But the issue is that John's story had always been a difficult one.
Hell, Neltharion is easier to write.
The second story of John was easier to write about. Because the situation was already established.
The story was just over complicated.
So, basically what I'm asking for at least is some ideas.
Where should I take this story?
So to properly ask the question of it, I need to give my audience a little history.
Well, a good portion of that history was in She can scare a Tyrannosaur. Where John pretty much tells Claire the his take on his own backstory.
But for those of you who have yet to read it, let's just start in the 80s.
1985 to be exact when relatively the idea of bringing back dinosaurs was pretty much brought into light and bioengineering and genetic engineering geniuses were hired on to make this dream come true.
So, we enter Dr. Elias Juan Carter, fresh out of med school, going into his doctorate, studying genetic engineering. Because yes, if you want to get into bioengineering and genetics, it is a good idea to actually be a real fucking doctor, not a philosopher.
“Alan said you need a little rest before taking that stuff,” said Billy. “Just wait until he gets back.”
“Alan’s not an MD,” said John. “I’m…more of a medical doctor than he is.”
That's from the first chapter of the new story. And yes, it is very true. Dr. Grant isn't a 'real' doctor. As in he's not really a medical doctor. He's used to digging up the remains of animals that have been long dead for millions of years. He's not gonna be able to diagnose the broken foot of an actual human.
John is a medical doctor.
So, basically since John's an M.D. and while he's getting his credits for his PhD in genetics, he has worked at a local hospital. Because his main focus of going into bioengineering is to help sick people. What better way of understanding sick people and how to heal them is to go out there and meet actual sick people.
Though by the time of the recent story it has been quite a while since John has told someone to turn their head and cough, he can still put on the scrubs (though they would have to be very gigantic scrubs) to administer first response treatment if need be.
“Yeah, right,” said Lowery as he began to back up. Then he paused. “You’re a medical doctor?”
“Yes,” said John. “It was required for me to get into genetic engineering. So that means, if you end up with a broken leg and I’m the only thing around to splint it…well…”
“I’m screwed.”
“No, but you better not piss me off.”
However, he has a special hobby. And that's dinosaurs. He loves dinosaurs. His childhood favorite was the
Tyrannosaurus rex. Yes, what a coincidence?
He also had to go into a minor in pharmaceuticals, but I won't go into that much.
Yes, he can prescribe drugs. Don't get any ideas.
So, basically, becoming a doctor, in two different ways, is very expensive. Like holy shit expensive. And well, his credentials out in the field were excellent. Which is why John Hammond approached him to join InGen.
And yeah, of course the kid in John got excited when he heard about the possibilities of cloning dinosaurs and bringing them back.
There was also a bid to who was going to be the head of this department. Hammond asked Dr. Carter, Dr. Wu, and a few other doctors on what the best course of bringing said creatures back to life. Dr. Carter and a colleague named Dr. Sorkin both agreed that mapping out the genome of each dinosaurs and attempting to completely restore them fully would be the best course. And this brought these two scientists together as good friends.
However, John Carter was already married to a paleobotanist named...yes...Ellie Carter. (who took the place of Ellie Sattler in this silly story.) And they had three kids, a newborn named Rachael, a kindergartner named Robert, and a 7-year old named Julie.
I mean, basically, they both were hippies in 60s. Sorkin was a college hippie and Carter was a high school hippie. They were all about animal rights, and such. But Sorkin was closer to PETA in her views, Carter was more along the lines of the Humane Society.
But despite having some different views, though shared similar concerns, they did agree that properly mapping out the DNA of each dinosaur was for the best.
But Hammond wanted to go the more cost effective route, so Henry Wu's little short cut of splicing frog DNA into the dinosaurs' strands is what Hammond liked. Much to Carter's chigrin. But he still went along with it, happy to at least see this dream out.
But he didn't get the position of head of the genetics team. He worked under Dr. Wu. There wasn't any bad feelings between him and Wu, but John just really couldn't put all his heart into taking such a cheap shortcut.
Then the bills started piling up. So, John attempted to ask for raises from Wu and Hammond. That went nowhere. And this is where the jadedness started to fill in. Mostly because John Carter, along with all the other scientists, were forced to move to Costa Rica, well Site B, Isla Sorna, where they would start raising the dinosaurs for Site A, the park itself on Isla Nublar.
