This may be a very long story for me to tell, but I think it is The Grandstand Passion Play of The Rangers of Shanghara Against The Men of Ten’jad and The Tyrant Reptile King, and here it goes:

The Tyrannosaurus Rex, The Tyrant Reptile King, skulking through the conifer forest of Late Cretaceous Canada, learns early in the game just what kingly or lordly sort of dinosaur he is. The conifer forest he stalks is either like the redwood forests near Crescent City, California or the Sequoia forests in Yosemite National Park today, but no grass in the forests of the Late Cretaceous with a small bird-like creature flying overhead. There was an occasional possum-like mammal—possibly the great granddaddy of apes and primate including humans like you and I—but small they are in the Late Cretaceous of North America. He daily does battle with an occasional Triceratops that strays from its herd. But that is because the Tyrant King and the Dinosaur with the Three-Horned Face is trying to meet the same survival challenges faced by other animals both living and extinct.

His conifer forest is part of a Late Cretaceous prehistoric kingdom where he resides like the lion of the African savanna of today or the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, but his reign—and that of the other dinosaurs of his domain—are crucial days that are about to become a thing of the past thanks to some cataclysm contributed either by a piece of outer space rock as big as Mount Everest of the Himalayas or else by The Volcanic Deccan Traps in Prehistoric India 66 million years ago.

I am not at all sure that girls have even the slightest hint that there is such a dinosaur kingdom. But no man or beast is really qualified to say. Most wilderness at the time of the Dinosaurs’ reign up until the end of the Cretaceous may be nothing like the wilderness of the world today, anyway.

But one thing that must be said about a wilderness, in contrast to civilization with its supple silkiness, is that the basic, primal elements of existence are laid as bare and raw and can’t be ducked. It is in even that ancient Late Cretaceous forest that all men (if they somehow went there by time machine but that’s another story!) find out about themselves and their places in the universe.

We all know certain things but we rarely admit these things. Say, for example, about that kingly, lordly, eagle-eyed, partially-feathery creature, that giant two-legged, two-fingered dragon partially covered in feathers like a vulture, that kingly carnivore with the courage and strength of a lion and the awesome power and brutal nature of a typical and mythical Dragon of Europe, that incorrigibly wild, insane yet mighty and lordly giant prehistoric beast—the King of the Tyrant Reptiles-and the killer that is in each one of us. We pretend it is not there most of the time, but it’s a silly idle sham, as all grown-up men are concerned. If they are to step out of a Time Machine in the Late Cretaceous that is the Twilight of the Age of Dinosaurs, and if they have seen the dreaded Tyrant King and have run fleeing from the T. Rex more than once. Screaming into the night before the survivors head back to their Time Machine to get back home to the Present Day.

Suppose it is one quiet summer afternoon in the year 2000, one year before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks had nearly three thousand American people brought down in a globally tragic kind of way. Now, leafing through a National Geographic magazine, with the sun slanting down in the backyard in the forested suburban neighborhood near the outskirts of Annapolis, the State Capital of Maryland, this person—perhaps yours truly—came across a black and white sketch-like picture in that very magazine—dated June of 2000 at the dawn of the New Millennium—of the very creature called the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The T. Rex in the picture, which spreads through two page, was female, and she growls with her powerful jaws opened as she stomps her feet through the two pages illustrating her world of leaved plants, ferns and conifers, her eyes as dark as night, and I have never forgotten it or her. I was looking at my own spirit, heart and soul!



The Tyrannosaurus Rex is aptly named, being a giant theropod dinosaur of forty feet in length and of kingly ferocity, being carnivorous, trying to survive like all other animals living and extinct, and when cornered by a charging Triceratops fighting with its powerful jaws that bite even deadlier than that of a lion. In fact, it is said that if the lion was the king of beasts, and the eagle was the king of birds, the T. Rex without a doubt, was the king of dinosaurs according to many dinosaur lovers, the world’s most famous dinosaur, and to myself, the dinosaur world’s version of the classic American protagonist: heroic, larger than life, dependent on little, beholden to none.

I looked at the female Tyrannosaurus in the eye; she looked back, and even from page 34 of that National Geographic magazine, I could feel her queenly majesty, but also a burning, primal rage that can glow white hot like the core of a nuclear explosion in Hiroshima or Nagasaki triggered by Fat Boy or Little Boy in the year 1945 that led to the surrender of the islands of Japan that officially ended the Second World War. There was a chord of understanding that was struck between them. She knew it and I knew it. We can be killers. The one and only true thing that separated the dinosaur and myself was the sham. She admitted it, and I was attempting not to cover it up given my fascination with dinosaurs.

