LNHY: Death of Trophy Wife #11: "If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love"
Drew Nilium
pwerdna at gmail.com
Sun Jun 7 05:34:02 PDT 2020
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Issue Eleven: "If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love"
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Content warning: Descriptions of freaky cosmic experiences, giant bugs,
dinosaur-adjacent shenanigans
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Ted the Time-Traveling Atheist screamed.
When he'd traveled back to the era of Genesis, he'd been beamed there
directly with his Mythoscopic Time-Projector. It had been clean and quick, like
stepping into the next room.
Putting on the Alchemical Wedding Dress was more like stepping into the next
room, finding it didn't have a floor, and falling endlessly, wondering when the
absent ground would suddenly rise up to meet you. Shinigami Girl and Dead Boy
were holding his hands, their spirit forms fluttering like kites in the breeze
as they whipped through the ages, hundreds of thousands of years per second.
The deep structure of time was passing through his body, as if it were a
wanderer on a foggy night and he was the fog. He could feel the crackships,
vessels that journeyed through the cracks in time, piloted by strange
bedfellows; he could see the retrovores and the loopweavers and the corpse of
the DHenry Force reflected in the black gold trim of the Dress.
The ground rose up.
Consciousness gradually returned. Ted groaned and pushed himself up, groping
for his pipe. His hand sank into the loamy ground, and he blinked in the harsh
sunlight. The air *tasted* wrong. All around, strangely shaped ferns mingled
with queer, wide conifers and tiny flowers desperately poking into the air. A
foot-long dragonfly zipped past his head. "Where... *when* are we?"
"The year 70,502,015 BC," said Shinigami Girl, standing at his left hand,
shafts of sunlight shining through her ghostly form. "Cretaceous period, not
Jurassic, but close enough. Sorry about not giving you a hand up, but I don't
have a hand to spare right now."
"Possessing a dinosaur sounds cool," said Dead Boy, standing to his right,
"but it's the kind of thing you've gotta work up to, you know?"
Ted grunted, and stood up, brushing dirt off the Dress as best he could.
"Right. Well, this is the age of dinosaurs, or so you say." He knocked the loam
out of his pipe and placed it between his teeth. "So where are the di... no..."
The trees parted in its wake. A monstrous, regal head, crowned with colorful
feathers. An enormous, sleek body, tuned to devour. Powerful legs, not stomping,
but moving with intent through the forest. Ted recognized it. Any schoolchild
would. Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Its mouth opened, and out from the forceful lungs came an unexpected sound...
"So then I said, Batman would never do that! He *hates* guns! And the Death Star
is basically the biggest gun in the universe."
Ted blinked, three times, in rapid succession. Then he fell over.
"Aw, jeez..." Shinigami Girl got down on one knee and carefully, with the
utmost delicacy and precision, inserted a spectral finger into Ted's frontal
lobe.
Ted sat up straight and shouted, "WHAT IN THE UNSAINTED NAME OF GALILEO IS
GOING ON HERE!?"
"Huh?" The T-rex looked over at them. From this angle, Ted could see that
it-- *he*-- was wearing an orange bandana over his face, with a pair of eyeholes
cut out. Ted wondered if he was having a stroke. "Aw, geez, I almost stepped on
you! Sorry, tiny person!"
"Say, is that a human?" Something that looked like a flamboyant ostrich
stepped out from behind the rex. This one was wearing a helmet with a hole for
her plume, and a reddish visor over her eyes.
Another, the size of a dog zipped out, looking up at him inquisitively. "It
might be a small gorilla." He had big eyes, sharp fangs, little claws, orange
feathers, and a green bandana.
Ted stepped back. Right. Dinosaurs who could speak English, had complete
knowledge of modern pop culture, and wore little... wait just a second. "Are
you... *net.heroes*!?"
"See, I *told* you people had heard of us!" The T-rex posed, tiny arms doing
a sort of 'Walk Like an Egyptian' pose. "Roll call! Ridiculous-Dreamer T-Rex!"
The little orange-feathered one reared up, kicking one leg (and its huge,
made-for-disemboweling claw, Ted noticed) in the air. "Argument-Smasher
Velociraptor!"
The ostrich-esque one turned her head and posed coolly, sunlight glinting off
her visor. "Laser-Eyes Dromiceiomimus!"
"Together, we are..." Ridiculous-Dreamer T-Rex made an explody noise with his
mouth. "Bkoom! The Dinosaur LNH!"
