safe.
Did you know there were mammoths living near Final Pumpkin back then? Razzberry and I used to love playing with the mammoths. Once they realized we weren’t going to eat them (okay, we ate one once), they really became like extra furry long-nosed dogs. Smart, too. As we got used to life in Final Pumpkin, it was the mammoths who made us feel most welcome. My favorite mammoth we named something that meant “Furbud” in English. Furbud followed us around wherever we went. He didn’t fetch, but we rolled logs to each other, or chased one another across the plains. He even slept near us sometimes.
Now… if you are waiting for a description of tyrannosaurus sex, I’m not going to give it to you. Suffice it to say that at first it was as difficult for us to imagine as it probably is to you now, but eventually we made it work on a biological level, and with some physical satisfaction.
And we were happy. We did achieve great joy, for a time. It just didn’t last.