In the ether of his mind, he found himself walking before he realised he was walking, across a narrow rocky path through a foggy void.  He now stood somewhat stronger than before, not hunched down with claws out, but striding with legs tall and arms swinging back and forth.  it was as if nothing had happened at all, the mind of Oddscar slowly slipping between the voids of consciousness, between the ego and the id.  One side purple-clouded with a cold wind, the other a lustruous green of a blazing intensity.  The ground felt like it was floating, but James did not dare look over the edge, walking towards the end of the abyss, the rushing sound of wind howling past his cheeks as if he were in a cavern.
A voice came to him, distorted, the raptor unable to tell its gender.
	"You're almost there James."
	"Wh...who is that?"
He hadn't realised that his voice was slowly turning less into growls and more into English.
	"You've been sleeping for a long time, haven't you?"
	"I....I don't know."
	"It's been too long, but you will finally wake up.  But you will have some...baggage."
	"Wh-what?  Who are you?"
Walking out of the fog was a velociraptor like himself, bloody with bullet holes in his face, the same purple markings as himself with piercing feral eyes and thin pupils.  His voice no longer held the growls and chirrs of a velociraptor anymore, and looking down upon himself, he saw his own body was more familiar to him.  A gun was in one hand, recently fired.  Looking between the gun and the other raptor, it all clicked in his mind at last as his language came back fully.
	"W-wait...I remember now...the raptor-"
	"Don't worry....we'll call him Mr Scratchy."
	"...that's a stupid name."
	"He will be a part of you now."
	"Then I'm thinking a better name for him."
He felt himself starting to come back, he could feel his memories slowly sliding back into place so neatly.
	"Who is he?"
	"Consider him your mental relief, should you ever become too stressed."
	"No no, I mean WHAT is he?"
	"A reminder of your mortality, and also your aid in strength for the future.  Now James...remember to turn the fire on, and wake up."
	"What are you talking abou-AGH!"
A sudden pressure grew in his head tremendously, a headache that dared to split his mind in half, as the world around him began to melt away, the raptor walking up to him until he rubbed his snout on his chest, hugging the creature's head instinctively close.  As he felt the world around him start to shiver and pulse erratically, a voice more clearly female came to him.
	"James, wake up."

With a flash of light, he roared into awakening, seeing a familiar scene, so far away from the last memory he had.  His mind felt disjointed, remembering how he shot a raptor, but now here he was strapped down to a table.  Humans were above him in lab coats, ready to experiment upon him, ready to cut him open.  Flashbacks kicked in as he saw the grinning sneer of the General back from Chicago, his mind sharpened as his memory as fully intact as he finished his tremendous roar with:
	"GET THE FUCK OFF MEEEE!"
	"Wh-what the!?!"
	"It TALKS!"
	"I CAN DO A HELL OF A LOT MORE THAN THAT!"
With a fury borne from a flashback, he tore through the straps with the thought of fire in his mind, feeling his fists and ankles burning like flames even if he could not see them, the wrist restraints soon melting like jelly to break free from.  Standing up from the lab table he viciously attacked the human with the tazer first before anything else, his neck a bloody fountain as he grabbed the tazer and violently shoved it into one woman's face.  Her eyes twitched and convulsed as he jacked up the setting to make her spasm like an epileptic victim.
	"HOW YA LIKE THIS, YOU LIKE IT, YOU FUCKING BITCH!"
With one more human left after he overshocked the female assistant to death, James ran and wrestled with the remaining scientist as he tried to escape the lab before slashing his stomach open to allow him to bleed slowly to a painful death all over the floor, a thickening puddle of entrails nearing his feet.  Now there was only one naked anthro raptor, standing in the middle of the room with one question only on his mind.
	"Ffffuuuh...huuuh...huuuh...where the hell am I?"
Examining the place around him of high-tech laboratory equipment, he imagined he was back in Chicago being experimented all over again, and his mind felt rather dazed with so many questions.
Have I really been travelling everywhere?  Was it all just a really bad fever dream 'cause of their projects on me?
He looked over himself with his jeans oddly missing, as well as the hospital gown from when he left Mute City.  He also noticed a lot more scars on him than before, healed all over his body.
	"Where the hell did I get these?  I didn't even have these before the F-Zero crash..."

