A Morning Stroll

The birds of the Dead City greeted the rising sun with their enthusiastic trills and chirps, like they were serenading the star into orbit. Nox always enjoyed waking up to that sound and he wondered if the little birds thought they were the ones putting the sun in the sky every morning. He hoped they did, they deserved the ego boost for being at the bottom of the food chain. He stretched, his feathers fanning out as every inch of him tensed and relaxed, waking his body up for the day. He stood up to observe his surroundings, the sun beaming through the window of his apartment. The windows faced east so the morning sun always woke him, stopping him from sleeping in too long and potentially slacking on his duties. He missed the days when he could stay sleeping as long as he wanted and stay up all night in various forms of revelry, but alas, the Dead City waited for no one. He stepped out onto the balcony of the building and dipped his head into the barrel of rainwater he had set up there a few months ago. The summer was hard for water, often sending him down into enemy territory to grab a drink, but recent storms had left him plenty as long as he rationed it. 

From his position on the balcony he could see a good deal of the streets below. Naturally, some of his view was blocked by the various trees and heavy foliage that managed to stake out their claim in the concrete. He knew that a few buildings down the way there was a small pack of raptors living similarly to him, finding a mostly intact human abode and making it their own. He saw them fairly often when he was out hunting and they rarely interacted with each other, mostly exchanging nods of mutual respect. It was a silent agreement to not start fuss over nothing, to mind their own business for as long as the city provided enough food for everyone. The more densely overgrown areas usually held the most meat, hunger pushed the herbivores from the sparse outskirts into the heart of the city where humans had already made a space hospitable to nature. The workings of humans were a mystery to him and to be frank, he didn't care much for understanding them. As far as he was concerned, humans were the ancient creatures that built the bones of his home and nothing more. He knew some dinosaurs felt some reverence for the scientists of Alpha Labs, attributing their entire existence to them, but as far as he was concerned he was hatched from an egg by two Utahraptors and he didn't see anyone else revering their parents.

Shaking out his feathers, he stood back into the building and began to make his way to the door. It hung loosely on its hinges and frequently fell off whenever he tried to open or close it, but it was a neat way of keeping a bit of privacy. Nox was a private raptor, preferring to stay on his own and mingle with others on his own time. He had no enemies to speak of and treated every dinosaur he met with respect and courtesy, he just didn't like to stick around those dinosaurs for very long. He tentatively closed the door behind him and grinned when it stayed upright. Today was going to be a good day. He picked his way down the stairs, the most efficient method of keeping most other dinosaurs out of your business. Utahraptors found stairs pretty easy to navigate depending on how narrow the stairwell was, but very few other intelligent species could manage them. The thought of a Shuno trying to climb his stairs almost pulled a chuckle out of him, further brightening his mood. 

Nox always enjoyed leaving his apartment, not that he disliked the place but for the walk just outside of his back door. His usual route through his territory took him through an old human garden, overgrown as all of them were and decorated with strange statues. The ones that were still standing were similar to each other, either rectangular slabs, round topped or flat, or tall 'T' shaped markers. They were in uniform patterns, lined out in rows and framed by rose bushes that had since grown into a jungle of thorns and red blossoms. Nox often wondered what it was used for, the one human artifact that intrigued him, mostly because it was right outside his home. He took a deep breath of the fresh air, taking in the smell of grass and the faint scent of the roses carried on the gentle breeze. The Dead City had a lot of rumours swirling around about it but it really was such a beautiful place to live. Once you found somewhere that wasn't in the grasp of a violent turf war, of course.

His path to the woods was framed by tall buildings similar to the one that he lived in, eventually dispersing into shorter, more spaced out structures that gave way to the woods where all manner of creatures lived. When herbivores were thin on the ground in the city itself he could always take a trip out to the woods and hunt in more plentiful areas. Not today though, today he was still full from a large elk he'd found and cornered in the alleyways late the evening before. Now he was taking a stroll through his territory, a casual patrol as he didn't expect anything out of the ordinary. The first sign of life that wasn't a bird or a bug was a black and white Utaraptor rummaging in the hollow remains of a car. Its head pulled out of the metal quickly when it heard something approaching but relaxed when they identified the raptor approaching them.

"Good morning, Nox, how are you?" Pyre greeted politely.

"Not bad, had a good meal last night so I'm just taking a walk," he replied easily. Pyre was a nomad of Isla Kela, you could find him nearly everywhere on the island except for in the middle of that damn volcano. It was a common joke that you could lift up a rock and find Pyre under it, such was his way of finding himself in strange spots.

"You heard about what Nublar found around here the other day?" Pyre asked curiously.

"I didn't," Nox stopped, his interest piqued.

"So there's a human building with a big metal gate blocking the door, have you seen it?" Nox nodded. "Yeah, you've seen it. It's impossible to get through and there's no back door into the place, a big pile of rubble is sitting where we think it might be. So the other day Nublar was taking some wires and batteries out of a car and when she was taking it apart it shocked her a little, BUT, her tail was touching the gate and the shock made it move!"

"So it needs power to move it?" Nox surmised.

