Goldilocks

It's a blurp of an idea that popped into my head after being up late last night reading Transmet and this morning when we visited a used bookstore in Manassas where I happened upon a book titled "Red Raptor." Even if it was the story of a prehistoric female Utahraptor, the method they told her story was not quite my cup of tea. I'd recommend Mek checking it out though. I don't know if it's his cup of tea either, but I figure it's worth mentioning. It's an old book though, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to find.
"Goldilocks" is the public's nickname for Specs, because she and her sisters are yellow raptors. I'm under the impression that it's popular for velociraptors to be portrayed with red colouring, so I wanted to do something different.
Goldilocks also comes to mind because of this morning's report on the planet that scientists have recently decided may be capable of supporting life. The man on the news described it as the "goldilocks" because its location to the sun in its system provides it with the "just-right" combination of temperature, etc.
I say ten bucks they end up calling the planet Goldilocks. I'm sure it'll come into some official name later like New Earth or Second Earth or something fantastically unimaginative like that. But I bet for the honeymoon period they call it Goldilocks.

My mom just opened a package from the vet's office. It had two cards and a little slab of blue clay. The clay had Boots's pawprint, as did one of the card.
We'll never forget you, buddy. You were a good cat.

Moving on before I cry little a little girl.


I'm a Utahraptor living in New York City.
That in itself should be enough to keep you reading.
Sitting in an apartment in the dark at o'dark thirty tapping away on my typewriter--the keys are easier to hit with claws, and sturdier, too--was not my idea of how this day would begin. I much rather had intended to sleep in after a long night of binge-drinking with the drawns tightly blinded--does that make any sense? Or am I still a little drunk? Oh well, you know what I mean--to keep the garish light of day out until I felt damn well ready to get up and greet it on my own terms. That is, sometime around the crack of noon.
Yet the people of the city that never sleeps are bitter bastards, and seem to have adopted a policy of, "if we can't sleep, no one can."
That is why I was dragged by the tail out of a delicious dream involving a pair of overweight triceratops bogged down in tarpits and screaming their little throats out at this despicable time of the morning by the sound of jackhammers pounding the city's heartbeat into the sidewalk at the foot of my apartment complex. A negligent rhino stumbled down it a week ago in a drug-induced stupor and when he decided it was time to pass out, his horn gouged a three-foot long wound into the already fragmented cement. It bled dirt and the guts of a massive fungi network that have been marinating in the wet darkness under that slab of sidewalk for what looked like years, if not decades. The fungus was white, bulbous, and gleaming. It looked like a baluga whale's corpse infested with tumours.
But I digress, and excessively. You get to do that when you're drunk.
Where was I?
Being a Utahraptor in New York City. No, I covered that.
Being up at this hour. Yes. No, that was the baluga. And tumours. So it's not a matter of where was I, it's a matter of where I was going.
Gus's whimpering from the corner has just reminded me.
She came home with a bullet graze on her thigh fifteen minutes ago. I was awake for it, thanks to the city's obnoxious, cigarette-smoke stained heartbeat. Gus is my sister, and she narrowly avoided being shot this morning in a hate crime committed in a downtown rave club reserved for us dino freaks. I won't deign to go into detail about it. That would involve interrogating my little sister, which I'd rather not due, and I'm sure you'll get plenty of fiction about it to appease your mundane curiosity on this morning's eight o'clock news.
Where I'm going with this, I suppose, is why? Why was my little sister almost shot in the crotch, which was probably meant to be her stomach, or even her lung? I'll tell you.
It's because you all suck.
Not just you humans that hate us primitive weers. It's our own damn kind, dammit, the flesh and blood of our own that betrays us. And I'll go ahead and tell you this, too--see how nice I am, to do your thinking for you?
Because in dino-reserved establishments, no humans are allowed to be involved in the club's staff. At all. Humans are only allowed in as guests with no less than two accompanying dinos to vouch for them. And this guy that almost killed my sister was human. He stank of it. He was filthy with the sweat of his racist nerves and racist adrenaline that kicked in before he was about to Kill A Dino and resurged after he had Killed A Dino, which made him a Man To Be Feared. He was cocky after he'd done it, do you realize that? So he tried to do it again. The fucker tried to kill my sister. Because one innocent wasn't enough.
And it was a dino bouncer who let the fucker in.
Why? There's a lot of these "whys" hanging about my apartment lately, and they're starting to get under claw. It's fucking irritating. They shit in my bed, they shed on my furniture, they scratch up my curtains and scream at me whenever I try to sleep.
You fuckers put them here. I want them out.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a half-empty bottle of Bourbon to pour out the window on some construction worker's head and a bullet wound to mend.

