( Starter for @dreadfulcupofmuses‘ Owen Grady - I just went for a “straight from the beginnng” kind of thing; if you need something else, let me know! )
She won a contest - not the offically-sponsored lottery, but one of those things thrown together by a hometown museum and a local business owner who thought his tickets would be put to better use drumming up new customers than delighting his own children (but after that incident with the mouse, the grease trap, and the single curly fry, well - he was going to need either the world’s biggest distraction distraction or its best ad campaign, and Dino’s Diner - Values so big even a T-Rex can feast! didn’t work as well as hoped when you considered his name was actually pronounced ‘Dee-no’, the restaurant’s mascot was an overmustachioed Italian man holding a hamburger in one hand and a plate of spaghetti in the other, and it had never once mentioned dinosaurs in any context in its previous twenty years of business).
Tell us why you deserve the trip! the posters had proclaimed, and she hadn’t even bothered to write anything. Her entry had been a photo essay, every image labelled with a date - from the birthday a tiny Shiloh had received her first stuffed Styracosaurus to the most recent rejection from Funtime Fossils LLC: Sorry, all our programs are full!
(There’d been a lot of pictures, particularly of the latter. She has more than one of those letters, and no shame whatsoever about going for the pity win.)
She’s queasy when the ferry docks (it’s not storming, but the waves act like they want it to be, so they’ll have an excuse to toss boats around the way they’re tossing boats around), and there’s a kerfuffle at check-in when her ticket doesn’t match the name on her travel documents and they have to call Dino in what’s probably the middle of the night back-home time to straighten it out, but eventually, she’s standing next to the monorail station with her pass in one hand and a map in the other, completely unable to decide where to go first because that tiny, dino-crazy Shiloh, who spent her childhood dreaming of meeting the real thing but could never have imagined this, is shrieking with such glee inside her head.
