Spinning Stories

The museum was filled with life - which was not something classically said about most museums, let alone this one which lay almost empty for most of the year, occupied by little else but bones, dust, and ghosts. Now it was so full that it was difficult to walk through without bumping into someone, which was inconvenient for Matriarch, who was more or less stuck on the ground for now. The aged flier’s bones ached from the flight but fortunately, most of the festival visitors were relatively courteous - and Polaris’s blinding white hide was difficult to miss.

Besides, this was a spectacle that Matriarch was not going to miss. There had not been a gathering of dinosaurs from across the archipelago like this in her long-lived memory, except perhaps to shatter the dam at Isla Pera or to try to free the Alpha lab dinos from their wretched, unstable, underground prison.

That was for a common goal, though. This was something more spectacular altogether. They were here out of curiosity, for fun, not for anything pressing. She tilted her head towards Polaris, who was walking with her head bowed slightly while Gianna chattered and pointed out all the fascinating oddities they walked by.

Matriarch glanced upwards at the towering giant. An articulated skeleton of something that looked almost like a styracosaurus, but the bones were hard like stone rather than sunbleached white, and the horns and frill were all wrong. She tilted her head, eyeing the ID plate in front of the specimen. What was it with the humans and labeling everything and preserving them, why couldn’t they just leave the bones in the dirt?

“They put the horns in the wrong spots,” Gianna chuckled, clacking her beak as she turned from the skeleton to Polaris.

Polaris was less sure - there wasn’t even a bump on the nose where a styra’s nose should be, and the horn rounds along the outside of the frill looked smooth rather than broken. The brow horns did look abnormally long, though, and this skeleton was awfully small compared to styracosaurus with comparable horn lengths. “I don’t know… look at the way they’re curved, none of a styra’s horns look like that.”

“That’s because it’s the bones of a diabloceratops,” Matriarch corrected with an amused cough.

Polaris and Gianna tilted their heads as they turned towards Matriarch, varying degrees of confused and curious. “A what?”

“Diabloceratops,” Matriarch said again. She nodded her head towards one of the next bone specimen. “These here are all smaller ‘ceratopsians’ not unlike the styracosaurs that roam the islands, but they’re not the same.”

“What’s a ‘ceratopsian?’” A new voice captured the tropeo’s attention and the three of them turned their heads towards a young acro, a male covered in a sparse feathered coat with cream and brown snake-like markings with splashes of green down his side. Tar looked curious, then apologetic when he realised he had been butting in on something.

Matriarch clacked her beak in amusement, continuing on with renewed vigor now that she had even more of an audience. She explained what a ceratopsian was and more about the diabloceratops, giving off an air of confidence as she spoke. It was a challenge to make herself heard above the crowd and she had to project her voice, and as she spoke she got the attention of others.

“What makes you such an authority on these things?” Petrichor and Callahan had caught up to Tar again, and Petrichor looked especially skeptical of the tropeo.

Entirely unfazed, there was a glint of amusement in Matriarch’s eyes as she laughed low in her throat. “I can read the signs that the humans left behind.” The “upwalkers” to most of the islanders, but Matriarch had read enough to know that was not what the featherless bipeds called themselves.

Petrichor snorted. “You’re just making things up.”

“I’m not,” Matriarch replied with a clack of her beak, “but what if I am? You’re still here listening, you’re still entertained.”

Tar did look thoroughly entertained by the stories that Matriarch was spinning, and Callahan gave Petrichor a good-natured nudge. There was not any harm in listening for a bit, the night was still relatively young and they had plenty of time before the stars began to fall. It might be silly, but they could stay a while and listen to what the kooky old bird had to say.

Without waiting for further interruption, Matriarch turned with a glint of mischief in her eye and started walking down the hallway, pausing at new exhibits to demonstrate her knowledge of the human language - the written version, at least. The young acro was enraptured - his mothers, less so, but Callahan at least looked amused by her son’s fascination and Petrichor seemed content to just let Matriarch talk herself out. Others had started to listen as well, curious by what the tropeo was talking about or what stories she was making up.

Each sign she stopped at, she either read more things or made up more stories, and who could say really how truthful she was being in translating the strange, partially faded scratches on the signs? There were few others around to challenge her translation, and even if they could, Matriarch was a good storyteller, and everyone was here for a good time. There was no need to correct her, even if her descriptions of what the skeletons (“fossils”) really were started to turn from the more factual to the more fanciful as she described daring combat scenarios between giant carnivores, not unlike Tar, and these horned lizards.

Gianna didn’t fail to notice that Tar also seemed to glance towards her often while Matriarch was speaking. He was still very young and the dinosaurs with her malady were not very many. There were even fewer fliers that managed to survive it, she could not blame him for his curiosity.

When Matriarch recognised that the youngster’s attention was starting to shift, she nodded towards Gianna as if to say, “Go on, educate him.”

Which Gianna would happily do.

“You haven’t seen this kinda thing on a flier before, have you?” She asked Tar directly, and the young acro looked embarrassed to have been caught staring. Not staring, maybe, but he hadn’t been exactly subtle in his curiosity. He mumbled a “no,” his feathers fluffing slightly.

