Hi there! Welcome to... whatever this is, haha... ha...

Backwoods and Frontier are synonyms by the way. This story's a pun. Just, just so y'all know.

Also, I changed the three parks' names from "Asia", "America", and "Europe" to Regis, Ilum, and Midell because connecting fossil fighters back to real life is lame, and that's it hahaha.

Last sidenote – this chapter is a sort of "special" preview/interlude thingy, so uh if you think it's hecking weird but still want to give this story a shot, the next chapter introduces our thirteen year old mess of a main character if you just wanna jump on right to him xD

Thanks for reading!

Backwoods

1: Lonely Brute

With the genius invention of Doctor Doug Diggins rolled up and kept snug in place by his folded arm, Rupert faces the horrors up ahead. He forces an expressionless silence, a desert of still, over himself, then gently elbows the boy next to him. "Now what?"

"Psssshhh," his spiky-gray-haired companion snorts hard. "I don't know! D'you know? Because I sure as heck don't. Also, what in the world are... whatever those are?" His—scaled—hand points wildly at the vehicles revving themselves up a storm of smoke in the vast metallic plain. It's the very same one the two boys crouch on the fringes of. What in the world have they fallen into this time around?

If not for some conveniently-left metalwork that appeared to be once a part of the ceiling, they would've been spotted, perhaps, had the two curious vehicles bothered to stop circling.

"I—Wh-Why would I?" Rupert sputters, nipping his tongue in the process. "Wh—... Why are you asking me? You're the one who enforced Diggins with the task of building the time machine in the first place!"

"Ha!" spiky-haired hoots, "to save youuuuur wife!"

Rupert flushes angrily. "She is not merely my wife, Dino! Or does your sister not matter all that much to you?"

Dino flushes back, hiding a smile behind a hand covered in reptilian scales. The dinaurian's tail twitches. "Y-Yeah, well. Y'know." He doesn't elaborate, but then he coughs and adds, "I'm just tryna be funny, man..."

Rupert's golden eyes hood. "This isn't a laughing matter."

"I, I know that, I'm just being cheerful and..."

The dinaurian decidedly does not whimper, not at all.

Within a hush, the two watch the monstrosity unfold. A pair of gargantuan vehicles, cars or something, but impossibly larger and sleeker, continue to hypnotically circle one another. They cruise in an enclosed dome of sorts. No door in sight. No, ah, normal, non-futuristic door, at least. Their heads poke out from around the mound of scrap metal, and they watch, mesmerized, terrified, as the metal beasts rev and circle and rev again.

There's the chunk of open ceiling, where all the metalwork had fallen from, but neither of the men quite amass the height to, ah, reach it...

"How f-far are we in the future again?" Rupert whispers, his already quiet voice a ghost of sound.

"Uhhh..." Dino snags the folded up cloth from under Rupert's arm. A little glass box on the edge, like a tag, reads off some funny bright numbers. "Hmm. How far ahead is this from where we came from, though..."

His companion glances over and his face expression dissolves. "Wh-What? We must be further ahead than..." Counts silently. Pale fingers waver over the numbers. "Seven digits, that would be..."

"That would be what?"

Rupert has neglected to respond. "I-I don't want to think about it. If Diggins correctly inputted the calculations, we should be fine."

"Yeaaaaaah... That's real sketch, but—whatever, buddy."

They fall into a silence of their own, hovering, waiting, restlessly waiting. An acrid stench—unknown to the palates of the boys from the past—leaves an ugly taste in their mouths. Like burning, but... thicker. The cars endlessly circle as if caught in a time loop of their own until finally the dark sleek one breaks out of cue and bashes against the side of the other.

Neither can tell what any of it means. Then a sound, shrill at first, erupts from the successfully smashed vehicle—an electric purple that hurts to directly gaze upon. Some sort of electronically... transmitted voice crackles to life within the gaping mechanism: "When will you stop being such a goober, Mister Stryker? It's rather annoying to have the ceiling of my submarine decimated! Why don't you be a normal person and, I don't know... ring the doorbell. We actually are equipped with one, you see. It's, ah, at the top. A nice tidy little button. Burgundy. My favorite color."

Dino covers his chuckling mouth, but it's the only hint of mirth that escapes into the otherwise frigid atmosphere.

An icy twirl of tension strikes like hail upon the eavesdroppers. Rupert visibly shudders. Dino's eyes bounce off and settle over the commotion ahead, his brow neatly furrowed into a crisp crease. Then a similarly electronic reply spits out of the black monster-car: "You are the villain here! Hand over the uncharted documents, Blacknycto! I am saving mankind from you"—as if to puncture his statement, the stupid black monster-car revs some more, causing the boys to cough—"and your intolerant horribleness!" He breaks out of line, wheels churning, and swerves at the electric purple beast—but Mister Stryker's prey has prepared this time and makes a quick vroom on out of there.

Dino watches with his mouth gaping, then mutters, "Do you think the drivey things are talking, or are there people actually inside? Or are the people on other sides of the planet and they're transmitting themselves into here?"

