I am not making any money with this. I do not own Lara Croft, Tomb Raider
etc.
Only to be archived at Fanfiction.net and 'Lara Croft's Tales of Beauty and Power'. All other sites email me first to gain permission.
================================================== The Last Revelation Part II: The Rainbow Serpent by Heidi Ahlmen (siirma6@surfeu.fi) ==================================================
Chapter 2
Lara Croft was cooking and working at the same time. It was a skill she was proud of. Cooking spaghetti and reading a book didn't even get near the word difficult, but try creating a pasta sauce and deciphering symbols. Her small portable cassette player was stumbling its way through her Nine Inch Nails cassette, and she whistled along.
Lara decided her meal shouldn't be wasted by eating in the kitchen, so she pushed off a pile of books from the sofa table and placed a plate and cutlery on it. It was almost nine in the evening, but Lara felt like she had just waken up. As she had told Jean, she worked during the nights when it was quieter and chillier.
Just as Lara was on her way to the living room, carrying a kettle full of pasta and sauce, someone knocked on the door. Suspicious as always, she remembered the door was locked. She walked to the cupboard, pulled out her spare pistol, and walked to the door, keeping her back to the wall.
Outside Jean was busy slapping off Peruvian mosquitoes attempting to turn him into a grand festival banquet, wondering if Lara had heard his knock. He knocked again, a little louder.
"Who is it?" yelled a threatening voice inside.
"It's me, Jean. We met today," Jean answered politely.
"Hold on a sec," Lara said, then put down her gun and opened the door.
"Can I come in? I have something for Professor Murray," Jean explained.
"Professor Murray can be found in the next trailer. As the sign says."
It was Jean's turn to sound not-so-polite.
"I am not stupid, Lara. He's asleep; he can't hear me knock. Professor Sandringham sent these and I thought that you could take them."
Lara's appearance softened.
"Come in. I was just about to eat. Fancy some spaghetti?"
Jean smiled, and stepped in, closing the door behind him. "Why not?"
Lara went to get another plate, and they settled to the table. Lara didn't say a word, so Jean figured he had to start a some sort of a conversation.
"So, what brought you to Chicago? You aren't from America."
Lara swallowed a mouthful of spaghetti and wiped the sauce drops off her lips with her hand. "I'm from Britain, actually. The accent's usually a major giveaway. I wanted to study archaeology here because I've heard that Chicago has quite a reputation in the subject."
"Have you always wanted to study archaeology?"
"Not at all." She left it at that.
"My father is an archaeologist. He was born in the French IndoChina and before retirement, worked as the head of the Asian division in the Museum Department of France."
"I don't have a father," Lara stated, and whipped some more spaghetti around her fork. Before Jean managed to throw in an argument she continued. "When I was sixteen, I accompanied a certain famous Austrian archaeologist on a trip to Angkor Wat, Cambodia. He had an accident, I escaped as a temple collapsed, and didn't save him. He's still mad at me, I've heard. He got out of there somehow. I had a sort of a lucky accident some time after that which made archaeology really seem like a plausible career choice. Jean, do you have a some sort of a dream - something you would like to discover? A pet project or something?"
"In fact, I do," Jean said and took a sip of water. "I'm interested in the Amulet of Horus."
"What's that?" Lara asked, looking puzzled.
Slightly suprised because Lara hadn't heard of the amulet, Jean explained. "According to an Egyptian legend, the Amulet of Horus is the very key that Horus used to seal the evil god Seth in his coffin."
"Oh."
A little hurt that Lara didn't sound too intrigued, he decided to return the question.
"What about you? By the way, was that Austrian archaeologist by any chance Werner von Croy?"
"Indeed he was, and I do have a pet project. When he had the accident, we were looking for the Angkorean Iris. You are familiar with the artefact, aren't you?" Jean nodded. "I saw it, but neither of us got it. It belongs to me because I won a certain bet against him. And I want to go and collect my prize. The temple collapsed - got completely destroyed - but there were some rooms in the basement. I saw them. There must be another entrance in."
"Or not. You don't know."
"I have discovered some proof supporting my theory, but nothing too certain yet. If I could just get in touch with the head of the National Museum in Phnom Penh, I could perhaps."
