[X][Personal]Offer to take Nicte to dinner to make up for apparently being an idiot about people? You just know she's mad at you and you really don't like it.
Asking Nicte to dinner hadn't been as hard as you'd built it up in your mind. Of course, the other side of that was that neither of you enjoyed crowded restaurants. So when Nicte had asked you where you were taking her to eat, you'd blanked and just blurted out "My place!". Nicte had laughed at least and then smiled and told you that it was a date.
Which led to now, where you were dressed comfortably in your favorite apron, shorts and a t-shirt. You'd both known each other long enough that dressing up for a meal would have been trying
way too hard. You'd picked up some steaks from the hotel kitchen in Matanceros and then taken a helicopter back over to Nublar. Being the boss had to have
some perks after all.
When Nicte had shown up, she had an appreciative look on her face as you let her in. "Hey, steaks are resting right now, and should be ready in just a bit." Nicte grinned as she pulled out a case of beer, a brew that, given the Spanish on the label, was probably a local product.
"Not as high class as the steaks, but I figure that they should go well together." You grinned and bumped her hip as she passed through the doorway, and got a companionable bump back. She was dressed just as casually as you were as the two of you set up the table (you'd been focused on making sure those steaks came out a perfect medium rare), and then as the steaks had finished resting, you'd plated them up while Nicte grabbed the beer from the fridge where it had been cooling.
Dinner was a lighthearted affair as the two of you traded stories about the mishaps and idiosyncrasies of the people you were each working directly with. Even with you now being the head of InGen, you'd managed to offload a lot of the stuff that you weren't effective at dealing with onto specialists that your father had added to his holdings more because of their names and prestige than because he actually wanted to make use of their talents. While you loved your father, the man often held on too tightly to the reigns of control.
After laughing yourself nearly hoarse as Nicte wound down a story involving a pair of terror birds that had decided that their keeper was, in fact, a chick in dire need of proper grooming, you'd opened your eyes to see her looking at you with a soft smile. The two of you had moved to the small sofa in your apartment to enjoy the after-dinner beers, and for some reason you noticed that Nicte's warm brown eyes had the slightest slivers of amber shooting through the irises. When had she gotten that close?
[ ] Kiss Da Girl - You've known Nicte for years. The two of you click, and you hired her well before this happened. There will probably be gossip but damnit you want someone that loves nature and animals as much as you do as a partner, and if things don't work out you're both rational adults.
[ ] Don't Kiss Da Girl - Too much baggage, too much chance for things to go wrong. Best to stay friends rather than risk things and end up at odds with your head zookeeper at a later date. You're not the kind of petty asshole that would fire her if things went south but you're also not sure how well you'd be able to work together afterwards...
---
[X][Ranger]Have them be subsidiaries to the animal handlers. It'll make them effectively their own sub-department and will have them constantly on the move through the park.
[X][Breeding]Rely on the future rangers/keepers and the system you're setting up to track the dinosaurs to monitor their numbers. Begin drawing up a base plan for entering enclosures to check potential nests, and ways in which you could control their numbers and genetic diversity even with a breeding population.
You looked over the listing that you'd been given and nodded. Out of the animal handlers you'd gotten the ones that had the most experience dealing with reserves rather than zoo enclosures. Here Robert Muldoon was proving to be a god-send, giving you the expertise needed to train these people.
They had also been read in on the animals they'd be patrolling the enclosures of, after a literal
brick of paperwork.The excitement and shock in their faces had made you feel giddy. It also meant that between getting familiar with the different enclosures before the animals were introduced, and all the various possible hidey-holes within the enclosures. This was especially important given the other decision you'd made...
"You can't be serious!" Shockingly Wu was the one to object as you made your position clear on how to handle the possible breeding populations emerging as the animals matured. Muldoon and Arnold were both nodding while Harding, Nicte and Sorkin actually looked a bit relieved.
"My process is perfect, there's no way for my lysine contingency to fail." Wu's certainty had you pinching the bridge of your nose to stave off a headache. Arnold snorted and grumbled, before pulling out a fiver and handing it over to Muldoon, who merely looked smug.
