By the time I'd reached the house, Lara had mused over our conversation, decided I was right, and come all the way up the garden to level with me as I hopped through the doorway. Those crutches were really slowing me down.
Striding past me with her head held high and her posture determined and confident, she looked every inch the image of someone on a mission.
"Rematch?" I asked, casually. She didn't answer, just smiled over her shoulder as she continued to march fluidly towards the training arena. I matched the smile with a triumphant one of my own as she disappeared through the doorway, and followed her.
As I flopped into a chair next to Bryce, who was reloading Lara's guns ready for her, I heard her raised voice from the kitchen, where she was apparently having words with Hillary.
"I really think that I'll find my own way. I'm sorry, Hillary, but if you want to help me, let me find my own solution."
I looked to Bryce, my face registering a 'Poor Hillary, wouldn't like to be in his shoes' kind of look, and Bryce complemented it with one of amusement. "Oooooh," he said in a mocking tone of voice. We laughed just as Lara returned, giving us a reprimanding glare before accepting her guns back from Bryce.
"Ready to win?" he asked.
"Absolutely," she replied, smiling, and she turned and headed back towards SIMON's lair.
Watching her stalk into the depths of room, I asked Bryce, "Where's SIMON?"
"West side of the room, on top of a column. He's programmed to strike when she's taken the prize."
"Which is?" I looked at him out of the corner of my eyes, turning my head away from the monitor only slightly.
"Jump drive. South end of the room, clearly visible, not so clearly booby trapped," and then, "Wow, she's jumpy," as she opened fire on a damaged column that had dared to drop some crumbling plaster.
"Booby trapped?"
"Spikes in the floor, axe on the ceiling." Bryce seemed calm and confident in Lara's abilities once again, obviously reassured by her own reassessment of her abilities that seemed to have taken place.
At that moment Hillary re-entered the room. He must have heard Bryce's last comment, because he said, his voice thick with disbelief, "Bryce, you haven't?"
"What? She can handle it," Bryce protested, dismissing Hillary with a wave of his hand.
"She doesn't even know they've been installed," the butler reprimanded slowly. "She's not doing so well, she'll - "
"She'll be alright," Bryce interrupted. We were about to find out, because Lara was just reaching the objective of her mission. Hillary exhaled in frustration with what he viewed as Bryce's careless behaviour, but stayed silent to watch the events play out.
Lara took the jump drive and, as if on sixth sense, back flipped out of the path of the traps before they could strike, rolled, and simultaneously drew her guns, opening fire on SIMON as it - he - sailed down towards her. It was hard not to think of something so well constructed and intelligent as not real.
So far, she was doing brilliantly, much more like the adventurer I had first met, and I could only become more astounded at her ability and agility as she set an ingenious trap for SIMON. Baiting him into leaping towards the axe, she rolled off a block out of his path, landing and rolling in one fluid movement to keep her sights trained on him as he missed her and instead caught the blade of the axe in his side, sending him to the floor in a crash of dust and clanging metal. For a moment, we were stunned. She had done it. We erupted into applause and cries of joy as Bryce and Hillary ran for her where she still lay on the floor, breathing heavily, her guns in her hands at her sides. I moved faster than I thought possible with my injuries, following them to congratulate her, yelling my appreciation of her acrobatics.
"When did those spikes and that axe appear?" Lara asked breathlessly as she hugged Bryce.
"I thought it might make a nice surprise for when you got back home," Hillary replied, laughing, apparently now glad that Bryce had chosen to use them in the exercise and ecstatic that she had conquered them.
"I think it might have been just the right kind of surprise, Hilly," she emphatically remarked. I agreed with her. She was going to be alright. I could only hope the same for myself.
After some lunch I went to the gym room to get some exercises in. Lara had set up a visit from a physiotherapist for the next day, and I wanted a head start. I was also bored.
Doing some gentle stretches, my mind drifted back to my almost constant torment. I just didn't feel right. I felt unfinished. I felt as if there was something far more important that I should be doing instead of hanging around a mansion pandering to a woman who was too wrapped up in her own petty problems to notice anybody else's, but there wasn't, was there? There was nothing more important because she had taken care of it!
No. No, that was unfair. I stopped my exercises, which had become steadily more violent with my mental outpouring, to lean my elbows on a vaulting horse and my head in my hands. I breathed heavily, exhaling long and slow.
Lara did not deserve that. She had understood that killing Eckhardt should have been my closure - she had tried to persuade me to go with her, told me that it was my job, but I was the one that had insisted she leave, I was the one who had refused to face my nemesis. It was my fault that I felt like this.