Confused, he left the lab with a keycard from one of the bodies and walked out into the hallways.  So far it seemed nobody had tripped the alarm yet, as he walked through the halls trying to find an exit.  The halls all looked the same, monochrome steel lengths of corner after corner after junction.  Keeping away from any particularly well-armed humans, he found himself at the security room after finding directions towards it.  Assuming that a clue to the way out could lie in there, he headed closer, also assuming that if he could handle security all in one small room he would have an easier time.
One small problem with this was that the security room was not small.  It was in fact two rooms with five guards, all armed with pistols.  All he needed was one at least, so he stood outside the door and cried out pathetically:
	"H-h-help!  S-s-someone!"
One of the guards got up to check on the problem and was immediately grappled by James with claws around the throat and a handgun in the other hand, walking in with a human shield and well armed.
	"Alright everyone get back from the computers!"
	"Wh-what the hell-"
	"GET THE FUCK BACK!"
To make an example he shot one confused security guard in the head, nearly missing but hitting enough to kill him as the others aimed their guns at the strange creature.
	"The fuck are you!?!"
	"Why do you care, you open every door in this place right now or you all die!"
	"Wh-what!?  Th-that's crazy, you can't even-"
	"OPEN.  EVERY.  DOOR.  NOW!"
With a friend held hostage and a gun aimed at them they divvied up between death or danger, the remaining three guards eventually just trying to shoot the raptor who had their friend hostage, who immediately shot back, covering himself with their ally who died pretty quickly from a few good shots to the lungs and jaw.  After enough shots, which was admittedly difficult to do while holding a human body close to him, James managed to kill or cripple them to harmlessness, thankful for his perceptive reflexes as he dropped his body shield and walked over to pick up their ammo clips.  He took a small brown utility bag with him around his waist, hung up on the security office door for the remaining clips.
Looking through the controls he eventually found a few buttons that would open many doors, but not all of them throughout the facility.
	"Let's see what's behind door number one!"
With a dramatic press, he heard the alarm suddenly activate, panicking slightly as the sounds of doors throughout the complex opened up.  It soon released a whole wave of shrieks and panicked cries from the intercoms, mostly to the tune of:
	"THE RAPTORS ESCAPED, GET SPECIAL FORCES HERE NOW!"
	"OH GOD HELP ME, SOMEONE HELP ME!"
	"...oops."

Realising his error, he decided to chance it and looked through all the monitors to find one particularly important corridor with EXIT marked on it, towards a large hangar area.  With this and his handgun, he headed out of the office to run along towards the hangar, following the directions on the walls fervently so while keeping an eye out for the odd armed guard.  So far he found none, but quite a few dead bodies torn to shreds along one way.  Following towards it along a trail of terrible bloody pools towards the hangar, he soon came upon the pack of raptors that had escaped.  11 of them.  All turning round to at first shriek at him in preparation to attack.  But then, after looking at him further, somehow they paused, gazing at him with intense curiosity.
	"Ffffuck."
Aiming a handgun at the raptors before him, flashbacks came to him from the last time this happened.  But he wasn't fooled anymore.  He knew that regardless of what they were, they wanted to kill him and he had to kill to survive.  Yet his aim shook with uncertainty at something tingling in the back of his head.  For a few moments, an eternity existed between thoughts, the gun twitching back and forth more and more at each and every one of them as James fought to control his subconscious anxiety.
	"S-stay back...all of you!  Don't any of you come closer!"
One of them however was rather curious and despite being a feral beast, it chirred in a rather submissive manner.
	"DON'T ANY OF YOU MOVE, I swear to God I'll fucking kill you all if I have to!"
Moving his gun over each and every one of their heads making one or two flinch slightly, they growled and murred in confusion at him, as if trying to question him and his actions.
The one who chirred first at him walked forwards, humbly so, as slowly and as non-threatening as possible which confused James greatly.  His gun aimed shakily at its head.  He soon saw the raptor to be quite heavy, bloated, but not fat.
Pregnant, thought James.  Oh god, he thought, I can't shoot her, she's got eggs, that's just low James, you wouldn't shoot a pregnant girl, would you.
He could see a flicker of something in his mind.  Something just at the edge of his thoughts of another raptor, but for a second.  The pregnant raptor eventually reached him to nuzzle his belly, eyes gazing up at him fearfully, staring directly into the barrel of the gun.  Absolute faith.
	"Wh...what are you doing?"
He was confused.  It didn't dare to bite him, not even a nibble, it just kept nuzzling and licking him affectionately.  And in his deepest memories of another side he would never see, he could catch the faintest scents and sights of something.  Something he understood to mean they wouldn't hurt him.  That and the fact that she was expecting made him panic in his ethics.
	"I...I-i-i-i...you...I...nnnnngh..."
He felt something click in his head, something that seemed to plead to not shoot.
	"I can't...remember...but...you...you know me?"

