Chapter Text
Barron’s rift in spacetime had not been very stable, and it sealed the second he stepped back to Earth. Barron looked at the scene around him and smelled the fresh air. It smelled like no food dyes and endless potential for getting preventable illnesses. Make America healthy again. Barron couldn’t wait to contract measles from a sickly medieval page.
He stood by a large lake surrounded by tall trees. Large birds flew overhead. They were non-GMO.
Barron was excited to find the nearest civilization and have dominion over the plebeians. He could even have dominion over the royals, if he so pleased. He hadn’t stopped to consider what would happen if he hadn’t emerged in western Europe, and he wasn’t going to.
However, Barron’s fantasies of medieval lordship, which would probably have ended rapidly with him getting executed for blasphemy anyway, were shattered as soon as he turned around.
Because, standing nose-to-nose with him as soon as he did, was a massive fucking dinosaur.
It was a horizontal dinosaur, walking on all fours, as opposed to a vertical one, like T. rex. If Barron had been smarter, he might have known that it was a stegosaurus, meaning he had emerged anywhere from the late Jurassic to the Maastrichtian era. Because he spent his childhood eating rocks and pretending to be Superman, not reading books about dinosaurs, the only dinosaur he knew was the leiopleurodon, from Charlie the Unicorn, and this was not a leiopleurodon. He dropped everything and backed up slowly, and the dinosaur did not follow him.
Barron looked up again at the non-GMO birds, and saw upon closer inspection that some of them were avian dinosaurs.
Well, fuck.
Barron decided that the best thing to do right now would be to get out, but when he looked at his hands his device had disappeared. He looked up to the ground in front of the dinosaur just in time, however, to see it crushed beneath a giant, destructive front foot as the dinosaur moved to eat a plant off the ground.
Barron was stuck here, the only person on Earth.
Oh, this was going to do wonders for his ego.
Barron wandered around a little, exploring the untouched landscape. He didn’t know enough to appreciate any of it, though, and he certainly didn’t know which plants were edible. He picked up a leaf and inspected it. Other leaves on this plant had bite marks, so he supposed it may as well be safe to eat.
He tried it. He hated it. What was he, effeminate? Everyone knew real men ate only meat and shat rocks a week later. Still, it was food. He put a pin in it.
As he wandered the dinosaur-infested Earth, Barron remembered that evolution wasn’t real. He wondered, then, how the dinosaurs had come about, if they hadn’t evolved on the planet. Previously, he had simply just not believed in dinosaurs, but he had since been forced to confront the realities that, maybe, he had been wrong once. He wasn’t about to be wrong about evolution, though.
His questions were answered when he wandered into a clearing and saw from a distance a UFO. It was very shiny, and shaped in the stereotypical “flying saucer” sense. It had a folded-up door, which unfolded into a ramp before his eyes. Off the ramp, a dozen or so dinosaurs were unloaded by little green men in high-visibility vests and hard hats. One of them carried a clipboard, and marked on it with each dinosaur that exited.
Barron could see it now. The dinosaurs were actually from Mars or wherever these aliens were from, and they were unloaded here as some form of…. pest control measure? Barron wasn’t sure. Either way, it was fascinating, and it made much more sense than evolution.
That night, Barron put together a makeshift bed in the middle of a field of tall grass, because tick-borne illnesses were a ploy by the government to sell more doctors, and tried to sleep under some very large leaves he had found earlier that day.
There was no light pollution this far back in history, so every star in the sky was visible. Barron had never seen anything like it before. He was almost tempted to abandon the project he was doing for his business degree, which proposed projecting advertisements into the night sky, but then he remembered that there were no business degrees in dinosaur times.
Oh, well.
He witnessed a meteor shower that night, the likes of which were unfathomable to him. The meteors seemed incredibly close, even though he reasoned that, logically, they were far out in space. They seemed to burn fiery trails as they fell out of his line of sight.
He managed to sleep— somehow— and spent the morning doing everything he could to steer clear of potential predators, because he wanted to live long enough to become the alpha dinosaur, commanding an army of tyrannosaurs (though he didn’t use that word because he didn’t know it). For now, though, he found himself forced to be a sigma, cast out of the pack because nobody understood his true power. But it wasn’t, like, bullying. No, he liked being on his own because that made him edgy. Part of the definition of a sigma male is that females like the creepy loner sigma male and he rejects them, and Barron was one because he was just that cool. He was going down the social hierarchy to become an alpha out of altruism, because he was even cooler than cool.
(Reader, Barron was not cool.)
That day, he tried a new leaf. This one, like the first, did not kill him. He squirmed a bit at the idea of drinking unfiltered water, but he did it anyway. He didn’t know to drink it upstream of where the animals were peeing, but ignorance is bliss. He tried to catch a fish, and he did not succeed. He also tried to make a fire, but likewise found himself unsuccessful.
It had been hot yesterday, and it was getting hotter the longer the dinosaur times went on. Barron didn’t know that the Earth in those times was actually warmer than our modern Earth, which was maybe best, because if he did know he would have called it proof against global warming. He spent much of the day hunkering in the shade or in the water. He pretended he didn’t see the predators in his peripheral vision.
One day, he’d make T. rex (or, as he’d call it, leiopleurodon with legs) his bitch. Today, though, was not that day, and maybe it never would be. Barron looked up at the bright, blue Cretaceous sky and saw a light that was not the sun.
The End