Stranded in a Lost World

by Fedora

Dinosaurs!

A small improvised device bounced off Lyra’s chest while she walked, but made no other noise. She wore it around her neck like a necklace, similar to the TARDIS key beneath it. She followed Clover and Brimstone, who in turn were following Commander Moonshine. Their task was to gather food for the group before night fell. It was currently sunset.

The Doctor had theorized that the wound they had created in space-time still existed somewhere between the Earth and the Sun, and like any other wound it would take time to heal completely. His plan was to fly the Poet back to that spot, use the TARDIS to aggravate the temporal anomaly, and then fly the Poet back home to the moment it had left.

The ship’s Captain had agreed to the idea, and teams were formed. One team, the team she was on, had been tasked with obtaining food. The device Lyra wore was supposed to detect traces of a certain chemical compound found in the type of gemstones Cortland needed to fix the ship. She wore a bag over her back to collect any they could find.

Derpy and the Doctor were both searching the jungle on the other side of the lake in an attempt to find the TARDIS. They hoped that they would be lucky and find it in the woods rather than be forced to conduct a dive.

The other three members of the Poet crew were all working on ship repairs. The Doctor had estimated that the time wound would take 27 hours to heal entirely, meaning the ship had to be ready to go by the following afternoon or they were stuck. Everypony working on things was under a lot of pressure as they raced against the clock to get ready.

Lyra gasped, and all of the ponies in her group froze. They had heard the sound too: something large was moving through the forest towards them. The ground began to quake beneath their hooves, and tree limbs were being trampled and snapped. A grumbling sound was heard to their left, and a gigantic body broke through the underbrush.

Everypony dove for cover to get out of the way of the dinosaur, hiding behind bushes and large boulders in the woods to avoid being seen or stepped on by accident.

The dinosaur had pebbled skin that looked brownish on its underbelly and gradually turned to a blueish gray on its back. The creature’s head was adorned with two large horns jutting out above the eyes, and a third on the nose above a beaked jaw. The back of its head formed a large frill that seemed to divot inwards at the highest point, and in the very center of this divot was another pair of hooked horns.

The dinosaur seemed to be in some kind of hurry. Once it had burst into the area previously occupied by the ponies they could see that it was injured; a fresh laceration extended from one of its hips to the top of its back.

“Looks like a Triceratops!” Lyra whispered excitedly. She was ducked behind a large log along with Clover, who despite the adrenaline pumping found it in herself to correct Lyra’s error.

“It’s got two more horns on it’s frill, that makes it a Pentaceratops actually,” she whispered, “It looks hurt.”

The Pentaceratops stopped itself, and turned around to face in the direction it had come. Several smaller creatures were in pursuit, snarling to each other. These were lightweight, bipedal, and about as tall as a pony. Their pebbled skin was brownish orange on top of their bodies, and faded as it went down to a whitish color on their underbellies. Each creature possessed rows of sharp teeth inside their snouts, and each clawed foot was outfitted with a retractable claw that was bigger than all of the others.

"Velociraptors!" Lyra whispered, stunned. She had for a long time considered dinosaurs to be one of the coolest things ever and had always wanted to see one up close, but now that she was faced with a wild pack of dromaeosaurs she was reconsidering that wish. They were downright terrifying.

"Too tall for Velociraptors, and wrong continent," Clover once again corrected her, "My guess is Deinonychus."

The Deinonychus pack lashed out at the lost Pentaceratops they had chased into the woods. Separated from its herd, this lone dinosaur stood little chance against five to six pack hunters armed with killer claws. The horned dinosaur swung its head at the nearest Deinonychus, but the raptor ducked out of the way to avoid the blow. A second leaped up at the face of the Pentaceratops, claws poised to kill. It swung its head again, bashing the raptor's side and sending it sprawling onto the ground.

Sensing that it couldn't frighten the Deinonychus pack off, the Pentaceratops turned tail and ran again, kicking up dirt in an attempt to confuse the pack hunters. They took chase after it unimpaired and disappeared into the underbrush.

