"How are they riding dinosaurs? Is there a class that I can take to train one of those things?" I whispered with a smile as Sam ushered me back into the tree house.

"Would you shut up? You need to understand that if they spot us, they will use those damn animals to rip apart everything that I have built. Don't make me regret taking you in!" Sam yelled.

His face was as red as blood. He poked me in the chest repeatedly as he spoke and accidentally bumped me into the table. My smile faded and I felt disappointed. Sam left his finger pressed on my chest for a few moments, then the red drained from his cheeks and he looked down at the floor.

"I'm sorry. I was only..."

"You need to know something about this place. When you first get here,  you build a fire so you can have a nice meal or a way escape from the cold. Then, you build a shelter to survive the environment and the animals," Sam cut me off.

He clutched the stone spear that was leaned up against the wall and reluctantly handed it to me.

"Do you know why you build a weapon?" he asked.

I shook my head no while I looked at the razor sharp tip on the end of the wooden shaft.

"You make a weapon to kill. No one here is your friend or ally. They are your enemies and will stab you in the back with a sharper one of those the second you turn around," he said while he pointed at the spear.

Does that mean not even you? I thought to myself.

He was right. Survival could turn the sweetest person bitter.

A loud crash clapped outside with the loud cheers of distant voices. I began to fiddle with the thin spider silk on the spear and stare at the door, wondering what the dino riders were doing outside. Sam crossed his arms with the same stern facial expression. I realized that he stood between me and the door.

"Oh, come on! You have to be a little bit curious to what they are doing out there," I scoffed.

"Nope. Not going to risk being seen."

Another loud clap rang through the room, much closer than the first. Birds squawked and the tree swayed as something big passed by. Sam closed his eyes slowly and turned around to the door.

"A quick look. You see where they are and what they are doing. If they see you, the oceans that way," Sam pointed as I walked past him and slowly opened the door.

I still had the spear and hoped that I wouldn't have to use it.

"Actually, the oceans that way,"I said pointing my finger the opposite direction. 

"What ever happened to that humours old man I met twenty minutes ago?" I chuckled when he didn't reply to me.

I looked back and saw that his back was turned to me again and his fists were clenched so tight that the ends of his knuckles were a snowy shade of white.

"I met a smartass with leaves for shoes," he finally barked.

When I stepped through the doorway, I saw that the men were far from where they first landed. They were still too far to see me hidden in the camouflaged tree house. I kicked the ladder off of the porch and climbed down. The trees grew taller as I snuck from one trunk to another, trying to get closer to the three dino riders.

Their armor was painted crimson with bits of unpainted, polished metal on the shoulders and a stripe on the wrist.
They have metal. That means they must have some sort of blacksmith and a way to ore the minerals.

The wind picked up and threw dirt around, which made them shield their eyes from the debris. Their mounts stirred and made irritated squawks at their riders. The riders worked together to hold a giant black box. They loaded what looked like a pile of rope into the open end of the box and shot it off into my direction. The same clap echoed through the forest when it was fired.

"Look at that, Ursula. Another perfect catch!" shouted a woman with a spanish accent.

They know where I am. How? I was so sneaky. I'll just run and maybe they won't see where I am.

Leaves began to ruffle in a bush and a giant pterodactyl flopped out from behind a tree, wrapped in a rope net with rocks attached at the end.

"Still missed the big one last week," one said with her voice growing louder along with her footsteps.

I feared that my heart was beating loud enough to be heard from space. I crouched and slowly walked around the trunk as they walked by. The bird yapped as it fell to the ground and was dragged along with one of the dino riders.

"Ike, get the eggs. There's five nests back there filled to the brink with fertile ones," Ursula ordered.

She dragged the pterodactyl away from the nests.

Ursula was tall with thick muscles. She had short pink hair that popped with her red armor and a bronze sword sheathed on her side.

A second pair of footsteps came towards the nest and me.

"Why does The Silver Eagle need so many birds?" the other girl asked.

Ursula sighed loudly.

