THE CHRONICLES OF FINALGAMER
A Dino's Crisis

"If there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it's that life will not be contained.  Life breaks free.  It expands to new territories.  It crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously."
Dr Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

Awakening once more, the first thing he felt was a cold wind howling all around him, standing up in what appeared to be a desolate fenced-off area.  The salty scent of seawater coming from one direction made him believe he was in a dockyard area, with a forest stretching out in another direction, dark and looming.  There was also a large building straight ahead, tall and imposing.  Stumbling against a few boxes after a particularly fierce wind, James panted hard to catch his breath, looking around himself.  It was pure darkness except for the few pale lights that shone on the other sides of the fences around him, as well the full moon above him.
Thankful to have his head finally clear of the morphine, he also felt a terrible chill with the hospital gown he was still wearing, trying to wrap it around him in some pretence of warmth as he tenderly walked towards the gate in one of the fences, leading to a guardhouse.  He realised he had forgotten his jeans back in an alleyway in Mute City, and briefly lamented their loss.  The place showed no sign of occupation for now, but it did show it had some at one time.  Glass shards were on the ground, cool to the touch.  Further past was a storage area fenced off, with one part of the fence torn outwards giving a messy cookie-cutter hole of something that slashed through.
	"So," said the raptor to himself, "What's it gonna be?  Super human?  Experiment?  Some monster that just happens to live here?"
He turned around to go back the other way only to hear a clink of something at his feet, looking down to see brass bullet shells scattered about.
Bending down, he examined them in the moonlight.  They shined eerily, cool and abandoned from their mother womb that was the gun clip.  The brass didn't feel that cold however.  A fight had happened some while ago but not as long as he'd expected.  He wondered if he was going to be in the middle of this fight soon.

He shook the idea from his head and walked onwards, the facility before him looking dark and suspiciously abandoned.  Opening the door with a creak, he walked in to find a metallic sleek-looking hall of windows all along the right side of him, each one of them making him feel wary.
They were tinted dark so he couldn't see what was outside, so only sounds could keep him alert.  For now, he heard nothing.  The silence made him feel just as uneasy.  As he turned a corner, he saw a double-set of doors which was locked beside him, with some flyers on a notice board next to it.  They spoke about some physics experiment that went completely over his head, and so he dutifully ignored the flyers, looking towards the end of the corridor.
Down the end of the corridor was another door behind a fence of lasers.  However he was not entirely trapped, for a vent opening was clearly above the laser fence, the covering of which had been pulled off and left smack underneath it.
	"Well, that's not too hard."
Using his natural jumping skills, he leaped as high as he could and grabbed the vent interior hastily before scrabbling upwards and inside, finding a rather large ventilation shaft.  It was large enough for him to stand upright and walk through.  Taking a breath after the jump with a stiffening pain in his legs, he walked along the ventilation, the lights of various units illuminating him in shades of green, red and yellow.
Eventually he reached another vent opening, leaping down into a more cramped corridor with a few lighted doors, one of which was directly behind him.  He opened it softly to see it lead into a room with two elevators and a map of the facility.  It was stained in blood and stood on its own, made of some see-through durable material.
Examining it somewhat, James noticed a huge room nearby that he could access, tracing along the way with his clawfinger, as well as finding behind the map a human corpse, slashed deep into his side.
	"Ahhhh hah."
James bent down to examine the body, clearly dead but checking the ID card on him, seeing the person was of the Ibis Island facility.
	"Huh...ohhh right, Ibis, dammit.  Well, I might as well explore a little...lessee if I can't get to this big room, looks kind of like the entrance to the place."
Tracing his way back, he noticed he had to go once again through the vents, and did so to another hallway of a more green-lit appearance.  Unfortunately, he noticed there was a laser gate in the way of the large room's door.  Beside him was one door, and behind was another. He went to the one behind him.
A locker room, the place rather wrecked with two bodies on the floor.