"I don't know..." Rupert releases a slow avalanche of breath. "I just want to find Dina. The—You said Diggins configured some way for the time portal to... what, follow wherever the silly fiend who kidnapped Dina had gone afterward, through some sort of energy transmission far over our heads? S-So presumably, she was here, at some point. The only... question is where she may be now."

Reluctant golden eyes arched toward the ceiling's hole.

His spiky-haired companion swallows. His dark gaze shivers. "Yeah. Darn it, stupid annoying weirdos who blast into the past and just, gotta steal cute orangey-haired dinaurian... sisters or whatever..." He ends in a pout, almost childish, but he can't bring himself to look away from the cars up ahead, peering through the windows.

"I KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE!" the shiny black one suddenly screams.

"Oh hey," Dino tries, "maybe he has Din—"

"RELEASE THE GIRL AT ONCE! I DON'T KNOW HOW YOU WARPED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS IN THE PAST AND—AND MANAGED TO CATCH A GLIMMER OF THE BEAUTIFUL, GLORIOUS VISAGES OF THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO CREATED OUR SOCIETY FROM THREE OR FOUR ISLANDS AND SOME REPTILIAN ALIENS, BUT SHE DOES NOT BELONG WITH YOU!"

Oh.

"That worked very well," he remarks and Rupert's face lights up like the moon above a snowlit sky, somewhere cold and unbearable and lifeless. He can feel his heart again, beating beneath numb layers of ice. "Now what, bub? Break in and scream at them until things go our way?"

They speak in hushed tones beneath the one man's rambling screams. Mister Stryker, was it? What a funky name.

"I-I doubt breaking in and screaming would be of much use."

"Ooh! I know. Let's sic Droplet on them." From his hand, a gleaming medal shuffles as if to peek through the boy's scaly fingers and catch a glimpse of the fantastical battle. A krona, a finned monster from the seas with a blue stripe down its sleek, white back, shimmers upon the front of it. "Droplet would know what to do."

Rupert pinches the bridge of his nose, slowly, his golden gaze elsewhere. "What, and Torn as well? The little... nuisance would perhaps frighten these strange people who lack themselves vivosaurs. Their... mechanical traps yet miss much of what our... friends could offer."

A corresponding dimetro—a vivosaur with a red sail along his spine—growls in Rupert's coat pocket.

"Well, what else can we do? What if we had them break open the windows and one of them found Dina, like, casually chilling on the ground? Then we could just open up the time portal and get the hecking heck outta here."

"Yes, but—

Dino raises his arm and Rupert, sensing it, promptly grabs him by the elbow and pulls him back. "Not yet! W-Wait, at least. That loud Stryker man has been ranting for some time now, but I hear him falling back. Wait and see what they say next."

With a reluctant ease to his hand, Dino drops it. His fingers clench tightly around the medal, waiting, watching his friend for some sort of mysterious, ulterior cue.

In the reverberating din of a sudden silence, the older man's gravelly tone returns, washing away the pain of Stryker's raw impassioned screaming. "Can—Do you have no off button? Chill out, for once. Goodness gracious. The young lady is of no harm, you know. I was just testing things is all. And now that I have her, I'll return her at some point, but not until I see my uses met with he—"

Rupert intakes a sharp breath that stabs him internally, a phantom wound in his throat. "H-He could mean so many horrible things by that—"

"Then let's attack now—"

"D-Dino! Not yet! W-Wait, what if we hurt her more by showing now?"

For once, the spiky-haired dinaurian halts himself. "Oh. Shoot. Didn't think of that... d-dang it." He folds his arms around his chest and stares through layers of gray. "I hate this."

"Just a little longer.

Rupert's hand, after a hesitant nudge, brushes against his friend's. "Just a little longer and w-we won't come back to this mess ever again. We've... fought ancient beings of total destruction, ah, old vivosaurs who amassed obscene levels of strength, the one that became a zombie, the one that possessed Dina—We... we can do this."

That loud younger fellow in the black car breaks in as if on cue: "RELEASE THE GIRL!"

"You literally are going to stare at her like she's your cute little specimen. And you'll never let her go home, and—no. I'm actually just enacting myself a little social experiment here, Stryker, I-I'll have you know—"

"YOU MONSTER!"

Rupert lets out a breath. "This is steadily pacing in the direction of nowhere." Closes his eyes. "Get the bloody krona out."

With great gusto, his friend complies, flinging his aquamarine medal over the junk heap.

Immediately the small disc morphs, with a burst of light, into the finned creature depicted upon the cold surface. She shakes herself, and little water speckles pool below her floating finned body, as if she's treading air. And maybe she is. Dino never figured out how that works, but it does, so it does.

Droplet swooshes through thin air and—remembering her manners—taps at the glass of the glossy black car. She speaks telepathically, as vivosaurs do, to the guy within, proving that they are hidden somewhere inside their strange mechanisms: So uh, can we have her back now? She's kind of a human being, and all, and also I'll just, um, rip your fancy metal thingies apart if you don't, so like...

In Rupert's pocket, the red dimetro grovels about and curses frequently, but he waits, and he waits rather patiently for the whole shebang to blow over with.

