Tales of the Parodyverse

Post By

champagne
Thu Jun 14, 2007 at 05:04:26 pm EDT
Subject
Champagne and the Eye of Baphom
[New] [Email] [Print] [RSS] [Tales of the Parodyverse]
 		Next In Thread >>

Note: Yes, I know one of the characters in this isn’t around any more. He was when I started writing it.

___


    “For the record, you are not Indiana Jones.”

    George Gedney picked himself up from the mound of leaf mold where he’d dived to avoid the giant rolling boulder. “No. No I’m not.” His unwary foot crunched through the rotting skull of some unwary earlier intruder to the lost temple who hadn’t jumped aside quite as fast.

    Champagne dusted the cobwebs off her khakis. That giant rolling boulder had come far too close. “And I’m not Lara Croft.”

    “You’re not,” agreed Con Johnstantine. “You don’t have a nude patch add-on. Sadly.”

    “But you’re annoying,” admitted Champagne. “Put that cigarette out please. This is a non-smoking adventure.”

    “A man’s allowed a last fag when he’s just got sealed in the pit of doom, isn’t he?” said Johnstantine.

    “No. Especially when we’re sealed in an airtight space. It’s bad enough facing the pitfalls and dead-drops and crushing walls without having to cope with the risks of second hand smoke.”

    Johnstantine ground his cig under his heel. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said, in annoyed tones.

    “I think we’re trapped,” George said. “When we triggered that hidden stud it didn’t just set the big boulder rolling. It made some big stone blocks fall down across the entrances and cut off the only way out of this place.”

    “It would probably have been a good idea not to trigger the hidden stud, really,” said Johnstantine.

    George got defensive. “That was a particularly fascinating Devatian frieze from the early Bayon period,” the museum curator argued. “I don’t suppose anybody has seen that carving since the temple was sealed up six hundred years ago.”

    “And now it’ll probably be six hundred years before we find our way out again,” the English occultist responded.

    “Quiet please,” Champagne called to the bickering boys. “I’m trying to work here. There were clues in the other temples we investigated at Angkor Wat and Phanom Rung and Thommanon that led us to this uncharted site in the Cambodian jungle. There were clues that helped us open the secret door and get into the hidden tunnels. I’m sure there must be clues here to lead us to the treasure chamber.”

    Johnstantine wasn’t convinced. “I’m sure they only put that big rolling boulder there because they hadn’t invented welcome mats.”

    George found his torch and shone it around the ancient carved walls of the hidden temple. “Don’t worry. I’m sure Xander wouldn’t send us anywhere dangerous.”

    Champagne dived on him and pushed him to the ground as the poison-tipped darts flew across the room and rattled off the bas-reliefs on the other wall.

    “Remind me never to play betting snap with Xander again,” Johnstantine said. He wasn’t happy about being there.

    George pulled himself up and looked around some more. “Betting is wrong. I came along because I’m hoping to discover lost artefacts that will improve our understanding of the empire of Suryavarman II. We know surprisingly little about his reign.”

    “And care surprisingly less,” Johnstantine grumbled. He pulled an unlit torch from a wall bracket and lit it with his cigarette lighter.

    “I’m here because Xander promised to help me trace a missing book that was spirited away by magic,” Champagne said. “He said if I did a favour and found the Missing Eye of Baphom then he’d get me a map reference to where the documents I need vanished to. Of course, first I’d like to get out of the death trap.”

    “Death trap?” George looked round. “Now we’re past the boulder and the poison darts it looks pretty safe to me.”

    The hungry beetles began to swarm through the vents in the walls. “You have to keep opening your big mouth, don’t you!” Johnstantine shouted. He waved his torch low on the ground to fend off the insects.

    “How did you know to light a torch?” George asked.

    “Haven’t you been to the movies in the last thirty years?” Johnstantine demanded.

    The beetles closed around them, waiting for the flames to die down.

    “Perhaps we’d better work on finding the secret door out of here?” suggested Champagne.

    “What secret door?” asked George.

    “You’re counting on the ancient Cambodians to have seen the same movies George missed,” Johnstantine pointed out. “So they know to put a secret door to get us out of certain death.”

    “Not really,” Champagne said. “I was thinking that big heavy stone blocks and rolling boulders don’t hoist themselves back into position after they’ve fallen one, and the skeletons show we’re not the first people down here to trigger them. Poison darts don’t stay poisoned for hundreds of years, and spring-loaded death traps need maintenance to still be springy and, er, deathy after all that time. And somebody has to feed the beetles when there’s no intruders to eat.”

