Summary:

Finding yourself kilometers away from your home, even home continent, is getting quite popular these days. E.T. firmly disagrees. An Inca cemetery is no way to end up after a sleepless night. A cemetery resembling the one in an Indiana Jones movie. E.T. panics. E.T. promptly passes out in her black flip-flops. E.T. wakes up. "Okay. Now we need to keep calm and carry on." WIP.


Prologue:

A 24-year-old girl appears in Peru. Having blacked out a minute before, wearing daisy dukes, a black bikini, thin pinstriped sky blue and white cotton dress shirt and black flip-flops, she's bewildered at how she arrived at some Inca ruins, kilometers away from her home continent.

Blinking rapidly, she faintly recognizes them as the place where Harold Oxley found and later hid the crystal skull from the movie Indiana Jones 4. After that she promptly faints.


Oh no. No, no, no. See, this doesn't happen to people, and even if it somehow does, it certainly doesn't happen to me.

I was home gasping at the bullshitting summer heat, which got even a few extra degrees hotter, thanks to global warming, desperately trying to cool down my apartment.

It was night, 23:30, and the fucking concert still wouldn't shut up, seriously, there are people needing sleep and NOT getting it.

But now I'm not home. Instead I'm standing-no, my knees buckled, I'm on the ground-in some nondescript ancient Inca ruins which are looking suspiciously familiar in a fictitious kind of way.

The name of the movie in question I would rather not say out loud, lest this becomes a very real hallucinogenic mushroom nightmare.

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the crystal skull." Well, shit.


Okay, the grass is real. The stone is real. So are the smells, skeletons in walls and ferns.

The oppressive heat is shining down and the eardrum splitting pressure is getting to me.

I'm heaving as I descended down the stairs. It looks so real, feels so real, so, I gulped, to an empiric, it must be real.

I didn't want to consider all the other possibilities.

/Go with the flow. /Sway with the breeze. Be a leaf. /

I nodded to myself. Supplies, food, water, lighter, rope, backpack, knife, anything? No?

Don't panic, think. A way out of here. Where? Tourist routes? No, I don't know anything about that. The skull? YES! The skull's the answer! …Wait. Bad feeling.

I slowly turned around. Please, please, don't let it be them.

A skull covered tribe native met my from fear dilated pupils. I flinched and shot for the entrance.

Please, please, please, whatever brought me here, please. Lend me the luck to survive. War cries bellowed behind me.

I ran and ran, narrowly avoiding another native. Darts (poison!) missed me in a flurry and hit the wall beside me.

Mid-flight I picked up a rock and threw it behind, darted around again, reached for pottery and repeated the procedure, hitting one of the native warriors on the head and then shot for the corridors.

Crossroads! I chose left, slowed down, took off my flip-flops and threw them to the right.

The noise distracted them, and with the crossroads being murky and dimly lit, they lost sight of me.

Patter of my bare feet was much quieter, realizing this in a millisecond I lynched myself for being stupid.

I must have sounded as an anorexic elephant with hooves clopping in a cheap china store!

I hid inside an alcove and waited, terrified. Full of adrenaline, my heart was pumping into overdrive.

"Danger!" my senses shouted, I was so afraid, afraid they could hear it. Silent tears ran down my cheeks. I held the sobs inside, grimacing.


They searched for an eternity, it seemed. I pushed myself to be still, quiet, made myself smaller. I shut out the world, disconnected myself from my surroundings. I didn't want them to find me.

Finally, after what felt like hours, actually minutes, I resurfaced back. Slowly, slowly, still very much afraid, I looked around.

I listened. No one, silence. I sighed in relief. Now I could feel the dried tears on my cheeks, and mascara too.

Great, just great. The one time I gussy up for a summer bonfire, and I end up not mingling, but haunting the snack bar and grill, gulping down hot dogs and chicken wings with chili sauce, because no one wanted to dance with me.

My so-called friends who promised to show up, bailed, my ex-boyfriends who I prayed wouldn't show up, well, they showed up too, yep, all 7 of them.

That's why I tried to flee the scene unnoticed, but of course, at the back exit, queen plastic Lauren ambushed me. I ended up nodding and aha-ing to how terrible her miniature chihuahua is feeling, from hair dyes to glittery pink purses and fake nails… I was in hell.

And I'm pretty sure the great G.O.D. won't think twice about what I had done next, in fact, I think I might get praised.

The bonfire was in the woods, a part of which was used as a dumping site, so I pushed her into a manmade waste hole.

Come on, it was the only highlight of my day. I ended up home, trying to sleep, but as you know, the 1D concert wouldn't let me.


Back in the ruins I chuckled at my bad luck and retraced my steps, desperately trying to spot a decorated wall or a carving, anything that I remembered that was near the corridor to Orellana's tomb.

"This looks like the place." I muttered. Creepy Peruvian mummy with crawling scorpions, check. Shady hole in the wall, check.

Wiggling the fingers on my left hand, I mentally prepared myself. Sticking your hand into unknown holes isn't smart or healthy.

/Depends on what kind of hole it is. / Bad, bad mind. Sometimes I questioned the debauchery living in my mind. I plunged it in. /That's what she said. / Stop it.

At last I felt the coarse rope's end. I clutched it firmly and pulled. It actually was a switch!

The hidden gateway opened and now I can make sense of adventure; finding a secret door is quite a thrill.

I crawled through on a plateau to the end; my weight lowered its side down and revealed the tomb.

