Claire Dearing (Jurassengers)

*"I mean, if I can't be myself without people hating me, what does that say about who I am?"*
—Claire Dearing(src)
Claire Dearing was a passenger on a ship headed to the New World.

## Biography

### Childhood

When Claire was young, she frequently challenged scientific knowledge. She started by trying to grab the moon, assuming it was just inches out of reach. She then learned the metric system (implying she was educated in a country outside of the United States, or that the United States uses the metric system in the future) and assumed that this was a more accurate measure of how far away the moon was. She was later informed that celestial bodies were much farther away. She also tried to prove that the naked eye could see cells, and that perhaps adults lost this ability as they grew up.

### Adult Life

Claire was a managerial worker during her adulthood. She was frequently concerned about not fitting in, and tried to tailor her outward appearance so that she would be normal. She developed low self-esteem due to the internal conflict between the person she wanted to be and the way she felt she had to act to fit in. She always wanted to be a dancer, but dismissed these dreams in favor of a more socially-acceptable job.

Claire didn't see her father for years, and she believed the reason was that she pushed him away by being too similar to him. She got engaged, but before the wedding came, she had a mental breakdown and signed up to colonize a new world on the spaceship *Neptune* without telling anyone.

### Aboard the *Neptune*

After just twenty years of cryosleep, Claire was awakened by the interference of a Stegoceratops named Owen (from 01, his ID number). At first she is dismissive of him, but when he shows her the security footage and she realizes he woke her up, she becomes frightened of him instead. He tries to drink himself to death, but fails. When Claire raids his safe for anything to use against him, she finds notes that he wrote as his father to himself and feels pity for him. As it is his birthday, she throws him a party, falling in love with him in short order. They party for three days, after which Owen decides to sedate her so she can go back into cryosleep in spite of her protests. She sleeps for another two hundred and eighty years. Upon waking up, she learns from another Stegoceratops that Owen only died three years ago. He lived for three times the life expectancy of a Stegoceratops with a mate.

### The New World

By the time Claire and the rest of her fellow passengers arrived at the new world, teleportation was invented by Earth scientists and interstellar colonization is a quick, easy process. Technology had progressed so much that Claire's job was rendered obsolete by the teleported colonists. Instead, she became a social worker and works with the dinosaur community to improve their lives. She adopted two children (Lily and Luke, though their names are not given in the story). She never married.

### Death

Claire died at the age of three hundred on a coast at night. She was satisfied with her life in her final moments, and was confident that she would see Owen again in the afterlife.

## Personality

Claire was extremely self-conscious and more concerned with fitting in than her own happiness. She constantly molded her outward appearance to make herself acceptable to everyone around her at the expense of her sense of self and all her confidence. Whenever she experienced conflict with other people, she blamed it on her being different from them. She trusted others very little, yet when she willed herself to open up to Owen, she fell in love with him in less than three days of meeting him. After meeting Owen, Claire became more willing to be who she wanted to be, and changed professions from management to social work.

While her spiritual beliefs remain mostly unknown, she did believe in an afterlife, at least after meeting Owen.

## Trivia

* According to herself, Claire was a terrible dancer, smelled like apples, and liked disco.
* This version of Claire was called "Space-Claire" behind the scenes.