    “This torch isn’t going to last forever, you know,” Johnstantine interrupted the big explanation speech.

    “So you think there’s a maintenance hatch or something, and somebody is caretaking the site,” George said. “That explains why the friezes are dusted.”

    Champagne checked the trap room. There was the wall with the beetles behind it, the wall with the poison darts, the wall where the boulder trap had rolled. She felt around the bas-reliefs on the last wall until she found the hidden lever that opened the maintenance hatch.

    The bald men in the saffron robes were carrying unfriendly-looking agricultural implements.

    “Use those on us and we’ll drop the torch,” Champagne threatened. “Then we all get eaten by swarming insects.”

    The priests hadn’t actually thought of that. George and Johnstantine pushed them out of the way so that the beetles could be sealed away behind them back in the pit trap of doom.

    “That’s better,” said George, with a sigh. “Now you can kill us.”

    “What?” cried Champagne.

    “Well, if we don’t pass the tests, anyhow,” George added. “You know, the tests the carvings I was examining earlier talk about? If we demand the tests they can’t kill us unless we fail.”

    “And you didn’t think it would help to mention these tests before now, squire?” Johnstantine said through gritted teeth.

    “We want the tests,” Champagne told the monks. “Please.”

    “Kill Gedney first,” asked Johnstantine.

    The old priest put down his elaborate eviscerating scythe and faced the museum curator. “I am so fragile that to speak my name is to destroy me. What am I?”

    Johnstantine made a rude suggestion about what the ancient monk might be. “Riddles? I didn’t come all this way into the maze of death for a scene from The Hobbit!”

    “You’d prefer the eviscerating scythes?” asked Champagne.

    George was good at riddles anyway. “Silence,” he said. “Speak its name and you break it.”

    The monk scowled at George and turned to Johnstantine. “He who invented me feared my use and did not want me. He who purchases me does not need me. He who needs me never knows it.”

    “Ooh!” said George, sticking his hand up. “I know! I know!”

    “Shut up,” said Johnstantine. “I happen to be a very smart occultist behind all this working class hero pose. It’s a coffin, alright? You’re a flaming coffin. As well as a…”

    The ancient quickly moved on to Champagne. “I have a mouth but do not speak. I have a head but do not nod. I run but never walk. I have a bed but never sleep.”

    “A river,” said Champagne. “These really are six hundred year old riddles, aren’t they?”

    “What do we win?” George asked the monks.

    “Death,” they replied, lifting their weapons. “You have answered incorrectly.”

    Johnstantine nodded. “The right answer would have been a hand grenade. But we didn’t bring one.”

    “These monks are so cheating,” sulked George.

    “There’s more than one answer,” Champagne explained. “We’re supposed to solve the riddles all together as well as individually, aren’t we?”

    Nobody killed the intruders. Yet.

    “The first riddle could also refer to a secret,” George said.

    “Secret, coffin, and running water,” Champagne reasoned. She spotted the ceremonial tomb behind the monks and emptied her canteen into the trough on the top of it. There was a wet click.

    “Damn,” said the old monk.

    “Don’t feel badly about it,” George comforted him. “Six hundred years is along time to be able to fool people. And now you can take a holiday.”

    There was only a mummified body inside the coffin. “Where’s the treasure?” asked Champagne.

    Johnstantine reached in and grabbed an eyeball. “There we are,” he said, tossing the desiccated orb in his hand. “The Eye of Baphom.”

    “But it’s not missing,” objected Champagne.

    “It is now,” said Johnstantine.

    “Blasphemer!” shouted the old priest.

    “And your point would be?” asked the Englishman.

    “Why would Xander want that eye?” George puzzled. He looked over at the distraught monks. “Maybe he’ll just borrow it and post it back to you?”

    “The reason I said damn,” said the old priest, “despite the karmic consequences, is that as soon as that body gets disturbed the ancient curse that maintains the temple and suchlike comes to an end and everything collapses and is lost in the bowels of the Earth. There’s probably lava and things.”

    “Damn,” said Champagne.

    “So Xander wanted to end the curse and things,” reasoned George. “But that raises the ethical issues of destroying so valuable an historic…”

    Champagne grabbed him and pushed him up the escape stairs as the first tremors began to collapse the roof. “Run!”

    “She said that just like Lara Croft,” George said, as they raced for dear life out of the exploding temple.




Posted from U.S. Company
using Mozilla Firefox/Windows 2000
[New] [Email] [Print] [RSS] [Tales of the Parodyverse]
Follow-Ups:

Echo™ v3.0 beta © 2003-2006 Powermad Software
Copyright © 2004-2006 by Mangacool Adventure