Chapter 12

Ric and Tony were up at the first light of day, dressed and downstairs and surprised that Frank had actually arrived in the dining room before them.

"Do you ever sleep?" Tony asked, remembering the late night orgy with the queen and amazed that Frank looked so well rested after so much carousing.

"Nope," Frank laughed. Then he looked at the two of them and added, "Alright, I'll confess. I slept 'til noon. Tanya did me a favor and timewalked me back until just before you guys came down."

"That's cheating!" Ric laughed. "So if I go upstairs and check, I'll see you and your blond bombshell sawing away the Zee's in your room?"

"Yeah, but I hope you don't, because then one of us would vanish," Frank informed him, "and you might not have a guide for this morning."

Cook, who had risen even earlier, began to bring platters out to the dining table. Thin slices of roasted something that looked like a slab of bacon filled the room with a mouth-watering aroma. There was also a tuber salad with the texture of lumpy mashed potatoes mixed with thick cream and diced vegetables – it could have been potato salad except for its orange hue. And eggs; huge, plate-wide and sunny-side up.

"All we need now is coffee," Ric grinned, setting himself down and sliding an egg plate in front of him. The smell of fresh coffee caused all three men to turn toward the kitchen doors as Tanya came in carrying a large pot of dark, steamy liquid.

"At your command, O Mighty Hunter!" she laughed.

"So, are you still upstairs, asleep, too?" Tony asked, admiring the way her magnificent breasts pushed against her filmy top.

"Hush," Tanya told him. "If we think about it too hard, we'll merge and I'll disappear into my other self. You don't want that to happen, do you?"

"So who else is coming this morning?" Tony asked, sitting down and forking several pieces of sliced meat onto his plate. "You got any gravy for this?" he asked Cook as the man set down an unfamiliarly fragranced fruit pie on the table.

"Sure, just a sec..." the man dashed off, then quickly returned with a bowl of steaming creamed gravy.

"Uh ... wait – hold on..." Tony called out to the cook as the man turned to leave.

"Yes?" Cook smiled.

"Uh, what are those lumps?"

"Oh – those are little savory chunks of ground stegosaurus sausage."

"Oh, okay," Tony replied, raising his eyebrows in interest as he reached for the ladle.

"I make it fresh from their brains!" Cook replied, then quickly turned and disappeared into the kitchen.

Tony dropped the ladle back into the bowl with a small splash of the delectable brain-sausage gravy. Frank and Tanya both laughed.

"He's teasing you, Tony," Frank told him, still chuckling. "Stegosauri don't have enough brain matter to make even an ounce of sausage!"

Tony reached for the ladle again.

"So Cook grinds up their balls and adds them to their brains," Tanya quipped.

Tony glared at his magnificently proportioned hostess, trying to figure out if she was razzing him or not.

Tanya simply shrugged, which attracted everyone's attention to her skimpily covered, very bouncy breasts and replied, "Well, they have really big balls..."

Then everybody laughed. Tony, his face only slightly red, ladled a dollop of the thick creamy gravy over the thin slices of meat. He was impressed with the meat's tenderness as he cut off a bite with his fork. Skewering the bit, he raised the fork to his mouth and discovered that everybody was staring at him – with obvious anticipation!

"Wha... ?" he asked, holding the fork a few inches from his mouth.

"Oh, nothing – go ahead. Take a bite."

Tony dropped the fork to his plate. "No way!" Then he sat back in his chair, folded his arms across his chest and glared up at them. "What's safe to eat here?" he demanded. "And no tricks!"

Mac, Haley and Holly came down the stairs, chatting away.

" ... and you just left me there!" Mac was complaining.

"Well, we woke you up," one twin said.

"and you didn't seem upset, then..." the other added.

The chatty trio reached the table.

"Great! Biscuits and deer sausage gravy!" Mac chortled happily.

"Deer sausage?" Tony asked, completely dumbfounded, now.

"Yeah," Haley grinned. "He has it brought from New Eden."

