Disclaimer: I don't own anything, as much as I wish I could own Indiana Jones and take him to bed with me. I'd get a kick out of that. But who wouldn't? Ah, my sexual fantasies are not what this is for. I don't get paid, so don't sick your fiendish sharks—I mean lawyers—on me. It's rather displeasing to be gnawed on. I'd know. Delilah is my friend. Marvel and Paramount own everything. Even you and me. So, if a bloke in a Paramount jumper shows up at your doorstep demanding that you come with him, either comply or… rise against the man! Don't let big movie corporations enslave you! BE YOURSELVES! DON'T LET THEM GET YOU! Be strong, and you will never be a slave to the water tower! Right then. I'll shut up and present the damned story now.
Special Bullitin Thingie: I apologize for my shot-to-hell formatting, but Microsoft Word has this whole Terminator-like thing against me and wishes my destruction. Anyways, the point of this breaking news is that I'm sorry but I can't make it pretty. It's too satanic and evil. If you love me you'll all write hate mail to Bill Gates. If you don't love me…you'll do exactly what the people that love me do. O.o;…
Delilah: Welcome, one and
all, to the amazing chapter 5 of this glorious piece of literature!
Tangy: While they can't detect the sarcasm, I can.
Delilah: Since when have I cared about you?
Tangy: Since never. So I would like to take this time to acknowledge my
less outspoken beta, Hannah-bambina. She's the one who takes my ugly formatting
and makes it easier on all of our eyes.*Claps for the Hannah*. Delilah really
doesn't do anything.
Delilah:*Snaps scissors*What was that?
Tangy: Nothing, Deli, dear. On with the spelunking!
Delilah: Yes, on with yet another stupid chapter.
Tangy: Well…this is slightly more interesting than last chapter.
Delilah: Yes but the last chapter was EVIL.
Tangy: In what way?
Delilah: The return of the groupie from hell?
Tangy: Oh, that. I thought you were referring to the overall crap levels. In any case, this chapter, I believe, is much better.
Delilah: I believe so too. *smiles evilly*
Tangy: I don't like you.
Anyways, it's 2:05 AM here, so I'm going to shut my ruddy trap and get with
the…*hand gesture*stuff. Enjoy yourselves. And please remember: do NOT try this
at home. Or if you do, please video tape it and send me a copy. Thanks.
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Kitty tumbled down the steps and into the living room long before the others. The search to find suitable hiking attire had taken her much less time, considering that all she had to do was fish out an old and moth bitten cardboard box from her closet that housed her stash of Indiana Jones memorabilia. She had stood in front of the mirror for a substantial amount of time, admiring the tight fitted leggings and boots, and the "jungle-worn" shirt that screamed safari. Her mess of curls was brushed and restrained by a vintage fedora, and the celebrated weapon of choice for Indy and lion tamers everywhere hung loosely from her hand.
It was no wonder that Bobby nearly choked on his Evian the moment he entered and noticed the X-Men's resident innocent toying devilishly with a whip.
"T-that's hiking gear?"
"Better than what you're wearing." She stuck out her tongue as he seated himself in an identical armchair across the way. Bobby seemed to think hiking required khakis, a brightly flowered button up Hawaiian shirt, a matching bucket hat, and a generous helping of suntan lotion seemingly only applied to his nose. Kitty skeptically eyed his wiggling toes in their sandaled enclosure.
None of the others seemed to take the threat of a "forest stroll", as Logan was referring to it, very seriously. Some had changed from their usually unique fashions to simple jeans and shirts. However, most (including both Emma and Pete wisdom), chose to remain in their usual state of attire. Nobody sat without granting Kitty his or her bemused appreciation of her getup. Kitty grinned most brightly at Ororo Munroe.
"Hah, and you said I'd never find use for it when I bought it."
"Kitten, I hardly constitute a silly little television show game cause enough for the purchase of that offensive costume. It's a hike, not a Halloween party."
"Like your 'uniform' is much better," Kitty growled, luckily low enough under her breath that Ororo didn't catch it.
At that moment, Sinister briskly walked into the room. He fought back giggles at the variety of vestments that his "prisoners" had chosen to wear.
"It is not merely a hike, Ms. Munroe. It is a quest for a lost artifact." His malicious eyes fell on Piotr, and everyone turned to gawk as though the boy had suddenly developed a severe case of leprosy.
"Mr. Rasputin, you ought to take care of your property more carefully. Luckily I have found your lost painting, and it is safe." Piotr turned a crimson color. He obviously had an idea of what Sinister was hinting at. Sadly, not another soul in the room did.