"We're thinkin' so," Pyre agreed, "We can't figure out how to send electricity through it though. Kava thinks we could get lightning to strike it by sticking some kind of pole between the bars but Nublar thinks we can't get a pole long enough, it has to be taller than everything around it for the lightning to hit it," the raptor sighed, "So we're back at square one with trying to open it."

"Not square one," Nox reassured him, "You've got a lead now. Maybe you need to clip a bunch of batteries together and set them off at the same time?" Pyre scratched his chin.

"Not a bad idea. Let me know if you find any, if we can gather a bunch of them we can split whatever's in there," the other raptor agreed.

"Might not be anything worth splitting," Nox reminded him.

"Maybe not, but solving the mystery would be somethin' in itself wouldn't it?" Nox couldn't agree, he didn't see much point in chasing something so ardently for no reward at the end. 

He said his goodbyes to Pyre and continued along his path, though diverting slightly to pass by the building they had been discussing. It was a plain pale yellow, the glass shattered but bars holding steady even all these years later, blocking the windows and the doors from entry. Letters were engraved above the door but very few dinosaurs could decipher human runes. Nox knew that the first letter was something called a 'J', but he had only remembered that because he thought it was the coolest looking one. The building behind it had collapsed long ago, covering the back wall entirely with rubble and blocking any chance to gain access to another door. The building next to it was long since picked clean, Nox reckoned it had been empty since before he was born. The bars were lacking on those windows and doors, letting anyone roam around inside. Someone had even gone to the effort of cleaning the glass shards from the ground. He reached out to the bars on the windows and grabbed hold of them, gently shaking like it would shift hundreds of years of solid metal.  They didn't move, of course, and he felt almost embarrassed to have tried at all. 

"You planning on ripping those off, tough guy?" a loud voice honked behind him. He recognised Nublar instantly, her high and nasal tone unmistakable from the other raptors in the area. She was holding an armful of old metal pipes and wires, Nox winced at how close some of the sharp edges were coming to piercing her skin. Kava was walking next to her with a similar load of metal, cutting a sidelong glance at the louder raptor. 

"Not quite, just checking them out, I heard there was some kinda mad scientist out here," Nox teased. Nublar didn't take offence, puffing her head feathers proudly and grinning at him.

"Closest anyone's come to cracking this thing in years," she said smugly.

"Closest so far," Kava emphasised, "We're gonna get it open for sure." At this Nublar huffed and looked at Equinox like they were sharing a secret.

"I'm helping this loser to build what's called a lightning rod, next time we get a summer storm he'll see exactly how his plan will fail."

"Hey! It's better than nothing! Besides, metal attracts lightning, that's just a fact, so we just need to direct it a little," Kava protested.

"And you're making this taller than the buildings?" Nublar asked drily. 

"It doesn't need to be," Kava insisted, "it just needs to stick out enough for lightning to reach it."

"It won't reach it past the tops of the buildings," Nublar interrupted, frustrated and gesticulating aggressively at the tallest structures in the Dead City, "there's metal up there too, the lightning will hit that first!"

"Why do you two want to get in there so badly," Nox interjected before the argument turned physical, "Surely any food inside will have rotted away by now."

"There are other valuable things that aren't food," Kava said, frowning. "The humans treasured whatever's in there enough to guard it with something this strong, it must be valuable."

"To them," Nox reasoned, "Why should we care about what humans found valuable?" Nublar and Kava exchanged a worried look and Nox felt indignant, why were they looking at him like he was crazy?

"Don't you find it interesting?" Nublar asked, "to learn about those that came before us? What were they like? Whether they were like us at all?"

"I get why some folk would find it interesting, I understand the curiosity, I just don't understand making such an effort for it. They're dead, gone, and we're here now, I just think it'd be a better use of time to develop our own spaces, our own traditions." He shrugged. "Just my perspective." The others didn't look very convinced, in fact they were still looking at him like he had two heads. Was his stance really that controversial or were these two just that overly invested in researching extinct species? 

"Alright, well. Don't feel too jealous when you miss out on the discovery of the era," Nublar said lightheartedly, bringing the mood back up.

"I'll leave you two to it," Nox waved them off. He continued his walk through the city streets and glanced back as he did, seeing Kava and Nublar already sorting their metal scrap into piles. Kava was using the  He really did respect their enthusiasm, but he would much rather spend his time in the here and now. Despite his diversions the sun was still low in the sky, showing he had the whole day ahead of him. He took a deep breath of the city air and centred himself. He felt the concrete under his claws, the breeze ruffling his feathers and the smell of flowers and damp stone in the air. This was where he wanted to be, not poking around in the past, scavenging in ruins to find minute clues as to what humans had planned with the world. He knew what he had planned for this world, a full belly, somewhere dry to sleep, maybe some mini-mes running around at some point. He wondered if humans ever felt these joys, or if they too were so preoccupied with their buildings and technology to truly thrive like an animal should. Nox shook his head, he had already wasted too much of his day wondering about extinct apes, he had a whole block of city to patrol and the streets weren't about to wait for him. He flexed his toe claws until they tapped the ground and took off into a brisk run, wanting to make up for lost time.