Stories: Dinosaur Gods:TTU

Stories: Dinosaur Gods

A glimpse into TTU's future -- and its distant past.

It's just another day at work for a tour guide at New Atlantis' foremost museum -- until one of his guests starts smiling at the 65-million-year-old statue known as the Atacama Dragon. Nobody smiles at the Atacama -- adults go silent at its aura of ineffable importance, and kids find it a boring hunk of rock ...

Meta-Data

Author

BaxilDragon

Release date

2010-05-10

Word Count

5600

Author Comments

And this is just scratching the surface of the
technologies that a nation full of mages would
develop as a matter of course!

Story Data

Major Characters

CharacterSerebraxus, a tour guide
Jim, a security mage
Fabrizio, a tourist

Dates of Story Events

Summer, 2012

Era: EraOverTheHorizon

See also: EraPreHistory

Locations

LocationMATT, in LocationNewAtlantis

TTU Events

None

Significant Cameos and References

Magitech firm GroupRavensHeadTechnologies, where New Atlantis financier Aaron Whitley made his fortune, gets name-dropped.
Life Through The Ages is a popular TV series -- produced by New Atlantis TV starting in 2008 and rebroadcast on various stations worldwide -- that uses time windows to show "life as it really was" in various cultures and historical eras.
LocationAIT -- the Atlantean Institute of Thaumology -- is the island's magical college (est. 2009), a magnet school that draws in the most talented mages from across the globe.

Trivia

Serebraxus receives a "10-scruple tip." The scruple is the official currency of TTU's New Atlantis -- named in homage to the actual New Atlantis, Leicester Hemingway's short-lived island republic in the 1960s. Leicester apparently felt that rich people should have lots of scruples.
Yes, volcanic ash turns water acidic; and yes, marble has problems with acid! They were lucky that the damage was minimal enough to save the statue at all.
After the events of this story, the TAMS squad's distinctive hats quickly caught on -- and the tam o'shanter tradition soon spread out across the island as a visual symbol for mages providing translation services.