And this is when John is approached by shady people who are wanting to commissioned him to use the very...at the time advanced genetics lab...to find out if dinosaur genetic material could help mankind in some way. Like curing osteoporosis.
That's where the reinforced bone structure project comes from.
Or maybe help in faster healing. Hell if anything, to help hemophiliacs be able to clot when they get a small cut.
Now you know where the super regenerative ability comes from.
But in reality, these guys wanted to weaponize dinosaurs. But not do what Vic was doing in Jurassic World, they wanted to have John create a serum to turn soldiers into dinosaurs, and then back into humans. Basically allow the soldier to gain the benefits of both their human sides and the dinosaur strengths.
More or less, putting on a dinosaur bio-suit as one reader put it. And then take it off like you would armor.
And it was only then that John realized what he was doing, using InGen's resources. And he wanted out. But our long-haired hippie scientist was in too deep. The ODESSA, aka the
Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, or for those of you who don't speak German...
Yeah, those guys.
Simple terms, Argentinean Nazis, because we gotta have those, as if fucking BioSyn wasn't bad enough, let's just put in Nazis into this story.
Well, the Nazis were pretty much not gonna let John back out on his deal, so they basically sent threats to him.
"We're gonna kill your kids and your wife." that kinda thing.
But these guys were good. Because they were kinda watching him for a while. Given John's Argentinean heritage. Yeah, John comes from Argentinean immigrants. Basically his family were too optimistic and had to be kicked out of the country.
I'm allowed to make these jokes, people. Because these were the jokes I heard from my good friend in junior high and senior high...who was from Argentina...and who was planning on going into bioengineering in college.
Yes, John Carter is based off of a real person in my life.
One who I still occasionally poke at to see if she's still around. Or, she does the same to me just in case she thinks I fell off the edge of the world.
Hell, one of the first things I learned in Spanish was: ¿Qué es exportación importante de la Argentina? Pesimismo.
I am not joking. Though the phrase is a joke.
So, the Nazis have John Carter's family. They have people watching the family and basically holding them hostage without actually physically holding them hostage.
So, John is forced to finish the serum, not warn his family of the coming shady organization that might kill them if he fucks up. Contact between him and Ellie cease, which makes her a bit more worried each time. But unfortunately, as John puts it, he didn't cover his tracks well and Hammond found out. Hammond, Henry, and a lot of InGen personnel found out.
So, John was in deep shit.
He already had the serum made for human testing. Which he was going to test on himself. Test on himself in front of the ODESSA so he could get his kids back.
And he was moments away from the cure as well. But the ODESSA discovered that Hammond found out and they began to raid the InGen compound in Isla Sorna.
John just decided to say fuck it, and pulled a Curt Connors and he shot himself up with the serum. And became the fuzzy tyrannosaur you see in the top picture.
InGen security then mopped up the bad guys, or actually now they were caught, they took their cyanide pills and died. And Hammond was forced to deal with one of his scientists turning himself into a dinosaur. So to basically hide him, Hammond takes John to Nublar and hide him in the undeveloped areas of the island.
Henry himself is very intrigued by what Carter was doing for the ODESSA. Like crazy intrigued. Henry is the true mad scientist between the two despite Carter creating his serum. Carter didn't do it for SCIENCE, he did it to save his kids. Henry would have been the guy who wanted to do it for SCIENCE! Or Evil Science! And secretly, though he did not admit it to John, he actually wanted to open John up and see all the goodies that were inside.
(He's actually gonna get a chance in the new story to do something similar to John. Which results in the creation of the iRex.)
This incident sparked a lot of controversy in the company, and with the investors, among other issues, so Jurassic Park takes place. With Hammond bringing Dr. Alan Grant and his assistant, Ellie Carter, who at last gets to see what her husband was up to. And why he stopped contacting her.
And among those were the lawyer Genaro, Dr. Ian Malcolm, a sniveling ass named Ed Regis who was a journalist who worked for the park, and Lex and Tim, Hammond's grandkids.