They did not understand a word he said, and he did not understand them either, yet there was somehow a common ground of understanding between them.  James slowly put his gun down, and the group of raptors all nuzzled him softly.  One particular raptor male turned very submissive towards him, who seemed higher than the rest of the pack by the way they reacted to him.
	"You DO know me.  Well...alright, if you ARE my friends for this, then we're getting out together.  With my brain and your claws, nothing's stopping us.  Let's go!"
Walking in front of them, they followed behind dutifully so, seeming to take him on as the new leader, which James did not question now.  They worked together, navigating corridors, killing enemies that tried to come up to fight them, a few of them got wounded in the fights, but any humans who were unfortunate enough to be in range or not kill them fast enough met a terrible violent end.
James kept cover with his handgun, strafing, covering corners, eventually finding a mean-looking assault rifle and taking it instead with the handgun in his small pouch, barely fitting so he had to be careful with it not falling out.  Before they reached the hangar they found a squadron of Special Forces who had just landed on a helicopter, well-armed with assault rifles, and well-armoured.
	"Shit, guys hold back they'll kill us in seconds."
The raptors seemed to understand and held back, waiting for orders from James, who looked back to them hiding around the corner.  He tried to make the most appropriate hand gestures to guide them.
	"We all distract them when they get close, they can't fight good in close quarters right?"
Moving away with them, he waited for the special forces to start searching through the complex, hiding behind corners and trying to direct the raptors to specific points to jump out from.  The first one was a test, which was ruthlessly slaughtered by one of the raptors, tearing the guy's face apart like a blood-soaked pillow with his mask coverings.  Seeing the limits of their armour, he was now more confident to fight them, keeping the pregnant female behind as she did so obediently.
	"No offence but I don't want you getting shot with all those kids in you, okay?"

With a combined assault of both his assault rifle and handgun from the front, and the raptors from behind, the special forces were no match after James found one looping corridor that made it perfect for either to be ambushed by the other.  That is, had James and his pack not already planted itself there.
Things would have gone better had he known how to actually use an assault rifle.  It took him all of his endurance to not only aim it properly, with its recoil being rather unexpected in making him fire wildly as he desperately tried not to hit the raptors by accident, but also to fire in bursts, realising quickly that firing a whole clip was far too much of a waste.  With only two raptors lost in the ensuing battle, there was soon only one human left, wounded badly, too weak to fight back as James held him down.
	"Any more of you guys coming?"
	"N-n-no..."
The human was gazing at the anthro raptor with shock.
	"Good...where's a way out of this place?"
	"H-hangar...locked...fences wired up, too high to get out."
	"How do I turn it off, or is there another way!?"
He twisted one particular wound to make the human scream hard.
	"AAAAAARGH!  Generator!...agh...floor B3, exhaust vent opening, th-they filter out the excess waste through there!"
	"Great, it's Arkham all over again."
And with that he slashed the man's neck to kill him and headed off with the raptors downstairs, keeping an eye out for humans.  The remaining nine saurians kept up with him ever vigilantly as they traversed lab after lab, with every enemy they encountered given no mercy from their vicious claws, torn asunder and feasted upon to keep up their endurance.