Sinister eyed their confused expressions with glee.
"Oh, he hasn't told you then? Even dear Katherine doesn't know? Well, what a shame for them to find out this way. While rummaging through the house for ideas on my first act as your gracious host, I happened along a particularly…risqué…painting of the one and only Katherine Pryde."
All eyes now fell on Kitty, who sank in her seat. It plagued her that she had no idea what was going on.
"Indeed," Sinister continued, "the one and only Piotr Rasputin painted…NAUGHTY PAINTINGS!"
Silence.
Sinister looked at them hopefully, and then lost his patience.
"For God's sake, you people are thick. He painted a nude picture of Kitty. God. Must I spell it out?"
His last words were unheard over the turmoil bubbling in the already humid room.
"YOU DID WHAT?"
"I…I am sorry, Katya. I did not mean for people to see. I…you are so beautiful…"
"I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS! YOU HAVE NEVER EVEN SEEN ME NAKED!"
"But he's got an awesome collection of playboy." Bobby was silenced with more than one pillow headed in the general direction of his empty head.
Kitty pounded her fists against her forehead while Ororo seethed with displeasure.
"How could you do this to Kitten?" She begged of Piotr, motherly tears about to swell her eyes.
"I'll pay you for it," Pete whispered. Unluckily Ororo caught on to his whisper.
"YOU STAY OUT OF THIS YOU…"
"Limey?"
"That works. AS I WAS SAYING! HOW COULD YOU PIOTR?"
"I…I…I said I was sorry."
"I don't think you realize how sorry," Sinister giggled. Kitty turned, raging.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Well, if you all don't go to a certain place indicated on this map," he whipped out a tattered piece of loose-leaf paper, "We'll disclose the painting to the public. Wonder what the Enquirer will read?"
"GAH! I DON'T KNOW WHO TO KILL FIRST!"
"Calm down, Kit. I'll get the picture—I mean—We'll get the picture." Pete patted her arm lovingly, a brutish smirk on his face. Kitty ignored him and stormed up to Sinister, greedily snatching the map and unrolling it.
"IT'S WRITTEN IN BABY BLUE AND PINK CRAYON! HOW THE HELL ARE WE SUPPOSED TO FIND THIS," she squinted, attempting to decipher the crayon text before her. "THIS 'TEMPLE OF X-TREME DOOM'?"
"Temple of X-Treme doom? Y'all don't lay off th' cliché X-titles, do ya?" Rogue asked simply.
"No. Studies show that they annoy you."
"Ah. Ah see."
"What did I miss, guys?" Moans and groans followed the high pitched voice of the one and only Jubilee (thank God).
"Damnit!" Logan and Gambit hung their heads in disappointment.
"Everything. You can't come." Kitty spat, rotating the map and looking at in various lights. She tilted up her fedora for a better look.
"As I just told your teammates, Jubilation, you will be embarking on a quest to find the lost art. NOW GET OUT OF HERE! ALL OF YOU!" He sat down with the T.V. remote, preparing for his midday soap operas.
"Yer not gonna tell us anythin'?" Rogue quirked and eyebrow and took up a stance with her hands on her hips.
"Oh. Yeah. Follow the pink lines through the forest in the back to the," he deepened his voice, "Temple of X-TREME doom." Clearing his throat, he resumed his normal volume. "There you will find the particularly stunning portrait of Miss Pryde, and you will have to retrieve it."
They all blinked.
"Since when did the mansion have a forest?" Jean scratched her head with "Explorer" Jeannie's arm.
"Insta-grow-forest," Sinister growled, raising the volume as Sheryl slapped Francisco on his favorite soap. "Get OUT!"
They all shuffled out the French style double doors and into the backyard, gazing up in awe at the newly grown redwood forest that towered above them.
"I'm the leader because the painting is of me, and I have the map. Not to mention, I look cool," Kitty stated, taking up the lead and directing them. Piotr and Pete took up the end of the line to protect them against the perils that they assumed would be planted along the way.
"Doooo doo doo doo, doo doo doooo," Bobby, having been inspired by Kitty's spelunking attire, had been restlessly humming the famed Indiana Jone's theme. A sharp crack from the extremely annoyed leader of the journey silenced him.
"If I hear so much as one more 'Doo' from you, Bobby Drake, you will no longer be a man."
"You can do that with a whip?"
"What did I say about saying 'Doo'?" She attacked him again with her whip.
"Ow. I didn't mean 'doo', I meant do. Damn dominatrix."
"WAITAMINUTE! I thought I was the token dominatrix," Emma whined.