Now, I remembered well the first time my own Tyrant King without warning let loose a screaming roar out of the darkness and revealed himself for what he has become—a monstrous, maniacal, yet kingly lord of a meat eater. But suppose that every child—whether be they male or female—sweats inside at a name that is rarely spoken by the forces of good and the light in my fantasy world: Mandark.



That is not to say that Mandark no longer exist in my fantasy world, having been brought down by, say, the heroic Lili’m�iya Taiy�ni—known to her friends as Lee Lee—putting an end to The Great War between the Two Avatars that will determine the future of my fantasy world—Lee Lee being the Avatar of the Light, and Mandark being the Dark Avatar.

Usually that name was associated with that a little science-loving redheaded boy’s arch-rival genius kid neighbor in a kids cartoon program from the 1990’s called Dexter’s Laboratory, with an M-shaped haircut and a strange laugh that has the 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4-5 pattern (for example, AH-HA-HA! AH-HA-HA-HA-HA!), but to me at the time, that name—which means Man of Darkness—is applied to an evil and powerful being like The Lord of the Rings’ Sauron, an evil being who wanted to control and rule the free lands of my fantasy world where the dinosaurs never become extinct. Mandark also has a life that tragically spiraled from an idealistic young lad and prince and son to the Emperor of Astronoma all the way to a Sauron-type tyrant brought down by some Asian friend of a ballet-loving blonde sister of a little redheaded science-loving boy who, in my imagination, ends up becoming a pretty, lovely, strong and heroic girl who is as mighty, brave, and noble a warrior as she is young, fair, and beautiful as a maiden—sort of like the legendary Chinese female warrior Mulan, and not just the Disney heroine. So my interpretation of Mandark is actually a person whose idealism is slowly beaten out of him by the allure of evil.

Suppose that I was an idealistic young boy who at the time was nine years of age, for instance, an accomplished hiker and a young runner. I may even be well qualified to endorse Nike’s shoes with:


“I have outrun the Tyrant King wearing Nike’s, and I am still here to tell the tale.”

It would have made a great ad in Boys’ Life:


“Kids! When that cold sweat pours down your back and you are facing the Moment of Truth on the way home from the store, don’t you wish you had bought Nike’s? Yes, our new T. Rex model has been endorsed by kids from coast to coast. That extra six feet or so may mean the difference between making the porch and you-know-what!”

And supposedly my own Moment of Truth might be a Ten’Jai warrior from Ten’jad, a land that lay to the southeast of Shanghara.

What an exotic name for a race of humans under the sway of evil! The Ten’jai people of Ten’jad waged war against Shanghara almost continuously since, say, the Great Strife of Shanghara. Their land lay to the south from Shanghara, which is hotter in climate, and was divided into a number of small fiefdoms, all of them eager to lay claim to Shanghara. The men of Ten’jad, some of them in exotic armor, and some of them in costumes similar to the twelfth century Saracen warriors of the Middle East, were adept warriors and used a number techniques to attack, including Gw�ngi, a large species of tyrannosaur dinosaur a quarter-to-one third bigger than Tyrannosaurus Rex himself, complete with war-towers on their feathery backs, much like in the fact that humans once used war elephants in our real world back in the ancient days.

Imagine this:

One summer morning, in the year 2000, while, let's say my two brothers Bill and Scott, were discussing the merits of playing video games on the Nintendo 64 than cooking pancakes with sausage or bacon, suppose I was walking through the backyard and beyond my family’s gate, where I went astray from the house and into the woods. In my imagination, the woods are those of Shanghara near the border of Ten’jad. Now, while I was walking through the woods, surveying the conifers, leaved plants and ferns and the calls of birds and pterosaurs, I can also something like a strange and distant, yet horrific and unbearable screaming roar from another world. So I decided to wander further through the forest to investigate the odd roar-like scream.

Once I was on the upper ridge of the forest, the woods unloosens the sight of a band of Ten’jai soldiers on the move through a clearing of dry ground and tough bushes (picturing a land slowly decaying under Mandark’s evil influence) and on their way to Astronoma, the mountain lair of Mandark himself. It was in this hour that Billy and Scott join me in surveying these exotic outlanders on the move.

“Who are these exotic outlandish guys, Scott?” asked Billy.

“They’re Ten’jai, Billy,” replied Scott. “Wicked men; servants of Mandark. They’re making their way into Astronoma. The Dark Avatar are calling all the armies that he selected to him. It will be ready soon.”

“Ready to do what?” I asked.

