Chance Encounter

This story is my own, although the characters I've used are not. They belong to the people that make money out of them. I am not one of those people. The only profit I make from this is spiritual.

Aunt Fanny xxx

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CHANCE ENCOUNTER (a late night PS2 Mashup)

Three bodies lay at her feet - they were strange - not exactly human, but too human to be anything else. They had given her quite a shock, just appearing out of nowhere like that, but a good solid helping of her shotgun had seen them fall just like any other stupid thug. She kicked one experimentally and was surprised to feel its body dissolve into powder beneath her feet.

*Sand.*

The entire body had, indeed, become sand, and collapsed into a shapeless mound, with a cloud of dust swirling eerily above it.

‘That was a trifle bizarre.’

She blinked, aware that she had started talking to herself again.

*Dammit. This always happens in these big old lonely temples.*
---
There was no time to stand about thinking aloud like a plum. She shook herself and, securing her shotgun safely behind her back, took a good look around her surroundings. It was only a small room, ancient and tumbledown as usual. The three Beasties appeared to have been guarding some sort of switch to a gate the other side of a far corridor. And, as usual, the switch was halfway up the bloody wall. And, as usual, the floor of the corridor separating her from the gate was missing and in its place were three whirring gears with razor sharp spikes.
She looked up at the age worn, climbable wall on the other side of the room to the switch.

‘Typical. Bet the gate’ll be timed too, knowing my luck...’

She began to climb the wall with surprising speed and, when she judged herself to be directly opposite the switch on the other wall, launched herself from it, clearing the entire room easily as well as flipping herself around in mid air. She reached out and slapped the large, square switch as she dropped. She heard the gate slide open as she did, but also heard the unmistakable rhythmic crunch of ancient cogs gradually closing it shut again.

‘I knew it!’

She turned on her heel and began to sprint down the corridor, leaping into the air just before she got to the spiked gears, sailing over them with an almost superhuman agility. She managed to roll under the gate seconds before it creaked down to the floor, and locked again. She got to her feet, brushing the dust from her knees and giving the gate a reproachful Look.

‘And what practical use would that be in a working temple? I mean, honestl...’

She trailed off as she saw the magnitude of the hall she had just rolled into. She was on a small platform at the top corner of a once great room, now ruined. It was seven storeys, at least, with precarious ledges, death defying leaps, switches, traps, the lot. She could just about see the yellow light of day coming from a small doorway, the other side of the hall, near the bottom.

She sighed. This was going to be a tricky one. And she didn’t even have any chocolate.

She was alerted to a flapping sound above her. She drew her pistols and shot a few bats idly, working out her route to the door below.

*OK, so I’ll drop down to the ledge beneath me, shimmy along to that platform, jump across to that pillar, climb up it so I can jump over to those rocks, then climb down them to pull that lever... then I reckon I can probably wing it from there...*

The last of the bats dead, she holstered her pistols, turned, and dropped from the platform, catching the edge of the ledge beneath in her hands as she did and allowing herself to dangle for a moment before lifting herself up and, because she was feeling fancy, performing a brief handstand. Setting herself on her feet, she proceeded to work her way along a narrow outcrop of stone until she was positioned six feet or so from a slim pillar. It would have been so much easier just to slide down it to the ground but, of course, its bottom half had broken away. With her usual breathtaking agility she jumped across the great chasm from the ledge, grabbing the pillar as she did and wrapping her body around it.

Only... only there was something else there. Something warm and bony on the other side of the pillar.
She started, only just managing to keep hold of the pillar in her shock.
The warm thing moved.
God! It was a hand! She tensed herself, wondering how on earth she was going to fight some creature off with all her limbs wrapped desperately around a pillar. She moved her feet slightly and felt them touch a leg.

Somebody young and male on the other side of the pillar coughed, politely.

‘Um,’ said a well spoken, English accented lad, ‘Hello?’

