AoS Lustria Park (Jan-Feb 2023 story comp entry)

[Y'ttar Scaletail]

Lustria Park


“This is beyond stupid!”

For a moment, At-Tok looked dejected, his oddly perched conical hat that he had painstaking crafted for himself out of pith seemed to dip in momentary despair. His arm was still held out in grandiose indication towards a large red stylised banner that read ‘Lustria Park’. He quickly regained his composure though with a short tap of his amber headed staff of office.

The other Skink Priests remained unimpressed.

“Look! Why can’t any of you understand? So much was lost from our old world when the powers of Chaos broke it apart. Yes! Many of us escaped upon the Temple Ships and brought samples from lost Lustria, but not enough! This park as I keep telling you, will show the way Lustria was. It will be teeming with recreated life and the way we once lived can exist again rather than just be a memory.”

“At-Tok,” spoke one of the Priests, “your duties laid out by the revered Mage Priest was to take care of the Carnosaur eggs...not this...wait, are those toys and those tunics the warmbloods wear?”

“Merchandise, yes.” At-Tok broke in, “What better way to make sure the Great Plan(s) go without issue than getting the warmbloods to see things through our eyes? Besides, egg production is at an all-time high and the exhibits are nearly filled already. We’ve got variable Bastiladons, Carnosaurs, Razordons, Cold Ones, Slamanders, Stegadons, Terradons, a Dread Saurian (she’s called Kroq Junior), a Huagerdon petting area for younger Skinks, even a host of Raptadons.”

“Wait...” spoke Pal-Tolo, looking very nervous, “Raptadons? You’ve been breeding Raptadons?”

“Not exactly, we’ve used ancient star science to control how many are produced by making every one of our specimens female. Also, whilst the ancient glyph wards hold, there is no danger and we have full control.”

“Life, er finds a way,” another Priest, Gol-Ptoo spoke.

“No!” growled At-Tok, “none of your silly Chaos theory, this temple ship is protected against such things.”

Pal-Tolo’s tail lashed with concern, “Even so, Raptadons are one of the deadliest predators, their vision is not movement based and their claws could rip through a warmblood like a blade through leaves.”

“...So can most things we ride or use in war...and that includes us...” sighed At-Tok.

“What even is the problem, Raptadons are just large turkeys,” another Priest quipped, a claw stuck up a nostril. The other Priests groaned and began to argue amongst themselves.

“Quiet!” At-Tok yelled, slamming his staff down with such force that it splintered in half. He looked at both broken ends in sudden sorrowful regret before turning his gaze at the others. “Just have a look inside, see what I have been doing, and if it goes against all your principles then report me to the Mage Priest.”

The other Priests were quiet for a long time before with a shrug they followed At-Tok inside the hold section.

---------------------------------------------------

Much later.


“Those were Draconith!”

“So they keep telling me,” muttered At-Tok, “it really breaks the immersion.”

“But the eggs entrusted to our Temple Ship were lost.”

“Well I found them...and honestly I don’t think they were a good choice for Lustria Park.”

The other Skink Priests stared dumbfounded.

“This needs to be reported to the Mage Priest,” Pal-Tolo spoke at last, “That you were able to properly incubate and hatch them is astounding.” He paused for another long moment, “The Mage Priest might even endorse...‘Lustria Park’...”

At-Tok tossed aside his broken staff ends he had carried up until then and clapped his hands together in joy. “Well why didn’t you say so?!”

-------------------------------------------------
Elsewhere in the park an overworked glyph winked out and there came a low rattled growl from a Raptadon.

 

[Y'ttar Scaletail]

I wrote this piece and got it sent with but few hours to spare after having a spate of no ideas and scrapped concepts.

In the end I decided to take the piss and do something silly. There was little plan with the plotline, the whole draconith part came out of the blue as I was writing...which was a gamble since it is one of the newer and interesting bits of lore in Age of Sigmar. In the Soulbound rpg system, draconith have only recently been released as a playerable race and most are still hatched and raised by the Seraphon, leading to them being very out of touch with mortals, very naive, and having a burning desire to drop a mountain or six on Kragnos.

However, the ending felt a little too abrubt and happy...so at a whim I added the final line of the raptadons breaking loose and leaving what silly shenanigans up to the reader's imagination.

Originally I was going to write a piece of an archaeologist in Age of Sigmar piecing together dinosaur bones incorrectly, with a teleporting Skink Priest on a mission to retrieve an artefact being so upset at how badly the bones have been connected has to stop and fix them whilst leaving a very snotty note for the archaeologist. But I just could not get it to work.

Spoiler

“Professor? Are you quite sure that is the correct configuration?”

Marius Azurheim’s brow furrowed at his assistant’s words and he turned away from the bone reconstruction of the giant dinosaur his team had unearthed far to the West of the Great Parch. He tutted and indicated for his assistant to follow him and the two began to slowly walk through the museum’s curio collection.