"Yes!" I gave a small shout of victory. The resting place of Francesco Orellana and his men, conquistadors, searching for El Dorado, the fabled City of Gold. It looked just like in the movie.

I went to the side, to Orellana. His mummified corpse looked as dried up as my grandmother's tea leaves, and his ensemble looked worse for wear, but hey, it was expected.

He was older than all my grandfathers' fathers ages on my mother's side put together. Alright, stop insulting the dead guy, find the skull. If I remember, it would be behind him.

My bare toes brushed up the cold gold coins and I jumped away on instinct. Picking a few of them from the ground I marveled at the design.

Stepping closer, strange buzzing sounded and I felt the coins escape my palm, like a strong magnet was pulling them.

The skull's actually here! I smiled in relief. Worries bottled deep down inside me evaporated. What if it wasn't here? Maybe the movie already happened, or it hasn't happened at all.

But now I know the approximate timeline. Oxley found the skull, went to Akator- El Dorado, but couldn't figure it out the whole way, the skull commanded him to return it, and since he didn't know how to go forward he returned it here.

Orellana's shriveled up corpse confirmed it. In the movie when Indy opened another grave, the conquistador inside looked untouched but after a moment lost all his "life juices".

Orellana then already caught up to his age. I looked behind me. The sand covered floor housed footprints I neglected before; they weren't mine but Oxley's.

That's another piece of evidence. Now for the decider. I licked my lips, bared my teeth and pulled the greedy Francesco's body forward to expose the back area.

A quartz-like shinning skull greeted my sight. I laughed in joy.

Taking the skull in my arms I twirled around. Yes! Finally, something good! The gold coins that escaped my grasp were sticking to it. "I hope you're the answer." I said to it.

"Maybe you can send me back? To my time?" I sat down on the sand crossing my legs. "You know I'm not from here, right? Of course you do. You know a lot of things." I whispered.

Colour me loony for talking to an alien skull, but it was my ticket out of this hell hole and the first sentient thing not out to kill me. Well, semi-sentient thing or part of a sentient thing.

But what now? I just found it. It won't be able to help me in this state. It wants to go back to its friends, and it will reward those who return it.

Given that maybe, I was sent here for a purpose, or just for shits and giggles, either way, nothing is going to happen until the skull is back where it belongs. And that's Akator.

The place where we travel to in the movie, full of treacherous obstacles, flesh-eating ants, tribal natives sworn to protect it, the river with its dangerous falls, pits of death filled with spikes, wild jungle, oh, and how could I forget?- the goddamned Irina Spalko with her brigade of Soviet soldiers.

And all that is a long way away. Any hope I had of this being solvable without Indiana Jones poofed away. *POOF!*

Okay, you're smart, you have a good head on your shoulders, you're an A's student damn it.

Oxley still went mad from the skull and was locked up in a loony-bin in Peru. He spent months in it, before Irina kidnapped him, and that's roughly when Indiana Jones and "Mutt" Williams come in Peru to find Oxley.

Not long and they are here, in this cemetery. So, I'm looking at months or weeks, I don't know, of waiting. Then what? I waltz in, introduce myself to one of the most famous fictional explorers and hand him the skull, then beg to go with, to meet the aliens? Better than nothing.

But first things first, the skull isn't going anywhere without me; it's my bargaining chip, my lifeline.

So I need to make it so that the Jones figures it out that it used to be here. Hm. My proverbial light bulb lit up.

I took all of the gold coins lying around Orellana and put some in the back, where the skulls outline was visible in the leather skin that made the Inca sac-like burial graves and then lined an impossibly straight trail of them. It was noticeably artificial so that even idiots would realize that something is up and follow it. Hopefully.

Good enough. Now I need to exit the chamber and once again retrace my steps. It's imperative for me to do so. After all, my life and my return depend on it.

My return. Returno. Oh the irony. Stuffing the rope end further inside the hole, the secret door closed.

I looked at the skull wrapped in a musky cloth I found, murmuring. "Ironic, isn't it? My return depends on your return. We both need to return to our home." It was silent. "Hey, if I'm going to be conversing with you, you need a name. Seriously, I can't call you it. That would reaffirm the similarity that I was talking to cutlery or any other inanimate object before and that is just silly. Not to mention insane." I rubbed its forehead, avoiding looking at its eyes. "Tim. For as long as I'm carrying you, your name shall be Tim."

Satisfied with the naming, I walked forward in thought.

The only way I would survive this is by planning, I need to remember all I can from the movie, and the details. The devil is in the details.

I need to leave this place, like I was never here. Kind of like a camping trip. Anything that doesn't belong in a creepy Inca cemetery shouldn't be here.

I was looking at my toes while thinking. My bare toes. My flip-flops. My flip-flops! Of course! I needed to find them.

Going through the corridors, I arrived at the crossroads. I threw them here, right?

Any natural light, save from the candles in dank crevices, was missing. It was as dark as the night. The sun already went down? Stupid, it was already dark!

I can't find my black flip-flops in the dark. I can't do it now. Tomorrow.

In this moment I started to feel the mental stress of survival. I was tired. Tomorrow.

Sighing again, now because of the lack of sleep, I went back to my hiding space; the alcove.

Cramming my body up there, and hugging the skull in front of me I stretched as far as I could. Luckily I'm quite short, measuring only 159cm in height. Yes. Tomorrow.

Slowly closing my eyes I thought. I hope the bad guys need sleep as much as I do, otherwise I can't guarantee I'll wake up again.