She frowned. Big Bad Beasties didn’t usually say “Um, Hello”. Swallowing her panic, she allowed herself to crane her head around the pillar to get a good look at the interloper. A handsome lad of about 18 smiled cheerfully back at her. He was strange looking - he was dark, with longish, black hair and olive skin, but his eyes were a bright, piercing blue. They sat oddly in his otherwise Middle Eastern features. Likewise, they had an age to them, an antiquity that didn’t fit with his youthful appearance.

‘I couldn’t help but notice,’ continued the lad, warmly, ‘that you seem to be clinging to my pillar.’

She smiled. ‘Your pillar?’

‘Yes.’ He flashed her a beautiful, white smile.

Her lips curled automatically in response. ‘I don’t see your name on it.’

*I don’t believe this! Here I am in a Sand Zombie infested ancient temple, clinging to a broken column of granite several hundred feet from solid ground and I’m flirting!*

‘My mess,’ shrugged the lad as well as he could with his arms full of pillar, ‘my problem. My pillar.’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean, “your mess”? You mean you’re not here for the treasure too?’

The lad seemed a little surprised. ‘There’s treasure here too?’

‘Yes. Lots. Now if you’d just...’

‘I don’t really do treasure any more,’ interrupted the youth before a sudden glint hit his strange eyes. ‘Not unless it’s a sword. I’m just crazy about swords.’

‘Well, it’s not a sword,’ she replied. If the lad wasn’t here for treasure, then that was his own business. She wasn’t going to give him any more information, in case it piqued his interest. Bit something still didn’t sit right. The “not any more” comment. Meaning that once upon a time this kid had played her game, but he had already been put off. That didn’t make sense. Once you caught the Bug, that was it. How could a fellow tomb raider have possibly become jaded so early in life? How young was he, anyway?

‘How old are you?’ She demanded.

The youth had begun to shimmy around the pillar. They could look at each other now without craning around the column of stone. She could also see the slender muscles in his young, naked arms, tensing under the effort of keeping him clasped to the pillar. There were several deep cuts on them. His clothes were as strangely beautiful as his face - a few straps of fabric were all that remained of a shirt, and it was a miracle that his trousers hadn’t suffered a similar fate, since they seemed to be made out of silk, or a similarly delicate fabric. They, like the boy himself, appeared Arabic in origin. There were only a few cuts on the silken trousers, but they were dirty with blood, blackening the gorgeous royal blue dye that matched his eyes. She noticed that he had two blood stained swords strapped to him.

The boy smiled again at her, sadly this time.

‘Right now,’ he replied, ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

There was a brief pause as she shuffled around slightly to get some more room on the pillar. The lad shimmied across some more until he was occupying the space that she had previously taken up, and looked behind himself, apparently judging a blatantly insurmountable leap onto a far platform. She peered around the pillar at him again.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I need to get to that switch’, answered the youth, nodding his head at a lever hanging several feet over the distant platform.

‘I imagine you do, kid’ she tutted, ‘but it’s impossible to do it just like that. I was going to...’

‘It’s easy!’ interrupted the boy. He indicated a couple of rickety poles and girders jutting from the wall. ‘You just swing off that flagpole onto that beam and the rest is history...’

She eyed the chasm suspiciously. ‘It’s still too far,’ she huffed, ‘you’ll never make it.’

‘Really?’ grinned the youth.

She didn’t have time to answer before he somersaulted backwards from the pillar, flipping over in mid air as she could, catching the flagpole and swinging around it once before flinging himself onto the thin beam, huffing painfully as he caught it.

She watched him as he dragged himself up onto his feet and balanced himself.

*He is good. But now what’ll he do?*

She was glad that she didn’t wince as he threw himself off the beam in the direction of the far platform. Because if she had, she wouldn’t have seen the boy do simply the most incredible thing she had ever witnessed.
He defied gravity. He found the wall with his feet and ran along it, using it to keep him aloft longer and propel him further than a jump ever could. By the time he ran out of momentum, the platform was already under his feet for him to drop gently onto.
She was vaguely aware that her jaw had fallen ever so slightly open. She had never seen anybody move like that before. Not anyone human, anyway...