He tried each locker he could, most of them locked, a few of which had weaker locks which he attempted to claw at then gnaw with his fierce teeth.  One of them gave way, and he opened to find nothing but a Glock 18 handgun and an ID card.  Taking both, the card in the pocket of his gown and the gun in his hand, he left and headed back out to the laser gate.  He almost put his finger into the trigger guard, but remembered Sarah's lessons on gun safety and chose not to.
He noticed beside the laser gate was a panel, but found there was nowhere to put in the ID card.  Annoyed, he tried the other door next to it, where there lied an office with one computer, and a lot of files on desktops against walls with one partitioned separate room.
	"Hey, maybe one of these'll hack it open."
To his dismay he only found reports about how certain panels worked with two card keys, stuff he could care less about.  The lockers and boxes had nothing but a few spark plugs.  When he checked the partitioned area, he got startled.
	"JESUS!"
Moving back suddenly against the door, he glared at the corpse of another human, this one clearly dead from the huge bite chunk out of the side of his body.
	"Fucking hell, what's with this place?"
He became a little panicked and got out sharpish to the hallway outside, the lasers mocking him.  Finally his patience ran out.
	"Oh fuck it, it worked last time."
He shot at the panel which began to sizzle and sputter, the lasers starting to flicker on and off randomly.  Taking his time, he ran through as soon as they turned off, and headed into the large room.

The main entrance of the facility, which was indeed Ibis Island as was emblazoned upon the main floor, was overshadowed by the set of stairs to the second floor, with three doors to go.  One double-door hat was the entrance itself, one under the stairs that had an odd panel on it for two card keys, and another door across the way, which James soon found was locked.
Trying the main entrance, he saw devastation outside.  The once lovely forecourt area of some plants and a gate, was now ruined with a few bodies.  Strange creatures cried out from above in the night sky, and a truck had piled through one side of a concrete wall blocking the way.
	"Guess I gotta go up."
Sighing, he head back in he walked up the stairs and found another door, taking him to a bright white corridor with three more doors.  One was of fancy wood panelling with another two-card-key panel, one at the other end of the hall that he saw lead to the outside on a walkway, and another to a bar halfway to the left of his entrance.  It stood directly opposite the wooden door, where a ruined painting and leather couch once stood.
	"The hell...are these...slash marks?"
The ripped painting and couch worried him, looking at his own claws and raking through the leather to compare.  They looked disturbingly similar.
	"Wh...what...no no, other creatures have claws, come on James, don't be a moron.  Maybe I can get a drink."
He walked into the bar, a darkish room where thankfully some drinks did remain at the neon-lit clinical-feeling bar itself, mixing himself a small cocktail to go with.
The selection was meagre so he had to make do with a rather pissy fruity drink that made him sneer slightly for even considering to drink.  As he collected his thoughts, sitting up on a bar stool and calming down with a weak orange cocktail, he heard a sound from outside the room.  The sound of footsteps, but not human ones.  Humans didn't make the click-clack of claws when they walked.