"There are deer in New Eden?" Tony asked. "I've never seen any..."

"Well," Holly replied, frowning as she tried to put together an answer. "Mac and uh..."

" ... the nameless one... " Haley whispered, adding her comment to the sentence.

Tony smiled up at the pair. He'd been here before when they played 'Screw With Their Minds' and looked forward to the banter these two were about to spout.

"Yeah, her." Holly said. "Anyway, he wanted to go deer hunting..."

" ... and, there weren't any deers, you see..." from Haley.

"So TNO went back to old earth..."

" ... back in time, she means."

Glaring at her sister; "and scared a herd of birds, I mean, deers, through a, uh..."

' ... wormhole. She made a wormhole."

"Yeah. And now we ... Oh, the wormhole went to, I mean, came through to New..."

"They know that." Haley interrupted. "So now we have a herd of deers up near Independence."

"Dear," Tony said, looking up at the slender little brunette who had sat down next to him while she (and her sister) had been telling him the story.

"What, sweetie?" Haley asked, grinning happily at Tony.

"No, I mean – deer – Dee, Eee, Eee, Arr," Tony explained, trying to keep his eyes on her face, which seemed to be getting closer and closer. "Deer are deer. More than one is still a deer."

"So ... two deers is a deer?" Haley asked, causing Tony's eyes to nearly cross as he breathed in the sweet peppermint scent of her warm, moist breath.

"No. Two deers are deer. Not 'is a deer'." His heart was beating faster and he was beginning to sweat.

"Deer, deers, who cares?" Haley shrugged, turning away and shrinking back as Tony automatically reached for her. "No nookie for you, egghead."

"Uh," Tony stammered, realizing that the sexy, dumb bimbo sitting next to him understood that he had called her a sexy, dumb bimbo. "I'm sorry..."

Standing up and deliberately reaching in front of him, specifically to brush the side of her luscious breast against his arm, she grabbed a biscuit and began shredding it onto a plate in the middle of the table. Tony couldn't move back without his hand either touching against her stomach or his arm brushing her left breast.

He sighed with frustration. Haley turned and glared at him for a second, then ladled a copious amount of sausage gravy over the shredded biscuit.

Mortified, Tony realized that he'd just blown his breath against the side of Haley's curvy body – specifically the soft, rounded part that he'd been staring at.

"Ah! Jesus! I'm really ... I'm sor ... I mean ... I didn't mean to do that!" he stammered as Haley moved back to sit down. "Ungh!" he added as Haley's elbow cracked against his forehead.

"Oh. I'm sorry," Haley meowed, "I missed your nose. Here. Lemme try again," and raised her arm so she could crack him a good one with her sharply pointed elbow.

"I said, 'I'm sorry'..." Tony pleaded, rubbing his forehead with one hand while holding his other arm up to protect himself.

"I am, too," Haley confessed, acting contrite as she lowered her arm. "Really," she added, then kissed him on his cheek. Looking down at his plate, she added, "You should probably eat that before it gets cold."

Relieved at being forgiven, Tony stabbed the piece that had fallen off his fork and put it in his mouth. Although the meat was a little tougher than he had imagined because it had cut easily with the fork, it was very tasty. He smiled and cut another piece as he swallowed.

"So, how's your first taste of 'Shingle of Dinosaur Dick'?" Haley happily queried.

What Tony had just swallowed met what he'd just put in his mouth as his stomach clenched. His cheeks bulged as he tried to hold it in while gravy dribbled down his chin.

"Whoops!" Haley yelped, and grabbed a bowl. She held it under his mouth as he filled it, barely able to keep from screeching with hilarity. "Aa-a-at's a good boy – get it allllll out. Boy. It's a good thing you haven't eaten much, yet. Need another bowl?"

Disgusted with himself and furious with Haley (she was waaaay too cheerful about all of this), Tony rigidly shook his head, 'No!'

