In the words of Hitch Hiker's Guide, 'Don't Panic!' Fear not, my loyal readers, it's not over quite yet. Although it will be ending soon because I'm wary of dragging this thing out too long. Do you honestly think I'd leave Lara and Kurtis in such a precarious position as that?!Well, actually, yeah I would, because I'm dark and depressing like that, but not today. I think there'll be one or two more chapters after this.

SilverDragon67 - Welcome to the reviews! I'm so pleased that you like the story and I'm really happy that you found Bryce and Hillary funny -writing humour is not my strong point at all, I'm glad it's worked for at least a few people.
Lady Lara Croft - You flatter me too much! LOL Thanks for sticking with and enjoy the remainder!
theharshlightofday - I bow to you for your compliments. :-) Thankyou kindly.

For those who have not seen Takeshi's Castle - if youhave access to a broadcast, go watch it. It's hilarious. The reason everyone is makingsuch a big deal about winning it in this story is because no-one ever wins. Ever.Out of all the dozens of episodesI've seen, possibly hundreds, I've only ever known three people win. That's why the Nintendo execs offered Bryce a meeting if he could win.

Unforeseen Victories

"Foiled by a piece of plywood!" Bryce plodded despondently over to Akira and Takeshi, who had already been knocked out of the competition and were now watching from the sidelines with the other losers.

He had conquered the nine foot high vertical wall; he had pranced nimbly over the stepping-stones, managing to avoid the ones that sank; he had ridden a surf board through mid air, leaping over foam whales as he went; he had survived the pummelling of high speed footballs aimed at him as he had crossed the wobbly bridge with no railings and he had done it all with speed, accuracy and, most importantly, success, until he had been foiled by a piece of plywood in the game where you had to throw yourself at a random door and hope it was made of paper rather than plywood or netting.

Bruised, sprained, mildly concussed, and even cut in one place, he turned and sank wearily to the muddy ground. "There goes my chance to pitch my video game," he moaned.

"Maybe your friend Hillary will win it for you," Akira offered, as he and Takeshi leaned forward eagerly as the butler stepped up to round seven. It was the last thing Bryce would have expected, but Hillary was still in. He blindly picked a coloured ball to determine his opponent in a wrestling match, luckily got the man dressed in the potato suit with no freedom of movement, yelled, 'God and King Richard!' and then darted forward on the starting whistle to topple the potato to the ground before the vegetable could even move. It lay there, waggling its arms and legs uselessly, and Hillary proudly bowed to the onlookers.

"Bloody hell," Bryce said.

Lara lost track of time as she continued to stare down on the Company corridor from her vantage point on the balcony, depressed. She didn't move, she barely blinked, and the growing cold that was taking hold of her body barely got a reaction. Eventually a part of her decided that enough was enough, and it was no good moping, and, suddenly regaining her energy and determination, she stood, turned on her heels, and marched off.

"I need your help," said Lara shortly, appearing at Kurtis' bedside. Her voice roused him from his doze, and he opened his eyes to look up at her, standing above him stony faced and fixated on something.

"What's going on?" he asked, sitting up.

"We're going to steal the Tip," said Lara. Saying nothing more and not waiting for any reaction, she spun and marched away, leaving Kurtis to scramble out of bed and hurry after her.

"Mr Trent!" a nurse called, alerted by the sudden movement of her patient running away, but he continued on after Lara and just held a hand out to the nurse to stop her. "Don't worry, I'll take it easy!" he shouted over his shoulder, and the nurse came to a halt and sighed in annoyance.

"Lara! Lara, what is going on?" Kurtis demanded, catching up to her and dancing to her fast pace.

"I told you," said Lara. "It's no good sitting around moping, waiting for Cheney to execute us. We're both alive, and I intend to stay that way, even if you don't. We're going to get the Tip and we're going to get out of here."

"How?" he asked, still finding it difficult to keep up with her and hold a conversation with her at the same time.

"The stealing will be easy. The escaping – I'm working on."

They came to Kurtis' quarters and stopped, Lara turning to face him and launching straight into orders. "I doubt that you'll want to be undertaking any espionage dressed like that," she said, folding her arms and regarding his hospital pyjamas with mock interest, "so you get changed whilst I get the equipment together. Come to my room when you're ready." With that, she disappeared into her own quarters next door, leaving Kurtis standing outside his own looking flustered and bemused.

