Chapter 1: The Thunder Lizard Stone

Nobita failed the test on a Thursday.

This was not unusual. Nobita failed tests the way other people breathed — regularly, naturally, without any particular effort. He had, in fact, failed so many tests that his teacher had developed a special face for returning his papers. A face that said: I have graded this, Nobita, and I am tired.

The score was a twelve. Out of one hundred.

He walked home slowly. The late afternoon sun turned the back streets of Nerima Ward the color of old paper. A cat watched him from a wall. A bicycle bell rang somewhere ahead. A woman at a ground-floor window was doing the dishes, and the sound of running water followed him down the street until it didn't.

He went home. He climbed the stairs. He opened his door.

Doraemon was asleep on the floor.

This was also not unusual. Doraemon napped like a professional — flat on his back, four limbs arranged symmetrically, a half-eaten dorayaki resting on his stomach. The afternoon light came through the window at an angle and caught the dust in the air and made it look almost peaceful.

Nobita sat down next to him and began to cry.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. The quiet kind, the sort where you don't quite know it's happening until you notice your shirt is wet and your nose is running and you feel oddly hollow, like a bell that has already been struck and is waiting for the sound to stop.

"I got a twelve," he said.

Doraemon did not respond. Doraemon was asleep.

"Twelve," Nobita said again, to no one in particular.

The dorayaki rose and fell with Doraemon's breathing.

Nobita looked at the Time Machine. It sat in the corner of the room the way it always sat — round and white and slightly larger than a desk, with that bamboo-shoot handle on top and the round dial with all its numbers. It looked like a machine that knew things. Or possibly like a large washing machine. Nobita could never decide which.

He wasn't supposed to touch it without Doraemon.

He knew this.

He went and touched it anyway.

The dial was interesting up close. There were numbers going in both directions — forward, into years he hadn't lived yet, and backward, into years nobody had lived for a very long time. Nobita's finger found the dial the way fingers find interesting things — without much deliberate thought.

He turned it.

Not far. Just a little. He didn't mean to turn it that much.

"Nobita," said Doraemon, sitting up sharply, "why is the Time Machine—"

The room lurched. The machine made a sound like a very large hiccup. The dorayaki slid off Doraemon's stomach and hit the floor.

Then everything went sideways.

---

The ground was soft.

This was the first thing Nobita noticed. Not the heat — though the heat was immediate and enormous, thick and wet and alive in a way that Nerima Ward air was not. Not the sound — though the sound was extraordinary, layered and green and full of things calling to each other in the dark. Not the smell — though it smelled like every plant that had ever existed had decided to exist all at once, right here, today.

The ground was soft, and his face was in it.

"Ow," said Nobita.

"Nobita," said Doraemon, from somewhere nearby, "where did you set the dial?"

Nobita lifted his face from the soft ground. It was the color of very old tea and it was damp and there were things moving in it. Small things. Many-legged things.

He sat up. He looked around.

The jungle was enormous.

Not enormous in the way that parks were enormous, or the way mountains looked enormous in photographs. Enormous in the way of something that had never been interrupted. The trees went up and up and up and became part of the sky. Ferns the size of houses pressed against each other. The light that came through was green and ancient and moved the way water moves. Everything was wet with a moisture that seemed to come from the air itself.

"I may have turned it," Nobita said carefully, "quite a lot."

"How much is quite a lot?"

Nobita checked the dial. "Sixty-five million years."

There was a silence.

"You turned it," Doraemon said, "sixty-five million years."

"Give or take."

Another silence. A bird — or something that had not yet decided whether to be a bird — screamed from somewhere very high up and very far away.

"The others," Doraemon said.

They were scattered across a small clearing, all of them, all five of them together. This made sense: the Time Machine's field had apparently been generous. Gian was sitting up slowly, rubbing the back of his head with one enormous hand. Suneo was on his feet already, checking his clothes for damage with the focused attention of someone whose shirt cost more than most people's dinners. Shizuka stood at the edge of the clearing, perfectly still, looking out at the jungle with an expression of careful attention.

"Where are we?" Suneo said.

"Sixty-five million years ago," Doraemon said.

Suneo looked at him. "That's not possible."

"And yet."

Gian stood up. He was the largest person in their grade and he looked even larger here, in the green light, among the enormous ferns. He looked around. His eyebrows, which were substantial, rose toward his hairline.

"Cool," said Gian.

A shape moved through the trees at the edge of the clearing. The shape was large. Very large. Larger than large.

The tyrannosaur stepped into the light like it had always intended to be here, which it had, because this was its world, sixty-five million years ago. It stood taller than a house. Its head was the size of a small car. It moved with a heaviness that made the ground tremble in small, polite, deeply serious increments.

It looked at them.

They looked at it.

The tyrannosaur opened its mouth. Its teeth were the length of Nobita's arm.

"Takecopters," Doraemon said, in a very calm voice, already reaching into his pocket. "Now."

