Enjoy your extra extended story this month, folks, courtesy of a commission!

By FoxFaceStories

A Commissioned Extension for Tactical Soda

Wilbur’s first stop after inventing a time machine is to see the age of the dinosaurs, of course! But when a coordination error occurs and he is forced to deflect a major asteroid, he returns to the modern day to find the world - and his own body - greatly changed! Well, you can still be a scientist as a dinosaur girl, right?

That Space Rock Wasn’t Important, Right?

Wilbur was terrifically excited. The scrawny scientist had been working on his time machine for over ten years, and now on his thirty-third birthday he could finally try it out! The man had always found the idea of travelling into the past and exploring the different stages of Earth’s evolution to be a fascinating one. As a child, he wanted nothing more than to go back and see dinosaurs. Now as an adult, he could finally make that dream a reality. To actually witness the final time of the dinosaurs just before their asteroid-induced extinction . . . it was too great to resist. Such a dream had propelled him in his studies of time, and left him little actual time for anything else in the rest of his life: getting outside, staying fit and healthy, meeting people, forming an attachment to a young woman, it had all been cast aside. Wilbur was aware of what he had given up for his dream, but then again, he was a thin scrawny man with thick glasses and misaligned teeth. He wasn’t exactly going to be a draw for the ladies anyway, so why not achieve something far greater?

Every calculation had been performed, every possible factor accounted for that he could think of. The pod was reinforced with steel, the glass three plates thick, allowing for the perfect observation once he was inside. It would allow him to visit an older period of time, then jump back to modernity when he was ready. Of course, he couldn’t visit the same time period twice, alas. The timestream would not allow him to overlap a previous trip, or else causality would go bust in a big way. Still, a test drive was in order, and his mind brimmed with ideas.

“It’s time!” Wilbur declared, his voice echoing throughout his private laboratory. The man jumped into the pod and considered all the possible destinations in time. Should he view the battle between Caesar and Pompey? Should he witness the arrival of Columbus in South America? Should he watch the Wright Brothers fly their plane, or view the magnificent court of Mansa Musa? He considered this, but one idea rose above all the rest to excite him, the one that had stirred his passion for time travel since the beginning.

“No, why play it safe? You’ve got to risk it for the biscuit! Dinosaurs it is!” he declared, tapping on the keyboard inside the near-indestructible pod. “Let’s see how life looked sixty-five million years ago!”

The light turned green, and so Wilbur pulled the lever on his left. The machine shook violently, energy building up. Suddenly the world erupted in blue sparks, the very fabric of time and space sundering apart. The pod shook violently, and for a moment the scientist and engineer was afraid.

And then he was elsewhere, floating. Wilbur looked about, confused. His instruments made no sense. They told him that he was in . . . space? That just wasn’t possible. He should be on Earth, not long before the arrival of the asteroid that wiped out dinosaur life! And yet the pod slowly turned in its zero-g space, allowing him to see Earth in the far distance, as small to him now as the moon was in the night sky.

“Of course!” he announced, slapping his forehead in realisation. “I failed to account for the shifts in Earth’s orbit! The magnetising field of the time travel machine kept me close, but not close enough. I’ll just have to make some new inputs, and then-”

Suddenly, alarms blared in his pod. Something was coming, and his radar systems were detecting it. Something coming fast. The man’s eyes widened as he observed the screens inside the pod. It was something in space, and it was big. No, it was immense. And it was moving at the speed of kilometres per second. Wilbur quickly tried to shift the lever for a return journey, but it was too late: the object slammed against the pod, and it was only thanks to his hyper-advanced defence mechanisms that damage wasn’t done. Instead, his anti-gravitron chrono shield redirected the force of the asteroid and sent it flying back into space, as if he had hit it. Wilbur sighed with relief, glad that the failsafe systems had functioned perfectly.

“I better head back,” he murmured to himself. “If even the tiniest bit of damage occurred, it needs to be looked over and repaired in my lab.” 