Ted just stood there, staring up, stock-still. Shinigami Girl stepped forward
and carefully, with the utmost delicacy and precision, inserted a spectral
finger--
"Okay, okay!" Ted batted her spectral hands away. "Fine! I provisionally
accept the evidence of my senses! Dinosaur LNH! Sure!"
"Awesome!" said Ridiculous-Dreamer T-Rex. "You must be some more of God's
friends, right?"
"'Friends' is a bit of a strong term, but--" Ted paused. "Wait, you know
God?" That seemed... wrong?
"Sure, we used to hang out and talk all the time. Wordplay, complicated
philosophical concepts, what the best pizza topping is..."
Ted looked a bit put out. "God never wanted to talk about complicated
philosophical concepts with *me*..."
"Aw, you're bonding!" grinned Shinigami Girl. "But we're in a hurry. Can you
take us to meet God's other friends?"
"Right this way!" chirped Laser-Eyes Dromiceiomimus, leading them down a
well-trodden path thru the heavy foliage.
Ted gawked at the heavy fruit, the strange leaves. It was alien and
impossible and *real*. Evolution was real and dinosaurs were real and... He felt
a giddy delight rising in his brain. Everything that had been dismissed so many
times, every idea he'd been told was invalid, every way the world could have
been bigger and brighter...
But the same inquisitive stubbornness and obsessive sense of rightness that
had lead him to insist on those facts was holding him back. How did this fit
with the God he'd met, haranguing his creations in the Garden of Eden? Why
hadn't he been able to access this truer, brighter past?
As Ted chewed on the impossible possibility, Shinigami Girl said, "You know,
for some reason, I was expecting a Utahraptor instead. Is this a Jurassic World
reference?"
Actually, no - it turns out that Utahraptor lived millions of years before
Tyrannosaurus and Dromiceiomimus, but Velociraptor was within spitting distance,
geologically speaking.
"Oh, yes," said Dead Boy, "because I can see why you'd want to make sure you
were being completely scientifically accurate in your description of the
Dinosaur LNH."
The three of them were lead to a clearing, where the fragrant ferns were thin
on the loamy ground. There, sitting on a circle of rocks and grumbling about it,
were the Before God Guys - The Cheapest Skate, Dentures Dan, Doctor I. Forget,
Geezer Gorilla, the Perpetual Virgin, and the Wrinkly Old Bag. They saw them,
the shadows of human forms in the prehistoric rainforest, and leapt to
readiness... stood to readiness... pushed and groaned and unkinked to readiness.
"God's other friends," murmured Ted.
"Yeah, and ours too!" Ridiculous-Dreamer T-Rex stepped into the clearing and
lowered his head towards the Wrinkly Old Bag.
Ted froze up, thinking he was about to witness a reenactment of the lawyer-
toilet scene from Jurassic Park - but he just held his nose in front of her, and
she smiled and stroked between his nostrils. "Thank you, dear. Now, I've just
heard a rumor that the Brotherhood of Evil Cephalopods is about to steal the
pluperfect conjunctive tense, why don't you go see about that?"
The T-Rex gasped! "SHENANIGANS!" He pointed his tiny arms dynamically in the
air. "Dinosaur LNH, AWAY!"
After the dinosaurs had stampeded off, Ted walked into the circle of really
extremely elderly heroes, flanked by Shinigami Girl and Dead Boy. He looked
around at their waiting faces, gripped his pipe, and chewed on the end of it. "I
absolutely loathe being this confused."
"I believe we can help with that," said the deep, warm, voiced-by-Phil-LaMarr
voice of Geezer Gorilla. "To begin with the 'why', we knew whoever went after
God would want to tie up loose ends. So we came here."
"But-- how!?" Ted took a deep breath of the strange air, younger than
anything he'd ever breathed by millions of years. "How did you even know such a
place, such a *time* existed?"
"All will be explained," said Dentures Dan, creaking into a dramatic
position, pointing at the sky.. "But first you must learn... the secret identity
of God!"
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Author's Notes: I came up with the basic idea for the Dinosaur LNH way back in
2014, and it's fascinating to be coming back to it in a time when Ryan North is
a well-known superhero writer.
My early notes for this story had an Orphans of Mars reference which I really
couldn't find space for, but I figured I'd put it here:
----
"I don't get it - where are the lesbian aliens?" said Ted the Time-Traveling
Atheist.
"You're thinking of a different imprint," said Dead Boy.
----
Drew "need to get the last few volumes of Squirrel Girl" Nilium
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