Remy loved exploring. He loved crawling through the bones of old buildings and castles, searching through all the nooks and crannies to find the little spaces that even the architects probably didn't know existed. Even better, he sometimes found hidden treasures long forgotten by the rest of the world tucked away in such spaces—fascinating fragments of lives and times past. Occasionally he found something with real value, and those invariably made their way into some museum or another. And, of course, there were the vaults and treasuries that often inhabited such structures, their owners naively believing that thick walls of stone would be proof against a skilled thief.
The royal palace of Wakanda proved to be more temptation than he could resist. Like a beautiful and exotic woman, the soaring towers of stone and steel called to him, and so, only two days after their arrival in Africa, Remy found himself scaling the sheer walls of what had once been a dumbwaiter shaft in one of the older sections of the palace.
Light trickled down into the shaft from the access hole Remy had discovered on the palace's third floor. The openings in the dumbwaiter shaft had been sealed with brick at some point in the past, but the mason had mixed too much water into his mortar, leaving it weak. It had taken Remy less than ten minutes work with his pocket knife to open a hole large enough for him to crawl through. He'd descended nearly a hundred feet since then and the light had grown dim, but there still remained enough for him to make out the four-foot wide cedar columns that supported the corners of the vertical shaft. Un-mortared, hand-carved stones formed the walls, their edges so exact he had to work to find good finger and toe holds.
Remy had done a little online research about the Wakandan royal palace since he'd arrived. There were two known vaults buried somewhere inside the stone foundations, with up to three more rumored to exist. T'challa's ancestors were believed to have squirreled away everything from raw diamonds to Egyptian artifacts to Spanish bullion.
Remy was curious if the rumors were true. He grinned to himself. Emma had told him to go do something fun and the truth was, he hadn't had this much fun in a very long time.
He ran his fingers along the crease between two blocks of stone, searching for a new hand hold and then carefully lowered himself another notch into the unknown depths of the palace.
#-#-#-#
Nearly eight hours later, Remy swung open the door to one of the palace vaults and stepped inside. He estimated the door to be at least two centuries old. It was made of eighteen inch thick riveted steel plates with retractable teeth that extended into holes cut in the stone floor. The lock looked to be as old as the door. It took Remy exactly twenty-three seconds to pick it, and that was only because the blade of his pocket knife really wasn't an ideal tool for the job.
The first thing he noticed as he entered was the relatively sophisticated video camera mounted in one corner of the room. He waved jauntily to the guards he assumed were on the other end of the monitoring system and proceeded to examine the vault's dusty contents. Statues and other artifacts sat in haphazard piles around the edges of the room, along with unlabeled crates of various styles and levels of antiquity. Several framed paintings leaned against one wall, their faces covered by tarps.
He was carefully blowing dust from the designs on an engraved bowl that looked to be made of pure gold when soldiers poured into the vault. The uniformed men surrounded him, the muzzles of their automatic rifles trained unerringly on his kneeling form.
"Raise your hands, thief!" one man barked in thickly-accented English.
Obediently, Remy held up his hands just as the King of Wakanda stormed into the vault.
"Is this how you repay my hospitality, X-Man?" T'challa demanded angrily. "And worse, the friendship of my queen?"
Remy straightened from his crouch, making sure his motions remained slow and unthreatening. He doubted the king understood any part of his friendship with Ororo.
A smile tickling the corners of his mouth, he inclined his head respectfully toward T'challa. "Y' highness." He met the other man's gaze. "No offense, but y' security sucks."
T'challa flushed with fury, visible even with his dark skin. He turned to his soldiers. "Handcuff him and put him in a holding cell until I can arrange to speak with the American ambassador."
"Yes, sir," the man who'd spoken before answered.
With a last look at Remy, T'challa turned and strode away. Remy offered no resistance as the soldiers secured a pair of handcuffs on his wrists and led him out of the vault.