He was about to throw the lever again when he looked back out the window into the magnificence of space, considering something. That asteroid had been quite large indeed. Very large. And while he hadn’t gotten a good look at his instruments, he could have sworn its trajectory was taking it on a collision course with Earth, of which the Gulf of Mexico was currently facing towards his drifting pod. The brilliant thirty-three year old gulped, trying to force down his worries.

“That space rock wasn’t important, right?”

With a dismissive shake of the head, he pushed the lever back, and the device tore time a new one and sent him shooting back into the present in a spark of bright blue energy. Only this time, Wilbur’s body trembled as well. He started to grow faint. Something was wrong, very wrong. The time field bounced his machine back and forth, as if something unstable had occurred to the timestream. He tried to see what it was on his instruments, but his vision was going blurry, and he could feel his flesh starting to ripple and shudder in response to some kind of radiation leak. The man tried to stay conscious, but the power of the time stream was too much. A bright light hit him, blinding him completely, and moments later he was knocked unconscious during the final arrival of the time travel pod. His last thought was a curious one: why did his skin feel so scaly?

***

When Wilbur woke up, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been out. He blinked his eyes, only to find that something was wrong with his vision. It was as if he was looking out both sides of his head, only that didn’t make sense, did it? He swallowed, only to find that his jaw was equally bizarre.

“Ugh, what’s g-going on?” he croaked, his voice sounding off. Sort of serpentine, in a way. “Was I irradiated?”

But Wilbur suddenly paused. His voice didn’t just sound off, it also sounded female. He had a raspy but clearly female tone of speech. He raised his hands up to touch his throat, only to uncover another shocking revelation: his arms were covered in scales and feathers!

“Whagh!” he cried in his husky female voice. The changed man leapt out the side of the pod, the device having opened automatically, and he quickly realised that his entire body was also thicker, heavier, and possessed strange sensations in places that were not only changed, but some of which had not existed at all before!

“M-my hands!” he whined, holding them up in front of his strangely positioned eyes. They had become reptilian claws at the end of a tropical, multicoloured feather coat he now possessed. “Oh God, my feet, too!”

They had long, sharp claws, and he no longer had footwear to contain them. The inner claw on each side was long and curved, a predatory claw meant for killing, but it was hard to see it properly because of his damn belly, which was round and blue-scaled as well, with the fears only starting around his widened hips and the sides of his waist, leaving the front clear. It was swollen indeed, and quite heavy.

“This is madness! This is impossible!” he cried, though even as he said this, he was very aware of a long and thick tail that shifted about behind him, providing a counterbalance to his huge and heavy belly. It too had a bright plumage of tropical feathers. “That asteroid couldn’t have been that important, could it? What would make me look like - look like -”

The answer arrived in Wilbur’s mind, and it was a shocking one to even consider, though deep down he suspected he’d known all along what he’d done. His hands and feet looked like those of a Deinonychus, a long-extinct dinosaur. The fact that his jaw felt longer and his teeth were greatly sharpened only added to this evidence.

“No!” he shouted in his distinctly female voice. “There’s no way - it couldn’t have been the asteroid!”

The new dinosaur-creature grabbed his belly and began to run to the edge of the lab. It looked different now, somehow. The ceiling was all skylights, allowing the sun’s rays to pour through, and the air was more humid, with numerous jungle plant displays. The model human skeleton in the corner had now been replaced with three skeletons, displaying what appeared to be an evolutionary ladder from hunched-over dinosaurs to modern humanoid creatures, albeit with dinosaur features. They each had a tail, and that reminded Wilbur that he now had one too; long and powerful and unburdened by any clothing, much like the rest of him. It swayed behind him and kept him from toppling forward due to the strangely large and rounded belly he now possessed.

“Where’s that mirror!?” he shouted, voice so very clearly female-sounding. “I need to see - oh no!”

