"Welcome to Jurassic Park"

Posted by Ellie Sattler

The past is not important to me and I rarely think about it, but I would like to tell you about why we – myself, Sam, and others – are here.

"Welcome to Jurassic Park."

For years these words haunted my thoughts and dreams. Every day a new struggle chipped away at me – Sam falling ill, having to defend ourselves from any number of races of dinosaur. After many years of pain, one night I locked myself in my room, and as the words "Why hasn't my life found a way?" repeated in my mind, my lungs and heart merged, then split into thousands of partly filled holes. As the rest of my body became clear, blood started pouring out all surfaces, and I fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning with a feeling of total bliss. A velociraptor, standing silent in the corner of my room, noticed my awakening and bared her teeth at me. Somehow I knew she wanted only to speak to me, so I listened. Handing me a sculpted model of a raptor's vocal chamber, she told me that having seen my transformation the previous night, she and the other raptors felt that I was ready to communicate with them.

At the raptors' suggestion, without so much as a goodbye note I left my friends and the camp, and for the next few years I studied with two raptors named Tolbert and Ulrich. They taught me to breathe side-borne and helped me to train my new set of legs. After three years, covered in peace and bone marrow, I felt I was ready to return to worker's camp to be with my loved ones.

When I returned, things were tense. I could sense that my dear friends were worn out, tired of constantly rebuilding after dinosaur attacks, malnourished, and desperate. I learned that Sam had begun locking away all of the fruit and edible vegetation in the area. He had declared that only those who worked hardest could eat – and began handing out out his own teeth as a form of currency. Soon the only occasion on which these friends spoke to one another was with a forced "thank-you" in return for teeth.

Since then a lot has changed, and we've come a long way towards a friendly and enlightened society here on Isla Sorna. I've convinced the others that the raptors are not a threat, but, as Ian remarked earlier in this blog, it may be too late. The raptors' population has dropped, and their food sources are vanishing even faster, having never recovered from Sam's mindless form of agriculture.

As a result, I've begun studying the various forms of small-scale self-sufficiency to allow us and the raptors to survive and coexist. I'll post more about these soon.