"Doctor Wu, sit down please. As for my decision, I am
deadly serious. We have no idea how the animals' growth and development will proceed. The fact that Rexy was hatched with down
and it is looking like she's going to have proto-feathers over at least parts of her body is proof that we cannot become too comfortable in how we're handling these creatures. Animals adapt, and even in a singular animal we have no idea how environmental stressors could affect their systems. On top of that, I'm sorry to say that your lysine contingency only works in an absolutely closed system."
Wu gaped at you again, and Gerry took the time to speak. "Doctor Wu, as a veterinarian this lysine contingency of yours would make my and my teams' job an order of magnitude harder as we attempted to compensate for it against the baselines we've already gotten for some of the animals."
Wu didn't look happy, but he stopped objecting. You thought it was a particularly good sign that Sorkin wasn't rubbing his nose in it. At the start of this endeavor she would have practically been crowing in his face about him not getting his way.
---
[X][Espionage]Follow up on Biosyn, they've got a long-standing rivalry with InGen apparently.
Unfortunately while things inside InGen were progressing steadily, you were facing something that you were
wholly unprepared for. Corporate warfare at its most base. You'd been leaving things mainly in the hands of the investors for the most part, and after you'd made the decision to part ways with them you'd still had a pretty solid legal team and HR department. But just from what you'd managed to scrounge up about BioSyn, you could already tell that you were a green rookie going up against a company that
excelled at espionage and sabotage.
Which is why you were honestly a bit glad that you'd gotten an answer to your request for help from one of your father's old friends/investors. Margaret Finch was a round-cheeked older woman whose graying hair still had slivers of red through it. She was dressed modestly but fashionably as she was shown in by your secretary. According to your father's notes and documents she was also probably the best person to ask for help in getting set up to fend off corporate raiders. You'd opted to have this meeting on Matanceros; giving her and, at her request, her son a full VIP package and a stay at the best suites in the hotel, along with a private plane to and from the island.
"Mrs. Finch, thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me. I hope that you and your son had a pleasant flight?" You smiled and extended a hand to her, which she took with a firmer grip than you were expecting. Mrs. Finch nodded, smiling politely even as she and her son took in your office.
You'd decorated the place rather spartanly all told. The walls had dozens of pictures, most of them taken when you were working at a zoo or park. In place of pride was one of the few pictures you had of yourself and your dad together. The man had always chased his dreams to the near-exclusion of all else, which meant that you and he hadn't had nearly as much time together as you would have wished. It was why your sister had jumped at the first asshole who she thought loved her and was still clinging to her crumbling marriage. Of course if she hadn't then you wouldn't have your niece and nephew to spoil either, so; good with the bad.
"Please dear, just call me Margaret. And of course this is my son Cabot." The only slightly younger man nodded pleasantly as he offered his hand. You took it and gave it a firm shake, and he smiled.
"Really nice to meet you Mr. Hammond. I have to say what you've been doing has been
really getting a lot of people in the business world talking about the possibilities." You do your best to hide a slight grimace.
"Yes, unfortunately that's actually somewhat the reason why I asked your mother to meet with me. And please, call me Elliot; whenever anyone says Mr. Hammond then I can't help but look for dad." You got the two of them cold glasses of water from the mini-fridge in your office along with one for yourself, before taking a seat at a table off to the side, rather than behind your desk. From what you'd read in your father's notes this was
not a woman to try a power play on.
"Very well then Elliot, what exactly is it that you need? I must say that your wining and dining skills are superior to your fathers. The man had charisma but he never learned the value of a light touch." You sighed and nodded, before deciding to get straight to the point.
"Biosyn." Your older guest looked like she had bitten into a rotten lemon, while her son looked politely confused, though it took him a moment to affect that, as realization lit in his eyes. You added a few points to your estimation of his intellect.
"Ah,
them." Margaret sighed and sipped her water. "What happened?"
You explain in broad strokes the situation, about how one of your lab techs had been enticed to steal sensitive and valuable data related to your de-extinction efforts. Only for sheer dumb luck to have foiled the attempt. A summation of the investigation and the results. And after your own meager research, what little you had found out about Mantah Corp and Biosyn.
