The Tyrranopotamus
The Tyrranopotamus
Author's Note:
I am an avid listener of the Writing Excuses podcast. I think they give great, easily digestible advice, especially for beginner writers. In season 13 episode 21, Howard Taylor drew a picture of a T. rex mixed with a hippo and dubbed it the "Tyrranopotamus Rex", and then gave a writing prompt to write a story about it.
I felt like doing something comical, so I gave it a go. My approach for this story was that the Tyrranopotamus is so incredibly worthless, that it isn't even capable of generating actualy plot conflict. So the story is basically a series of bait and switches. Maybe it's spy thriller? No. Maybe escaped monster horror? No. Maybe romantic drama? Still no.
It is still a pretty rough draft, but I think it has some kinda funny moments.
“Dr. Fleming, what the hell am I looking at?”
Two men stood in a dark room, one in a crisp, black suit, the other in a lab coat. The only illumination came from a floor-to-ceiling aquarium window that ran the entire length of the wall, bathing the room in an eerie bluish light. The water only reached halfway up the window, and a large concrete platform rose out of the water away from them.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
The first man turned his head to look at Dr. Fleming.
“No, it is not. But what is it?”
He turned back to the window.
A round, gray creature floated in the tank of water, nearly completely submerged. Its large, bulbous head rested half in the water, ears flicking occasionally. Its short, stubby arms curled up against its body, nearly hiding the sharp claws that curved out from its fingers. The legs were squat and thick, but seemed insufficient to hold the massive, blubbery weight of the rest of its body. A round, fat tail tapered from the base of its back, nearly as long as the rest of the creature.
“A triumph of genetic engineering, Mr. Smith,” Dr. Fleming said, pride evident in his voice, “This creation represents a leap in scientific achievement, pushing us decades ahead of where we were.”
“It looks like a damn hippo.”
Dr. Fleming deflated a little.
“Well, it is. At least in part. Like 40% hippo.”
“What’s the other 60%?”
Dr. Fleming smiled again.
“A tyrannosaurus rex.”
Mr. Smith turned to face Dr. Fleming, who quailed under the angry look.
“A dinosaur?”
Dr. Fleming nodded.
“You spliced dino DNA with a hippo?”
Dr. Fleming nodded again. Mr. Smith glared at him for what seemed to Dr. Fleming an exceptionally long time.
“We call it a tyrannopotamus.”
“You said you were going to make a super soldier.”
Dr. Fleming held up a finger.
“No, no, what I said in the proposal was —”
Dr. Fleming retreated backwards as Mr. Smith started taking steps towards him.
“—that I would use novel genetic engineering methods to combine traits from different species that could benefit soldiers. I could not have been more clear.”
Dr. Fleming anxiously stepped behind a desk.
“And how is THAT!” Mr. Smith pointed an angry finger at the creature, “Supposed to benefit soldiers?!”
“Ah… well, I’m not sure yet, but—”
He held up a finger again as Mr. Smith took an angry step towards him.
“In the proposal, I was very clear, that the experiments could benefit soldiers, not a guarantee that they would, so really—”
Mr. Smith lunged across the desk at Dr. Fleming, grabbing the lapel on his lab coat. Dr. Fleming let out a yelp, and began swatting at Mr. Smith’s hand with a phone he plucked off the table.
“I’m going to kill you!” Mr. Smith yelled, stumbling to his feet, still struggling to take hold of Dr. Fleming’s coat.
“Now really!” Dr. Fleming said, pulling backwards and swinging the phone wildly, “If you’ll just take a moment to consider the ramifications of what—”
“OW!” Mr. Smith yelled as the phone struck his eye. He released Dr. Fleming and covered his face with his hands.
“Well, I’m sorry, but you left me no— my god…” Dr. Fleming’s face paled as he looked out the window to an empty tank. “She’s escaped!”
“What?!”
Dr. Fleming pushed past Mr. Smith and began dialing on the phone.
“Security! We have a containment breach! Deploy teams Alpha and Bravo! She’ll head for the river, so get a team in the air, as well.”
Mr. Smith stood with his mouth slightly open.
“Has this… happened before?”
Dr. Fleming looked over his shoulder to respond.
“Well, no, but we’ve run drills—” He did a double-take.
“Oh wait, there she is!”
Mr. Smith wheeled around and saw the window continuing around to the side wall. The tyrannopotamus was there in the tank, floating obviously and serenely.
“Nevermind,” Dr. Fleming said cheerily into the phone, “It was a false alarm!”
Dr. Fleming turned back to face Mr. Smith, smiling broadly.
“She likes to go number 2 in that corner. It’s right by the intake for the filtration system, so it keeps the whole tank clean. Really quite clever.”
He gazed at the tyrannopotamus fondly.
Mr. Smith pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered to himself.
“120 million dollars. Almost half our research budget.”
Suddenly, a sultry, feminine voice called from the hallway.
“Darling! Did you miss me?”
A gorgeous woman wearing a short, black dress walked in, carrying two champagne flutes. She stopped short and gasped when she saw Mr. Smith, dropping the glasses on the floor.
“Jonathan!”
“Beth!”
“What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here?! What are you doing here?”
“I work here, Jonathan.”
Mr. Smith stared hard at his wife.
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“In this lab?”
“Yes.”
“Making the dinosaur hippo?”
“Tyrannopotamus, yes.” She smiled apologetically, “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you about my work, but it was a top-secret government project, and they told me I would be blacklisted if I told anyone about what was going on here.”