*I’m going to have to keep an eye on this one, I can see.*

She continued to watch as he used the same technique to solve the problem of the high lever, running a good eight feet up the wall before flipping off it, catching the lever and using his body weight to pull it down. She could just about make out that he was grinning at her.

‘Yes, all right,’ she cried out to him, ‘that’s a terribly clever trick and I’m awfully impressed, but it doesn’t really do me any good now, does it?’

The sound of ancient gears moving was suddenly audible. She bit her lip in irritation as a large bridge to the platform slid out of the wall, only inches away from where she was dangling.
The strange youth let himself drop from the lever as she stepped daintily onto the bridge.

He smiled strangely at her again. ‘My lady.’

---

Her hands finally free, she whipped a handgun from its holster and pointed it at him. His smile did not drop. He made no move towards her, so she slowly began to step across the bridge towards him.

‘So do you always blindly trust every girl you meet?’ She asked.

‘Only the living ones,’ he replied with a smile.

‘So you trust me?’ she continued, ‘even with a pistol pointed at you?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know what that is,’ shrugged the lad, ‘doesn’t look very sharp, though.’

She frowned, cocking her head slightly. ‘Not very sharp...?’

*Who IS this boy...?*

Suddenly the youth’s easy smile twisted into an angry scowl. His hands flew to the swords at his back and unsheathed them, holding them out at his sides.

‘Behind you,’ he hissed, and backflipped away.

She looked behind her for only a microsecond. Two more of the zombie-like creatures were there, on the bridge, seemingly from nowhere, and heading straight towards them, weapons raised.

*Definitely a job for Mister Shotgun.*

She sprang into the air, somersaulting backwards over the creatures heads, holstering her pistol and drawing her shotgun as she did. As she landed, she saw the smaller zombie break into a run towards the lad, who was using the wall again to spring, swords first, at the creature. The larger figure had turned and was heading towards her, a large stone hammer raised. She fired both barrels at it at close range. It hit the creature’s bloated belly, but barely slowed it down. She shot again. The damn thing blocked her pellets with its hammer.

‘Shit!’

She attempted a sideways somersault as the Thing swung its hammer, but misjudged the distance and hit the wall, gracelessly. Shaking herself out of her daze, she felt the large zombie stomp up to her. She tried to aim her shotgun again.

The creature stopped in its tracks, moaning suddenly in pain. A flash of steel and a spray of blood behind it was the only sign that the boy had run up to the Beastie and was slashing it across its large back. The zombie grunted and swung its hammer around itself, sending the slight boy flying over the edge of the bridge like a rag doll.

‘No!’

She was barely aware that it was her who had cried out in despair, not the kid. The creature turned back to her and leered, grabbing her shotgun and wrenching it from her hands. She gazed up at what remained of the zombie’s eyes, wondering if she’d have time to grab her pistols, and wondering whether they’d do her any good if she could. She did not see the youth spring up from the ledge he had managed to grab, and as he sprinted up behind the creature, vaulting over it, lashing out at its small, piggy head as he did so, all she saw was a flash of blue cloth and shining metal. The zombie stumbled back, its head bleeding... sand. Its blood was becoming sand! She rolled sideways, drawing both pistols, firing several shots into the widening wound in its head. The sand was growing, taking over its entire huge body. The youth had fallen to his knees, blood pouring from his mouth. The hammer blow to his skinny abdomen must have injured him terribly. She shot again, and the creature fell. She watched as the youth struggled to his feet, staggered over to the prone, sandy body, and stabbed it, once, in the torso. The body disappeared into a cloud of dust, which seemed to be sucked into the boy’s chest.

She stood, holstering her pistols, amazed. The lad sheathed his swords behind him, coughed up a little more blood, then collapsed.

*____*____*____*____*____*____*____*____*____*____*

(So that's it for chappy 1... must admit I'm not 100% on which way it should go... Hope you guys know who the mysterious young man is - if you don't it doesn't matter - all you really need to know is, he's quite similar to our Gel, he's hot and he's got a big secret which will be revealed in due time!
Aunt Fanny xxx)