He halted before the mirror, taking in the full view of his new form. But it wasn’t his form, he realised as his long jaw fell. No, it was her form. Because the body she now possessed was as undeniably female as her changed voice. Her hips were wide, and there was a clear and obvious space between her legs with no scaly sheath to hide a penis in. Her waist thinned out just like a human woman’s, though her build was overall a little more bulky. She didn’t possess breasts, but had a beautiful slimness to her figure. Her face was like a mix between that of a Deinonychus and a human woman’s, with a surprising softness to her features that remained expressive despite her sharp teeth and the fact that her eyes were spread out further. The feathers on top of her head were much longer, and had been deliberately styled so that they fell over one side of her head, as if they were hair. Her tail shifted behind her almost elegantly, and she was totally naked, though perhaps the feathers counted as clothing? Either way, it was shocking to take in, especially the prominent bulge of her belly, which was massive and round on her surprisingly exotic-looking figure. 

“I’m a f-female,” Wilbur muttered. “I’m a female and I’m . . . pregnant!? Just how did . . . oh no!”

The new pregnant dino-woman turned on the spot, accidentally knocking the mirror over with her tail, which she wasn’t used to having. She waddled across the laboratory floor, her big claw on each foot tapping nervously on the ground. She could feel the pressure in her stomach, and it was starting to clamp, her belly growing tighter. She pushed away that sensation and focused on getting outside.

“Please don’t tell me I stopped the extinction of the dinosaurs! Please don’t tell me I erased humans from history and changed all of reality!”

She erupted out of the front door, her feathers fluttering nervously and her tail smacking the door closed behind her. Wilbur lived in a quiet neighbourhood, and that much was still true. But instead of her neighbour Hank mowing the lawn, a large triceratops man was down on all fours and nibbling away at it. Across the street, Agatha Pickmire had been replaced by a family of humanoid struthiomimus, all of whom were playing some sort of strange ball game. Above, a couple of planes raced through the sky. No, not planes! Pterodactyls with far more humanoid bodies and faces, though their beaks were still quite long.

“Stop flying so low!” one called out in a girl’s voice. “We’ll get in trouble!”

“So what? We can just fly away, sis!”

A car drove past slowly, bulkier than any standard road vehicle that Wilbur had ever seen. Within, a heavyset tyrannosaur-like man waved a two-fingered hand his way.

“Nice ta see ya, Wilma!” the dinosaur roared. “Still haven’t laid those eggs, I see?”

Wilma blinked as he passed. “E-eggs?”

But then the pressure in her big, round, scaled belly suddenly broke, and she roared without meaning to as an urgent need to bear down began. Across the street, the father struthiomimus looked over to her. “Has it started, Wilma?”

“Has wh-what started!?” she cried, clutching her belly and moaning. Her tail lifted up automatically, and she spread her legs by some strange instinct as she positioned herself over a soft area of her front lawn.

“Your eggs, of course! Are you laying? The kids will be so excited!”

Wilbur - or perhaps Wilma now - had no idea what to say to that, but she couldn't say anything more anyway, because suddenly a terrific need to bear down and push came over her. Something in her mind cracked as she squatted in the public neighbourhood space, snarling and growling like a true Deinonychus gal as the need to push overwhelmed her. She was a woman. She was a mother. It was undeniable, and the male neurons in her brain were set alight by this information, making it impossible for her to think of herself as anything other than a woman. How could she, when she was literally giving birth through her wide, scaled, and very womanly hips?

The new curvaceous dino-gal roared into the sky and pushed, pushed, pushed. Something squeezed her new passage wide, and to her shock something finally emerged out of her, dripping and round, and then plopped upon the grass. 

It was an egg.

A large spotted dinosaur egg.

“Oh God,” she muttered. “I really changed reality. And I can’t change it back, because I can’t overlap my own visits. Oh dear, oh - ohhhhhh! NGHHH!”

She bore down and started to push again, the next egg beginning to crown, the second of what felt like nearly a dozen or so. Across the street, more dino neighbours were appearing, all watching this public display with interest and a roar of congratulations. Clearly, this dino world she’d inadvertently made didn’t have qualms about public birth. Wilma could only roar and pant and push as more eggs emerged from her loins, reality changed so that she was, and had always been, a very fertile dinosaur-woman, one evolved from the stupid creatures of prehistoric past into an entirely alternative civilisation to man.

