Blue doesn't know where they are. The False-Alpha is dead. Her Alpha has left her. She has to survive and make her own way. But a velociraptor is a social animal. And Blue doesn't know how to be alone.
Set after the end of Jurassic World, Boundaries
is a work of Xenofiction from the perspective of a social predator whose world has gone suddenly mad.
Boundaries (Jurassic Park) has examples of
- Baths Are Fun: Owen trained the raptors to tolerate sponge bathing since they were chicks. It serves as a bonding exercise as well as a hygienic one and as a chance to check the raptors for injuries.
- Body Horror: Echo and Delta's injuries are already horrifying, but the narrative lovingly describes how the injuries fester after days in the jungle.
- Home Sweet Home: Blue was raised in captivity. The Raptor Paddock was frequently boring, being surrounded by prey that can't be hunted and jungle that can't be explored was irritating. After three days in the wild, Blue has had enough. She wants guaranteed food, water, and shelter, and is smart enough to realize that the walls of the paddock keep things like Rexy and the Indominous out.The outside world is full of prey and excitement, the freedom to run and hunt. It’s also pain, fear, and the hot, sick scent of her siblings trapped in dangerous territory, undefended on their own as she struggles to bring them food and water. The walls are den and safety. She wants to be here. This is home territory.
- Only a Flesh Wound: Despite having burns covering half her body, Echo is able to walk, barely. She manages to build a nest around Delta and bring her food, but eventually she's equally disabled by her injuries.
- Please, Don't Leave Me: Being alone is psychologically devastating for raptors.
- When Blue fails to recognize Echo due to her extensive burns, Echo panics.
- "Just as strong is learned behavior, however. Pack demands compromise, although she doesn’t think of it as that. All she knows is that being ignored is the worst thing ever. She’s a single chick with her parent, and she can’t stand being out of his favor. She can’t. It’s impossible. She has to be part of pack. A raptor will do whatever it takes to stay with their pack, even if it takes learning foreign body language and responding to new social cues."
- The Power of Trust: Owen has nothing protecting him should the raptors turn on him or challenge his leadership. But Blue is terrified and bewildered and Owen has spend her entire life building himself up as a bastion of normalcy and hope. Owen manages to deny a starving Blue food. She listens when he tells her not to hunt humans and backs away from a drugged bucket of meat. Her faith is justified when he feeds the meat to an equally starving and injured Delta and Echo.
- Undying Loyalty: The defining characteristic of raptors. A raptor will throw itself into battle to avenge a corpse. And they don't do alliances. You're either pack or prey.Humans have responsibility and guilt; raptors have loyalty. They are loyal to the pack because they are the pack. The idea of giving up, of having an option, will never occur to them. Raptors fling themselves into attack without the human self-awareness to know it will kill them. Defense of the pack manifests so strongly they will die for their dead.
- Weirdness Censor: Blue doesn't seem to realize that Owen isn't another raptor. She thinks that he has a "sense of prey", and she can notice some differences between them such as his softer skin and the noises he makes. But she grows frustrated trying to imitate how he holds a water bottle, as if she doesn't understand that their hand structures are different. Owen is the only human she can pick out from a crowd, the rest are "prey".
- She has begun to recognize Barry.A tiny niggling doubt gnaws on her rage toward him. This is a familiar prey. It has touched them before. It hasn’t hurt them, even though it's a prey-with-fang. It often stands beside Alpha. It sometimes feeds the pack. It’s prey, but Blue is an intelligent predator. She looks at it and hesitates.
- She has begun to recognize Barry.
- Worst Aid: Blue instinctually attempts to help Delta and Echo by trying to force them to walk and licking their wounds. It's made abundantly clear that her efforts are doing more harm than good.