"Lara, you know what? My father has retired, but I'm sure he could get us what we need. He was the head of his department after all and probably knows the person you mentioned."
Lara smiled.
Weeks later, the hot Peruvian sun had tanned everyone golden brown and made working on the dig a metabolical challenge. Mosquitoes were constant companions of the diggers, and the not-so-fit Professor Murray had adopted Lara's practice of working at nights and sleeping during the day.
They had made remarkable progress. The dig was no longer an area full of red sand and dust, but a building had started to appear from the ground. It was solid rock, in form of a mastaba of some sorts or an antechamber. Everyone was excited, but the diggers didn't consider it such a big deal - they knew that if any unusual structures were uncovered from the sands of time, it would be the professors' and the research assistant's job to explore whatever was inside.
Lara and Jean had both been busy on their own frontiers. They had met occasionally at the site, of course, but after that late-night meal, they hadn't really had a real conversation. Lara seemed always so caught up in her work, pacing back and forth between her trailer and the digs. She seemed less like a research assistant than a scientist working on her own, but after hearing Professor Murray comment on her work very positively to Professor Sandringham, Jean realized it was just her way of doing things.
Lara always seemed very short-tempered and arrogant - she had ideas and wanted to show off her skill. She bossed the diggers around, but Jean noticed that she never commented on his work. Jean was a little annoyed when he wondered if the reason was that he hadn't yet proved his worthiness to this woman. But yet, he wanted to believe good of Lara Croft, as Jean was intrigued by someone as ambitious as he himself was, and at least equally skilled or more.
On a cloudy Thursday, after lunch break, Jean observed Lara's arrival at the excavation site. He returned his attention to the dig again, delighted by the fact that he stood in a sort of a hole, and the chilly mud cooled the air around him.
To his great surprise, Lara soon jumped down next to him and grabbed a palette knife.
"Lara Croft."
She smiled, and started scraping off mud from the doorway ornament. "I thought I'd give you a hand with this."
"Have you done a lot of digging?"
"Some. Not much. I spent a summer in Cinque Terre, Italy, and it wasn't really my cup of tea."
Jean paused his scraping of another ornate figure and wiped off sweat from his forehead. "So what is your cup of tea?"
"At least I know your forte, bookboy," Lara teased.
Jean looked puzzled.
Lara explained: "I've seen you many times in Chicago. You're always robbing the school library empty, and everyone knows it's you if they see someone carrying a pile of books higher than their forehead. No offence."
"I have my books and you have your gun. We're even."
This startled Lara - he'd seen her Beretta. She stopped scraping.
"Try stopping a tiger with an encyclopedia and then come tell me if we're even." Without looking at Jean, she began scraping off the mud again.
Jean sighed and decided to clear his reputation. "True; I love books, and I think that if we seek beauty and wisdom, ancient libraries are the places to start. I like field work, too, but I'd much rather work as a research assistant. How did you get the job, anyway?"
"Easily, I studied a lot of extra history in finishing school, and majored in anthropology at Oxford." Lara replied, shaking off mud from her left tennis shoe.
"You've studied in Oxford? That's quite a school," Jean complimented.
"Nah, nothing special. The professors are a lot more strict than in Chicago, no talking of student-teacher co-operation like here. I like working independently."
"So I've noticed," Jean commented and decided to renew his question. "So, what do you consider your field in archaeology?"
"Egyptology interests me, along with the Mayas. I have a degree in Egyptology, but of course, if you want to be an archaeologist, you have to study archaeology itself."
"So why didn't you continue in Oxford?"
"As I probably made clear, I did not like their attitude. Plus I forgot to sign the reapplications, so they came to me untreated. That made me decide to apply to Chicago." Lara told, and stopped her incessantscraping to marvel at the now revealed human-shaped carving in the pillar.
"You still didn't answer my question. Are you in for digging dirt, drawing things, reading symbols, or paperwork?"
"It's called translating or deciphering."
"Thanks," Jean replied, and cursed his English.