"Stay on the lookout for any more dinosaurs," Moonshine warned, standing up from his position behind a cluster of tall ferns, "Clover, I'd like you to take a look at this species of fern to see if it's edible. Lyra, have you found anything on the gemstone detector?"

Lyra glanced at the device. It contained a small screen that had been cannibalized from the item selector on a food processor inside the Poet. The device the Doctor had thrown together appeared to be working and indicated a gemstone deposit to the northwest, near the base of a large mountain.

"Northwest," she said, "It's showing a yellowish blob on this screen."

Moonshine shook his head.

"Yellow's no good," he said, "That means they're relatively weak, and wouldn't last us very long. We're looking for something that's dense and packed with energy. It'll show up as being a bright red on that, so keep your eyes peeled."

****

Derpy flew above the Doctor, rising above the trees to try to locate the TARDIS from above. So far she had seen nothing but the tops of conifers and a rocky cliff face, and a river that ran on the edge of a clearing and towards the freshwater lake. The clearing was full of dinosaurs, including a group of Pentaceratops and a flock of the ostrich-like Ornithomimus. There was no sign of the blue police box.

Derpy swooped back down toward the Doctor and landed at his side with nothing new to report.

“Doctor,” she said, “Couldn’t you do the thing you did with the keys like back in Ponyville?”

The Doctor nodded. He hadn’t thought of doing that, and quickly set about activating the homing sequence of the key strung around Derpy’s neck.

As before, it started pulsating slowly a first.

“Stand over there,” the Doctor said, pointing to a spot deeper into the forest. Derpy obliged, and trotted over in that direction until she could barely see the Doctor.

The Doctor dug at the ground with his hooves, making an “X” in the pine needles on the forest floor. He then followed after Derpy, bounding over a large vertebrae bone lying in his path. Upon reaching his companion, the Doctor examined the pattern of the key’s pulsating.

It was slower.

That confirmed what he had feared: the TARDIS was most likely at the bottom of the lake.

“What’s the matter, Doctor?” asked Derpy, “It’s in the lake?”

“Yeah,” he replied, “I was kinda hoping to avoid diving down there.”

“You pulled that thing out of the belly of some land eel, what’s the worst that can happen in the water?” she asked, “It’s not even salt water, so no sea monsters, right?”

The Doctor shook his head. The water was very deep, and the lake was large enough to host either a significant group of small predatory creatures or one very large predator.

He made eye contact with Derpy, and turned his concerned frown into one of his usual grins.

“C’mon, we’ve got to get back to the Poet for tonight. It’s starting to get dark.”

Something was moving through the trees not far from them. With each step, the ground shook. It was massive, and it was heading toward them. The Doctor raised his head, narrowing his eyes to see into the distance, discerning a large bipedal creature walking toward them in the shadows.

“Not again,” he groaned.

“What is it?!” cried Derpy, backing up slowly.

“Tyrannosaur,” he said, “We have to go.... now!”

The two ponies raced away from the predator’s shadow, weaving through the tall trunks of conifer trees and over scattered vertebrae bones lying on the forest floor. The tyrannosaur looked identical to the one that had pursued them in Starswirl’s time; mottled red skin with black patches and a squarish face lined with rows of long teeth.

The dinosaur hadn’t initially noticed the ponies, and had been lumbering toward the edge of the forest intent on watching and waiting for more of the night grazers to come out, but the two equines caught her attention.

The footsteps following behind the Doctor and Derpy grew louder and quicker. The dinosaur was shifting its course, fixated on these strange creatures. An angry bellow erupted from its lungs, slicing through the darkened woods and drowning out Derpy’s terrified scream.

They came to a rocky hillside with a sharp incline, leading down roughly a quarter-mile. The Doctor skidded to a stop and looked over the edge to the ground far below, just as Derpy burst from the woods behind him. Another angered scream from the female rex sounded, and birds flew up from the swaying trunks of the trees displaced by the huge creature.

