Which turned out not to be a tunnel, but a bridge.
Bringing up the rear, Felline peered over the edge of the bridge, her night vision picking out the forest of tall, lethal spikes that carpeted the floor of the cavernous room. What purpose did those serve?
"I don't like the look of that," she murmured, still not quite used to speaking. The kittens and Snarf knelt at the edge and made identical noises of dismay.
With what little ambient light was available, Felline couldn't tell how big the room was, or even if the bridge and walls were made of metal or stone. Like her rifle, it seemed to be some kind of in-between material. It was deathly quiet.
Lion-O approached the far wall, where another lion's head frieze roared silently at them, its mane freakishly spread out like tentacles around its disembodied face. Within its open mouth, a door beckoned.
He put his hand on the red and blue design of a stylized cat's eye – exactly the same shades as his mane and armor, Felline noted – and pushed experimentally. Nothing happened. Everyone but the kittens crowded around him on the narrow walkway for a closer examination. A small slot mocked them from the middle of the painted eye.
"Think they left the key behind?" Lion-O joked, giving Cheetara a rueful grin.
"Actually," Tygra said. He jerked his thumb toward the indistinct ceiling. "They left a few."
They looked up. Metal keys glinted in the low lighting, dangling by wires thinner than a cat hair, twisting in unseen breaths of air. No one needed to say it. Something about the cold, spike-bottomed room demanded a hushed respect. Felline tucked her hands under her arms.
"We'll just have to try them all," Cheetara said. She extended her staff and gave a gentle swipe with it. Jingling, three keys fell into her palm, their gossamer wires still attached.
Panthro said what Felline was thinking – "This could take forever." – but Cheetara had already fitted the first random key into the lock in the center of the eye's red, slotted pupil. She turned it. Something behind the door emitted a series of clunky, rusty groans and an ominous thud.
The door didn't open.
Cheetara straightened, eyes wide, as what sounded like a crank started up, wheezing. The walkway beneath their feet rumbled, buzzing against their soles.
"I don't think we have forever," Tygra said grimly.
WilyKat and Kit saw it first and cried out a chorused warning: The bridge had separated from the entrance and was retracting. Fast.
Snarf screamed. He and the kittens sprinted toward the locked door. Felline, digging her claws into the unrelenting seam in the middle of it, didn't know what they'd do once they caught up, but the truncated end of the walkway was right on their heels. She knew that to stop was to fall into the carpet of tall, thin spikes below.
The kittens and Snarf reached the end a second before the walkway did. It sucked into the wall with a jerk right beneath them. With a collective shout, everyone jumped.
Everyone fell.
Felline latched her arms around the only reliable thing near her, which turned out to be Cheetara's waist. She came up short, hanging on for dear life. She stared into Tygra's dark eyes until she convinced her frantically pounding heart that they were safe, that they hadn't fallen very far. WilyKit was wrapped around Tygra's leg like a furry boot, and he had hooked a bemused Snarf out of the air. Tygra himself dangled from Lion-O's ankle.
"Whiskers," Lion-O whispered, and Felline looked up.
Cheetara was hugging Panthro's baggy-trousered leg, and Lion-O was gripping two fistfuls of the general's spiked vest. WilyKat perched on the big panther's back, his tail twice the size of normal.
All eight cats were relying on the strength of Panthro's fingers, sunken deep in the crumbling, inch-wide ledge beneath the locked door.
"Find the key!" Panthro managed to say in a strangled voice.
"How?" Felline asked with Cheetara's hair in her face. She blew it out of her eyes in time to see a smiling Kit pass her, nimbly climbing up the chain of cats.
"Leave this to the masters," Kat called down smugly.
"Hurry!" Lion-O grunted. "There's hundreds to pick from."
He wasn't the only one making sounds of pain. Cheetara and Panthro both sounded like they were being pulled apart at the joints.
Above them, WilyKat stood on his sister's head while she stood on Panthro's as if they were all some sort of bizarre totem pole.
"Why waste time picking out a key –" Kit calmly said.
"– when you can just pick the lock?" finished Kat. Tiny scrapes and clicks bounced around the room, amplified by the high, empty walls, and then Felline heard another clunk.
Creaking and clanking, the halves of the door slid aside. The kittens disappeared. Tygra tossed Snarf through the new opening, and then stretched for Felline. Letting go of Cheetara, she grabbed his hand gratefully as she swung down and let him hoist her to the ledge on the upswing. Quickly, she got out of the way as one by one the other cats jumped up on their own. It took the combined effort of both brothers to haul Panthro to safety, though.
On his hands and knees, the general dragged himself through just as the doors slid shut again, locking them in. Felline crawled over to him, offering him a smile in the darkness when he raised his head. Panthro nodded at her and accepted her help in standing. Just one of his hands engulfed her arm up to the elbow.
"The Book could be just beyond that wall," Lion-O said, his voice echoing oddly.
Felline turned around. They were in another room, very long like a tunnel, smaller than the first but still significant. The tunnel was hexagonal in shape, the walls bowing outward at the sides and then in at the ceiling, and consisted of uneven stone blocks.