Specs shoved away from her desk, the chair's wheels squeaky-squeaking over the floor. She considered the Bourbon, and took one last sip before she stood, went over to her window, and poured the rest out over the street. Some of it hit someone, if not all. Specs didn't care enough to make sure it was aimed at a construction worker. Either way, it was still satisfying.
"Asshole," Gus grunted from her corner. She was slumped against a wall and looking a lot happier than she had when she'd come in. The empty bottle of whiskey in her half-claw-half-hand probably had everything to do with that.
The medical market had yet to develop a set of antibiotics that worked on all weers in general as well as any that worked on Utahraptors specifically. The coding for each species of weer's magic gene was different, and even though shamans and witches could formulate poultices that were universal, they didn't last. So unless you lived next door to one, or even on the same block, they didn't do a weer much good. Specs knew some healers, but none close enough at the time for the pain Gus had been in. So Specs gave her sister alcohol.
Alcohol, Specs thought tiredly. The gift that...well, there was probably a clever way to finish that thought, but she couldn't formulate it right now. Still a bit drunk. So very tired.
"Ready for antibiotics?" Specs asked. Both she and Gus smirked at the old slang.
"Lay it on me," Gus rumbled. Her voice got gravelly when she got exhausted. Most dinos' did. Voice was one of the first things to revert when the body got too tired to maintain an entirely human front.
Specs got the pure alcohol out of her bathroom cabinet along with the bandages.
"Fuck movies," Gus muttered as Specs laid out an old tattered towel under her sister's leg to catch the alcohol. "You seen the latest werewolves movie? Fuck wolves. Why they so damn popular?"
"They're fluffy," Specs said, untwisting the cap from the bottle. "Humans love fluffy shit."
"Fuck fluffy. Scaley's badass, everyone knows it."
"Prepare for touchdown," Specs grunted, and poured a handful of alcohol over the graze on Gus's leg.
Her sister snarled and her upper body writhed as she struggled to keep her leg still. Small patches of transformation rippled across her, the primitive gene fighting to lash out at the pain.
"Fuck," Gus growled, her voice having dropped an octave. She blinked and winced, and her jugular area contorted as she readjusted her larynx. "Fuck," she repeated, and the word snapped with a much more satisfying clarity in the quiet of the apartment.
"Werewolves?" Specs reminded her sister.
"Yeah. Fuckin' movies. Got us in real life but they still try to pull that instant regeneration shit. And vampires, man. Fuckin' vampires. Still tryin' that shit, like they still think they gotta be real as wolves and we're just hidin' 'em somewhere."
"Humans are stupid," Specs said with a shrug, gathering up the dampened towel and using it to mop up what had soaked through. "Bandages?"
"Do it myself," Gus muttered, sitting up further.
"You're drunk off your ass," Specs said dryly.
"So're you."
"I was. Writing's sobered me some."
"Heh. Does it now? We gotta get you REAL drunk someday, see what you'd write then." Gus snickered. "I bet porno."
"It's not porn when it's literature, little sister," Specs corrected as she wrangled a cigarette out of the box with her snout and foreclaw, lighting it on a candle kept burning for exactly that purpose. "When it's written, it's erotica."
"Whatever," Gus snorted. "I bet you'd write it if you got drunk enough."
"Who's to say I need to be drunk?"
Gus raised an eyebrow.
A pounding on the door startled them both. Specs flicked her tail at her sister, a command to stay. Gus nodded and got back to fumbling drunkenly with her bandaging. They both knew who it was.
Specs waded through a carpeting of crumpled papers, the remains of past blog entries, essays, short stories, and one book she'd been working on for two years. None of it was ever thrown away. It'd been accumulating since she'd moved in three months ago.
"You need a maid," Brass growled as Specs opened the door. She muscled her way in past her younger sister. "Where's Gus?"
"Back he-e-re," Gus snorted in a sing-song voice. "I just had the gr-hic-reatest fuckin' idea ever."
"You gave her beer?" Brass snapped at Specs.
"Had to put the antibiotic on her," Spec said with a smirk and a shrug.
