My daughter has two favorite stuffed dinosaurs, “Mama Blue” and “Little Tree Eater,” this is the beginning of a story for her about those stuffed dinosaurs, it’s pretty passive right now, but I’m just discovering the “made up” world as I write so maybe I will go back and rewrite in a more active tone later or if I don’t enjoy the project maybe I will leave it as is, either way I can illustrate some pictures and produce a photo-book version for my daughter as a gift later.

Under a red sun, near the star Gliese, is a world of monsters. Forty-two years away from the light of the yellow sun, this world is different than the Earth, different, but also home to life.

Long ago, there were dragons, dragons who traveled through space. These dragons had children who were different than them, babies who became the guardians of their world’s spirits.

The ancestors were known as dragons, and over generations, their children grew different depending upon the world in which they lived. The children had tiny friends with tubes on their faces known to some as water bears. The children are called many things; some people call them the dinosaurs.

Life is abundant in the galaxy, comets with small animals bring them across the worlds, as planets die some are born, and life migrates across the cosmos like a skipping stone across a pond.

It is impossible to know where life first started, but some believe it was on the ocean world orbiting the star Gliese. In a world of mostly water, under thick clouds of steam, under the ocean of hot ice, is a rocky core. Vast fields of underwater plants created pockets of air that get trapped under the ice, the plants for a thick mat that doesn’t absorb the heat well and creates a swampy, yet survivable temperature. Upon those plains of plants are herds of Jobaria.

The Jobarias of this world are much like the Jobaria of Earth, except indigo blue in color. Their darkness dissipates the heat well far under the clouds of steam, far under the ocean of hot ice, deep in the vast Underdark.

Jobarias grow 49,000 lbs and 60 ft tall, they are not great thinkers but are very kind and agile. They visit a tree of wisdom and think together if they feel the need to seek an answer to a question. They spend a lot of time eating from the purple trees, which taste like lavender, and they also sing in low soothing voices. Jobarias don’t like to change, but on one particularly hot year, a tiny six-inch egg hatched a baby girl jobaria who was different than the rest of her heard. When she hatched out of her egg, the baby glowed both gold and silver (like a sea mushroom), but unlike any other jobaria, who had ever been remembered by the herd. She looked like a stary sky, but the jobaria had never seen a stary sky far beneath the sea ice of their planet surrounding Gliese.

Her mother was so surprised about her daughter’s glowing spots, she wondered if the baby was ill and what to do, so she decided that they should seek the tree of wisdom, but that tree was a very long way from where they lived, it lay across an ocean under the island of land where they lived. The mother’s name was “blue,” a name given to the most beautiful Jobaria, meaning that she lived up to an ideal of how she should look. Though she didn’t take pride in being what she had been born to be, Blue didn’t like to complain about her name, so she kept the secret that she would have preferred something that reflected her soul.

After having her baby some people called her Mama Blue, which she actually didn’t care for any more than Blue, since almost every female became a mother, it seemed like it didn’t really differentiate her from anyone else.

Mama Blue was confused about what to name her daughter, who was blue, but also wasn’t blue. She didn’t need to name her right away. First, she watched her baby wondering if she was different in other ways.

The time passed quickly tonight, something soothing about writing fiction, maybe that’s why living without fact checking is more enjoyable. 🦕