Cassie takes her first step on the boat before her. The ground creaks beneath her boots, reminding her that she is walking over wood that is able to give way at a moment's notice. She waddles over to the door and she opens it. As the door was technically upside-down, she pushed it opened and looked down.
"Wow," she gasped, "this is the entrance to Noah's Ark."
She takes out her grappling hook and climbing piton. She stabs the hook into the rock wall beside her and rappels down. When she reached a point where her rope couldn't go further down, she stabbed the climbing piton down into a crevice and wrapped her hook around it.
Derek uses his grappling hook to lower the Priest and Bethany down below while Cassie left her grappling hook dangling above for the others to climb down.
Cassie had touched the solid ground for two minutes while waiting for the others to meet her. She took out her angle head flashlight and switched it on.
The angle head flashlight illuminated the room around them, a simple room made of wood with carvings inscribed on the wall. The symbols resembled various figures ranging from a stick to a box but they all lead across the room to a hole at the other end of the room big enough for a dozen people to fit through at once.
Derek shined his flashlight and illuminated a path for them to follow. Bethany took out her camera and took a selfie of her inside Noah's Ark, Derek doing the bunny ears on her.
Cassie reached for her back pocket subconsciously to reach for her pocket-sized journal before remembering that she lost the journal when she abandoned that detonating vehicle.
"The amulet!" Derek remembered. "The one with the symbol."
Bethany reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the amulet. "What about it?"
He points to something above the hole in the wall in front of them. "It's the same symbol on the amulet."
"Wow," Bethany gasped.
"Any item marked with that symbol comes from Noah's Ark," Cassie says offhandedly. "When the ark washed up, valuable it was carrying were scattered around the world."
"Where could these lost artifacts be?"
"The bible speaks of Noah's Ark being at least three hundred cubits long, which is four-fifty feet long," Bethany states. "I may be off by a few feet but the ark is that big at least."
Man, Bethany sure knew her geometry.
"Man you sure know your geometry," Cassie spoke her mind.
"Thank you, my uncle homeschooled me," Bethany answered.
Liar.
"I am actually surprised he taught you more than religion. I'm self-educated," Cassie remarked. "Either way, if we want to find the artifacts hidden deep inside Noah's Ark, we follow the symbols on the wall until we reach the treasury."
"Can we at least turn on the lights so we can see?"
Cassie took out her zippo before heading over to a lantern. She users her zippo to light it up. Once the lantern lit up with the smallest of flames, the trail flames faded into the wall and traveled along until it reached another lantern, the process repeating until the entire room was lit up with the lanterns.
"Wow, I can't believe we are inside the ark."
Cassie and Bethany's smiles dropped and turned around. They were staring into the eyes of Burak and Leyla Uzun, Arda, Hasan, and Bedrettin, their faces illuminated by the lanterns.
"Cassie Drake, Derek Lowell, thank you for finding the ark for us, thank you very much," Burak said in between laughs. "Now, lead us to the room with all the treasure," He waved the revolver to Derek.
"The journal?" Cassie guessed. She looked to the ceiling (or floor) above to see that the grappling hooks Overlord left behind.
Burak took out the journal from his back pocket. "You practically drew a map for us. We were lying in wait as we were unable to get into Noah's Ark without you."
"You always know me; always ready to help bad guys." She laughed before she remembered what she wanted to say. "You're after something that's been hidden inside Noah's Ark rather than the ark itself."
Leyla smiled. "Aaron's Rod."
Cassie thought back to her visions, what she saw when she was climbing in the boat and what she saw. "For the longest time, I've wondered what the infamous Overlord organization could want with a boat and how they would use that boat to take over the world... but it's not the boat itself, and when I realized this..."
"You've heard the stories of Aaron's rod and its connections to the Ten Plagues of Egypt and Moses."
She nodded.
"There is more to it than just ten plagues and being connected to the man who parted the Red Sea, there is a far greater power that comes with Aaron's Rod; the ability to create tsunamis, sandstorms, and avalanches, controlling forces of disasters. A beauty if I do say so myself."
"You know what, that doesn't sound like a bad idea, we take the child, tie up the others, and sink this wooden vessel," Burak thought aloud. "Yeah, it would be poetic for Cassie Drake to die by the treasure she sought." He aimed his gun at Derek's forehead. "While you have drawn us a map leading us here and opened the door for us, we're not stupid to know that there could be traps and an experienced person such as yourself should move on ahead."
Cassie steps in front of Derek, preparing to take the bullet if it came to it.
"If you so much as graze Derek I will break every bone in your body."
Burak aims the gun at the Priest and fires.
The Priest screams and clutches his shoulder, nursing a flesh wound near his right collarbone.
"UNCLE!"
"If you do not advance for us, I will make Little Belinay Sadik here an orphan."
Cassie held up her hands. "Wait, don't shoot." She looked over her shoulder to the doorway. "I'll go first and solve any traps I come across; I promise."
Leyla tilted her head, eyeing the young woman suspiciously. "You better."
Cassie points to the doorway. "I'll go right now... but I would like the notebook, please."
Bedrettin marched forward and grabbed Bethany by the back of the head and yanked her back. "I'll keep this one in check."
The pain in the Priest's shoulder was blocked off, ignored by feelings of pure anger at the sight of his niece being grabbed.
"I'm going," Cassie panicked before running to the doorway. When she looked back, Leyla tossed her the notebook and she caught it in her hands.
She lined her angle head flashlight forward to illuminate a path for her.
She opened her journal to the fourth and final vision she saw. She reread over the passages and closed her eyes and sighed.