"Wh-What sort of vivosaur are you?" the overly emotional Stryker cries.

Uh, a krona? I, uh, come from underwater? And like, I'm the best, obviously. So that's kind of a giant punch to my pride right there...

"Huh. Never seen one of those before."

"IT MUST BE DINA'S!"

Dino lowers his head. "But... she's not Dina's, though... that's not cool... They apparently know all the fun things about my sister, and not me..."

"Th-That's strange, though," Rupert mutters. "Why would they know so much about her? Enough to configure a time machine and approach an exact interval where she is still alive, however many years in the past! Wh-What are we, some... celebrity-status people? In this world, we haven't existed in hundreds of... th-thousands of years..."

Dino flips his hair. "We're just cool like that."

"Well, maybe you are—"

"Awww, Rupy, that is no way to treat yourself! C'mon, settle down and stuff, you."

Then Droplet, the loyal companion she is, adds, Yeah, no, I'm Dino's, you idiots. I mean I don't know how you'd know that, actually, but... She stumbles. Wait, frick, I totally just revealed that we've been hiding over there in that junk pile for the past, what, five zillion years.

One of the giant cars zooms toward the junk pile and Rupert and Dino stumble backwards. "Droplet!" the latter shouts, "you literally just ruined everything, but it's fine!"

That loud screamy Stryker voice goes flying out of his vehicle at top speeds. "YOU ARE THE CHOSEN ONES OF THE OLDEN AGE, THE FIRST ORDER! I CANNOT BELIEVE I'VE BEEN HONORED ENOUGH TO BE GIFTED AN OFFHAND GLIMPSE OF YOU IN THIS WAY! THE PRODIGY, RUPERT, AND THE...

Dino's self esteem kick-drops itself off the cliff in his gut. "DINO! YOU! YES, YOU! OH, AND YOU'RE BOTH SO YOUNG! NEITHER OF YOU HAVE EVEN SIRED CHILDREN YET! WHAT A TIME IT IS TO BE ALIVE!"

"G-Goodness, I think it's about time to leave," Rupert mutters, ducking under a bit of metalwork hopefully tiny enough the car can't get in. He shoots for Dino's arm but misjudges and snags his tail, but it works alright and the two huddle beneath the metal awning.

"Now what?" Dino mouths, but of course neither of them know anything about anything that they are doing, so they just stare at each other in a moment of abject terror as they hear the trundle of the other car coming up and by.

Loud, like mountains—if mountains had feet—are moving, too quickly for their own good. Rupert could feel in his throat the drop of cold terror as they shuffle, his heart thundering, cursing the silly krona who got them into this mess until he remembers that it possibly would've ended this way no matter how it all started—

What had that Stryker man said about siring children?

…

An unbelievably uncomfortable sensation erupts all over Rupert's body. It's like this stranger had planted him on a table and opened him up from the inside, and now all of the vital things that make him Rupert are busy being shown off to the rest of the world.

But then a tiny ladder pops out of the car parked in front of them—the purple striped one, the non black one, the not Stryker one.

Sharing a singular look, the two wordlessly climb up and enter.

Rupert finds himself clutched within someone else's arms. When he dares look upon them, his breath shudders in his throat: there his orangey-haired wife stands in front of him.

He checks her over—no bruises, no... no horrible fear in her eyes, no, nothing.

Somewhere behind lies a man, a man cast in the shadow of his own image, the heart of his mechanical monster. "You... I didn't expect any of you to discover the power of time travel within the week." Then a pause. "Sorry to scare you. I just wanted to prove a point."

Dino, leaning against the sleek wall, props his arm out a window and catches his krona's medal. "Prove what point?" While he asks it, he leans too far and just about falls out the window, until his arm lashes out and he jumps back, snaps the window shut, face red.

"Oh, nothing. It's a dumb game I play with good old Mister Stryker."

Rupert and Dino share a glance. "Oh...

The dinaurian coughs into a scaled fist. "But Dina's unharmed, so..."

And decidedly they leave it off at that.

Instead of asking any further questions, Dino pulls the magical white cloth out from under his arm and lays it out like a picnic blanket on the ground. The three pile in and they press a little switch in the side, and with a bright light it's all over, mercilessly over. The afterburn stains Blacknycto's dark, putrid eyes.

He turns ahead again, and his face casts within the void of darkness. "Just a silly old game we play... a game where he tries to make me play by his rules, and I almost do, but never quite, never quite what the silly man wants. I work with the wardens, he says no. I go off to do my own work, he says no. I try to rip him out of my hair... he says no.

"But can he say no to this?

Dangerously quiet eyes follow the way around the bone buggy until hitting the blueprints mocking up some sort of time portal. "She was a nice girl. I sure wish more people were nice like that in this day and age.

"Oh how the labors of this world have made me so very... very tired."

And in the midst of his pondering, Stryker's massive black buggy rams into the front of his vehicle, jostling and jostling until the shadows overwhelm.

Psshhh this is pretty intense

Torner's next though, and he's a real treat

ahaha, thanks for reading!