"The Unleashing of Pangea: A Transformation Tale"
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I don’t remember the exact moment my bones twisted into something ancient and unstoppable, only the cold metallic taste of fear sharpening in my mouth as we were dragged through the echoing corridors of the facility.
They took us—me, my little brother Max, and my big sister Lila—from what was supposed to be a summer hiking trip near the Silverleaf Woods. One minute we were poking at the skeleton of a deer, the next a net—electrified, burning—fell from the trees and the world spun out. I woke wrapped in concrete and steel, the scrape of dress shoes and sharp voices talking over us. They called the place “Pangea Dynamics” as if it named itself.
“Subject One is waking,” a voice said. Too calm, too practiced. Emptier than the cages.
I blinked into fluorescents, shadows moving behind one-way glass. Lila and Max were on either side of me, thick restraints biting into their wrists. She was always the first to notice what mattered. “Are you hurt?” she whispered. Max, teeth chattering, shook his head. I flexed my arms—the left one tingled like pins; the right, nothing.
The first time it happened, the technicians crowded behind computers murmured about “trigger events” and “reptilian DNA expression.” All I knew was pain rushed through my body in a hot wave and I felt my muscles splitting, bones rearranging, teeth slicing down into monstrous points. Max screamed; Lila thrashed against her bindings, cursing them all.
And just like that, I wasn’t human anymore—I was something bigger, river-shadowed, and impossibly strong. I only vaguely recognized that I’d become something I’d only seen in books: a spinosaurus, jaws bristling with teeth, long-necked and sail-backed and snarling through bars that now bent in my grip.
It was weeks before I learned to control it. The scientists made us fight—sometimes against each other, sometimes against machines. If we refused, they shocked us until the transformation wracked our bodies. Max became a raptor, green-eyed and fast as panic itself, all claws and shrieks. Lila—surprising even the researchers—turned into a triceratops, horns fighting through her skin, broad-skulled and impossible to ignore.
*You have to focus,* she told us, when they gave us a break for “recovery.” *If you lose yourself to the beast, that’s exactly what they want. They don’t care about us—they care about the monsters inside us.*
In the pale-lit cell, we sat in a triangle, knees to knees, our hands still trembling from the latest round of transformations. My tongue felt heavy with words I’d forgotten how to say, my teeth too big for a human mouth. I studied the puncture marks in Max’s neck, where they’d drawn blood for more “studies.”
“I want to go home,” Max said. His voice shook, but his green-gold eyes were fierce.
“We’re going to,” Lila replied, with that flat determination that meant she was planning something. “We just need to wait for the right moment. They think they can control us. They can’t.”
They kept pushing us—forcing us to change again and again; sending us into larger and more elaborate enclosures, testing our skills, watching us with forced neutrality as though we weren’t still children beneath the scales. But they were wrong, and Lila was right. The more they tested us, the stronger we got. We learned the feeling, the vibration, the spark that meant the change was coming; and eventually, we learned how not to lose ourselves in it.
One night, under the thin glow of the security lights, I nudged the switch inside myself. I felt my spine reach higher, muscles sliding, claws curling until the world loomed small and soft around me. We moved as one: I broke the doors, roaring, distracted the guards as Max darted raptor-silent around their ankles and Lila, all tonnage and aggression, barreled down the steel partitions.
Bullets hurt, but they didn’t stop us.
We made it through the compound yard, sirens howling, and into the thick woods. Even as the sun rose, we kept running—our skins flickering between human and dinosaur, running not just for home but for the taste of freedom we’d been denied.
Eventually, the facility gave up chasing. Their monsters had escaped; their experiment “terminated.”
Back in the wild, we learned how to stay hidden and safe. We learned how to transform at will when we needed to hunt or to move fast—or to simply feel that ancient power trembling in our veins. At night, we built a fire and sat around it, knees to knees, sharing stories, sometimes talking about what we’d lost, sometimes about what we’d become.
And I, the boy who had become a spinosaurus, knew that though the scientists had tried to break us, we’d become more than they’d ever dreamed. A family, still, stronger and stranger, running together through the world—ancient and new, monstrous and magnificent, and, for the first time in a long while, finally free.
This story was generated by user kade with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.
Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.
