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When Rex first decided to bring dinosaurs on board to make his crew he was only thinking about how totally awesome it would be. Then he found out how intelligent the raptors who’d boarded were and the awesomeness factor ramped up even more. He barely had to teach them how to turn on the ship’s computers before they were all tapping away with their claws and figuring out the systems easy as pie. It was funnier to think that prehistoric lizards knew technology better than a certain nineteen-eighty something spaceman that Rex didn’t want to think about.
Spaceman? What spaceman? Rex only knew about his awesome space raptor crew.
Anyway.
Days went by after the crew got settled in and everything was still awesome. Then one of his raptors started acting funny and Rex began to worry. She paced around the nesting area he’d built for them, making strange noises and scratching through the hay lining the floor. After a few hours he found her skateboarding with another group and asked what was going on. He’d built a tiny communicator to talk to the dinosaurs (no sense in having a crew he couldn’t understand, right?) so he had no trouble getting an answer.
“You okay, Ripley?”
The raptor in question landed a kick-flip before answering with a quiet growl. “Yep. Just needed to lay an egg. You know how that goes, right ladies?” A chorus of growls and screeches answered her.
Rex, meanwhile, frowned. “You lay eggs?”
Every raptor around him turned to regard him as if he’d just said something dumb before several replied with “yeah”s and a few “duh”s.
“We’re bird-lizards, boss. We lay eggs.”
“Like highly advanced chickens!”
“Didn’t chickens evolve from us though? Doesn’t that make them the advanced ones?”
“Shh. No one needs to think that way.”
Rex wasn’t sure what to think about his crew laying eggs. And judging by the sounds of it they would continue to lay eggs. Which brought him to his next question. “So does that mean the ship’s going to be full of baby raptors soon?”
Again every head turned to stare at him.
“No?” Conner answered in a questioning tone. “All of us are ladies, boss. You’re the only guy on board.”
“What’s that have to do with baby raptors?” Rex asked with a frown.
Heads turned to glance away from him and several raptors coughed, but none gave an answer to his question. Eventually the topic was steered away.
“All our eggs will be duds, boss. Not a single one will hatch. No pitter-patter of baby claws here.”
“So...” Rex glanced around curiously. “What should we do with all the eggs?”
The raptors shrugged. Options were tossed out ranging from tossing them out the air lock to throwing them at anyone who made a bad joke. Rex thought about it for a while after letting the raptors go back to their skateboarding. He’d figure out something, but for now he just wanted to see what a raptor egg looked like.
A week of collecting eggs later and he finally came up with an idea.
It had been a long time since he’d worn an apron. They weren’t tough like the new persona he was carefully crafting. But he also didn’t want to get his vest dirty since the raptors hadn’t figured out how to fix their broken washing machine yet. So apron it was.
Standing at the stove took him back to days long past. He kept trying to focus on the days that involved loneliness while he cooked alone in his apartment with Planty (Man Upstairs rest that plant), but his traitor mind kept flitting toward dark hair and a sweet smile. He shook his head and almost hit himself with a frying pan to get rid of the image.
The smell of freshly cooked breakfast soon filled the entire ship and Rex found his crew starting to crawl out of their rooms to filter sleepily into the dining hall. Quickly the raptor friendly tables were filled and those who wanted coffee got their raptor friendly mugs filled at the coffee cooler (which was just a re-purposed water cooler that stayed hot for coffee, but the name ‘cooler’ had stuck since Rex thought the name ‘coffee hotter’ didn’t sound cool). As the raptors slowly woke up in their seats Rex popped through the kitchen doors, wheeling in a huge cart covered with steaming piles of fluffy golden deliciousness.
“Hope everyone likes scrambled eggs because there are plenty more where these came from!”