“Over the edge, move!” the Doctor cried, jumping off the last bit of earth hanging over the slope and tumbling down the rocky hillside. Derpy followed, landing in a heap of rock and mud and sliding. The tyrannosaur looked out over the edge at them both, stopping herself from going any farther in fear of falling. She roared at the tumbling equines a number of times, warning them to stay away before retreating back into the dark grove of conifer trees.

Derpy and the Doctor slid to a halt far below on a soft ring of soil that cushioned their fall. The pair sat for a moment, wheezing and attempting to catch their breath. Derpy had gotten her lower leg cut on a sharp rock, and it was starting to bleed. The Doctor reached into his jacket in search of a bandage or something to help her, but instead produced a blueish bandana. He tied this around Derpy’s leg just over the cut, and knotted it in the back so that it would remain on her leg with a reasonable amount of pressure still applied.

“You ok?” he asked, “Any other injuries? Anything broken?”

“No,” Derpy wheezed. She coughed, and turned her head to the side to spit out a buildup of saliva. They sat like this for a few minutes, catching their breaths before trying to talk any more.

“So...” Derpy said, “this is the second time travelling with you that a T. Rex has tried to eat me.”

“Eat you?” the Doctor replied, raising an eyebrow, “What makes you say that?”

“Didn’t you see it?” she cried, “The thing was right on our tails ready to gobble us both up!”

“No,” the Doctor said, “That wasn’t hunting behavior- neither was the one we saw in Starswirl’s time. Did you hear her roaring just now?”

“Yeah,” Derpy admitted, “It was louder than a train.”

“Exactly,” he said, “That kind of behavior- and I suppose the fact that she gave up when we were rolling down that steep hill back there- makes me think she was only trying to scare us off.”

“Well, she succeeded in that,” Derpy said, “I’m frightened out of my wits!”

A deep, resonating cry sounded from just over the large ring of mud, and a colossal head peered down at the time lord and the pony from above. It sniffed the air, and nuzzled the Doctor’s jacket with a large snout. The dinosaur's head was a light blueish green, and its mouth flat and bill-like. A small crest adorned it's face between a set of dull eyes that stared at the Doctor and Derpy stupidly

Derpy gasped and fell backwards away from the large face. She could see the bulk of the body stretched out behind it, a massive creature compared to them.

"Get away!" she wailed, causing the dinosaur to rear its head back and trumpet in alarm. The Doctor clapped a hoof to Derpy's mouth, silencing the frightened pony and keeping the pair of them huddled together. They kept still as no less than twelve separate heads rose up over different mounds of dirt, peering about cautiously.

"They're not gonna eat you," the Doctor whispered, trying to calm Derpy, "See those mounds? I think they're caring for eggs or infants. Watch the adult's behavior." He let his hoof drop from Derpy's mouth, and kept it hung over her shoulder. The two sat on their hindquarters rather than sideways and watched the dinosaurs get back to work.

The dinosaur that had sounded the initial alarm lowered her head after a few minutes, signaling that the coast was clear. Other mothers continued working, grabbing tufts of plants and ferns growing up between the mounds and chewing them up. A dinosaur that did this then ducked her head down into the mound, and let out a gurgling sound. Small squeaks came from that same mound, and Derpy caught sight of a small tail flopping up over the edge.

"They're feeding their babies plants," she murmured, "so that means they're plant eaters, right?"

"Yep," the Doctor said, "some kind of Hadrosaur by the looks of them. My guess is this is a herd of nesting Maiasaurs, the 'good mother lizard'."

Using the cover of darkness, the two slipped unseen into the edge of the woods again, heading back toward the wreck of the Poet.

Comments

[themouthofmush]

i feel like this story's clover is kind of a reference to clover the clever because of how she answers quickly and effectively on what kind of dinosaur it really is. would i be right on my guess?