“Sara,” Marius spoke as they walked, “I am the foremost professor of Brightspear’s natural and unnatural history department. I have travelled across the realmgates and visited Ghur and Azyr in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the creatures that made up and in some cases still make up the realms.”

He paused before the stuffed remains of a huge Frost Sabre, frozen mid-leap, its jaws stretched wide in a terrifying forest of fangs. Marius adjusted his spectacles and smiled gently at the Frost Sabre.

“I have seen and learnt things the likes of no other mortal man could claim to equal.

Lustria Park

• no Chaos Dwarfs content

Alas, my original story might have had the remains of a k'daai, so I might have made your voting decision slightly harder. Oh well.

Spoiler: Story five: Lustria Park

Yet another Jurassic Park parody, this time with the Skinks running things and housing dinosaurs like in the original. The story takes place after the End Times in the Age of Sigmar, however no exact location is given. I was wondering in which realm a park like this would be best suited, probably the Realm of Ghur.
The inclusion of the Raptadons as dangerous predatorial dinosaurs was a fun extra, although we do not yet know how these creatures fit in the lore, I liked the idea of the finding of their lost eggs.

Grrr, !mrahil

I feel like Ghur would eat them all up for breakfast. The story took place on an unnamed Temple Ship so technically outside the realms if my AoS lore be correct. The reveal of raptadons as a unit was perfect timing to make many velociraptor references. Angry teeth turkeys attack!

Spoiler: Story five: Lustria Park

The second Jurassic Park parody. I bet the writers of this story and n.3 were hoping to be the only one with the idea.

Pros: It's not a complete reversal, it's the new Seraphon that revive old dinosaurs. this makes it for an original PoV and it includes also the right amount of fun.

Cons: as said previously, parody is fun, but not exacly an original story, and when you only have one vote...

I was thinking there would be more and that they would be much better since only young Y'ttar was a fan of dinosaurs and Jurassic Park. Older Y'ttar has a soft spot for certain fossils but isn't so heavily invested as he was.

Story Five: Two! Two Jurassic Park parodies! Ah! Ah! Ah!

This piece was a fun little comedy. The whole Draconith part at the end caused me to spit-take as the mental image of very intelligent dragons stuck in a dinosaur park arguing with their deranged Skink keeper that they weren’t technically dinosaurs or part of historical Lustria and would very much like to leave the Temple Ship and fight this Kragnos guy. There’s just so many little nuggets of silly (and yet sometimes subtle) moments and quips in this piece. Heh...‘Chaos Theory’...

However, this piece is mayhaps a little too silly to the point of kicking in the suspension of disbelief. It also doesn’t really go anywhere with larger scale action or story. Great fun nonetheless.

Heh...'Chaos Theory'...

Story Five: "Lustria Park": Two Jurassic Park stories, so I'm going to do a bit of apples-to-apples comparison with Story Three.

I thought Story Three had a better twist ending and a funnier premise, I thought "Lustria Park" was better at everything else.

Again, keep in mind that I agree literary rules can and should be broken from time to time but I believe in general, a short story name should very clearly tell you what's going on and I don't agree with Story Three author's decision to make a misleading title just to get a rise out of Nightbringer.

More importantly, "Lustria Park" was better constructed. The characters felt more alive and it seemed to follow the main story beats of Jurassic Park much more closely but deviated enough to maintain my interest. The pacing was slightly better and this piece had a better defined beginning, middle, and end (though the ending was not perfect as my next paragraph attests). Story Three had one great joke but "Lustria Park" had several good jokes, and I'd say "Lustria Park" won the humor award overall in my opinion. Also, it had huagerdons in it. I feel warm and fuzzy whenever an author other than me writes huagerdons in something.

My main misgiving is that this short story is written as a teaser or introduction to a larger story. 19 times out of 20 we never get the larger story finished. 49 times out of 50, the larger story is never as captivated. I've been running these short story contests a very long time. Introduction stories almost never win. I put the almost in for padding. Maybe if I looked over all 32 previous contests very carefully, I can find one exception that proves the rules, but that still only counts as one! Maybe I'm a nerd or a rules stickler, but I generally believe short stories should contain short stories that are well contained to specific things. There is a general rule that because space is at a premium in a short story, I had an English teacher say every sentence must advance the plot or establish characterization, anything else is wasted space. I'm not sure I would go that absolute (especially for the fantasy genre), but certain stories work better as short stories, some as novelettes, some as novelas, and maybe some as novels. It is not like we disallow writing outside the short story contests.

Thankies. I honestly wasn't throwing out huagerdons to nudge for your vote, since you would look past that and vote on the writing itself. I just genuinely like the little buggers, so I wanted to give a little reference to them. In regards to the ending, it was not my intention at all for this story to be a teaser or intro for a longer story/saga. I just threw in that last line to give a silly cliffhanger, 'here we go again!' sort of vibe and let the reader imagine Skinks being chased across a Temple Ship by a bunch of angry teeth turkeys.