Chapter 6: Expedition

~~ Delta - Nov/02 - (Earth - May/2095) ~~

We headed slightly east of south.

It was a beautiful day, but Snorre said it would probably rain later tonight as we were in a sub-tropical region. I had the feeling they loved nothing better than being out in this amazing landscape. They were hunters by nature and deed.

They told me that their wife Janta was a homebody, and she loved their new farm. She was well aware that they needed to roam, and as long as they turned up when she needed them most, she was content to let them scratch their itch.

Apparently, being bodyguards was part of their job as shields, and they loved this new part of their employment when they were looking after scientists, who were off investigating new wonders.

I soon learnt they were both highly intelligent men in their field of expertise. I decided that if they said don’t, or gave me instructions, it would be best for me to comply. They did know more about this place than I did, after all. Their hunting instincts were better tuned than mine were.

They informed me that while they could take the linger up to about 6m off the ground and travel faster, they thought I might prefer a slower journey and get a good look at the lay of the land. They were happy to stop if I wished, as long as they determined it was safe to do so.

I agreed, they were the guides, and I was here to learn about the many aspects of the ecology of this fantastic place and would abide by their decisions. They looked at me with scepticism; however, they would learn that I was true to my word.

I had acquired a small vid recorder that clipped onto the arm of my sunglasses and just let it run. I could stop and start it from my Mad if I wished or just tap it. I acquired some fantastic footage. The continent we were on was simply astonishing as far as I’m concerned.

The initial assertion was that this planet was in a similar phase to the late Triassic era on Earth. However, on closer inspection, there were a lot of anomalies. For one, woody trees like eucalypts, oaks and maples and many of the grasses didn’t appear on Earth until about a million years later in the Cretaceous period.

Yet on this planet in the sub-tropical to temperate zones, they dominated. The Earth was still one large landmass and was supposed to be mostly hot and dry in the Triassic era. However, here the above sea level continents were effectively eight major masses, with a vast number of islands mainly in the tropical regions. Harmony also had ice caps even if they were smaller than Utopia and Earth’s.

Lee’s satellites had pinged the seafloor and identified the different continental plates. The icecaps linked the northern and southern continents at the poles like on Utopia. They had now determined that the North was in fact, four significant plates that meshed with the three plates of the south, and the one inner plate that held Dragonia, the continent the dragons lived on.

The islands dominated several smaller plates, and some were the edges of the plates. Many were volcanic, but only two were active but not explosive. The high oxygen levels also indicated plants had been around for a while and they believed that Harmony was entering a cooling period and had much higher rainfall than was initially assumed.

It was as if, things here had been sped up when compared to the ecological time scale of Earth, and she had even skipped a few steps. In the tropical to arid zones, cycads, conifers, ferns, reptiles and crawling insects were the dominant life forms. They could, however, still be found in the cooler climates too.

As you moved into the cooler and mountainous regions flowering plants, grasses and hardwood trees started to take over. It was if someone flew over the top of the temperate zone and dropped a heap of seeds for plants that would grow there and spread out.

Grasses and ferns covered the plains, and they supported large mammals, as well as reptiles but not the giant dinosaurs as we know them. It was as if Harmony skipped the rest of the Mesozoic era and dropped into the Tertiary period.

I had learnt that the Keltrian people had moved to Earth about seventy thousand years before. The scientists also believed that many of the plants and animals had been introduced here by them. They assumed it was to make the place more livable for them, should they need to use this planet as a bolt hole. No one knew how long they had known of this world before that.

Seventy thousand years, however, was more than long enough for any introduced species to have found their niche in the scheme of things or to have been wiped out. Some of the newer species were believed to have been added by the wizards that had claimed this planet, about two thousand years before. My teams had the job of working out what was original and what was added and when.

Cath Cheboi, Professor Hue Hague, Professor Ram Dindi and his wife Aishah from the original crew that settled here had already done a phenomenal amount of work in Clarksville. While Hue and Aishah mostly liked bugs, they had also documented what they knew ate their bugs.

Ram was their leading biologist, and Cath was a botanist. In a lot of cases, they had simply recorded the plant or animal and what they knew, but they were still working out the species evolution and place in the ecology. It was a huge job, and I had been devouring their work on the trip out. I was pretty sure the new people in the north from Earth were doing the same as me.