"I'm in for field work, but not the kind of field work we do here. The bigger the better. The more dangerous the better. I want to try to recover something noone else would even try to. I'm into tomb raiding, you could say. "
Jean-Yves hiked through the forest, taking a shortcut to their camp. He was a bit worried about pumas or whatever the forests hid - he hadn't bothered to read any kind of guidebooks before leaving for this summer job. The reassuring lights of his fellow students' trailers made small triangles on the dirt. Jean figured he couldn't be over a half mile from his trailer so he quickened his pace.
He had been the last to wrap up the dig with Professor Murray, despite the fact that he had to walk through the dark woods afterwards. He wasn't afraid of the dark, and even if he were, it couldn't have made him leave the dig any earlier - they were too close to something, he could feel it.
Their dig was expanding, but they hadn't opened the antechamber door yet. In fact, they had tried, but the heavy, odd-shaped rock refused to move. Jean-Yves had wondered if there was some complicated mechanism to open it, but threw this idea away when he remembered how Professor Murray had debunked Lara's theory about the gold idol being a key. Speaking of Lara. she had been digging with the team for some time, but from a distance from the actual site. She refused to tell anyone what she was doing, and Professor Murray seemed satisfied with her explanation; "I don't want to mess up the dig site just because I want to practice my digging skills - basic skills that I haven't used for ages." Jean was suspiciousfor some reason, but it was none of his business.
Lara had disappeared back to her accommodation earlier that afternoon, after visiting the dig at dawn - very unusual for her.
Jean continued threading the worn path, the light from his torch making round patterns as he moved, trying to spot possible spiderwebs in time.
Suddenly he heard it.
Rattling noises somewhere near him. Branches and twigs were breaking somewhere nearby. Jean stopped at his feet, his mind whirling with images of black panthers and other predators - but the noise soon stopped. Now he could only hear some rattled monkeys chattering in a nearby tree. Who or whatever had caused the noise had obviously shortly after he'd done so as though following his movements. Uncharacteristic for an animal. Besides, an animal wouldn't make that much noise, Jean-Yves reasoned, and his racing pulse slowed slightly.
He heard the mysterious creature take a couple of steps closer. Jean turned his flashlight around hoping he would see what was skulking in the forest. Then he heard a whisper.
"Jean?"
-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~
As always, comments and reviews would be much appreciated - they're the fuel that feeds this creative furnace.
siirma6@surfeu.fi
Only to be archived at Fanfiction.net and 'Lara Croft's Tales of Beauty and Power'. All other sites email me first to gain permission.
================================================== The Last Revelation Part II: The Rainbow Serpent by Heidi Ahlmen (siirma6@surfeu.fi) ==================================================
Chapter 2
Lara Croft was cooking and working at the same time. It was a skill she was proud of. Cooking spaghetti and reading a book didn't even get near the word difficult, but try creating a pasta sauce and deciphering symbols. Her small portable cassette player was stumbling its way through her Nine Inch Nails cassette, and she whistled along.
Lara decided her meal shouldn't be wasted by eating in the kitchen, so she pushed off a pile of books from the sofa table and placed a plate and cutlery on it. It was almost nine in the evening, but Lara felt like she had just waken up. As she had told Jean, she worked during the nights when it was quieter and chillier.
Just as Lara was on her way to the living room, carrying a kettle full of pasta and sauce, someone knocked on the door. Suspicious as always, she remembered the door was locked. She walked to the cupboard, pulled out her spare pistol, and walked to the door, keeping her back to the wall.
Outside Jean was busy slapping off Peruvian mosquitoes attempting to turn him into a grand festival banquet, wondering if Lara had heard his knock. He knocked again, a little louder.
"Who is it?" yelled a threatening voice inside.
"It's me, Jean. We met today," Jean answered politely.
"Hold on a sec," Lara said, then put down her gun and opened the door.
"Can I come in? I have something for Professor Murray," Jean explained.
"Professor Murray can be found in the next trailer. As the sign says."
It was Jean's turn to sound not-so-polite.
"I am not stupid, Lara. He's asleep; he can't hear me knock. Professor Sandringham sent these and I thought that you could take them."
Lara's appearance softened.
"Come in. I was just about to eat. Fancy some spaghetti?"
Jean smiled, and stepped in, closing the door behind him. "Why not?"
Lara went to get another plate, and they settled to the table. Lara didn't say a word, so Jean figured he had to start a some sort of a conversation.
"So, what brought you to Chicago? You aren't from America."