"She's only eighteen."
"Alcohol on fresh wounds fuckin' hurts, Brass."
"I know. I also run a bar, you dick. You know how many underaged pricks I shut down--"
"A day. I know. You tell me over and over. Just this once, B. You know she gets it at parties anyway."
"Not in our own damn house--"
"Who's house?"
Brass remembered they were adults now and where she was.
"She was in pain," Specs muttered as they entered her writing room, where Gus was slumped in the corner. "Scared shitless. I did her a kindness."
"Don't do it again. Shit, Gus." Brass crouched down next to her youngest sister and snagged the bandages from her hands, which were having difficulty staying hands. You could always tell when a weerdino was drunk, even from a distance. They couldn't stick to anyone form. "You drink the whole damn bottle?"
"Brass, listen," Gus slurred, struggling to sit up. "We gonna make a million. Here's what we do, 'kay? You listening?"
"I'm listening."
"Ow. Not so tight. Hokay, so, what we do is, is we get Specs drunk, kay, and we make her write porno--"
"Erotica."
"Whatfuckever, she writes sex, okay, and then we sell it on the black market. Everyone loves her fucking blog, everyone'll buy it. I'm a fuckin' genius, right?"
"We wouldn't have to sell it on the black market," Specs remarked as she pulled her blog entry out of her typewriter and folded it into its envelope. "Erotica is its own genre of literature. We could get it published properly."
"Fuck it," Gus said. "We'd get shit from publishers on royalties. They'd get half the profits or some shit."
Specs looked at her sister sideways as she sealed the envelope with her tongue and stamped her friend's address on it. Specs didn't mess with computers--she was a full-time scaley, someone who preferred to live entirely in beast form 24/7, and computers were hard to manage when you only had three fingers on each hand that weren't very flexible and ended in massive, viciously sharp claws.
"Do you even know what you're talking about?" Specs asked with a mild curiosity. Brass shot her a glare over her shoulder as she finished tying off Gus's leg.
"She's an airheaded raver that's just been a witness to a traumatizing hate crime, almost been shot herself, ran all the way back here alone through New York City at night in the rain, and downed a whole bottle of whiskey, and you're asking her if she knows what she's talking about?"
"We call it Goldilocks!" Gus suddenly exclaimed. "The Goldilocks collection. Of porno."
"Erotica."
"Whathefuckever it's called!"
"I've gotta get this mailed to Rube," Specs said, waving the envelope about. "I'll hit up Lace for a poultice on the way back. Make sure Gus doesn't chew on my armchair again."
"You're going out?" Brass said, an actual tinge of disbelief in her voice. "Your sister was almost shot a half hour ago and you're going out to mail your fucking blog entry?"
"It's a blog entry about my sister almost getting shot, if that helps at all," Specs replied as she donned her hat and fished a plastic bag out from under the sink in her kitchen to keep the envelope safe from the weather. The storm hadn't hit her part of the city, but she wasn't taking chances. "And I said I'd get a poultice."
"Whatever," Brass muttered, trying to help Gus off the floor. "Fuck off and die."
"Love you too," Specs said dryly on her way out.
Brass was about to make a retort when she heard a loud flapping noise, and as the door shut behind Specs, a wyvern the size of a raven landed on the fire escape outside Specs's open window. It was wearing a polic bonnet around the base of its neck. As Brass stared at it, it cocked its head, examining her with one beady little eye, and squawked.
"What the..."
"It's the Lawman!" Gus mumbled as her head began to slump. "He helped me 'shcape the coppers..."
"What?" Brass looked down at her sister as the younger weerraptor's eyes slid shut. "Why'd you have to escape the cops?"
Gus was already out cold.
Brass felt an uneasy feeling blossoming in her gut as she dragged her sister over to the couch and dumped her on it.


This doesn't deserve to be posted as an actual deviation, so my blog gets to endure the fodder, but if anyone cares I have a sequel bit to this floating around in my head and I could put it down if you want. I don't see it continuing beyond that.
I did enjoy writing this, though.