He sighed, undoing the few buttons on his pyjama shirt as he did so, and then shrugged it off and flung it over his shoulder as he spun on his bare feet and, exhaling in choiceless obedience, pushed open the door and walked inside.

Grinning to the cameras, Hillary jumped out of the underground tunnel that led out onto the playing field for the final round of Takeshi's Castle, and ran to take his place in line next to the other six survivors. Behind him, their opponents, guarding the Castle, stood ready for battle as the show's host gave his team their final pep talk.

On the sidelines, Bryce fell to his knees and began to pray for victory and that coveted meeting with the Nintendo bosses.

"Ok, I'm ready, what's the story?" Kurtis cried as, now fully clothed in his usual attire, he swept back into Lara's room.

"Are you sure you're up for this?" Lara asked from where she was leaning over the bed packing up all the equipment she'd brought back from home into her backpack. She'd also changed clothes, back into her camouflage shorts and a black top.

"Yeah, I feel fine. Bit of a headache, maybe, but I took aspirin."

"You're not too tired? Because I don't need you messing this up, I'd rather do it on my own than with you in the way."

"Hey, aren't you the one who dragged me out of bed? Come on, spill, what's the plan?"

"Alright," said Lara, "the plan is, we avoid the cameras, go through the ventilation shaft, come back out by the room where the Tip is kept, break the lock, get the Tip, come back here, and then come up with something bloody spectacular to get us away from The Company." She shoved a few pieces of equipment – smoke canisters, PDA, C4 explosive – across the bed towards him. "You take these, let's go."

"Hey!" Kurtis protested as he picked the stuff up off the bed and Lara strode towards the door, "These are mine!"

"So was the password I used to log on and check the security around the Tip," Lara grinned as she stepped out into the corridor.

As he did at the beginning of every round, the host of Takeshi's Castle yelled the Japanese equivalent of 'Charge', and, with a puff of pyrotechnics, the final round began. Hillary, along with the other players, urged his electric cart forward and started aiming his laser gun at the targets on the opponents' carts that, if they were hit, would take them out of action. A couple of contestants were taken out by the enemy almost as soon as they began, but Hillary and the others managed to stay out of the line of fire, and one, two, three enemy carts went down.

"Oh please, oh please, oh please," Bryce muttered in a mantra as the remaining players weaved and swerved their way around, firing at each other. "Please, please, please let Lara have taught the silly idiot to aim."

"Now this is more like it," Lara said to herself as she led the way through the ventilation shafts, Kurtis crawling close behind.

"More your thing than all this spies and espionage stuff?" Kurtis offered.

"Much more." Without further comment, Lara reached the end of the shaft and carefully removed the cover, bringing it back inside and silently resting it against the wall, before flipping herself head over heels down into the corridor below.

"You have got to teach me how to do that," Kurtis said, instead exiting smoothly feet first.

Lara smiled smugly, flattened against the wall out of the view of the cameras. "The room's ten yards ahead down that corridor. You're the expert at dodging those two cameras, so why don't you go ahead?" she smiled.

"My pleasure." Kurtis returned one of his patented devastating smiles that he thought made him look irresistible, and Lara sniggered behind his back, following him as, like before, they darted down the corridors in short bursts of speed punctuated by moments of total stillness just out of view of the security cameras as they swung back towards the thieves.

"Ok," said Kurtis, dashing the last few feet to the door of interest and flattening himself against the wall, "you got six seconds."

Lara sprang into action, retrieving the lock pick from her back-pack in one fluid movement and hurriedly plugging it into the electronic lock of the door. Her fingers rapidly pressed a sequence of buttons and she watched the display intently as it cycled through thousands of combinations of numbers as the precious seconds ticked away. Just when she thought they were going to run out of time, the blue display flashed up a single combination, the lock pick beeped, and the clunk of the door unlocking satisfyingly sounded in the quiet hallway.

With no time left for celebration, Lara jerked the door open and leapt inside as Kurtis said, "One!" and then he followed her and slammed the door shut behind them, the bang barely dying away as, grinning at Lara, he counted down, "Zero."

"Nice," Lara smiled, smug once more, and she stepped forward to survey the room.