“Your mate will be so excited!” shouted the triceratops next door. “Your first clutch! And so soon after your devotion ceremony! That’s a good sign for many more clutches to come!”

Wilma wanted to tell the woman to shut up, but she could barely speak as she pushed out another pair of eggs, still clutching her belly in disbelief as she birthed them onto the ground. Wait, what had that dino neighbour just said?

Her mate?

Her first clutch? 

More to come?

But then the urge to push hit her again, and she had no time to think of such things. She had altered the entire timeline, and now there was no stopping what she’d started. She was going to be a dino-mother whether she liked it or not. And to the rest of the world, this was how it had always been . . .

***

When Wilma woke, it was evening, and someone was rubbing her scaled, feathered back. She couldn’t even remember falling asleep, just that she’d had this overwhelming instinct to lay across her eggs in the aftermath of birthing fourteen of them, and then rest there, protecting them with her body and nurturing them with her warmth. Several neighbours had brought her water and some slices of meat, which she’d consumed eagerly, still shell-shocked by all she’d just experienced. And then, somewhere along the way, she must have fallen asleep.

“Wilma? My mate! You did it!”

She stirred and shifted her head up to look at whoever was talking to her. To Wilma’s surprise, it was another anthro-deinonychus, only this one was male. He was slim figured, with narrower hips, but his shoulders were broader, and he had a lithe strength to him. He was also naked, but he had a slight bulge between his legs where, she knew as someone fascinated by dinosaurs, his reproductive member was concealed. For now, at least. 

“Who are you?” she murmured, though she found herself sniffing the air and finding a strange comfort in his close presence. Like they were . . . compatible.

“Oh, my dear mate. You have been through quite a lot. It’s me, your mate: Jarshu.  I’m sorry I wasn’t here for the laying, but I’m so proud of you. How many children do we have in our clutch? I know I was hoping for twelve. Did we manage that many?”

Wilma’s mind cleared a little. This creature, this deinonychus man . . . was her husband? Her mate? She blinked a couple of times, grappling with this, as well as the fact that her body was insisting on finding him attractive. Slowly, she pulled herself back, revealing all the eggs she had pushed out of her body and into the world. The ones she had been comforting according to her new instincts.

“I - I laid fourteen,” she said, shell shocked.

“Fourteen? Fourteen! My mate, my devotion to you grows ever stronger. With that, the feathered dino-man darted around to her side and held her, running his claws down her back in a soft way that was oddly calming.

“I’ve got fourteen kids on the way,” she said. “You - you put fourteen kids in me.”

“A mighty clutch! I still can’t believe I landed such a mate as you, my Wilma. I’m so proud. Come, let me help you inside, and we’ll bring the eggs down to the incubation pod. The changes you’ve made to it will help them grow even stronger than most, I just know it!”

Wilma swallowed, her tail thudding a little on the ground as her apparent mate nuzzled up against her side and pressed his long face against hers.

“I invented an incubation chamber?”

“My mate, how long have you been out here? You must need some food. You know what a great scientist and engineer you are.”

Wilma smiled wearily, baring her sharp teeth even as Jarshu helped her stand upon her own two taloned feet and begin walking back into their home, which was an altogether different design with numerous plants growing atop the roof. She looked back at her eggs - her entire clutch of fourteen eggs - and to her own astonishment she felt a sense of worry stir in her heart.

“But - but the eggs-”

“Hush, I’ll come bring them in. You come rest. You’ve done so much, my loving mate. You’ll be the talk of the neighbourhood with such fertility as you’ve shown! A mother and a scientist, what a lucky man I am!”