Keeping himself steady, he readied his gun as he heard it come through the door, a wall between the bar and door's direct line of sight making good cover.  He ducked behind the bar, thankful for Sarah's basic training in firearms that he received.  The creature came closer towards him, the neon lights not helping the already poor lighting of the bar, barely able to see the shape that came closer.  A familiar-looking head appeared that he could not place, and a strange purring sound from the beast tingled at his mind.
Soon he made a mistake, his tail accidentally hitting a few bottles and alerting the creature, which charged at him with a hissing screech.
	"AAAGH!"
Firing insanely at the shadow, the lights flickered and gave him brief visions of scales as it leapt at the bar, crashing into the bottles, pouring liquids all over both of them as James shot at its head and slashed at its gut.  The creature countered with a few strikes from its claws at his arm.  It was vicious and unrelenting, slicing away with thick black claws that tried to tear at James' face.
	"GET THE FUCK OFF!"
Firing half the ammo in his gun, James eventually managed to make the creature stop as it fell and laid on top of him.  Moving away immediately, he got up and ran out of the bar back into the well-lit hallway, panting heavily and shuddering at the scars on his arm.  They hurt but were thankfully not too deep, though they did start to bleed a little.  He didn't care about his partly-torn gown.
	"Fuck...wha...what was that thing..."
He was curious to go back inside, but didn't dare, trying to sit on the torn couch and relax.  He tried to calm himself down as he let his wounds heal up with a little swift rip of his gown to bandage up the worst wounds.  After he breathed hard for half a minute, the clacking of claws started again from directly in front of him.  It wasn't dead.
Aiming his gun at the door, he stood up and waited, shaky in his aim, hearing it come closer.  Eventually the door was nudged open.
	"COME ON OUT!  I-I'M NOT AFRAID OF YOU!"
The door soon opened enough to reveal what the monster was, slowly revealing brown scaly skin as its head weakly came into view.  The raptor gasped in shock.  It was a velociraptor, just like him minus his unique purple marks, but the same species nevertheless.  It hissed weakly at him, wounded badly, eyes still hungering for him.
	"Wh-wha...n-n-no...s-s-stay back..."
His voice lost his nerve, the shock of seeing his own species primal as they once were in a place like this.  It made him panic more, his breaths stuttering as the velociraptor got out of the room and hobbled nearer.
	"I MEAN IT!  STAY BACK O-O-OR I'LL SHOOT!"
The creature growled lowly, either in pain or in anger, it didn't matter to James.  But it was starting to concern him, his own whimpers of distress seeming to speak out to the raptor.  Despite this, it walked closer, claws at the ready.  He lost his patience as he roared in a panicked voice:
	"I SAID GET BACK!"

He fired furiously at the prehistoric reptile, emptying the remaining ammo in the handgun directly into its skull.  The creature screeched with a small explosion of blood from its head as it fell forwards towards James, landing on the glass shards of the former painting directly at his feet.
Seeing the raptor dead before him, James didn't register his actions of self-defence for a few minutes.  In fact he was starting to question if it was self-defence at all by that point, as the creature's blood began to pool into a puddle beside itself.  The red ichor reflected the fluorescent lights and James' own face staring back at him.  And as it did, he suddenly shook and convulsed in sickening shame, doubling over and dropping the pistol into the puddle in horror.  The splash distorted his face, tears shaking out as he saw the body of his fellow raptor, holes still smoking from the neck and head.
	"Oh god...fu...f-f-fu...no...no no no god th-this isn't happening, this isn't happening..."
He put his hands to his face and began to heave tears from himself, which slid between his claws and dripped into the blood puddle.  Even when he had killed others of several other species, this was his first raptor.  The first one of his own kind, and not even an anthro.  A real velociraptor.  It was practically his ancestor.  He wasn't even sure if it was going to attack him in its wounded state and he killed it regardless.
As selfish as his grief became, it nevertheless blasted his mind with terrible ramifications as he wept onto his knees.  He didn't know why it was affecting him so much other than the fact he killed a creature so kindred to him.  Perhaps this was how humans felt when they first killed an ape, his uncontrollable lament of shaking and sputtering followed by an unearthly screeching howl of confused anguish came, as his mind cracked up with this particular raptor's death.
He felt everything rushing through his mind and vision.  His childhood, his life with Sarah, the fossils in Crossville, the dinosaur fossils, his ancestry, how Daisy told him about all this and showed him the past right up to her death.  It was all taking a toll on him, connecting to his memories in twisted ways as he screamed and shuddered, his mind seizing up until finally...he stopped.

All his memories and thoughts slipped from his mind.  He didn't even notice the switch turning off in his head as his eyes turned blank, and his tears soon stopped.  His speech faded away as he watched the corpse of his ancestral brethren become more and more alike with him than ever.  He felt as if he had been asleep for a long time, only to suddenly wake up to the smell of a velociraptor's blood and the bitter stench of cordite from the bullet wounds.  Soon he could not even remember his own name.  To him it suddenly felt like he never even had a name.  Never needed one.  He took on a strange pose, bending his legs and body low to the ground.
With his well-developed claws out front, he churred and looked around him, looking at the gown on his body which was soon torn away in an instant by surprised claws, ridding himself of the suddenly uncomfortable cotton.  The born-again raptor wandered in the direction his fallen brother had come from.  His first word in this new state of mind was not even that of English, but of a more simpler instinctive tongue.  A small chirring sound that meant one thing.
	"Food."