“To make his great war, Timmy, the last great war that will cover the whole wide world in an endless night of evil,” said Scott.

“Well,” I said, “We better get moving before they see the three of us.”

I was about to get up, when William stop me by showing me something.

“Timmy, look!” he said. “It’s a Gw�ngi!”



Out from the forest of Shanghara emerges two T. Rex-like theropod dinosaurs—forty to fifty feet in length—that follows the Ten’jai soldiers. These are the legendary Gw�ngi, the Ten’jai’s two-legged beasts of burden with war towers carrying Ten’jai soldiers on their backs. One of the monsters let loose a roar-like slobbering growl or grunt.

With an amazing smile, I said to Billy, “No one back in Maryland would believe us.”

Then the Gw�ngi let loose another loud slobbering growl. And that startles the three brothers. But just as the Gw�ngi and the Ten’jai soldiers are progressing through the forests of Southeastern Shanghara, a fistful of arrows began flying from the bushes hitting some Ten’jai men. It seems that growls of the Gw�ngi have signaled a group of East Asian-like Shangharan rangers in the service of the Emperor of Shanghara to ambush the Ten’jai. The two Gw�ngi are startled by this, so one of them let loose the same horrific and unbearable screaming roar from another world that I have supposedly heard earlier. One Gw�ngi runs off to the right direction roaring and stamping all the way. But the other Gw�ngi began charging towards the three of us to our own astonishment, terror and lasting delight. Big as a living elephant, but a quarter-to-one-third bigger than the dreaded Tyrant Lizard King that I supposedly saw in the National Geographic magazine, and it looked to the three of us a black and/or red-clad two legged, two fingered land-based dragon, but without the breath of fire.

Maybe fear and wonder enlarged him in our eyes, but the Gw�ngi of Ten’jad was indeed a quarter-to-one-third larger version of the dreaded Tyrant King of the Late Cretaceous of Canada and South Dakota, and the like of him does not walk the earth since the extinction of the mighty dinosaurs sixty-six million years before my lifetime; the birds that still live in the world are but smaller beaked memories of the Tyrannosaurus Rex’s girth and majesty.

On the Gw�ngi came, straight towards the three of us, rocking the ground beneath our feet with his every footstep; his great feet like a giant flightless bird, his two-fingered hand upraised like the talons of an eagle or hawk, his counterbalanced tail swinging around like a war club, his eagle eyes raging. His two-fingered arms were braided with bands of gold or scarlet. And what seemed to be a very war tower lay upon his heaving yet swift back, and high upon the Gw�ngi’s neck, still rode a tiny figure, a mighty warrior and a giant among the Ten’jai.

The Gw�ngi let loose another horrific and unbearable screaming roar from another world when a Ranger of Shanghara named Chang’Shāo appears from behind us and fires an arrow at the war tower, hitting a young Ten’jai soldier in his teens in the chest, sending him down to the ground besides the three of us. On the great theropod dinosaur thundered, blundering his blind wrath through pool and thicket and he was soon lost to view, still roaring and stamping faraway. What became of the Gw�ngi we may never hear or know: whether he escaped to roam the wild of Shanghara for a time, until he perished far from his home or was trapped in some deep pit set up by the Shangharan rangers; or whether he raged on until he plunges its body in a creek of the Saigō river and swam to Astronoma by himself even though he was swallowed up to his neck, back and tail by the deep waters.

I sighed a deep breath and said, “It was a Gw�ngi! So there are Gw�ngi and we have seen one. What a life! But no one back home will believe us.”

“Well here's a thing," said Chang’Shāo to yours truly. “What lies or threats led this boy from Ten’jad on this long march from home. If he would not rather have stayed here in peace. I think, young lad, war will make corpses of us all.”

Then I close my eyes and then opens it to find everything back to normal. There was no signs of Chang’Shāo and the other Shangharan rangers, so I was just fantasizing about things. And so the three of us decided to head back home. It was supposedly an adventure for my two brothers and myself. And I was convinced that I will still grow up to be eighteen or twenty one dancing with some pretty girls at my high school prom!

Later that night, I was supposedly lying in bed with the National Geographic magazine turned to pages thirty-four to thirty-five showing the Tyrannosaurus Rex, before finally drifting off to sleep, completely passed out of walking in the woods. Both the dinosaur and I slept quietly, the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the Late Cretaceous and me. Both of us slept. For the time being.

So there you go!

Anyway, sorry it is a long post or a great wall of text, and sure, all of you don't have to read all of it if you want, can you please give me a brief summary of the story that I told you about? Also, what was I doing in the story?

Cool