AI Prompts
Prompt: Write me a moderately long story about a person and his two siblings who can turn into dinosaurs at will after being kidnapped by a facility with him being a spinosaurus from first person
Response: I don’t remember the exact moment my bones twisted into something ancient and unstoppable, only the cold metallic taste of fear sharpening in my mouth as we were dragged through the echoing corridors of the facility. They took us—me, my little brother Max, and my big sister Lila—from what was supposed to be a summer hiking trip near the Silverleaf Woods. One minute we were poking at the skeleton of a deer, the next a net—electrified, burning—fell from the trees and the world spun out. I woke wrapped in concrete and steel, the scrape of dress shoes and sharp voices talking over us. They called the place “Pangea Dynamics” as if it named itself. “Subject One is waking,” a voice said. Too calm, too practiced. Emptier than the cages. I blinked into fluorescents, shadows moving behind one-way glass. Lila and Max were on either side of me, thick restraints biting into their wrists. She was always the first to notice what mattered. “Are you hurt?” she whispered. Max, teeth chattering, shook his head. I flexed my arms—the left one tingled like pins; the right, nothing. The first time it happened, the technicians crowded behind computers murmured about “trigger events” and “reptilian DNA expression.” All I knew was pain rushed through my body in a hot wave and I felt my muscles splitting, bones rearranging, teeth slicing down into monstrous points. Max screamed; Lila thrashed against her bindings, cursing them all. And just like that, I wasn’t human anymore—I was something bigger, river-shadowed, and impossibly strong. I only vaguely recognized that I’d become something I’d only seen in books: a spinosaurus, jaws bristling with teeth, long-necked and sail-backed and snarling through bars that now bent in my grip. It was weeks before I learned to control it. The scientists made us fight—sometimes against each other, sometimes against machines. If we refused, they shocked us until the transformation wracked our bodies. Max became a raptor, green-eyed and fast as panic itself, all claws and shrieks. Lila—surprising even the researchers—turned into a triceratops, horns fighting through her skin, broad-skulled and impossible to ignore. *You have to focus,* she told us, when they gave us a break for “recovery.” *If you lose yourself to the beast, that’s exactly what they want. They don’t care about us—they care about the monsters inside us.* In the pale-lit cell, we sat in a triangle, knees to knees, our hands still trembling from the latest round of transformations. My tongue felt heavy with words I’d forgotten how to say, my teeth too big for a human mouth. I studied the puncture marks in Max’s neck, where they’d drawn blood for more “studies.” “I want to go home,” Max said. His voice shook, but his green-gold eyes were fierce. “We’re going to,” Lila replied, with that flat determination that meant she was planning something. “We just need to wait for the right moment. They think they can control us. They can’t.” They kept pushing us—forcing us to change again and again; sending us into larger and more elaborate enclosures, testing our skills, watching us with forced neutrality as though we weren’t still children beneath the scales. But they were wrong, and Lila was right. The more they tested us, the stronger we got. We learned the feeling, the vibration, the spark that meant the change was coming; and eventually, we learned how not to lose ourselves in it. One night, under the thin glow of the security lights, I nudged the switch inside myself. I felt my spine reach higher, muscles sliding, claws curling until the world loomed small and soft around me. We moved as one: I broke the doors, roaring, distracted the guards as Max darted raptor-silent around their ankles and Lila, all tonnage and aggression, barreled down the steel partitions. Bullets hurt, but they didn’t stop us. We made it through the compound yard, sirens howling, and into the thick woods. Even as the sun rose, we kept running—our skins flickering between human and dinosaur, running not just for home but for the taste of freedom we’d been denied. Eventually, the facility gave up chasing. Their monsters had escaped; their experiment “terminated.” Back in the wild, we learned how to stay hidden and safe. We learned how to transform at will when we needed to hunt or to move fast—or to simply feel that ancient power trembling in our veins. At night, we built a fire and sat around it, knees to knees, sharing stories, sometimes talking about what we’d lost, sometimes about what we’d become. And I, the boy who had become a spinosaurus, knew that though the scientists had tried to break us, we’d become more than they’d ever dreamed. A family, still, stronger and stranger, running together through the world—ancient and new, monstrous and magnificent, and, for the first time in a long while, finally free.
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