Tomb Raider: The Future Begins
By KC and Melody 

KC’s Chronicles
The Seal Of Excelsior, The Seal Of a Friend

Tibet

KC Turner snapped on a flare to lead her through the dark temple.  Her red-brown hair, held back by a clamp at the nape of her neck, dripped steadily as she climbed out of the freezing water.  The pitch-blackness was broken only by the green glow of the flare.  Suddenly, her heart seemed to beat a little faster, adrenaline seemed to replace blood in her veins.  She was close to the prize; she could feel it.

Lara Croft jogged slowly through the glowing, golden halls.  Impossibly bright firelight was reflected in a sharp zigzag between the mirrors that lined the hall.  Nothing could compare to the feeling in her heart at that moment.  She had felt this way before; she was about to discover something wonderful.  She deftly pulled her sunglasses from her leather satchel and strode confidently on into the light.

The Excelsior scrolls had eluded Tomb Raiders for centuries,  mystery seeming to mask them from the unwary explorer.  Said to hold the recipe of Alchemy: the elixir of life and the method of turning base metals into gold, they were split into two halves.  The light and the darkness.

You must remember here and now that Lara and KC had never met.  At they point they had no idea they were even in the same temple.  But their paths were about to unexpectedly cross.

	It had grown too dark for KC to see.  Even with three flares and a high powered torch she was walking blind.  The air, heavy with dust and thick with cobwebs, seemed to swallow every ray.  She had expected this, and she was prepared.  She fumble in her pack for the night vision goggles her sister had thrown together.  Everything was bathed in green light, but still she heaved a sigh of relief that she hadn’t taken another step.  The path directly ahead was littered with traps and tripwires.  In other words, another step and she’d have been dead.  But her eyes were on the trophy.  Literally, as the charred black scroll, suspended above a flame, rather like the Olympic torch was straight in front of her.

	Lara was having trouble seeing too.  There was too much light on the other side of the temple.  The penetrating rays streamed through her sunglasses, putting her eyes, even though they were closed, in agony.  She rolled sideways into one of the alcoves in the walls, the only oasis of shade in the room.  Sliding the dense, black lenses from her bag, she clipped them over her shades in layers.  In the pool of darkness she could see nothing but when she stepped out into the light everything had dimmed immensely and the trap-laden path to the golden scroll, protected in it’s deep tank of water, lay ahead.

	Each reached out at just the same moment and gentle, easy smiles split serious faces as each sensed that their raid was nearly over.  In the same second as they touched the scroll, clutching them in tight fists, light gave way to utter darkness and vice versa.  Both Lara and KC were temporarily blinded during the sudden change, but when they could see again, they had been flung back to entrance to the temple, and were leaning on opposite doorposts.

	“Bloody Hell!” they groaned in unison, suddenly very aware of each others presence and continued the same way.  “Who the hell are you?”

	“KC Turner, Tomb Raider.”

	“Lara Croft, Tomb Raider.  Casey, pretty name.”  They had both been knocked breathless on landing and spoke in short, abbreviated sentences.

	“K…C…  It’s two initials, not Casey.  So how bright was it?”  she queried as she dragged herself to her feet, motioning to the gold scroll still tightly held in Lara’s fist.

“Very bright.  Yourself?”

”Not very bright at all.”

At the same point in time, each drew their preferred weapons to each others heads.  Instinctively they knew what was meant by the motion.

“May I just remind you, Lara.”  KC spat out the name like bad meat.  “that if you shoot me what’s to say I won’t take you as I drop?  Then any one could just find these.”  She twisted her scroll between her fingers like a baton, dexterous from years of practice with all kinds of weapons, old and new.

“What’s to say I won’t shoot you so many times you’ll be dead before you drop?” 
            
Unshaken by Lara’s strong words, KC was about to throw out a sarcastic comment when the chirpy ringing of two mobile phones split the tense air.  “Just let me take this call,” KC growled.  ”Then we’ll decide who to dispose of.”  Then, under her breath, ‘Oh and thank you Mel for spoiling that atmosphere!”
 
“Bryce, what is it?” Lara snapped to her friend on the other end. “I’m sort of in a situation here.”

	“I know.  I can see you, remember?  There’s a camera on the strap of your backpack.”  Lara mentally kicked herself for forgetting that her tech was watching.  “Anyway, don’t kill the red head.  You’ll need her to seal the scrolls.  Hold off for an hour or so, then kill her.”

“Right then,” she sighed resignedly, “Thanks Bryce.”

Meanwhile, KC was taking almost the same call from her sister, who also served quite happily working the more technical side of raiding, the equipment, the connections and often translation of less spoken or lost languages.

When the two raiders spoke again, it was annoyingly in unison again.  “My tech said we shouldn’t shoot each other yet.”

Without another word, they both turned back to the temple entrance with raised eyebrows at the thought of the trapped passages and ancient runes to be translated.

“Why are these things never simple?” KC sighed in frustration, just as Lara was thinking the same thing.

The granite inner quadrant seemed endless.  The room, bare aside from the ancient stone sentinels placed there thousands of years before, stretched limitlessly in all directions, but three stone pillars crossing the centre opened into staircases leading to the hidden chambers of the temple.  Footprints traced the thin layer of frost to two of these, but a single one still remained closed.  It seemed unmovable, by hand or by crowbar, but the worn face of the stone slab was covered in line after line of Tibetan runes.

KC pulled her phone from her back pocket and began to fiddle with the strap of her black backpack as she dialled.  It seemed a strange movement, and Lara’s puzzled look fazed her only for a second as she began to send pictures from the built in camera to Melody.  With any luck, she’d have them translated before the connection was made.  After a hurried conversation, she flicked the phone to speaker while Melody read the translation.