They meet Henry Wu, who Ellie demands to know where her husband is. Of course Henry doesn't say much. That is until the crazy shit that happens in the park happens. And Alan Grant is treated to a surprise when he climbs into a tree with the kids...to save them from the rampaging T rex. He finds another T rex with very unusually long arms, a rather unusual length of tail and strange height. And this rex is talking to him. Yeah, he meets John. John pretty much just says that what happened to him was a "mistake" but doesn't go into anything else about it. Alan and many others start thinking it was an "accident."
And while everyone else is trying to get the park back up and running, John helps Alan get the kids out of danger. Which included dealing with a bunch of pteranodons, going down a river where the female T rex was pursuing them, to which Alan then notes John's unique ability of communicating with her to tell her to back off, and running into raptors while John parted to look for his wife.
And he finds, again using the "mistake" excuse. Ellie is just happy to see him. But Robert Muldoon, who doesn't die in my story or the book, calls in an airstrike and it's all about getting everyone to the helicopter before it all hits.
John says that it's best that maybe he should die on the island and decides to stay behind. But the air strike doesn't quite hit just yet. John stays behind to pretty much help get some stragglers off before what would later become InGen's security detail, and the ACU come in for their air strike. He finds Gerry Harding and Dr. Sorkin. But Sorkin goes a bit batshit, saying that she wants to save the animals. And dies on her own with John Carter and Gerry going on an InGen boat back to Isla Sorna. With most of the animals from Nublar being killed in the fire storm.
And Hammond then gets a radio from Carter, asking that he would pronounce him legally dead. Then, Hurricane Clarissa hits Sorna. John helps InGen personnel evacuate the island and releases the animals from their cages. And he basically goes to live there while the rest of the world sees him as dead.
Well, then we have the problems of InGen's filing Chapter 11 over four years later, aka Bankruptcy and Ludlow wanting to carve out a buck from that island. John Hammond gets a research team together to try and document the island, in the hopes of creating a biological preserve. And one of those he gets to go on this trip is Ian Malcolm, who finds out his girlfriend, Sarah Harding, Gerry's sister...I think...and Ian's girlfriend. But then he says they'll meet up with a contact on the island that will help protect them.
And it's John Carter. And that's basically when the truth comes out about the retrovirus.
John tries and fails to keep Ludlow from taking at least one animal (he took two One fully grown male rex and the chick) off the island. And Ludlow even attempts to expose him for the scum he is...which then forces him to return to the mainland. And while John was on Sorna, he attempted to try and complete his project, to make the cure.
As we know, that doesn't work out as well.
We then are treated to the T rex incident in San Diego, with John Carter chasing after the male with the help of Ian and Sarah.
And yes, people saw this. They even saw a few times John shouting, talking to the T rex, in both English and the "dinosaur" language. Or whatever.
People saw this happening.
And when it was over, that's when John's reputation was ruined. Though he managed to get some support, at least in creating the faulty serum to at least be human again, even if it doesn't last and he has to keep taking it to stay human...all the dirty laundry gets aired out.
John's dealing with the ODESSA was exposed to the science community, and his wife Ellie, who found someone else during the 4 years he was pretending to be dead, finally just said the marriage was over, took the kids...and left John to his misery.
John Hammond at least gave Carter something, a small plot of land in Northern California where Carter could at times be free to be in his rex form when he needs to be out of the way of prying eyes.
And John does attempt to get a job. However, the best he could do with was a piss-ant community college professor job that really didn't pay much. And the kids did call him Dr. Dino, and not because of his work in InGen, but for the fact that many of them at times would catch him transforming when he couldn't take his daily dosage...or hourly dosage as it slowly became.
Though he would try to hide what he was as it wasn't common knowledge to everyone...and saying that the meds he was taking to make himself human were insulin.
His son Robby tried to help his dad once by going to Sorna and find some more of John's old notes. Which forced John to go and save him from the evil Spinosaur. (Not Sadie)
At last Alan Grant just took pity on John and asked him to join his dig site as one of his assistants. And yeah, it's also a good idea to have a medical doctor on hand.
And during those unhappy years, Masrani, who acquired InGen, tried to get John to come back to InGgen to help make Jurassic World. Which John refused many times.
Until the recent story where Simon Masrani brought Henry Wu with him to China where a be-rexed John Carter was helping Alan out on an international dig to find feathered dinosaurs.
So there have been sightings of T rex John roaming around Northern California, and in China. As well as Montana.
A that leaves us at the start of this story.