"Well, apparently Kitty is one too."
"Not fair," The blonde twitched.
"Since when was I a dominatrix?"
"Since last night," Pete muttered. He could hear every word of the conversation because everyone, with the exception of Rogue, had insisted on staying in a closely-knit blob in case headhunters decided to bar their path.
Ororo shouted for the conversation to go no further, and gave each member of the discussion a stern look. Kitty denied everything to Ororo, who ate up the lies like cake.
When the idle chatter further back in the group struck up once more, Kitty turned and whispered to Emma her desire to borrow some intimate apparel when they got back to the mansion.
A few hours passed, and nothing too out of the ordinary happened aside from a few episodes involving Emma Frost, poison ivy, and some usually private parts of her body.
"It's quiet. Too quiet. And you know,"
" 'I hate it when it gets too quiet.'" Kitty finished Pete's predictable sentence for him. His response was a low grumble.
"Well, ya don't have to worry much longer. Look up there, Kitty! Th' 'Temple of X-Treme Doom'."
Kitty nodded and held up a hand to keep them in place. She smiled as an idea dawned on her.
"Hey, Jubilee, go up there and check for booby trap—er—I mean—read what that sign says," she said, her voice laced with sugar and her eyes heavy with eagerness.
Mutterings of unhappiness left the group when Jubilee reached the sign in front of the temple and waved.
Damn, still alive.
The group slowly advanced towards her and the sign she stood before.
"What's it say, Pubes—I mean—Jubes." Rogue snickered at Remy's crude humor. Ororo, while amused, glared in their direction. Children.
"It says 'Port-a-Temple: A branch of the Port-a-Potty industry."
"Pubilee is right!" Bobby couldn't help but overstate the obvious for a chance to use the joke as well.
Jubilee didn't notice.
"Great, just great. We're walking into a giant and stylized port-a-potty."
"Pubes—I mean Jubes—go first. You're, uh…the most equipped to handle danger." Kitty thrust her inside the cave-like opening.
A series of ouches and damnit's poured from the mouth of the cave, and the grins on their faces widened at each one.
"It's…safe," Jubilee's distorted voice echoed from inside.
The explorers giggled senselessly at her battered appearance, noting the maces, arrows, and burn marks dotting the path she had chosen. She had tripped every single trap that was set out for them.
"Wait a minute," she rasped, spotting Piotr.
"What?"
"Why didn't you use him? Nothing would have touched him. Or Logan, he has a healing factor!"
"Too late for that now, petite." Remy slapped a silencing hand over her mouth, awaiting instruction from Kitty. He cried out in more horror than pain when Jubilee bit down on his finger.
"RABIES!" He screamed like a five year old girl, running to Rogue for assistance.
"There's still another corridor to go, the map says, and there should be a door somewhere." They had been touring the inside of the Port-A-Temple for a while, and finally Kitty stopped in front of a gloomy doorway, peering cautiously into the dim lighting.
"Stay back, Katya! There is no telling what danger lay ahead." Piotr jumped in front of her to block the way. He seemed to be attempting to claim brownie points with her for saving her from possible danger, but it wasn't working. She grunted and shuffled to Pete's side.
"Now what?" Jubilee croaked, while Logan and Remy, with bloodthirsty eyes focused on Jubilee, were restrained by Jean and Emma.
"We just have to use our marbles!" Bobby produced a bag of cheaply produced marbles, grinning.
"You stole that from the DuckTales movie."
Everybody seemed surprised to hear Warren's voice, seeing as how Betsy was usually the middle-woman between him and others.
"Did not."
"Did too!"
"Oh Gawd, not this again."
"Did no—Oh alright, I did. So what. You watch too many Disney movies!" Warren seemed angered by Bobby's last comment, but only he an Bobby seemed to understand how there could be anything remotely insulting hidden in it.
Bobby got down on one knee after scowling at Warren, who for once proud of the movies Betsy had deemed "appropriate" for him and had the satisfaction of beating Bobby in a game of "wits".
Bobby chucked half his marbles down the corridor.
"You did it wrong!" Warren screamed almost instantly.
"How would you know!"
"You don't chuck them! You have to gently roll them."
"How would you know, bird boy?
"I watched the movie last night, brain-freeze!"
"Fine, Einstein, here you go." With that, Bobby dumped the remainder of his marbles into Warren's anxious palms.
Warren rolled.
Their eyes widened as one narrowly escaped a button in the center of the floor, and gasped as it swung back and tapped the button. They jumped up, feeling a sudden jolt.
