Nathan Drake slowly opened his eyes. He did not feel at ease as he did just moments ago. His back was aching, now propped up against a concrete wall. He felt groggy, but he slowly became more alert as he tried to stand up. "Damn... what happened." he said to himself. He took a quick look at his surroundings. The room was dimly lit by torches hanging on both sides of him. The concrete walls were thick. He appeared to be at the end of a very long passageway. The cement floor was stained with blood - after a quick check, he determined that it wasn't his blood. But he wasn't sure who's it was. Someone from before he got there? And just how did he get there?
"Let's see... one minute I'm stealing a map with the location of the City of the Caesars on it... and then I got on a plane... and... Damn. I don't remember anything else." he said to himself. He checked his watch for the time, but it was broken. There was no sign of sunlight to tell the time by. He had no idea how long he ad been there.
Had someone drugged him, and then left him here after stealing his map? He checked his back pocket, but the map was still there. Whatever it was they were after, it wasn't the City of the Caesars. Drake grabbed one of the torches off the wall. "Well, might as well find a way out of here."
He began walking down the corridor in the only direction there was. All he could do was go forward. The light got dimmer as he walked down the corridor. He looked for any sign of a door or secret passageway that might lead him out of this strange place. But he found nothing. He tried measuring the distance that he walked by the number of steps that he took. By the time that he walked what he judged to be a mile, he began to wonder just how long the corridor was.
"Just how big is this place?" he asked himself. "I sure could use Sully right now. Or Elena. Boy, i bet they're pissed at me. I disappear without word of where I'm going? Yeah, this isn't going to end well for me."
Another half mile went by, still with nothing new. Forward was the only direction he could move - and even that was taken from him when he came to a large pit in the middle of the corridor. Across the other side was just concrete wall. The same color of wall that he had stared at for the past half hour or so. Down, was the only way to go. But Drake knew better than to leap without looking. So he pulled a coin out of his wallet, and tossed it into the pit. He waited for the sound of a 'clang' or 'bloop'. But it never came - the pit had to be too deep for him to survive such a fall.
"Damn..." he said. "Can things get any worse?"
And just as he finished saying 'worse', ten spiders began piling out of the pit. He peered into the pit for an instant - just long enough to see the millions of spiders that were waiting for him.
"Me and my big mouth..." he said. He tossed his torch into the pit hoping to kill as many of the spiders as he could, and ran in the direction that he came from. It was futile, he thought. This was nothing more than a death trap. No way out. But - there had to be. How else did he get in? He ran as fast as he could, the spiders still on his tail. He began to lose his breath as he ran what judged to be half of a mile.
"Alright, if I get out of here, I'm going on a serious diet..."
He figured that there had to be a secret passageway somewhere. He had seen many in his travels, he wasn't sure why he hadn't thought of it before. There may have been some place that he had to push in, or something like that, and it'd reveal another path. But he had no time to search for any bricks that may be slightly out of place now. He still had the spiders to contend with. The lack of light wasn't helping any, and Drake refused to look back to see how close the spiders were to him. But judging from the fact that he was still alive, he still had some sort of a lead on them.
After another five minutes of running at top speed, Drake could make out a light up ahead. He presumed that he was close to where he started - that the torch he left behind was waiting for him. But he knew he hadn't run that fast - there was no way he had returned to the beginning. It just didn't seem right. And it seemed less so when Drake finally got to the source of the light - it wasn't the torch he left behind. It was a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The floor and walls were different now. The cement floor was replaced by dark red carpeting. And there were no blood stains here. The walls were no longer made of concrete, but now of brick.
There was something else too.
"Now I know THAT wasn't there before." said Drake, turning behind him to see that he had enough of a lead on the spiders to take a short break and catch his breath.
What he saw was his once chance for salvation. Something he didn't expect to find running back to where he started. Nathan Drake never thought he'd be so happy to see something as simple as a door.
He allowed himself only half a minute to catch his breath, before opening the door and slamming it shut behind him. This new area looked even more different from where he had come from. It was well lit, and the walls had blue wallpaper on them. The floors were covered by beige carpet. It looked a lot newer than the area from where he had come from. In his time as an archaeologist he had been to many ancient places - many of which he had destroyed in the name of finding treasure, breaking every rule in the archaeologists handbook - but he had been able to usually gauge the age of a structure. The corridor he had just been in looked to be at least thousands of years old. Medieval from the looks of it. No architecture that he recognized, but still. The walls screamed 'old'. But this new place... it looked to be less than fifty years old. Something you might see in a modern house. Nothing as foreboding here. Still, he was relieved to be away from the spiders.
"I don't know where the hell that door came from, but someone must be looking out for me." he said.
It was seconds later that Drake was disturbed by a laugh coming from across the room. The laugh itself was harmless - but the fact that he was not alone was enough to spook him.
"Hello?" said Drake. He wasn't sure if this was the person who was looking out for him - or if they were the one who had put him here. They seemed to be friend, and not foe however. Because their reply was a simple echoing "Hello." in return.