Setting the bowl down, Haley grabbed a napkin and daubed at a stringer that was about to stain Tony's shirt. She caught it and followed it back up to his chin, then folded it and wiped around his mouth. After a few seconds of solicitous wiping, Tony snarled, pulled away and snatched the napkin from Haley's surprised fingers.

"Hey!" Haley protested. "Don't get mad at me! I didn't cook that! Or put it on your plate!"

"You didn't eat any, either, did you!" Tony accused her. "You already knew what it was!"

Slapping the napkin down on the table, Tony angrily scooted his chair back and stood up. He was upset, angry, embarrassed ... and still hungry. And now, there was no way he could save face and eat with the rest of them. He knew it wasn't Haley's fault – not really. She hadn't eaten anything, yet. She had just dropped in. Just in time to get in on the joke. That was what everyone had been waiting for – his unsuspecting ass to take a bite of dino dick.

"To answer your question," Tanya said in a soft voice. "The biscuits and gravy – and the pie – are safe."

"And the eggs!" Ric quipped, displaying enough food in his mouth to let Tony know that Tony's stomach problem hadn't hurt Ric's appetite any. "They're good, too!"

"The potato and egg salad's good, too," Holly added.

"Even though the potatoes are green..." this from Haley as she finally brought her snickering under control.

"I actually like dinosaur dick," Frank confessed. "Cook prepares it – mostly for me. And I'm really sorry we teased you like that. Come back and sit down, Tony. We can't have a good hunt if you're starving to death."

"Yeah," Tony replied, doing his best to make his voice sound normal and un-stressed. "But I'll be a lot more willing to eat whatever we shoot if I'm starving." Everybody laughed, and Tony, relieved that this horrible event had now passed by, sat back down. Haley got up and carried the bowl away.

Murielle passed Haley at the foot of the stairs as the girl carefully carried the bowl outside, keeping it steady with both hands as she walked.

"Yum! What's that?" Murielle asked.

"Used penis stew," Haley murmured as she passed.

"Penis stew?" Murielle asked, her interest perking up. "Where are you taking it? Uh ... what'd'ya mean, 'used'?"

"Used – as in – already eaten once."

"Eee-yew!"

"Yep, Eee-used!"

It was mid-morning; the sun shone brightly, halfway between the mountain peak and its high noon position. It was already warm and the air was heavy.

"Of course the air feels heavy, here," Alana was explaining to Tony. "There's a lot more of it here than what we had ... Have? ... in the future. I can fly a lot higher here before the atmosphere starts to feel too thin to hold me up."

"Yes," Sibilius concurred. "According to Praetor history, there were – will be – have already been – several, what they call, 'Extinction Events' that have occurred throughout Earth's geologic history. There had to be a couple, at least, that caused atmospheric loss."

"So you mean," Tony replied thoughtfully, "that there is actually less air – air cover – in the future? During the so-called 'Age of Man'?"

"Yep!" Murielle piped in. "Also, in Praetor class, it told us that there's evidence of a nuclear war or something that happened about fifteen-thousand years before the advent of our current, I mean, most recent civilization."

"Hmm," Tony hummed. "I imagine a couple thousand atom bombs could blow a substantial amount of air into outer space, at that."

"No, at that time," Murielle corrected him, "Earth lost most of its atmosphere. And it was turned sideways on its axis. That's the only way that freeze-dried mammoths could've ended up at the North Pole with their stomachs full of tropical plants. The oceans must've boiled down to provide the atmosphere that we breathed when we were growing up."

"Good thing," Miranda chipped in. "Otherwise Earth would be just like Mars, only warmer."

"I don't think bombs, no matter how big, could do that," Sy considered. "Something large could've hit the planet and spun it sideways."

"Wouldn't that knock it out of its orbit?" Ric added, having been listening as they walked along the base of what he'd begun to think of as Pterodactyl Cliff.

"Who says it didn't?" Murielle asked. "At least it missed the moon..."

Ric looked up at the pale sliver halfway across the sky from the sun. "Is that bigger than it is in 'our' time?"