I let my forehead drop to the horse and wrapped my arms around my head, crawling away into my own little dark world where I could be alone with my demons.
Eckhardt was dead, my father was avenged. I had to accept that, move on. I had to calm down - I lost control of my psychic abilities when I got like this, and if I had inadvertently activated my chirugai and it was now whizzing around my room destroying things unchecked, well, then it wouldn't be the first time.
A memory surfaced at that thought - a Lux Veritatis lesson. A child crying and yelling at his father in frustration because he couldn't control his chirugai, and the bladed weapon, aggravated by the storming torrent of thoughts and conceptions in the child's irritated mind, flying around the room in a random unpredictable path, a singularity of destructible power, unbridled. The father plucks the weapon out of the air effortlessly to prevent it from doing damage, and steps towards the child, towering above him menacingly. Concentrate, he tells the child. Concentrate and focus or face his unspoken threat of finding out what happens to those in the order who do not. "Kurtis?"
I was shaken out of my thoughts by Lara's soft, concerned voice.
"Kurtis, are you ok?"
"Yeah," I sighed, composing myself and standing up as straight as I could manage, wincing slightly. "I'm fine. Just in a bit of pain, that's all." I smiled reassuringly.
"Oh. Ok." She moved further into the room and hoisted herself onto a shoulder high block, sitting down with her legs dangling over the edge.
She looked around the room, rubbing her thighs absentmindedly. God knows what she wanted. Maybe she just didn't know what to do with herself and so had come to bother me. Yep, there I went again, bitching at the woman who had saved my life and taken me in. Nice one, Kurtis.
"You feeling better about yourself now you've beaten SIMON?" I asked, leaning on the horse.
"Yeah." She nodded and smiled. "I don't feel quite so useless anymore."
"Good. Cured?" I asked enthusiastically, slapping the vaulting horse.
Lara looked down and laughed quietly. "Not quite." She looked up at me through her lashes and smiled again. "Thankyou. Kurtis." She slid off the box and jogged out of the room, her trademark braid swinging behind her.
"You're welcome," I conceded to the empty room. Matching her earlier action of looking around the room, my gaze fell on the view out of the window, and I decided to escape my childhood memories and head outside into the sunshine to carry on looking around.
Striding past me with her head held high and her posture determined and confident, she looked every inch the image of someone on a mission.
"Rematch?" I asked, casually. She didn't answer, just smiled over her shoulder as she continued to march fluidly towards the training arena. I matched the smile with a triumphant one of my own as she disappeared through the doorway, and followed her.
As I flopped into a chair next to Bryce, who was reloading Lara's guns ready for her, I heard her raised voice from the kitchen, where she was apparently having words with Hillary.
"I really think that I'll find my own way. I'm sorry, Hillary, but if you want to help me, let me find my own solution."
I looked to Bryce, my face registering a 'Poor Hillary, wouldn't like to be in his shoes' kind of look, and Bryce complemented it with one of amusement. "Oooooh," he said in a mocking tone of voice. We laughed just as Lara returned, giving us a reprimanding glare before accepting her guns back from Bryce.
"Ready to win?" he asked.
"Absolutely," she replied, smiling, and she turned and headed back towards SIMON's lair.
Watching her stalk into the depths of room, I asked Bryce, "Where's SIMON?"
"West side of the room, on top of a column. He's programmed to strike when she's taken the prize."
"Which is?" I looked at him out of the corner of my eyes, turning my head away from the monitor only slightly.
"Jump drive. South end of the room, clearly visible, not so clearly booby trapped," and then, "Wow, she's jumpy," as she opened fire on a damaged column that had dared to drop some crumbling plaster.
"Booby trapped?"
"Spikes in the floor, axe on the ceiling." Bryce seemed calm and confident in Lara's abilities once again, obviously reassured by her own reassessment of her abilities that seemed to have taken place.
At that moment Hillary re-entered the room. He must have heard Bryce's last comment, because he said, his voice thick with disbelief, "Bryce, you haven't?"
"What? She can handle it," Bryce protested, dismissing Hillary with a wave of his hand.
"She doesn't even know they've been installed," the butler reprimanded slowly. "She's not doing so well, she'll - "
"She'll be alright," Bryce interrupted. We were about to find out, because Lara was just reaching the objective of her mission. Hillary exhaled in frustration with what he viewed as Bryce's careless behaviour, but stayed silent to watch the events play out.