After carving a bloody path through the facility underground to leave a trail of dead behind him, the raptors never leaving any alive even if James wanted them to, they finally reached the underground generator room.  Floor B3 had an unusual number of large holding pens, like that for the raptors but far bigger, one of which seemed recently used judging by the crushed front door of it.  The raptors sniffed at the pen, and they growled in fearful apprehension.
	"Lemme guess, we don't wanna meet this guy right?"
With that caution in mind they made their way to the generator room, the hallways giving off a more bluish light as they reached ever closer to a large generator in the middle of a huge room.  The room was fitted with all sorts of suspensions and cranes, as if it were an underground hangar, giant disused machine parts the size of forklifts left around the place in neatly stacked piles.
The generator itself was a gently pulsing blue-grey container dominating the middle of the room, as one huge hexagonal pillar as wide as a helicoper's width.  A light throbbed from within, accompanied by a constant electrical hum.  It made James uneasy to be near it, but the raptors were fascinated and tried to go closer, even if they couldn't get too near due to the fact the base of the generator was far below them, and the entire place could only be navigated by large walkways as wide as the length of three bulldozers.
	"AH-AH, let's not mess with it guys.  We gotta get out of here quick as we can."
But before they could, a tremendous deafening roar shook through the entire room, making the entire area vibrate with its ferocity.  The raptors panicked and looked around in fear, only for the pregnant one to cry out over in one direction at the Tyrannosaurus Rex that slowly lumbered into view towards the pack of raptors.  The walkway somehow managed to uphold such a monster.
	"Holy..."

He couldn't even finish his exclamation from the biggest monster he had seen in his life, a towering colossus practically half the size of the generator itself.  And it was charging right towards them.  The raptors dispersed to avoid it as they fearfully realised they had to fight it.  It seemed intelligent enough to know to stay on the walkways, and James had to think of an idea to deal with it before they could all escape.  He saw the exit along one way, a maintenance tunnel along to the outside marked "Exhaust Maintenance", their destination.
	"Alright...just focus James...it's just a really fucking huge dinosaur...it's big and you're small, you're a lot faster than it."
Giving himself a small pep talk, he aimed his assault rifle as steadily as he could to shoot at the skull, finding it did not do much damage from the thickness of its body and bones, snarling at the fact he only pissed it off and made it chase after him.  Then he had the idea that he believed would save them as the raptors helped distract and confuse the T-Rex by going in all directions.  Though it managed to grab one unfortunate raptor which became brutally crunched into a bloody smear within its jaws, the beast's huge tail swinging and knocking over things.  The pregnant one was given a lot of protection, aided by the other raptors to be kept out of the T-Rex's range.
	"HEY!"
James ran over to a walkway right in front of the generator, lined up for a perfect bull run, shooting at the beast again to irritate it into charging him.  He waited for the right moment to evade, seeing the monster turn and roar towards him, ready to leap.  But right when he did, the T-rex stopped just in front of the generator and looked around for his prey, not fooled by just bullrushing forwards.
	"DAMMIT, that should have worked!"

Underestimating the beast's alertness, it swung at him with its tail hard enough to knock him away to one side, skidding across the floor in pain with floorburn on his chest.  Standing up and holding his side, he saw the T-Rex moving towards him.  In his struggle to get up, one grizzled-looking raptor with one eye courageously leapt from a stack of nearby machine parts onto the T-Rex's back and climbed up towards the face.
The beast tried to claw its face with its feeble-reaching arms as well as swinging its head back and forth, yet the raptor held on with tooth and claw before slashing right into the monster's eye.  First one and then the other, slashing hard enough to rob most of the vision as bloody pustules replaced its hollowed eye sockets.  With a new idea, James got up and ran back towards the generator, standing before it and firing his handgun with every bullet currently in it at the T-rex.  If he needed a second chance, he had several more clips.
	"HEY, OVER HERE YOU BLIND-ASS MOTHERFUCKER!"
Keeping his handgun firing so the beast turned towards him, it roared so furiously loud that James felt he would turn deaf from the shaking of the room.
	"WHAT, YOU WANT ME TO SHOOT IT IN BRAILLE INTO YOUR FUCKING FACE, COME ON!  I DARE YOU, FUCKING TRY ME!"
Frightened as hell to see a blinded monstrous dinosaur charge towards him with a furious rage, no longer able to see the danger or direction it was truly facing, James easily dodged to one side and watched.  Almost in slow motion, the T-Rex smashed through the barrister of the walkway and directly into the generator, headbutting its skull right into the core of it, cracking through the casing.  And with a tremendous bass cry of anguish, it suffered a terrible explosion directly into its face, with James and the other raptors running away from it towards the maintenance tunnel, running too fast to care about the handgun that fell from his pouch.
	"THIS WAY, HURRY!"