“No traps lie on the road to heave
n,
Nor on the path to hell,

So long as you turn away…  That’s a strange one, isn’t KC?  I mean usually…”

“Bye, Mel.”  A slight smile crossed Lara’s face at KC’s business like manner before she realized the slightly younger raider was leading on and ran a few steps to catch up.

The stone steps were treacherously small and steep, the uneven sizes and lack of a railing meant one slip and you could fall god knows how far to your death.  But Lara and KC were professionals; they’d seen worse so this was almost easy going.  The room at the origin of the stairs was twice as large as the first one, and from the gallery where they stood, a rickety rope bridge crossed the deep arena below.

Lara took one gentle step onto the bridge… then leapt back as the planks of wood which supported her fell through.  “Bugger.  How do we cross this then?”

“Well, we have two choices; a) We go back to the stairs from hell, through all the other galleries, then scale the other side or b) We sprint.  Personally I’m saying B.”

“We’ll never make it.”

KC turned to face her, a playful sparkle in her chestnut eyes.  “Losing our nerve, are we Lara?”  It was challenge, a dangerous one no doubt, but Lara couldn’t turn it down.  She readied herself for the dash while KC smiled softly, doing the same.  In the same moment, they began to run, constantly swift, side by side over the wide wooden bridge.  Even the high speed, the boards behind them cracked at an alarming rate, falling away almost beneath their feet.

Looking to her side, Lara noticed the ancient rope beginning to fray, the fibres splitting away, leaving the fragile core exposed.  As even that tore away, she shouted out to KC to jump.  Making the decision to trust the rival raider between heartbeats, KC flipped forward and landed in a crouch on the solid stone.  Lara however fell short and was clawing for grip in the frosty stone when she felt the strong grip of KC’s palm around her wrist, pulling her upwards.  ‘I suppose that was only because I have a scroll,’ she thought, looking coolly ahead to the two tunnels that had been revealed.

The first was a low pitch black opening in the ground, dropping down into a crawl space half filled with water and the other was a monkey swing over flaming lava.  Neither looked particularly appealing.

“I see no reason to break with tradition.  I’ll take the crawl.  Hold this will you?”  KC pulled her crossbow from the side of her pack before handing it to Lara who studied it for a while before sliding it into her own.  It was too long to carry in the tunnel, she realized that much, but why carry such a cumbersome weapon?

“Wouldn’t you be better off with a rifle?”

“The crossbow’s a weapon of choice.  It was a present from my sister, Melody.”

“Melody?  Melody Turner?”

“You know my sister? How?”

“She’s living in the manor.  Best friends with my tech.”

“A certain Bryce Turing if I’m not badly mistaken.  More than best friends.”  KC, while lowering herself into the crawl space, missed the rare, surprised look on Lara’s face as she replied
.
“Very interesting.  See you on the other side.  And remember to take the first turn.”       
    
	Lara’s muscles were straining to hold on the slippery monkey bars, all her weight resting on her arms which already ached from taking that amount of strain in the blistering heat.  She swung her legs from side to side, avoiding the plumes of flame that shot up periodically from the lava below.

	‘Oh yeah, no reason to break with tradition whatsoever KC,’ she thought sarcastically as she went.  If she’d known the trouble that KC was having in her own tunnel.
  
The entrance had sealed behind her so that for a while the only light was a reflected shimmer in the stagnant, disgusting water.  As she felt her way down the smooth walls of the passage the only variation was a set of metal bars.  When she touched them, they began to grind upwards, rust screeching and showering her with orange-red flakes.  With alarm bells blaring in her head, she began to half-swim, half-crawl towards the dazzlingly bright shaft of light that was now clear and less than twenty feet away.  “Bugger!” she whimpered as she heard a piercing, feral snarl behind her.  Flipping onto her back to face the creature, she wished she hadn’t.  It bore some resemblance to a rat, only much larger, with tough, bony scales covering it’s upper body.
  
With new found speed, fuelled mainly by fear, she pushed herself back through the water, streamlining her body towards the slanting path.  “Oh yeah, no reason to break with tradition, Lara!” KC muttered softly to her self as she ran up the slope, hanging on to the ropes on the walls to avoid sliding down towards the advancing creature.  Ahead there was another upward shaft that she prayed was a simple vault, but she should have known better.  It was far too high to jump, but thick tree roots stuck out from the earthen sides.  Hauling herself from root to root out of the snapping creature’s reach, she emerged into a beautiful frosted garden.

Lara emerged minutes later to find KC inspecting a skilfully carved ebony box set in the centre of the garden.  The marks of two hands facing in opposite directions surrounded the illuminated “E” that was the seal of Excelsior.  As each Raider left their scroll in the box and pressed down on the handprints there was once again a whirlwind of blinding light and enveloping darkness before they found themselves thrown back to the temple entrance again.  The combined scroll fell onto the ground between them.  They both snatched out for them but this only served to roll them farther away.  Unexpectedly, Lara looked up a hesitating look in her eye.

“Maybe, KC, we shouldn’t fight over them?  Why don’t you come back to England, stay with us for a while?  You could meet up with Melody.”

KC shrugged nonchalantly, “Sounds like a plan to me.”

“Right then,” Lara beamed, “I suppose we’d best start walking back to the village.”

“Walking!!!” KC yelled, outraged.  “In these conditions!  After a day like that!  You must be joking.  My jeep’s two minutes round the corner.  Lara laughed, if not in amusement then relief.  Could this perhaps be the beginning of a new friendship between raiders?

THE END

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