"Look, the door!" He had tried to help by announcing, but the poor Russian simpleton was trampled by a ravenous hoard of mutants.
"Thar she blows!" Bobby eagerly pointed to a painting of a nude Katherine Pryde that seemed to have it's own lighting and was set upon crimson colored velvet. Kitty's face went about three shades lighter than the fabric her likeness was set upon.
The artwork, however, was not entirely unguarded, although the safety precautions seemed a bit weak to the X-Men. The pedestal that it rested on was in the middle of the circular room, on a platform alienated from them by a deep canyon and a rickety bridge made of frayed rope and rotton wood.
The superheroes did not heed the bright red warning sign, and immediately started to run across. The halted only when a small scream was heard, and then a splash. They looked amongst each other for who had fell. Then they looked down to the lava-filled crater. Bobby was whistling and trying to look innocent, which pinned him as the guilty party.
"Jubilee fell," Ororo remarked without feeling, and without mentioning that Bobby had knocked her over.
"What?"
Logan and Remy began to rejoice, dancing something that looked oddly like River dance…only it was on an unstable bridge. They ran in circles with the small space provided, held hands, and made merry.
They were not at all close to the center of the crater, and Kitty seemed to be the only one who noticed this aside from Pete who was too busy wondering how much money Piotr would take for the painting in question.
"I think we should keep moving."
Kitty's suggestion went unheard. At that moment, Remy somehow managed to let a charged card slip to the end of the bridge on the side they had come from. It caught fire within an instant, and while they swung down to their inescapable doom.
"CLIMB!" Somebody shouted above the hollering, and nobody knew who it was. They just followed the order.
While the bridge burned from below them and threatened to toss them into a pit of molten lava, they climbed up for their dear lives.
One by one they made it onto the platform. Bobby was last, and made it just in time as the last bits of the bridge went to ashes beneath him. Piotr pulled him over the side while Kitty danced over to the painting and threw a cover over it, hugging it closely to her chest protectively. Pete, with a victorious smile, managed to pry it out of her arms on the pretext that he would burn it. He intended to do nothing of the sort, of course.
"Say, why didn't we use our powers to stop ourselves from falling?" For once, Bobby had posed a reasonable question.
"It wouldn't have been good for the show. They like to see danger," Jean replied, un-knotting Jeannie's hair.
"Ah nearly forgot we were on a reality television show."
Suddenly, as if brought upon by Rogue's statement, the torch lit Temple was flooded with lights, and cameras were revealed to be in the most unlikely of places. The X-Men found themselves on a moving platform back over to the other side, with crew members behind the cameras laughing openly at them. Sinister stepped from behind the shadows with a goey red mess that was shaped like a subhuman.
"Well, congratulations. Success." Sinister clapped a whole of three times with a smile before resuming his normal composure and thrusting the jam-like being into their midst.
"I believe you lost something."
"Hey guys!"
"DOESN'T SHE EVER DIE?" Logan was comforting a very distraught Remy while Jubilee licked the "lava" from her skin.
"But didn't you die?" Emma asked impatiently.
"No. It wasn't lava. Just strawberry jello."
Scott turned to Sinister in utter amazement.
"You filled an entire canyon with jello?"
"Yes, Scott."
"Nifty." Jean blinked at him a few times. "I mean, that was cruel and unusual."
"Definitely unusual," the rest of them chorused.
"Definitely cruel," Logan and Remy replied.
"Well, you're all done here so you ought to get back to the mansion. Who knows what I have planned for tomorrow. And they need to wheel out the Port-A-Temple, and uproot the miracle-grow forest. Ta-ta!" Sinister gave a small wave before the X-Men were violently pushed from the Temple and back out into the forest to find their way back to the mansion.
The group mumbled incoherently of their unhappiness and held their hands to their ears on the voyage home as Jubilee struck up her own chorus of "J-U-B-E-S…I'm alive, I'm alive!"
Tangy: …Yes. I'm sorry. I lied about when I would post this. I got really lazy…and it sat on my computer, half finished, for a while.
Delilah: Oh well. It's out now.
Tangy: Yes, that's what matters. I have NO idea when I'll get chapter 6 up and running, hopefully soon. So—
Delilah: I feel funny.
Tangy: You have not insulted me yet?
Delilah: Oh, that must be it! You're a rancid whore! Ah, much better. I am happy.
Tangy: *Sarcastic*Oh, how I love making people happy. I hope you all liked this one, and complain at me if you didn't. Please. I love compliments, but suggestions make the world happy too. Yay for a peaceful happy Tangy ruled world! Yay I say!
Delilah: Shut up.
Tangy: OK.