The room of irritating flickering lights and weird liquids offered no sustenance to him, but he smelt the blood of the other raptor in the room as well as smoke he did not recognise.  Leaving, he went walking further and smelt some blood in the room of the wooden door, clawing in and trying to break it down, but found it too strong.
	"FOOD!  ARGH!  Food must be nearby!"
He wasn't even going to consider eating the raptor nearby.  It smelt too odd for him because of the smoke, which he realised had come from the metal thing near where he "woke up".  What did it mean?  He didn't even want to chew on the warm odorous metal as he walked to the larger room, seeing the area downstairs and leaping the stairs to the ground expertly.  He headed outside through the doors, which surprisingly opened just for him.
	"Why do these walls open for me but not others?  Walls never do that."
His mind felt addled, and he could barely remember anything of before.  All he knew was that he was hungry, and he smelt meat nearby at last.  Leaping over the small trees in a marble trough of dirt with unnatural lights between them, he found a human body, already torn but still cold raw meat.
	"FOOD!"
He hungrily set upon it with joy, nomming on the flesh tenderly to test it before he tore an arm off for himself and stripped the meat, spitting out the clothes that offered no nutrition to him.  Feasting on the arm until it was nothing but bone between his claws, he licked his lips clean of blood and murred in relish for having a full stomach.  At first the taste of human flesh was odd to him, as if he had never tasted it before, but he needed nourishment to fuel his body.  He did not care about taste, only for sustenance.
	"Foooood....mmmmm...where do I go now?"
He noticed one of the walls had been broken down with a large machine and clambered over it to the outside area, where he noticed a forest.  Primal memories stirred in him as he looked once more at the large metal building before running into the trees.  Zipping through them, dodging between them with expert swiftness, the moon guided him with its soothing natural light further and further into the woods.  Eventually he smelt something and stopped suddenly.
	"...others?"
He was intrigued but also anxious as he walked in the direction of the scent of his species, eventually hearing the sounds of claws on the forest floor, walking nearer towards one of them.  Taking care to show he meant no harm, for now at least, they soon spotted him and immediately hissed in warning, gazing at him.

He knew others were in the woods nearby.  Such was the way of the velociraptor, to spread out and ambush, but he merely went into a submissive posture and chirred:
	"Please, I mean no harm!"
The alpha of the pack stared at him, curious at the complete submission and walked closer, accepting it.
	"Where is your territory?  Where is your pack?"
	"I don't know...I've been lost for so long without any memory...so long that I can't even remember how long..."
In James' new state of mind this was true, for with a new identity he had no history to recollect on.  The alpha kept his distance but when James approached them, they turned defensive with claws raised.
	"Keep your distance, stranger!  Your scent is not one we trust."
	"My scent?"
	"It smells...strange...like everything else in this land but moreso."
	"I must be from further away, I can't remember anything.  Please, guide me as one of your own, I have no pack to be with, I will do whatever you wish!"
He placed his claws on the ground as if worshipping it as he laid down, making himself completely vulnerable.
	"We do not take strangers, especially ones with such a scent."
	"I can soon have your scent, please!  I will do anything to belong somewhere...I'm all alone..."
	"No, you are-"
	"PLEASE!  I...I can't live alone...I'm so lost..."
The whimpering and submissive posture from the newly-primal raptor stirred some basic empathy in the alpha.  Realising that James was being honest with the utmost submission, he walked over to his side and firmly bit down on James' neck in dominance.  He did not break the skin but put his head down to growl:
	"Disobey me and I will slaughter you to be a feast for our pack.  You will do whatever I demand regardless of your condition, as I expect from every one in my pack, male and female."
James whimpered but accepted the offer eagerly.
	"Oh...thank you my leader, thank you!  I will be as willing as a female in season!"
	"Very well."
The alpha took his jaws off the raptor's neck and walked away into the compound with his pack, beckoning James to follow.  With a tender neck he trodded after them, staying behind all of them for in his most feral of memories, he knew that as the newest member of the pack he would be at the very bottom of the ladder.