Lara swallowed a mouthful of spaghetti and wiped the sauce drops off her lips with her hand. "I'm from Britain, actually. The accent's usually a major giveaway. I wanted to study archaeology here because I've heard that Chicago has quite a reputation in the subject."
"Have you always wanted to study archaeology?"
"Not at all." She left it at that.
"My father is an archaeologist. He was born in the French IndoChina and before retirement, worked as the head of the Asian division in the Museum Department of France."
"I don't have a father," Lara stated, and whipped some more spaghetti around her fork. Before Jean managed to throw in an argument she continued. "When I was sixteen, I accompanied a certain famous Austrian archaeologist on a trip to Angkor Wat, Cambodia. He had an accident, I escaped as a temple collapsed, and didn't save him. He's still mad at me, I've heard. He got out of there somehow. I had a sort of a lucky accident some time after that which made archaeology really seem like a plausible career choice. Jean, do you have a some sort of a dream - something you would like to discover? A pet project or something?"
"In fact, I do," Jean said and took a sip of water. "I'm interested in the Amulet of Horus."
"What's that?" Lara asked, looking puzzled.
Slightly suprised because Lara hadn't heard of the amulet, Jean explained. "According to an Egyptian legend, the Amulet of Horus is the very key that Horus used to seal the evil god Seth in his coffin."
"Oh."
A little hurt that Lara didn't sound too intrigued, he decided to return the question.
"What about you? By the way, was that Austrian archaeologist by any chance Werner von Croy?"
"Indeed he was, and I do have a pet project. When he had the accident, we were looking for the Angkorean Iris. You are familiar with the artefact, aren't you?" Jean nodded. "I saw it, but neither of us got it. It belongs to me because I won a certain bet against him. And I want to go and collect my prize. The temple collapsed - got completely destroyed - but there were some rooms in the basement. I saw them. There must be another entrance in."
"Or not. You don't know."
"I have discovered some proof supporting my theory, but nothing too certain yet. If I could just get in touch with the head of the National Museum in Phnom Penh, I could perhaps."
"Lara, you know what? My father has retired, but I'm sure he could get us what we need. He was the head of his department after all and probably knows the person you mentioned."
Lara smiled.
Weeks later, the hot Peruvian sun had tanned everyone golden brown and made working on the dig a metabolical challenge. Mosquitoes were constant companions of the diggers, and the not-so-fit Professor Murray had adopted Lara's practice of working at nights and sleeping during the day.
They had made remarkable progress. The dig was no longer an area full of red sand and dust, but a building had started to appear from the ground. It was solid rock, in form of a mastaba of some sorts or an antechamber. Everyone was excited, but the diggers didn't consider it such a big deal - they knew that if any unusual structures were uncovered from the sands of time, it would be the professors' and the research assistant's job to explore whatever was inside.
Lara and Jean had both been busy on their own frontiers. They had met occasionally at the site, of course, but after that late-night meal, they hadn't really had a real conversation. Lara seemed always so caught up in her work, pacing back and forth between her trailer and the digs. She seemed less like a research assistant than a scientist working on her own, but after hearing Professor Murray comment on her work very positively to Professor Sandringham, Jean realized it was just her way of doing things.
Lara always seemed very short-tempered and arrogant - she had ideas and wanted to show off her skill. She bossed the diggers around, but Jean noticed that she never commented on his work. Jean was a little annoyed when he wondered if the reason was that he hadn't yet proved his worthiness to this woman. But yet, he wanted to believe good of Lara Croft, as Jean was intrigued by someone as ambitious as he himself was, and at least equally skilled or more.
On a cloudy Thursday, after lunch break, Jean observed Lara's arrival at the excavation site. He returned his attention to the dig again, delighted by the fact that he stood in a sort of a hole, and the chilly mud cooled the air around him.
To his great surprise, Lara soon jumped down next to him and grabbed a palette knife.
"Lara Croft."
She smiled, and started scraping off mud from the doorway ornament. "I thought I'd give you a hand with this."
"Have you done a lot of digging?"
"Some. Not much. I spent a summer in Cinque Terre, Italy, and it wasn't really my cup of tea."
Jean paused his scraping of another ornate figure and wiped off sweat from his forehead. "So what is your cup of tea?"
