Meet the Family
Written for Futuristic Four Week 2024! Today's theme was Family. (I'll also be posting these as a series over on ao3, though we'll see if I make all the days on time lmao)
Summary: Wilbur invites his friends over to meet his family. He maybe should have given a few more details on who--and what--all his family includes. Gen, humor.
“No…” Wilbur said warningly as the great, gaping maw lowered slowly toward Hiro and Violet, teeth edging toward Violet’s forcefield while one beady eye watched Wilbur to see if its owner could get away with this. “Don’t do it…”
The monster lunged. Violet shrieked and slammed more energy into her forcefield. Hiro yelled and ducked instinctively, then peeked out from behind Violet’s shoulder, bare fists raised as if that would somehow do any good.
“No!” Wilbur yelled. “Bad dinosaur!”
Hiro and Violet screamed again as the T. rex chomped down on Violet’s forcefield and began to shake it like a dog with a ball. Violet concentrated everything she had on not dropping the forcefield as Hiro crashed into her and the two teens bounced around the purple bubble. They could dimly hear Wilbur still shouting.
Suddenly they were spinning across the grass in bright sunshine.
“Wo-o-oah!”
They rolled and tumbled and somehow, finally, slowed to a stop. Hiro staggered up, swayed, and promptly fell over again, too dizzy to stand. Violet clambered to her own feet carefully, trying very hard not to lose focus on the forcefield. It looked like it was dripping drool.
“Ew…”
“At least the shield held,” Hiro wheezed. “Thanks, Vi.”
Looking out, Violet saw Wilbur, not too far away (apparently they had done more spinning than actual traveling, which explained why her head was doing cartwheels), hands on his hips, scolding the T. rex that had almost just eaten his friends, while it sat on its haunches with a shamed, hanging head.
A panicked shout for Wilbur to get out of there! hurtled up Violet’s throat, paused, and died. It was replaced by annoyance. Extreme annoyance.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” She looked at Hiro.
He’d managed to get to his feet, and was watching with a nonplussed expression.
“Seriously, Wilbur?” he yelled.
Wilbur looked over, grinning. Hiro and Violet glared.
“What?” Wilbur asked.
“‘What?’” Violet shrieked.
“When you said we should meet your family, this was not what I pictured,” Hiro complained.
“I told you I had pets!”
“You said you had dogs!” Violet said. “You said Buster was, and I quote, ‘a Kennel Club crossword champion’.”
“That is not a dog!” Hiro gestured violently at the dinosaur, which was trotting happily after Wilbur as he walked over to his friends.
“Because that’s not Buster,” Wilbur said as though Hiro and Violet were the ones being silly here. “That’s Tiny.”
A shadow fell over the bubble as Wilbur—and his scaly terrier—reached it. Violet looked up at the dinosaur. It was easily 10 or 15 feet tall.
“Of course it is,” she said.
“Bowler Hat Guy brought him from the past during that one incident I’m not really supposed to talk about,” (Wilbur ran on too fast for either of the others to point out that they already knew practically everything about ‘that incident’, because Wilbur was absolutely terrible at not talking) “and we couldn’t figure out exactly when or where from to put him back. I mean, you can’t just dump a T. rex anywhere—he’d totally mess up the local ecosystem! And then we accidentally socialized him, and you really can’t dump a tame T. rex anywhere.”
“I don’t think tame T. rexes try to eat people,” Hiro said.
“He wasn’t trying to eat you. He was playing.”
“How was that—!”
Violet’s indignant question was cut off by the jangle of Hiro’s phone. He fished it out of his pocket and looked at the screen.
“It’s Penny.” He put her on speaker. “Hey, Penny.”
“Hi, Hiro. Are you already at Wilbur’s?”
“Yeah; Violet, too.” He looked at Tiny, clearly pondering the best, snarkiest way to mention their situation.
“I wanted to tell him sorry for being late, and I’m heading over now, but he forgot his phone somewhere again.”
“I did not!” Wilbur protested. “I…put it in a secure location.”
“You lost it,” Penny laughed. “Why do you sound so muffled?”
Hiro flicked on video chat. After a moment, Penny appeared on the screen, squinting at her phone.
“Why are you in a forcefield?”
Hiro silently panned the camera over.
Penny yelped and vanished in a pinwheel of house-grass-sky-Penny-house-grass. A second later she snatched her phone off the ground again and gaped at it.
“Is that a dinosaur? …he’s not eating Wilbur.”
“He’s tame!” Wilbur threw out his hands in exasperation. “He only went after Violet and Hiro because Dad made him some extra-reinforced jumbo beach balls to play with, and he thinks the forcefield is one.”
Tiny looked up hopefully and thumped his tail at the phrase ‘beach balls’. Violet glared.
“…are you serious?” Penny said slowly.
“I—”
“You’re petting a T. rex without me?! That’s so unfair! Aw man, traffic’s terrible this time of day. It’ll take forever to get there.”
“I can get Uncle Art to give you a ride,” Wilbur said. “He left on a delivery out near you right before Hiro and Violet showed up, and his ship’s plenty fast.”
“Don’t you need your phone to call him?” Hiro asked at the same time Violet said:
“Wait, so all those times you mentioned his spaceship, you meant actual spaceship? Your cousins aren’t going to turn out to be vampires, are they?”
Wilbur glared at them both.
“That’d be great, Wilbur; thanks!” Penny called loudly over the phone, though she was clearly stifling laughter too.
“…I might need some help finding my phone, though.” Wilbur said. He looked pointedly at the forcefield.
Violet eyed Tiny skeptically.
“You sure he’s not going to eat us?”
“Hurry up and find Wilbur’s phone so I can meet the dinosaur, guys!” Penny called.
“His name’s Tiny,” Wilbur said.
“Oh, that’s so cute—”
“Seriously, Penny?” Hiro asked. “You don’t care at all that we’re about to get eaten?”
“Alright, here goes nothing,” Violet said. “But Hiro, you better keep that call going. If we’re going to get mauled by a T. rex for Penny’s curiosity, I want her as a witness.”
Five minutes later, tentatively scratching Tiny’s great bronzy side, Hiro asked:
“So, are the rest of your family this weird?”
“Oh, no,” Wilbur said with a shrug. “The frogs are all from this time period; Mom just genetically modified them for intelligence. Which reminds me, we better go in through the side door. They tried to start a protection racket with Uncle Spike and Dmitri’s lawn gnomes, and now there’s a mafia war going in the front yard.”
“…I’m going to take that as a yes.”
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