Following him dutifully, they all ran as fast as possible through the wide maintenance shaft, seeing the light on the outside.  James and the pregnant raptor were the last to get out, as they leapt from the exit into the forest.  An explosion rumbled from within about 10 seconds later, followed by a colossal blast of flames from the exit as the generator exploded truly in a tremendous fashion, to the point that the facility caved in on itself.  The lake nearby suffered one hell of a water blast into the air, the bridge destroyed in turn as the pack of raptors gazed upon the fruits of their freedom.
	"...woah.......that...that was....that was AWESOME!"
He made a small victory dance to himself much to the pack's confusion.
	"YEEEEEEEAAAAH HAHAHAAAAAAAA!  THAT'S WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU FUCK WITH JAMES ROBERT CAMPBELL!  I'M IN YOUR BASE, BLOWING THE FUCK OUT OF IT, BITCHES!"
With his self-congratulations out of the way, he turned to see the raptors staring confused at him, turning embarrassed as a result.
	"Wh-what?  Just that we did good guys, I mean, I uhh...I couldn't have done it without any of you, really."
The pregnant one came up to James once more and nuzzled him softly, licking sweetly along his chest and crotch.  She seemed to be extremely enamoured with him.
	"H-h-hey now, you're nice and all but...uhhh might be a li'l weird with you being uhh...glad that you're okay though."
Feeling rather affectionate towards her and not entirely sure why, he kneeled down and hugged her neck warmly, firmly as she kept licking along his head and nibbling him affectionately.
	"Hehehee, heeey come ooon stop that."
The rest of the raptors all came to him one by one, submissively, chirring to James who realised what he was to them by now.  Though he noticed one of them in particular out of the group, the one-eyed raptor.
	"You...you are one ballsy dude, one-eye."
The old raptor chirred and licked James' face happily, who hugged him in turn.
	"You really saved us back there, you look like the leader of this group, right?"
He did not understand, but James assumed nevertheless before he decided it was time to leave.  He had no idea what had happened to him, but he felt that he had spent way too long in this world, in an island that was surely different to the one he had woken up on before.
	"Well...it's been fun with you guys...but...woah..."
He felt himself develop a massive headache, shuddering with pain as he got on the ground, much to the anxiety of his pack who crowded around him.
	"NNGH...wh-wha...I'm okay I just...agh...I have to go.  I...I can't stay here anymore.  You guys'll be fine on your own...okay?"
With that, he began to wish himself somewhere far away, gazing upon the wide sprawling hills around them.  It wasn't much but it was the best he had as a word clicked in his head, the hills resonating with the sound of glory to him.  The raptors sensed a strange magnetic feeling from James and backed away from him immediately.  The headache had come on so strongly that he could not focus on anything else and he tried to think of somewhere else to go, his own personal portal opening up and swallowing him into its folds.  The confused distress of the other raptors was evident, as they saw their new temporary leader disappear, rather similar to the way they had come back and forth to their own time.

And with that, he was gone, a swirling mass that came and went out of thin air, in the midst of raptors.
	"Wh-where did he go!?" chirred Alpha in panic.
	"He has become one with the stars," said Eyeclaw sagely.
	"What do you mean?"
	"A raptor like him...have you not noticed how unique he was?  His scars, his body, the way he walked and used the fire of the hairless?  Truly he is too special for this world."
	"It is strange that he developed such powers while we were trapped within their clutches for so long."
	"But what if that was his destiny?  He has always had those scars, those claws, odd as they seem.
	"But.....who will lead us now?"
	"Were we mistaken that you were our leader?"
	"But I failed you...those hairless, they tortured me, they made me mad with fear, they even killed Beta and while I could not do a single thing, Oddscar freed us all!"
	"Does that make you any less of a leader, my son?"
Eyeclaw went up to Alpha and nuzzled him warmly.
	"A great leader must command great warriors, those who will perhaps outlive him, but who nevertheless carry on his will, his spirit, and his intelligence."
	"He will never truly leave us," chirred Barren.  "My children are his...he will always be with us through the hatchlings he left behind."
	"And with your children...we will lead our kind into a prosperous new era."
And so continued the legacy of Oddscar by the offspring he had left behind.  A mysterious raptor, and one of many but nevertheless important elements in the conquest of the dinosaurs over the interference of unnatural forces in their time.  Preserving the sanctity of the prehistoric world, for millions of years to come.
As for "Oddscar" himself, he dwelled within the mind of James, teleported deeper into another world beyond this one.  Yet he was nowhere nearer to his own home world.