She had discovered the second piece hidden in the rubble in the church. Standing up, she looked at both wooden pieces in both of her hands, eyes looking over them, studying them with sharp intensity. Once she studied them long enough, she turned to the only door in the church and pushed it open.
Instead of finding the place to be flooded like it was last time, she was surrounded by a maze of crystal ice. It was like the water had frozen solid in place and she knew it was the ocean; there was a sculpture of ice in the form of the wave that towered over her to the right.
She walks forward, relying on instincts to get around this maze of a frozen ocean, no need to keep her balance as the ice was strong enough to walk across without slipping.
When she reaches a slope that goes up, she takes out her grappling hook and piton and uses them to dig into the ice and climb up. She nearly loses her footing after a few feet but found her rhythm and went at a slow and steady pace.
When she was roughly halfway up the icy hill, she felt a rumble in the ground and nearly loses her footing. She clings onto the grappling hook and piton for dear life before turning around to search for the source that nearly caused her to fall.
At the bottom of the hill was a giant wolf with piercing yellow eyes staring down at her from fifty feet in the air. Cassie yelps and begins climbing faster. The giant wolf was about a hundred feet away before it started closing in on Cassie, charging for the hill with the intent of snapping her in half.
When she climbed up a hill, she came to a junction where the hill had two paths for her to take.
She saw Derek climbing up the path on the left with two ice picks.
"Derek!" she called up and climbed after him. She remembered the giant wolf closing in on her and looked back. Its jowls were ten feet from biting into her before it backed off.
"Holy crap," Cassie panted, "why isn't it eating me?"
"You're on the left side of the mountain," Derek answered nonchalantly, "The power of Noah's Ark is keeping them from causing too much damage to the mountain. They don't normally hunt on the northwest side of the mountain but I wouldn't take any unnecessary risks if I were you."
"What the hell even is that?"
"It's a female wolf that was lost during the Great Flood; there are other animals that boarded Noah's Ark aside from the ones we know today."
"Why is it so big? Did it evolve to live off of life energy rather than oxygen because our oxygen levels would not be able to sustain a creature THAT size?"
"Compelling theory." He points upward. "It won't chase after us, nor will any of the adolescent wolves behind it."
Cassie's eyes widened. "There are more wolves?"
"Yeah, and they'll kill anyone who gets WAY too close to the ark. But there is a weakness; the inside of their mouths. They basically evolved so their fur and skin can survive the harsh conditions of the cold but the insides of their mouths are vulnerable. If you see one of these monsters sneaking up on you, shoot them in the mouth."
"Thanks for letting me know, Shaman Derek."
Cassie follows Derek all the way up to the hill and finds her footing on solid ground, or snow. When she stood, she looked behind her to see the entire ocean have frozen. The ice quickly defrosted when the sun rose over the horizon and melted the ice before her. The melted ice was sinking downwards until it covered the entire landscape beneath her in snow. When she realized what happened, she stared off into the distance, recognizing that she was at the top of a mountain.
Derek walks up to her with his hands in his pockets. "It's the top of Mount Ararat."
"That was my first thought," she remarked. She turned to see the rock wall with two holes barely visible and big enough for the two wooden pieces to go.
"That's part of the ark," Derek said as if reading her mind.
Cassie obeyed Derek's words and planted the wooden pieces into the rock wall before Noah's Ark appears before her.
She takes out her grappling hook and climbing piton to lower herself down. When she touches down, she finds herself in an empty room with an unlit lantern beside her. She lights up the lantern with her zippo, which lit up the other lanterns before her.
Derek appeared out of the darkness and stood behind her. "Noah's Ark is hanging on its side; you have to descend down before moving to the center where you'll find the center of the boat."
Cassie steps through the doorway, following the path with the symbols, the space around her lit up with the lanterns. She looked over her shoulder to see Burak and Leyla shoving Derek forward with assault rifles aimed with rigid determination at the back of his head. She notices that Hasan and Arda stayed behind to watch the Priest and she imagines that Bedrettin was still holding Bethany hostage. All these reminders that her friends' lives were in actual danger made her heart pump in her chest, threatening to kill her with a heart attack.
Cassie Drake, death by a heart attack at age twenty-four, it's not right.
She moves forward through the hall, watching her steps carefully.
If my memory is correct, the first set of traps should be up ahead right about... here.
Cassie steps on a pentagon-shaped tile in front of her and goes falling forward. Derek thrusts a hand out and grabs her by the shoulder in the nick of time, dangling her over more pentagon-shaped tiles at a ninety-degree angle, his arm twitching before yanking her back on solid.
"What was that?" she yelled whilst panting.
"The first trap."
Cassie rips off a piece of wood from the wall and uses her zippo to light it. With the end burning, she leans over the hole and drops the flaming wood. She stayed on the wooden piece as it disappeared down into an empty abyss before disappearing from sight.
"Hollow part of the mountain," Derek said absentmindedly. "If you step on the wrong tile, you'll fall sixteen thousand feet to your death."
"Thanks for the heads-up." She looks at the tiles presented before her, sweating nervously. "Which tiles do I step on?"
"You're lucky I'm around and I have enough foresight to guess the correct tiles." He put a hand on her shoulder, stroking her affectionately. "Follow my lead."
She looks at him with a warm smile on her face. "Lead the way, D-Man."
She stops just shy two paces away from walking on a pentagon-shaped tile on the ground. She aims her flashlight down to see illuminate a path of pentagon-shaped tiles big enough for one person to stand on... and fall through.
So this is the first challenge. Alright Shaman Derek, show me the way.