By the end of it you've gone through two glasses of water and a plate of snacks that your secretary had brought in. Margaret was listening with an inscrutable look on her face, while Cabot was paying close attention.
"So frankly Margaret, I'm in over my head here. My people are good at what they do, but I need someone with the knowledge of the business side of things that can spot weak points that need to be shored up or processes that need to be better protected. I'm better at dealing with animals than people most of the time, so this is entirely out of my bailiwick."
The woman examined you for a moment, before her eyes flicked to the side to look at her son.
"Elliot, I'm willing to help you, but I have two conditions." You waited for her to continue and she smiled as if you'd just passed some kind of test. "Good you're not immediately agreeing to anything. First, I would like a five percent stake in this endeavor. I've seen the boats and helicopters when we flew over here, and that they were headed to Nublar and Sorna. Matanceros is only the beginning isn't it?" Okay, that was honestly a bit scary how intuitive she was. She continued on without waiting for an answer.
"My second condition is that you take on Cabot as your aide and intern. I believe that this would be the perfect proving ground for him to properly stretch his wings." You glance at Cabot, the guy has a look of shock on his face, apparently this was news to him as well. "Do those two things, and you will have my full assistance in ensuring that Biosyn hits a wall every time they try to come after you. Because they
will try again. De-extinction is already proving to be quite a valuable line of business."
[ ] Take the Deal: Cabot's about your age anyway so you should hopefully be able to get along with him. And a five percent stake is... okay it'll be a pretty tidy sum of money but she's not asking for a controlling stake in the parks at least?
[ ] Alter the Deal: Yeeeah no. You're not going to just let her walk all over you. Either you take Cabot on, or she takes the five percent. One or the other.
-[ ] Take on Cabot.
-[ ] Give the 5% stake.
[ ] Reject the Deal: She's asking too much of you. You'll let her have her VIP week and see her off, but you're not going to take her deal.
---
[X][Hatching]Continue the slow and steady pace of having the scientists work on a singular species of dinosaur at a time. There will be fewer dinosaurs than in canon but they will be more robust, socialized, and better understood.
You gently rubbed Rexy's snout as the juvenile Rex gave a rumble that vibrated through your bones. She'd been enjoying some time in the open air enclosure that you'd transferred her to after beginning acclimation to humans, and she was responding very well to the... well, it was a form of training. Using specific noises and colors to associate people with care and comfort, rather than using pain as a goad. There had been a few instances where Rexy had been stalking people, but a glare and a sharp word had her practically sulking.
Your teams had already put together entire
reams of notes on her behavior. You gave her one last scritch under the chin that had her eyes fluttering closed in pleasure, before backing off. One thing that you and the others had learned first was that turning your back on Rexy apparently wasn't a great idea. Those were the times that she'd started trying to stalk her caregivers. So instead you'd come up with a novel workaround. Hats with eyes on the back. Apparently if it looked like she was still being watched, Rexy was content to just lay down and sleep off her earlier meal rather than try and be a little shit.
Exiting the enclosure through the airlock style gates, you went to wash your hands to ensure that you got the scent of predator off of you. You nodded to the keepers that were keeping a discrete eye on Rexy, noting her behaviors and habits. Every scrap of information would make it easier to care for her as she grew.
There had been some push from the labs to begin speeding up the production of the dinosaurs, but you had put your foot down,
hard. You weren't going to spread your people thin like that, and doing so would have made the possibility of missing behavioral problems and potentially harmful tendencies.
A short jeep ride took you to the enclosure where the Ankylosaurus' have been put up. It turned out that they
did apparently tend towards herding behaviors, though the now twelve dinosaurs had split along gender lines, with the males and females keeping to themselves. They were actually acting more like elephants in that the group of females seemed to have centered themselves around a sort of matriarch, while the males seemed to just keep loosely banding together. Eight females and four males at the moment, and at this point it was about as many as you wanted until your people had a better grasp of their temperament and habits.