Lara took the jump drive and, as if on sixth sense, back flipped out of the path of the traps before they could strike, rolled, and simultaneously drew her guns, opening fire on SIMON as it - he - sailed down towards her. It was hard not to think of something so well constructed and intelligent as not real.
So far, she was doing brilliantly, much more like the adventurer I had first met, and I could only become more astounded at her ability and agility as she set an ingenious trap for SIMON. Baiting him into leaping towards the axe, she rolled off a block out of his path, landing and rolling in one fluid movement to keep her sights trained on him as he missed her and instead caught the blade of the axe in his side, sending him to the floor in a crash of dust and clanging metal. For a moment, we were stunned. She had done it. We erupted into applause and cries of joy as Bryce and Hillary ran for her where she still lay on the floor, breathing heavily, her guns in her hands at her sides. I moved faster than I thought possible with my injuries, following them to congratulate her, yelling my appreciation of her acrobatics.
"When did those spikes and that axe appear?" Lara asked breathlessly as she hugged Bryce.
"I thought it might make a nice surprise for when you got back home," Hillary replied, laughing, apparently now glad that Bryce had chosen to use them in the exercise and ecstatic that she had conquered them.
"I think it might have been just the right kind of surprise, Hilly," she emphatically remarked. I agreed with her. She was going to be alright. I could only hope the same for myself.
After some lunch I went to the gym room to get some exercises in. Lara had set up a visit from a physiotherapist for the next day, and I wanted a head start. I was also bored.
Doing some gentle stretches, my mind drifted back to my almost constant torment. I just didn't feel right. I felt unfinished. I felt as if there was something far more important that I should be doing instead of hanging around a mansion pandering to a woman who was too wrapped up in her own petty problems to notice anybody else's, but there wasn't, was there? There was nothing more important because she had taken care of it!
No. No, that was unfair. I stopped my exercises, which had become steadily more violent with my mental outpouring, to lean my elbows on a vaulting horse and my head in my hands. I breathed heavily, exhaling long and slow.
Lara did not deserve that. She had understood that killing Eckhardt should have been my closure - she had tried to persuade me to go with her, told me that it was my job, but I was the one that had insisted she leave, I was the one who had refused to face my nemesis. It was my fault that I felt like this.
I let my forehead drop to the horse and wrapped my arms around my head, crawling away into my own little dark world where I could be alone with my demons.
Eckhardt was dead, my father was avenged. I had to accept that, move on. I had to calm down - I lost control of my psychic abilities when I got like this, and if I had inadvertently activated my chirugai and it was now whizzing around my room destroying things unchecked, well, then it wouldn't be the first time.
A memory surfaced at that thought - a Lux Veritatis lesson. A child crying and yelling at his father in frustration because he couldn't control his chirugai, and the bladed weapon, aggravated by the storming torrent of thoughts and conceptions in the child's irritated mind, flying around the room in a random unpredictable path, a singularity of destructible power, unbridled. The father plucks the weapon out of the air effortlessly to prevent it from doing damage, and steps towards the child, towering above him menacingly. Concentrate, he tells the child. Concentrate and focus or face his unspoken threat of finding out what happens to those in the order who do not. "Kurtis?"
I was shaken out of my thoughts by Lara's soft, concerned voice.
"Kurtis, are you ok?"
"Yeah," I sighed, composing myself and standing up as straight as I could manage, wincing slightly. "I'm fine. Just in a bit of pain, that's all." I smiled reassuringly.
"Oh. Ok." She moved further into the room and hoisted herself onto a shoulder high block, sitting down with her legs dangling over the edge.
She looked around the room, rubbing her thighs absentmindedly. God knows what she wanted. Maybe she just didn't know what to do with herself and so had come to bother me. Yep, there I went again, bitching at the woman who had saved my life and taken me in. Nice one, Kurtis.
"You feeling better about yourself now you've beaten SIMON?" I asked, leaning on the horse.
"Yeah." She nodded and smiled. "I don't feel quite so useless anymore."
"Good. Cured?" I asked enthusiastically, slapping the vaulting horse.
Lara looked down and laughed quietly. "Not quite." She looked up at me through her lashes and smiled again. "Thankyou. Kurtis." She slid off the box and jogged out of the room, her trademark braid swinging behind her.
"You're welcome," I conceded to the empty room. Matching her earlier action of looking around the room, my gaze fell on the view out of the window, and I decided to escape my childhood memories and head outside into the sunshine to carry on looking around.