White boarded walls, a grey tiled floor and lines of small silver lockers in a grid that started about ten feet from the front wall of the room where Lara and Kurtis were standing, the whole thing was as perfect, clinically clean and polished as the rest of the building.

Lara hefted her bag off her back and pulled out her infra-red goggles, scanning the room with them. "Just like the computer said, lasers." She began to strap the goggles on so that she could move through the lasers with them, but there was a click behind her as Kurtis armed a smoke canister, and then the whole room began to cloud up, revealing the laser traps as glistening, red lines webbed out across the room between them and the lockers.

Lara let the goggles drop to her side and turned back to find Kurtis grinning at her triumphantly. "Told you they'd come in handy."

Lara rolled her eyes good-naturedly and then, quickly pinning her braid up into a practised bun to prevent it accidentally breaking any beams, she took a breath and stepped over the first beam, lying in wait at ankle height.

There was only one enemy cart that Hillary had to put out of action to win the game – Count Takeshi's, the lord of the castle that they were trying to storm, and the largest and fastest cart of them all. Not that that deterred him.

The other enemies, however – the Emerald Guards as they were known – were too much of a distraction, and unfortunately needed to be taken care of.

The next beam was knee height and Lara stepped easily over that, too, before stopping before the next beam that required her to go under, and bent, legs straight, to touch the floor. She transferred most of her weight to her hands and let her legs slide out almost into a full sideways split, slow and controlled, leaving her in a position low enough to go under the beam without accidentally breaking the previous one whilst doing so.

She paused as she realised that Kurtis had remained by the door. "Not coming?" she asked.

"Nah," he said. "I'm not sure that I'm, er…" – he eyed her lithe form in the gymnastic position - "supple enough for that." He swallowed, a little embarrassed at her acrobatics, and Lara laughed to herself before ducking under the beam and pulling herself forwards and slightly to the left, allowing her legs to close and follow behind her.

Repositioning herself to lie parallel to the beams, she used the extra room it afforded to stand back up, and then considered her next course of action for the final two beams. The next was at waist height, easy to crawl under, but just beyond it with no room to stand between the two was a post sweeping from one side of the room to the other with five beams from floor to chest height being shone out perpendicular to the others, terminating in another, synchronised post that swept just in front of where the lines of safes began. This was going to take some agility.

"Now what?" came Kurtis' voice from behind her, sounding somewhat smug that he hadn't got himself trapped in the web.

"This," Lara retorted. With that, she ran towards the left wall, planted one foot as high up on it as she could, used the leverage to vault herself over the first laser and landed, one foot after the other, on the other side of the beam, facing the left wall. The sweeping laser rushed towards her from the right hand side, and, utilising the momentum she still had from her previous manoeuvre, Lara jumped and back flipped, landing easily away from the trap that continued, unawares, right through the spot where Lara had been only a moment before. Still moving, she sprinted towards the lockers, and managed, only just in time, to escape the area patrolled by the final beam.

Gleeful at her successful gamble, she looked up to find Kurtis' smirk satisfyingly wiped right off his face and replaced with utter amazement.

"Not bad," he managed to get out at last.

Lara laughed and turned to the lockers, searching for number six, the home of the Periapt Tip.

"Ah ha!" Hillary cried triumphantly as he and the one other remaining contestant successfully ganged up on the last guard and targeted the sensor on their cart. Now all that was left was to take down Takeshi before he got them.

"Got it!" Lara announced, laying her hands on safe six and running her fingers over the electronic lock. "Kurtis, I need the lock pick, slide it along the floor."

"You're mine!" Hillary shouted maniacally as he chased after Takeshi's cart.

"You're mine," Lara growled triumphantly as she pulled out the drawer from within the locker to find the Periapt Tip lying there majestically, embedded in moulded foam.

"YES!" Bryce screamed as Hillary aimed successfully and the sensor on Takeshi's cart went up in a puff of smoke.

"Yes!" Kurtis whispered as Lara, smiling, turned to him and opened her hands to reveal the Periapt Tip glistening in her palms.

The crowd went wild as the three carts of two contestants and one Takeshi, came to a stop, Takeshi's still smoking, and the show's host ran towards his winners to congratulate them.

Lara and Kurtis laughed to themselves, eyes fixed on the Tip where it lay in Lara's hands, as the sweeping laser and its stoic companions kept up their oblivious vigil in the centre of the room.