It had turned out that while they didn't have the greatest eyesight, their sense of hearing was phenomenal. Something about the structure of the spikes on their heads seemed to help act as receivers for sound vibrations through the air. Which was making training them to recognize human sounds as non-hostile much easier.
---
[X][Wu Next Step]Triceratops. One of the Big Names of the dinosaur world, as recognizable as the T-Rex by any child around the globe. Also probably going to be the second third biggest herbivore you give the okay on reviving. You and Gerry are likely going to need to lean heavily on how Rhino calves are dealt with, as well as making damn sure no one loses any body parts to that beak. You've seen what an alligator snapping turtle can do to a man. A Triceratops eclipses that by several orders of magnitude.
You were glad to see that Wu's not hung up on having his Lysine contingency rejected. The Triceratops had not only gestated without major hiccups, but had all hatched successfully. Your initial plans to treat them like rhino calves unfortunately had to be scrapped due to their size upon hatching. They were far too small for the enclosures that usually were used for the young animals. Instead you'd needed to install a sort of cross-hatch of bars to keep the baby trikes from simply squirming through the gaps. They'd also been quick to begin establishing a pecking order via something close to wrestling. They'd been born with a small bump instead of a proper horn on the snout, very much like rhinos, but their shearing beaks were nothing to coo about.
You'd already determined that they used a form of gizzard-like function to help pulp their food, and as such had made sure that they had poultry grit in order to facilitate digestion. It seemed to be working, and overall the hatchlings had been taking to their handlers without too much issue.
As there was zero chance that these animals would be intentionally introduced to the wild, having them acclimated to humans and not predisposed towards violence against them would be ideal, especially if some idiot decided to try and circumvent the enclosure security in order to get up close and personal with the animals. Hopefully the moat systems that had been dug out would be a good barrier against that, along with their secondary function of helping mitigate water from the occasional torrential rainfalls that sometimes struck the islands. Another of the design ideas that the Imagineers had given your team to run with.
You'd also noticed that Wu had been spending more time around the enclosures for the newly-hatched dinosaurs. Coming up to stand next to him, you stood in silence for a few minutes, watching the trikes gambol about the small plains-like area the enclosure had been modeled off of.
"It's... different, seeing them like this," Wu eventually murmured. You turn slightly to give him the side-eye. His face is pensive, and you wait for him to continue. "In the lab, even while they're hatching, it's so much easier to look at them as subjects. Things meant for study and if need be, destruction. It's easy to forget that even though we made them, from that first breath to the last their development is out of our hands. Their personalities, their likes and dislikes..." He pointed at one of the bigger hatchlings. "That one for instance, for all that she's the biggest out of the group, is more than happy to let the others fight over things. She'd much rather nap and wallow. But that one," he points towards one of the smaller of the clutch who is eagerly butting heads with one of its clutchmates. "He's not even a week old and he's already got a chip on his shoulder, always ready for a fight."
"Makes them a bit more real, doesn't it," you say quietly. Wu nods, before turning to you fully.
"I think I get a bit more of what drives you to continue your father's work. It's not just to fulfill a legacy is it?" You shake your head and smile, and Dr. Wu nods. "Well then Elliot, what's next on the schedule for revival? And please, feel free to call me Henry. I think that you and I have worked together long enough to use first names." You nod, chalking up the victory in your head.
[ ][Revival]Passenger Pigeon. The President is looking to get some points with the ecologically-minded voters. And bringing back a species that Americans had wiped out should work quite well. The biggest problem will be getting enough genetic samples. But compared to pulling the DNA of a T-Rex together it'll be child's play.
[ ][Revival]Thylacine. One of the poster species of extinction, the Tasmanian government has requested your efforts to revive the species. Possibly the most complex project yet due to the subject being a marsupial. But also a much more recent extinction event than the Terror Birds.
[ ][Revival]Auroch. The ancestor of all breeds of modern day cattle, Aurochs were larger with massive racks of horns. There's been some talk about trying to breed them out of their descendants, but honestly this way is much faster and more assured to work.