Naturally, there was a door at the further end. This one was circular, with a comical feline face carved into it. Felline thought its expression was mocking them and put her ears back in distaste. They could have died back there in that first room. What new horror did this place have in store for them?
With a confidence no one else seemed to feel now that he was no longer hanging like a rack of meat, Panthro stepped forward.
His foot touched a stone tile. It sank under his weight.
With the slick rasp of metal on metal, a rotating sickle blade slid out of the wall, nearly shaving his crooked nose off his face. Faster than sound, Cheetara yanked the big cat backward as more of the whirling, shearing blades slid into view, blocking off the entire passage.
"Legend said the ancients rigged a series of obstacles near the temple, meant to keep outsiders away," she said, her sunset eyes on the spinning blades. Some protruded into the tunnel vertically, some horizontally, and some retracted to appear again in another place. If there was a rhythm, Felline couldn't trace it.
"Then this whole place is a death trap," Panthro growled indignantly.
Ignoring him, Cheetara grinned fiercely. "Gotta move fast," she said.
Before anyone could say anything else, she was off, a blur of sun-yellow in the dank, lethal corridor.
WilyKit clapped her hands over her mouth to keep in a shriek of surprise. So did Felline. Their anxiety lasted less than a second, however. Cheetara reappeared on the far side of the trap, sliding on her knees toward the cat-faced door. She stood, completely unharmed. Then, as if she'd known what to do all along, she raised her bo staff over her head and extended it.
The two ends of the staff pushed two separate panels back into the tilted walls, which seemed to cut power to the spinning sickle blades. They stilled and then retracted, leaving the way clear. Behind Cheetara, the stone door rolled aside with the grinding of giant molars.
A cheer bubbled up in Felline's chest, and she let it out as she bounded toward Cheetara. No matter the hostile feelings between them, nothing could have beaten Cheetara's feat of speed. The kittens whooped and hollered with her.
"Nice work," Lion-O said, flipping Cheetara a thumbs-up as he ran by her.
Felline caught a glimpse of Cheetara's face. She smiled, apparently pleased with herself and with his praise. When all had passed, she lowered her staff, jumped through the doorway, and let the door roll ponderously closed again.
Two traps down. How many more to go? Felline followed Lion-O into the next room. She stopped dead in her tracks.
For one wild, ridiculous moment, she felt like she'd returned to Thundera.
Then the déjà vu passed, and she could see clearly. This time, the room was square, built of the same stone blocks, but much brighter than the prior two. Two white-gold beams of light penetrated the gloom, angling into the stone basin in the center. Like Thundera's great marble fountain, the basin was filled with clear water. The beams of light originated from two tiny apertures in one wall, which then reflected off the surface of the utterly still water and terminated at the eyes of a stone lion's head in the opposite wall.
Felline frowned at the beams. What an odd way to light up the room. And what was the source of the light? It wasn't daylight, that was for sure. It was too bright, the color and direction both wrong.
WilyKit and WilyKat trotted forward, their tails waving happily since nothing spiky or sharp had accosted them. They leaned over the basin's lip.
"Look, treasure!" Kit exclaimed.
She was right. The light multiplied in the basin, shining off mounds of gold and silver coins, heaps of lambent, glittering wealth. Like a magnet, the basin drew their eyes. The glittery lights beguiled them all, making Felline forget about possible traps.
"We're rich!" Kat cried, and stuck his hand in the water.
"Wait!" Lion-O yelled, startling Felline, but WilyKat was busy gathering coins. Ripples spread out from his arm, disrupting the beams of light.
With a low growl, the stone eyes in the lion head, no longer in contact with the white light, glowed a menacing red.
A/N: Greetings and Salutations! Anne here.
Reviewer Thanks! Blacktiger93 (I feel like such a heel, posting a chapter like this that isn't any different than watching the show! Not only that, but I have to leave all the cool Mumm-Ra stuff out. *pout* I hope you don't mind it too much and will wait for the next chapter!), KelseyAlicia (I agree! I love cute, especially when it's guy-cute. ^_^), Heart of the Demons (Oh, good, I hoped that would come out all right. I'm always blown away by how perceptive my readers are - it's really flattering and a nice challenge. :3), Naiko20 (Re: the sketch: Thank you! Re: the review: Me, too, LMAO!), Darwin (Oh, chica, that was part of the fun of watching the reboot; all the things we thought we knew, we don't anymore - but there are some really fun nods to the original series [like the outtake reference on the samoflange, so HILARIOUS]. I mean, at least Lion-O isn't fake-aged and freaky anymore [no, he was SO not my favorite in the original, and frankly the kittens used to make me gag], so now there's this awesome and awkward love triangle going on between him and her and Tygra . . . yay! Plus, Lion-O's original voice actor played Claudus, and he did the "ThunderCats, HO!" and it was AMAZING . . . fangique alert! I'll stop rambling now), Night Whisperer (Re: the review: Oh, my, I know who would win that. Felline still has a lot of growing up to do, hee! Re: the sketch: Thank you!), and Momochan77 (Welcome! Thank you [again] for stopping by!). To all of you, here's one big THANK YOU for being the best people on Fanfic. Thank you. Really.
And, I must say, I am so grateful for all of the recent favorites for this story! You guys are awesome!
Until next time,
Anne