"At least I know your forte, bookboy," Lara teased.
Jean looked puzzled.
Lara explained: "I've seen you many times in Chicago. You're always robbing the school library empty, and everyone knows it's you if they see someone carrying a pile of books higher than their forehead. No offence."
"I have my books and you have your gun. We're even."
This startled Lara - he'd seen her Beretta. She stopped scraping.
"Try stopping a tiger with an encyclopedia and then come tell me if we're even." Without looking at Jean, she began scraping off the mud again.
Jean sighed and decided to clear his reputation. "True; I love books, and I think that if we seek beauty and wisdom, ancient libraries are the places to start. I like field work, too, but I'd much rather work as a research assistant. How did you get the job, anyway?"
"Easily, I studied a lot of extra history in finishing school, and majored in anthropology at Oxford." Lara replied, shaking off mud from her left tennis shoe.
"You've studied in Oxford? That's quite a school," Jean complimented.
"Nah, nothing special. The professors are a lot more strict than in Chicago, no talking of student-teacher co-operation like here. I like working independently."
"So I've noticed," Jean commented and decided to renew his question. "So, what do you consider your field in archaeology?"
"Egyptology interests me, along with the Mayas. I have a degree in Egyptology, but of course, if you want to be an archaeologist, you have to study archaeology itself."
"So why didn't you continue in Oxford?"
"As I probably made clear, I did not like their attitude. Plus I forgot to sign the reapplications, so they came to me untreated. That made me decide to apply to Chicago." Lara told, and stopped her incessantscraping to marvel at the now revealed human-shaped carving in the pillar.
"You still didn't answer my question. Are you in for digging dirt, drawing things, reading symbols, or paperwork?"
"It's called translating or deciphering."
"Thanks," Jean replied, and cursed his English.
"I'm in for field work, but not the kind of field work we do here. The bigger the better. The more dangerous the better. I want to try to recover something noone else would even try to. I'm into tomb raiding, you could say. "
Jean-Yves hiked through the forest, taking a shortcut to their camp. He was a bit worried about pumas or whatever the forests hid - he hadn't bothered to read any kind of guidebooks before leaving for this summer job. The reassuring lights of his fellow students' trailers made small triangles on the dirt. Jean figured he couldn't be over a half mile from his trailer so he quickened his pace.
He had been the last to wrap up the dig with Professor Murray, despite the fact that he had to walk through the dark woods afterwards. He wasn't afraid of the dark, and even if he were, it couldn't have made him leave the dig any earlier - they were too close to something, he could feel it.
Their dig was expanding, but they hadn't opened the antechamber door yet. In fact, they had tried, but the heavy, odd-shaped rock refused to move. Jean-Yves had wondered if there was some complicated mechanism to open it, but threw this idea away when he remembered how Professor Murray had debunked Lara's theory about the gold idol being a key. Speaking of Lara. she had been digging with the team for some time, but from a distance from the actual site. She refused to tell anyone what she was doing, and Professor Murray seemed satisfied with her explanation; "I don't want to mess up the dig site just because I want to practice my digging skills - basic skills that I haven't used for ages." Jean was suspiciousfor some reason, but it was none of his business.
Lara had disappeared back to her accommodation earlier that afternoon, after visiting the dig at dawn - very unusual for her.
Jean continued threading the worn path, the light from his torch making round patterns as he moved, trying to spot possible spiderwebs in time.
Suddenly he heard it.
Rattling noises somewhere near him. Branches and twigs were breaking somewhere nearby. Jean stopped at his feet, his mind whirling with images of black panthers and other predators - but the noise soon stopped. Now he could only hear some rattled monkeys chattering in a nearby tree. Who or whatever had caused the noise had obviously shortly after he'd done so as though following his movements. Uncharacteristic for an animal. Besides, an animal wouldn't make that much noise, Jean-Yves reasoned, and his racing pulse slowed slightly.
He heard the mysterious creature take a couple of steps closer. Jean turned his flashlight around hoping he would see what was skulking in the forest. Then he heard a whisper.
"Jean?"
-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~
As always, comments and reviews would be much appreciated - they're the fuel that feeds this creative furnace.
siirma6@surfeu.fi