[ ][Revival]Stellar's Sea Cow. One of the few contracts that has a very obvious political bent, it's a way for the US to thumb its nose at the USSR by reintroducing the extinct animal into the habitat it had once roamed. Specifically the Bering Strait.
---
[X][Revival]Dodo. The poster species for extinction in recent history. There are plenty of samples to be found thankfully, and while unlike the other species it wouldn't be able to be reintroduced into its home range, The World Wildlife Foundation was willing to shell out a lot of funds to bring it back. Sort of a whole "man wiped them out and then man brought them back. We just had to try," thing to bring more focus on ecological husbandry and conservation.
You sipped at your drink as the reveal gala of the Dodos continued. Nicte has begged off, but as the head of the company you were
expected to be here. Dozens of select photographers were taking picture after picture of the Dodo chicks as they followed after their surrogate, in this case taking the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone; metaphorically speaking anyway. You'd gotten in touch with the government of New Zealand, and in exchange for helping diversify the breeding program, you'd gotten a number of Takahē birds to act as surrogates for the chicks.
On top of that you'd also arranged for shipments of the fruit of the Tambalacoque tree. These ancient trees had adapted so closely to a symbiotic relationship with the Dodo that after the bird's extinction there hadn't been any records of new trees growing. You were hoping that you'd be able to achieve a hat trick by getting new trees to sprout.
You spot Dr. Sorkin, looking
supremely uncomfortable in her dress rather than her normal lab attire. She's smiling awkwardly at the reporters that were gathered around her as they probed her on details about the revival. Thankfully so far she'd apparently been playing coy, but you decide to intervene. As you move towards her, you spot Henry at the edges of the party looking a bit smug about her distress, but he looks almost as ill-at-ease.
"Dr. Sorkin, there you are. I apologize folks, but the doctor is needed for a consultation with some other specialists." The reporters try to get you to answer some more questions but you're firmly polite about it, gently pulling Dr. Sorkin by the elbow until the two of you are out of the viewing area that had been turned into the gala room. The Dodo chicks didn't seem to mind the voices and cameras, though thankfully none of the cameramen were using flash photography.
Once the sound of chatter had faded somewhat, you turned and gave Dr. Sorkin a small grin. She returns it a bit tentatively. "Ah, thank you Mr. Hammond. I'm afraid that such social situations aren't my forte, even though I do enjoy some accolades."
You nod. "Understandable doctor. I am a bit curious about your next project, so it's not even lying when saying that I was looking for a consultation; and I
am a specialist." Both of you chuckle a bit before the doctor starts talking about her next choice for de-extinction.
[][Sorkin Next Step]Utahraptors. Since you've already gotten the biggest predator that you're going to be reviving in play, might as well go smaller. The Utahraptors would also be the ultimate stress test of your policies for raising these animals. They were big enough to see a person as prey, and if the theories about them hunting in packs are correct, you'd be looking at something as or even more dangerous to raise than lions, let alone the wolves or hyenas that these animals have been compared to.
[][Sorkin Next Step]Stegosaurus. Easily being another childhood favorite of millions thanks to it's distinctive thagomizer (
Heh, you still can't believe that a cartoonist came up with that name and then it stuck), and the plates along its spine. Another large herbivore, and one that likely would be in a mixed setting (you hoped), the current estimates on their potential size are pretty large, even larger than Triceratops after some corrections to the growth models by Wu and Sorkin.
[ ][Sorkin Next Step] Dilophosaurus. Smaller even than the Utahraptor while still being potentially a threat to humans, they may be able to give you a good stress test of the predator protocols without quite the amount of intellect as the raptors are projected to have. There are a few bits of their DNA structure that Wu and Sorkin aren't sure about what they may manifest as in the actual dinosaur, but the mystery makes it all the more interesting to the scientists.
---
AN: Yeah, I'm not dead. Sorry that it took so long but the job I'm working isn't exactly ideal for being able to focus on writing. But I'm hauling myself back into the saddle an inch at a time.
Also, please feel free to suggest any other species for de-extinction, as well as any other dinosaur species that weren't canon to the park. As of right now we're in the late 80s so there's still a solid five years before the canon park opened.