The Takecopter was a small propeller that attached to the top of your head and made you fly. It looked like something you might find in a toy capsule machine at a convenience store. It cost twelve hundred yen at the same hypothetical convenience store. It fit on your head like a very small hat and when you activated it, it spun, and then you rose, and then you were flying, which was nice except for the wind.

Doraemon distributed them in four seconds. They attached them in two.

The tyrannosaur charged.

They went up.

The tyrannosaur snapped at the air below Suneo's feet with a sound like a car door slamming very hard. Suneo made a sound that was not words. They rose above the treeline and the jungle spread out beneath them, green and enormous and impossible.

"That was—" Shizuka started.

"Do not," Suneo said, "tell me this is exciting."

It was, objectively, exciting. The jungle from above was another thing entirely. It went on forever in every direction. Rivers caught the light. Something very large moved through the canopy a kilometer to the east, its path marked by the swaying of the treeline. The sky was a blue that modern air had forgotten how to be.

"Beautiful," Shizuka said softly.

Nobita said nothing. He was looking at something else.

To the north, past three ridgelines of jungle, a volcano stood. It was taller than the others and it was smoking, which was normal. What was not normal were the structures on its slope. They were angular and metallic and clearly not geological. They caught the light differently from the rock — harder, more deliberate. Lines of something moved between them. Small figures, or rather figures that looked small from this distance.

"Doraemon," Nobita said. "What is that?"

Doraemon looked. His expression, which was round and usually cheerful, became something more careful. He reached back into his pocket and produced a small tube — a miniature telescope, roughly the size of a marker pen, labeled FARSCOPE — ADJUSTABLE MAGNIFICATION — 40× MAX.

He looked through it. He looked for a long time.

"Those," he said, slowly, "are soldiers."

"Soldiers?" Gian said. "What kind?"

"Not ours."

He passed the Farscope to Nobita. Nobita pressed it to his eye and adjusted the dial.

The figures on the volcano slope came into focus. They were wearing armor — but not like any armor in any history book. It was blue and black and angular, with tubes running along the joints and helmets that covered everything. They moved in ordered formations, carrying equipment that dug into the rock face with the regularity of machines. They were digging. They had been digging for a while.

"Those are not dinosaurs," Suneo said.

"No."

"Who are they?" Shizuka said.

"I don't know yet," Doraemon said.

Then the Farscope reached the figure standing above all the others, on a natural platform of black rock that jutted from the volcano's side. It stood still. It did not dig. It watched the operation below with arms folded and eyes that, even at 40× magnification, carried the flat patience of someone who has decided what they want and is waiting for it to be delivered.

It was enormous. Purple. Built like something that gravity had agreed to argue with, briefly, before deciding it wasn't worth the trouble.

Nobita could not have said how he knew the figure was dangerous. He simply knew. The same way you know, sometimes, looking at a storm on the horizon, that it is coming toward you and not away.

He lowered the Farscope.

"Big purple guy," he said.

"Yes," said Doraemon.

"He's looking for something in the volcano."

"Yes," said Doraemon. He paused. "There is a meteor. It arrives in this era, in this location, in a few days. Inside that meteor — or close enough that it doesn't matter — there is a Power Stone. An object of extraordinary energy. Enough energy to change the course of everything."

"That's the extinction event," Shizuka said quietly. She had been reading ahead in science class. "The meteor."

"Yes."

"If he gets the Stone before the meteor hits—"

"He can use it anywhere," Doraemon said. "Any time. Any place. Forward or backward." He paused. "He could come to our time. He could go further. He could—" He stopped. "He is not someone who should have it."

The volcano smoked in the distance. The soldiers moved in their ordered lines.

"We should go home," Suneo said.

Nobody argued with this. Suneo was, factually, correct. They should go home. They should go home right now, this minute, and let whatever was going to happen in this era happen the way it was supposed to, sixty-five million years before they were born, and eat dinner and do their homework and go to bed.

"The Time Machine," Doraemon said.

They all looked.

The Time Machine, which had deposited them in this clearing and which was their only way home, was not in the clearing.

It had tumbled free when they jumped and flown on, apparently, without them. It was somewhere in sixty-five million years of jungle.

"Oh no," Nobita said.

The Takecopters' batteries had been running for seven minutes. They had about three minutes left.

"We land," Doraemon said. "Carefully. And then we find the Time Machine. And then—"

Something enormous screamed in the jungle below them, long and echoing and ancient.

"And then we figure out," Doraemon said, more quietly, "what to do about the purple man."

They began to descend.

Nobita looked back at the volcano once more before the treeline rose to swallow the view. The figure on the black rock platform had not moved. It stood absolutely still, patient and enormous and certain of itself, in a way that Nobita, who had scored twelve out of one hundred and was currently descending into a Cretaceous jungle without a plan, could not imagine being.

The trees closed over them.

The jungle was very large. They were very small.

Somewhere below, something was being dug out of the rock, slowly and with tremendous purpose.

They had, Doraemon had said, a few days.