"Hayle, what the boss wants, the boss gets. I suggest you learn that, before it gets your tongue cut off like Ike's. Now that I think about it, that might not be so bad," she chuckled slightly.

Looks like I'm not the only one getting the life lesson speech today.

I inched my head around the last bit of trunk to look at their mounts, two gray skinned pterodactyls and a extremely large winged bird that looked like someone gave a peacock the wrong cake. I couldn't recognize it from any museum or book , but it was the size of a small house.

A clank rang out as a steel axe stuck into the trunk a few inches away from my nose. I spun around and swung my spear wildly, trying to hit off any attacker.

A bald man stood behind me with his hand on the axe that nearly took off my head. He had already managed to detach the axe and was dodging my untrained attacks with ease. His toothless smile revealed a nub where his tongue had once been. I managed to hit him on the side and watched as a goopy liquid oozed out of his pocket.

His eyes grew wider as we both realized I had just cracked an egg. He looked at the goo and touched it with his middle finger. Little bits of a blue spotted shell came up with it.

He lowered his eyebrows and pushed his bottom lip up. His swings were filled with anger and less trained. A spear implanted itself in the tree in between us and shook until the force left it.

"You know, it's a crime to eavesdrop. I'd say you could spend a few years in a federal prison, but I guess that's a little redundant here isn't it," Hayle said as she walked towards her spear.

Ike stepped back and went back to gathering eggs while Hayle jabbed at me with her steel pointed tip. I fell back, towards their mounts, and immediately regretted it. The animals were well trained, even knowing how to bite me in the butt while I was trying to fight off their masters.

Hayle was fast; her spear seemed to move like a blur. I was no match for her. It was obvious that she had training in fighting. All I had was amnesia and a dodo child lost somewhere in the world... and spider silk. I smiled when I threw the spear to my side and spun it around in a one hundred eighty degree arc, using the spider silk attached to the butt of it.

The tip jabbed into her side unexpectedly hard and broke off a chunk of her shoulder blade, stained with some of her blood. She stepped back dazed, not comprehending how she got hit with a flying stick.

"Cool trick! I like mine better," she beamed as she dove to the ground.

Ursula was holding the net cannon by herself and Ike lit the end, which shot the net at me faster than I could blink. Within a second, I was entangled and barely able to move. I still had the string in my hand. I wrapped it around my wrist and hoped they wouldn't see it.

"You killed one of our birds. It will never get to fly," Ursula said.

She held a half broken shell and walked towards me.

"I think you should fly in it's place," she grinned and so did Ike, who had a bag full of eggs slung around his shoulder.

Ike hopped onto his pterodactyl. He whistled and the dino's foot hooked around the ends of my net and pulled me into the sky with them. The string pulled hard with the spear dangling under. We kept getting higher and higher, until the massive trees seemed to shrink and the ocean looked more like a pool.

The Island was a massive circle and I could see four different ecosystems split apart like a perfect pie chart: a cold, a tropical, a woodland, and a desert region each took up an equal quarter of the island.
  
I'm not waking up on that beach again!

I yanked on the string until I could grip the spear through the hole in the net. I pointed the tip up and hesitated when I looked at the animal that was carrying me. I tried to jab, but I couldn't. I couldn't hurt the animal that was going to kill me.

Ike whistled again and I was released into a free fall. I flailed my arms and accidentally catapulted the spear back up into Ike. The spear pierced through his skull and latched tight. The string snapped tight and my free fall was halted by the dead man flying.

"I'm alive! Oh my god! Wholy crap, I actually won a fight! Take that toothless wonder," I shouted as I hung in the air.

The body fell forward onto the pterodactyl's neck and the bird began to descend back into the trees from where we took off from. The spear was lodged tight in Ike's body and even managed to pin the egg bag to his dead body. I could see Hayle and Ursula looking up at the sky in the opposite direction, looking for someone like me to be plummeting to their death.

The pterodactyl got low enough to the ground to where I could plant my feet and swing the dead body into another death trap.

"My trick was only getting started!" I yelled at the top of my lungs to the surprised gang members.

They barely had time to make a facial expression before the spider silk cut through them both like a saw blade.