Mr. Smith turned back to Dr. Fleming, who was smiling contentedly.
“Wow, what a coincidence, eh?”
Mr. Smith grabbed him by his coat and shook him.
“Are you sleeping with my wife?!”
Dr. Fleming spluttered.
“Wha—? Me with her? I never…”
Mr. Smith kept shaking him, his protests getting increasingly unintelligible as his glasses slipped down his nose.
“Jonathan! What are you doing?!” Beth screamed. She grabbed Mr. Smith’s arms and tried to pull him away, to no avail. Pens began falling out of Dr. Fleming’s pocket.
“Stop it! STOP IT! We are not sleeping together!” Beth cried.
Mr. Smith stopped shaking Dr. Fleming, and turned his head to look at his wife.
“You’re not?”
She shook her head.
“I’m actually gay,” Dr. Fleming added helpfully as he straightened his glasses.
Mr. Smith looked back and forth between the two.
“Why are you so dressed up?”
“There’s a staff party. I was coming to get Dr. Fleming.”
“What about the champagne?”
“He’s supposed to give a toast.”
“But you called him darling?”
Beth pointed at a small plaque on the window that read, DARLING.
“That’s her name, Jonathan.”
“Oh…”
Mr. Smith slowly released Dr. Fleming’s coat and smoothed the lapels.
“Sorry about that.”
“Not at all. Wasn’t the first time, certainly won’t be the last.”
Mr. Smith looked at Dr. Fleming’s unkempt hair, ill-fitting clothes, and gangly, unathletic body.
“Right...”
He turned to face the tyrannopotamus.
“Look, I need something to take back to my superiors. Something that shows this wasn’t a complete waste of resources. So can soldiers ride it?”
Dr. Fleming considered it.
“For a short distance. Slowly. Near freshwater. But not anywhere cold. But not too hot, either, if her skin dries out—”
“Can it be trained?”
“No. Not that we’ve found. But she does have her own unique kind of intelligence—”
“Can it kill?”
Beth gasped.
“Jonathan!”
Mr. Smith shrugged apologetically.
Dr. Fleming smiled.
“I’ll have you know that the hippopotamus causes more deaths than any other animal in Africa, unless you count mosquitos for spreading malaria.”
“Well that’s something, I guess,” Mr. Smith said quietly.
“However, it seems t-rex’s position at the top of the food chain offsets the defensive nature of a typical hippo. Likewise, the herbivorous diet of the hippo offsets the the t-rex’s need to hunt and kill, rendering the tyrannopotamus completely non-aggressive towards all animals. Humans included.”
Mr. Smith sighed.
“Fine. Maybe I can spin it as you developed a process that can be weaponized. Where did you get t-rex DNA from, anyway?”
“Oh that was the hardest part. First, we had to determine where t-rexes were most likely to have lived. Then we had to send teams back in time to different time periods to scout for signs of the t-rexes. Took years to find one, but then of course, once they did find it, they just sent someone back to the first day of the search to tell us where to look. Supposedly, that created some sort of temporal paradox, but no one seemed bothered—”
“Wait, wait, wait… Back in time?”
Dr. Fleming nodded.
“Uh-huh. Then, of course, we had to collect a sample, which we wanted to do ethically, but after we lost the first couple teams—”
“Stop. Just… stop. Where did you get a time machine?”
“We built one.”
Mr. Smith looked from Dr. Fleming to his wife, who nodded.
“Okay…”
“Where was I? Oh right, the sample. So eventually we decided that we could just kill a t-rex, collect the sample, then take the sample back to before we killed it, and then bring it back. Of course, that’s sort of a moral gray area, but—”
“Dr. Fleming?”
“Yes?”
“May I see the time machine?”
“Ah, I’m afraid that’s impossible.”
Mr. Smith stood up to his full height and Dr. Fleming cowed.
“Was it built using our funding?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then it belongs to us. Show it to me.”
Dr. Fleming shook his head.
“I’m sorry, I can’t.”
Mr. Smith bared his teeth.
“For the first time since I’ve been here, you just told me about something that is actually worth a damn. In fact, it might be the most revolutionary technological development in the history of mankind, and I am NOT going to leave it under your reckless, idiotic responsibility. Show it to me. Now.”
“I’m trying to tell you, I can’t! It was disassembled!”
Mr. Smith glared at him.
“To keep it from falling into the wrong hands?”
“What? No… I mean yes, I guess it does that too, but we really needed the components to make a bed for Darling.”
He pointed to a pile of twisted metal on the concrete platform behind the tyrannopotamus.
“We didn’t know if she would sleep like a hippo in the water, or would prefer to sleep on land, so we—”
Mr. Smith held up his hand and Dr. Fleming went silent.
“Can you construct another one?”
“Another bed? I don’t really see the point, she—”
“No, you imbecile. Another time machine.”
Dr. Fleming scratched his head.
“Maybe… Though the temporal physics required was more Dr. Frederickson’s specialty and he died trying to get a DNA sample. I suppose if we still had the time machine, we could go back and ask Dr. Frederickson how to make it before he died. Though as I said, we don't—”
Mr. Smith pinched the bridge of his nose, and held his hand up. Dr. Fleming tapered off.
“Why… what possible justification could you have… to make a dinosaur bed—”
“Tyrannopotamus, not a dinosaur.”
“A DINOSAUR BED,” Mr. Smith repeated, “Out of the world’s only functioning time machine?!”
Dr. Fleming shook slightly, eyes darting around desperately.
“Well, we really were working on a shoestring budget—”
Mr. Smith punched him in the face.