Wilma could only nod along, moving with Jarshu and trying to come to terms with it all. Her mind ran theorem after theorem through it, even as he settled her against a very warm rock that was obviously heated from below. She nestled against it, making a strange purring sound. Her body was no longer sore, but her mind was buzzing, racing with potential solutions. Perhaps if she arrived just before her own arrival? Perhaps if she could arrive a year after the intended death of the dinosaurs, and then propel an asteroid of the same size - somehow - down onto the planet. God, but how would she even do that? And could she even do it? For as she rested, her eyes only occasionally blinking open, she saw her mate continue to return into the heated red room that was the incubation chamber, placing her eggs around the room and a few near her own body for intimacy’s sake. Without even thinking, she reached out and pulled two of them closer against her, hugging them against her. She’d been a scientist and engineer for so long, casting aside everything else in her life all for the pursuit of time travel, and now . . .

Now she felt a desire for something else.

***

“Jarshu? Jarshu! Where have you gone?”

Wilma strode through the mall. It had been four weeks since being turned into a dinosaur-woman, and two weeks since their eggs had started to hatch. The new woman had been astonished at how instinctively motherhood came to her, and what strength of maternal instinct she now possessed. She had been trying to work out a way to travel back and undo her change to the timestream, but after holding her first little hatchlings and giggling at the ways they climbed over her and nuzzled her scaled and feathered form, she could no longer countenance the idea of it. She had already destroyed one timeline by changing the past; she would never forgive herself for destroying another, especially not one that contained her children.

So she had adapted. She had learned more about this world, which had more than twenty types of dino-people, ranging from carnivores to omnivores to herbivores, and yet all of which lived in a greater state of peace than her own time as a human. They farmed much more sustainably, there was no damaging fashion industry due to the warm air making nakedness preferable, and across the history of the dino-people there had been a move to ensure that all of civilisation was accessible to all of them, be they huge brachiosaurus people or little raptors. Still, it was a remarkable thing to walk through the mall of this new timeline and take in the sight of so many different kinds of scaled humanoids, some thudding in their steps, others scampering about and avoiding the heavy footfalls. And here she was, another one of them, a new mother pushing an extended Crater Pram 3000 that was designed to hold an entire clutch of hatched little ones. Most were sleeping right now, but others were jumping about, which was why it had a transparent closed top with airholes. There were just so many hatchlings to keep track of that there was no risking a possible escape.

“Jarshu!” she called out. “Jarshu, where are you?”

She wished this world had modern phones, however. That was the other thing. Their much slower evolutionary process meant that they were a bit behind human progress at the same timestamp. Computers were just being invented, but nothing too mobile. She had ideas on how to fix that and become a mighty innovator.

“Jarshu, where are you?”

“I’m here, my mate!” 

Darting to her, his tail swaying behind him and his talons clacking upon the floor, came her mate. She had come to know him much better in the past two weeks. He was attentive, kind, and loved watching dino-wrestling far, far too much. But he was also a scientist, much like herself. Not brilliant enough to make a time-machine, but his work with organic grown meat processing was incredible. In fact, it made his mind as attractive to her as her body.

“Sorry!” he declared. “I was just getting some extra selections of meat for our date night. I hope I wasn’t gone too long.”

With a smirk, Wilma nuzzled against him. “You were, but that’s okay. My arms are just getting tired pushing this stroller, and our hatchlings were getting worried in your absence.”

He placed a hand around her waist and gazed down at them, reaching out a claw. They nuzzled up against it through the gaps in the protective cover. 

“I love you all,” he declared.

“I love you, too,” Wilma said, and her words surprised herself. They had come out so easily, and were not just directed to the children she had laid, but to her handsome dino-husband as well. In response, he simply gave her a little nuzzle of warm affection.

“Let’s get going, shall we? Lots of meat tonight to grow our little ones, and then once they’re asleep, we can get back to science, my mate!”

Wilma smiled, letting her tail slide against his as they walked together. Science indeed would be a good thing to get back to. A thousand new ideas burned through her head on what she could make, invent, and introduce to this world. But then again, her body also had other desires she would like fulfilled as well. Funny, how it had taken warping the entire timestream so that dinosaurs became the dominant species just for her to finally embrace the other aspects of life. And when it came to her hatchlings and her husband, and all the pleasure he could give her when he mounted her in a primal, prehistoric fashion, she couldn’t imagine ever going without them again.

Maybe hitting the space rock hadn’t been so bad after all?

The End