Fanfiction – The Scaly Raptor

The Scaly Raptor by Harry Leferts

First, let me admit that I’ve only ever seen the first Jurassic Park movie and read the first two books. That said, it certainly seems like Leferts hasn’t cut corners on his Jurassic World crossover… and he’s the one who lured me into the My Little Pony fandom with the work he put into a Harry Potter crossover.

The basic plot to this sequel fic is that Owen inherited an amulet from his grandfather which will supposedly allow him to become a better animal trainer.  Following the events of the movie, Owen decides it certainly couldn’t hurt and wakes up as a Velociraptor, capable of speaking English and understanding Dinosaurs.

(Given that his grandfather wasn’t stuck as the animals he trained, it’s realized fairly quickly that, after a week, he’ll be able to take the amulet off and shapeshift back and forth on his own.)

It’s a delightful character piece, but the real fun comes about when Blue decides to use the amulet to become a human. Once that happens, the story graduates from great to being a joy to read.

Like “The Wizard and the Lonely Princess”, it’s primarily a character piece, so it’s hard to summarize much about the plot beyond “Entertaining and satisfying character interactions set against the drama of the movie’s aftermath”. That said, I’ll share an example of one of the more amusing references used for humour:

Now that got a laugh out of Owen as he shook his head. “Well, it is unexpected you know… but why not? I got time to kill after all.”

That caused him to get blank looks from the raptors before they looked at each other. Then Charlie reached up with one claw and scratched the bottom of her jaw like she had learned to after copying some of the various handlers. “{How does one kill time? Time not have body to kill nor blood to spill?}”

In reply, Blue scoffed. “{Just Alpha being stupid with saying stupid confusing things.}”

As the story continues to unfold, the drama starts to build as various concerns come to light, including cloned species that weren’t put into the record and a potential volcanic eruption but, at the same time, the character elements also unfold, with additions such as the discovery of an injured juvenile Ceratosaur while foiling a poaching attempt.

Near the end of what’s been written, it even starts to move along a subplot with a scope and importance which truly acknowledges the philosophical and societal implications of the breakthroughs in the Jurassic Park series. It’s a shame that progress is stalled just as that is starting to really pick up, but at least we got over 160,000 excellent words first.

All in all, I’d give it a full-blown 5 out of 5 since I know I’ll be re-reading this in a couple of years when my memory of it has started to fade. If you want to read a satisfyingly character-oriented story, you like transformation stories, or you enjoy stories about a lovable character learning what it means to be human, definitely give this a read.

P.S. If you want more in this vein, Pack by mjimeyg is a Harry Potter – Jurassic Park crossover that was probably inspired by it. Note quite as brilliantly written, but a great read in its own right.

Raptor by sakurademonalchemist also has commonalities with both stories, though I don’t want to spoil which ones.. It’s not marked complete but it sure feels complete.

Fanfiction – The Scaly Raptor by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.