When Queen Lee had been the Lord Wizard of her decad, she had inherited the northern hemisphere of this planet. She decided to split the main continents between the nations of Earth. She had grouped the countries into eight blocks, written a charter and told them they had one year to work out if they wanted a share of the spoils. So far, four blocks had signed and now had teams here.

Wizard Kyle Vella had inherited the southern half of Harmony. When they had established the second decad of wizards, he split this side into five nations for them. Alec and Justin were wizards of the second group called the Gem Decad.

Lee kept ownership of the islands in the north, and Kyle the ones in the south. The dragons owned Dragonia. It was a separate continent that was strictly out of bounds to Earthers. The rest of the first group of wizards, the Metallic decad, That Kyle and Sean were part of, owned the continents on Utopia.

My fun was to work out similarities and differences on my side of this fantastic world.

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I soon found my two new buddies, Yves and Snorre, were seriously observant guys.

Being hunters, they paid a lot of attention to what ate what and the land around them. I pumped them for as much information as I could. The two guys soon realised that I wanted to know what they knew. They found that they had indeed become my safari guides. They were happy to talk to a willing listener.

They told me about the place we were going to. The cavern system was located in the vast mountain range that ran off to the south of us and then later curved back to the south-east. The massive river that we were following was effectively the border between Justin’s lands on the west and Alec’s, being on this side.

Justin’s side of where the river skirted the mountain range we were heading for, was a considerable floodplain covered in lakes and streams and grasses, shrubs and the many small clumps of tall woody forests.

The grass-eaters and their predators spread across the plain for hundreds of klicks. It also has its fair share of swamps near the rivers. This would be dangerous crocodile territory in the summers. This was when they came south and laid their eggs.

The extensive mountain range was covered with a massive forest due to the higher temperatures here, rainfall and location. Justin had said the mountains were perfect for mining. They had found a lot of game, both reptilian and mammalian. The animals tended to be tall leaf-eaters or small, very fast, climbing types.

The forest has its share of predators too. The one they thought I would like the most was a bigger cousin to the whippers found around Futura. They didn’t get the huge reptiles like they’d been shown that had lived in our Jurassic Era, but they still had their nasties. They had called them, Fangrinders.

The biggest one they had seen so far stood 3m high to the top of its head and about 6m from head to the tip of its tail. They were twice the size of whippers and had shorter snouts with more prominent nastier teeth that they liked to grind, hence the name ‘Teeth-grinder’ from their language.

These predators were fast and could jump very high using their winged arms to assist them. Fortunately, they couldn’t climb well or fly. I was fascinated, of course. They sounded like a species of Deinonychus but larger than had been known of on Earth.

With the lighter gravity and lack of bigger predators, the increase in size was very possible. If I remembered correctly, they also had very large claws on their feet. They used them to rip their prey open with.

Yves handed me what looked like a clear crystal cut in the emerald style. It was about 3cm long by 2.5cm wide and about 1cm deep in the middle. It was suspended on a platinum chain. He told me to wear it at all times. I noticed it had embedded in it several small gems surrounding a larger greenish crystal in the middle. He said it was a personal shield.

Pretty much anything coming within 3m of me would want to move away. I asked him how I was to investigate live creatures if I was wearing it. He grinned and reached between my breasts and turned it over, so the smaller face of the crystal that was partially covered was outwards.

He explained that when the medallion was in this mode, it created a shield up to about 5cm from my skin in any direction. I had shivered at his touch, and he winked at me, making me suddenly wet. I got the distinct impression that while the boys were married, they wouldn’t say no to scratching my itch if I asked.

I had noted the interested looks they had sent my way but had put it down to simply a male thing. It was intriguing to find guys who found my height desirable rather than a turn-off. I realised that to them, I was of similar height and build to their women back home.

I was just their sort, and the looks had definitely lingered on all my parts. They seemed to like my big tits, tiny waist and lightly flared hips. My nipples were hard from his first touch, and I’m damn sure Yves had deliberately wiped the back of his hand over one of them, as he took it away from the crystal.

The grin he had afterwards confirmed it. Yet I didn’t feel threatened by them and knew if I said no, they would take it at face value, as they had adopted the Genteli values, that no, meant no. We had been warned that the Genteli and Granteli were not backward in coming forward if they were interested in you.

I looked between the two big men and realised a romp with Yves and Snorre would be something a girl would remember if she was game enough to ask. I just wasn’t game enough to ask. The boys went back to being my tour guides and happily pointed out interesting things.