He travelled with the pack, doing nothing that they would do unless ordered.  And with nothing to hunt for the time being, they returned to the pack within a large rocky clearing of the forest, not too far from the cliff edge of the island itself.  At their return, a female raptor nuzzled the alpha, chirring sweetly at his return, before the pack noticed James at the back, hissing and raising their claws angrily at him.
	"Who is this!?!"
	"An intruder!"
	"His scent is strange, why is he here!??!"
	"SILENCE!"
The Alpha screeched to his pack to gain their attention.
	"This stranger came to us while we were out hunting, he has no memory of where he is from, and he knows not of his own pack.  He begged and submitted himself before me, claiming loyalty to me to be a part of this pack."
	"Alpha, how can you trust him!?  Look, he smells like those who live in the shining rocks!"
	"And his markings..."
One raptor came up towards him, sniffing his snout and growling at the purple scars all over his body.
	"They are not natural!  They reek of the hairless!"
	"Perhaps he was captured by them.  Stranger, do you remember anything at all?"
James replied tentatively in whimpers as he looked up to the Alpha.
	"I...I can't...I remember tiny images...I remember...pains in my head, strange pale hairless creatures looking down on me..."
	"There, Beta, you have your proof, he was captured by them.  They must have used him for their purposes, perhaps to study us."
	"Hmmm...then why does he come here, into our pack?"
	"He wishes to reunite himself with his true self, that which the hairless took away from him, piercing his mind and body with their shining stone.  They wished to study us, learn our ways by unnatural ways, at the cost of this youth's memory."
	"...perhaps you are right, my leader," said Beta with a snarl at both Alpha and James.  "But if this stranger acts in a way unnatural to us, make no mistake that I will kill him, immediately."
	"I will do my best to aid this pack," said James in the primal tongue, "as if it were my own, my leader!"
He chirred this with hopeful enthusiasm, but Alpha merely rushed forwards slashing at James' face to screech:
	"YOU DO NOT SPEAK UNLESS SPOKEN TO, HATCHLING!"
James whimpered and submitted as he was berated to for his mistake.
	"Remember, you are beneath even the eggs of this pack.  Even if a hatchling demands you pluck the sun from the sky as if it were fruit, you will do so, or we shall cast you out before hunting you down as our prey!  Do you understand?"
	"A-AAGH...Y-y-yes, my leader, I'm sorry my leader, I will obey everyone in this pack, everyone!"
	"Until we have made you one of ours, then you may be allowed some privileges.  And to even become one of us, you must earn our trust."
	"Anything my leader, anything!"
	"Then for now, we must rest, for the night has gone on long enough.  You, stranger, are not allowed within the pack grounds if unguarded, so you will sleep away from us."
	"Wh-where?"
The leader beckoned James towards a tree further away, but in clear sight of everyone in the pack.  He urinated upon the bark, pressing himself against the tree with his claws, his sheath exposing a well-hung feral penis.
	"Here is where you will sleep.  If you wish to be one of us, you will do whatever we demand, whenever we demand."
	"Yes, my leader."
	"Now sleep.  We shall see how we may initiate you into our pack when the sun rises."
And so James slept against the tree, the powerful stench of the alpha raptor's urine making him sneer, but the strength of it made him whimper and lie against the stained bark.  Helpless and with nowhere else to go, entranced by a dominant male, to be a part of his own kind in a strange new world, with a strange new mind.  A mind he felt he had never had before.
His dreams were nonsensical yet familiar, his mind scrabbling to repair itself in the downtime of sleep.  Memories flitted back and forth, showing the faces of all kinds of species that tingled the faintest of familiarity at the back of his head, all of them as faint as a lit match within a deep cavern.