Callahan nibbled his muffed feathers smooth (or smoother, at least) while Gianna chuckled. “I’m not surprised, it’s not common. It’s very hard, though, and makes me strong.”

She stepped right up to Tar with a confidence that made Polaris fearful of what Gianna was going to do next. Matriarch simply laughed as well, her beak clacking quietly.

“You can test it. Look, you can bite my shoulders and it won’t hurt me,” Gianna said, standing tall. Never mind that if the scales on her face grew much larger, they would obscure her vision and blind her, or that the heavy plates weighed her down and made long-distance flight a chore.

“I… “ Tar looked uncertainly towards his mothers. Was this tropeo sure? He knew what his jaws could do to bone, this seemed like she was asking him to do something dangerous.

When Tar hesitated, Gianna stood on her hind legs and spread her wings. “Surely, someone here is brave enough to test their teeth against my scales?”

Callahan sighed and stepped forwards. If it would settle Tar’s nerves and make the apparently showboating tropeos get on with it, she would go along with their game. “Turn.” She did not want to actually wound the tropeo, not when they were meant to be visiting the museum peacefully.

Gianna tucked her wings against herself and Callahan gently put her jaws around Gianna’s shoulders. Sure enough, her teeth didn’t pierce through the hardened keratin plates - even when she strengthened her grip on the tropeo and picked her up off the ground in her teeth.

Tar marvelled quietly while Petrichor watched, truly unimpressed with the flying reptile’s display. She would rather they move on than participate in whatever show the tropeos were putting on, but she was sure they would continue exploring the building sooner or later. She just had to wait this out.

Callahan set Gianna back down after the tropeo gave a nod. Once she was back on solid ground, Gianna spread her wings again for all the gathered dinosaurs to see that there wasn’t a mark on her, and her plates did not even bear a single scratch from Callahan’s teeth. Callahan was, of course, a smaller utahraptor, but Tar was impressed regardless.

“You can still fly with them?” he asked, not thinking about how uncomfortable the question might be if the answer was “no.”

“I can,” Gianna replied, eyes gleaming. “Like I said, they make me strong.” She just needed a little extra space to take off.

“Polaris is the real aerial acrobat though, you should see how long she can soar through the air. I think she could fly for days without landing if she really wanted to.”

Polaris blinked, embarrassment warming her blindingly pale hide into a flushed pink when the gathered attention suddenly and unexpectedly turned towards her. What was Gianna doing? She knew that Polaris didn’t like the limelight.

And Gianna did know that very well, but that did not stop her from giving Polaris an encouraging nod. Polaris shifted her claws where she stood, looking uncertain. Tar looked hopefully towards them, eager to see the graceful display that Gianna had promised.

Polaris sighed and bent neck slightly to whisper in Gianna’s ear. “Fly with me?”

A gently asked question. It would make her feel better about flying where so many eyes were watching, though, and Gianna agreed with a quiet hum. It would show off her own flight skills as well, proving once again that even though her keratin weighed her down, she was no less for it. In fact, she was a stronger flyer, even if she did tire faster.

“We’ll need some room,” Gianna said, turning towards Tar, Petrichor, Callahan, and the others of the crowd that had gathered behind them.

The small family stepped to one side and others parted to either side of the grand hallway, giving the tropeos a runway of sorts so they could safely take off and land. With no tall spaces to give her a bit of extra height before takeoff, Gianna had to run to get the lift she needed, but after racing forwards, she was soaring through the air with powerful strokes of her scale-clad wings.

Tar cheered for her below and Gianna called out as she swooped through the hallway, triumphant and at the same time asking for Polaris to join her. Gianna was in the air, now it was her turn.

Polaris still looked a bit more pink than usual, more so when the attention turned back to her again. She shook herself and took a few jogging steps forwards - a considerably shorter distance than Gianna had needed - and then she was airborne.

Polaris’s flight made Gianna’s powerful strokes look heavy and strenuous. Everything about the pale flier was graceful. Her broad wings carried her effortlessly even in this more confined space, her long neck and legs adding a sort of elegance that most tropeos were missing. Even when a particularly small pink and green tape unexpectedly joined her in the air, Polaris’s correction and recovery was spectacularly stunning, beautiful as she dipped and turned - and accidentally a suspended aquatic animal’s skeleton directly in the path of her flight.

Expertly, Polaris tucked her wings and flew straight through the animal’s ribcage, coming cleanly out of the other side.

Her success was met with cheers from below and from beside her as Gianna flew nearer to her, careful to maintain a considerable amount of space between them so they didn’t tangle and crash in this enclosed space.

Polaris angled back towards the suspended skeleton, landing neatly on top of it. Gianna landed just beside her, chattering approvingly. That had been spectacular, just like she knew it would be. Polaris just had to believe in herself a little more.

Polaris’s eyes squinted with a slight amount of happiness. She didn’t think it was anything too impressive, just a bit of complex flight in a tight space with even more confining obstacles, but… the cheering that they received because of this ordinary thing that they did. Flying together with Gianna. Those were nice things.