Bepergian did not want to wake up. Just a little longer, he thought. He lay very still with his eyes closed. He could hear voices quietly murmuring around him. Through the fog in his mind he realized the voices were not familiar. Curious he moved toward wakefulness. With wakefulness came pain. Everything seemed to hurt at once. In fact, he felt so much pain he was afraid to open his eyes. He tried anyways and found he could only open one eye and was rewarded with … more pain. He gasped at the brutality of it and promptly closed his eye again.

At his gasp the sound of the voices changed. They drew nearer and were more urgent. The voices sounded feminine but the language didn’t even register for him. He did recognize inflections of concern. As he wondered where he was he began to remember his last thoughts before he lost consciousness. He remembered being mauled by a dinosaur. That thought was so ludicrous and if he did not feel like he had been mauled he would have chalked it up to dreaming. But the pain told him otherwise.

He remembered then how he had arrived here. The missing Faro, the time travel device (that seemed to malfunction and he still didn’t know how to use and at this point he may have lost), the fish with a mouthful of razor sharp teeth and the incredible meeting with the dinosaur.

Bepergian lay still and used his other senses. He did try to avoid paying much attention to his sense of feel. That one only registered pain at the moment. He concentrated for a moment on the smells that surrounded him. He could smell a variety of herbs so extremely pungent and bitter mixed with soothing smells. He could also smell smoke from a wood fire. Listening he could hear the crackle of the fire and the rustling of at least one other person if not two.

He felt some one lean over him and then move away. He decided to try opening his eye again. He cracked it open. He was lying on his back and could see in the flickering smoky light that he was in a shelter of some sort, possibly a crude hut. All manner of herbs and other things he could not identify hung from the ceiling. He slowly turned his head feeling pain and stiffness in his neck and was able to see who his caretakers were.

Again he gasped. This time with shock rather than pain.