by TheTimeTrust
The Tower of Cuccubao, Brazil:
With a renewed zeal, Chance -- the Luckiest Man Alive -- sped through the labyrinthine corridors of the evil Tower of Cuccubao, determined more now than ever to complete his mission and find that map to the Lost City. Knowing that Pete Glover was okay even though he was a ghost, and that Chance was able to live for himself again rather than filling another man's shoes, he felt as if a great weight had been taken from his shoulders. Not all of his problems in the world had been solved, of course, but the burden of knowing he had his life at the cost of Pete's had been one that had seemed almost crushing at times over the past few months. Now he was liberated from that particular problem, and he could focus his brilliant mind and energies on the problems at hand.
Chance had come across a few guards in one of the corridors and knocked them unconscious from behind before they could react to his presence, but although he quickly checked every room he came across, there seemed to be no sign of the map anywhere.
"Lookin' for a map, are ye? Why don'tcha try lookin' fer a pair o' pants ta cover up that butt-crack o' yours first? It's so feckin' muscled you could crack hazelnuts with it!" the ghost of Pete Glover cackled as he kept up with the bronzed Swede.
"Pete, this isn't the best time..." Chance whispered as he ran up to another guard and slugged him across the face, throwing him unconscious to the ground.
"I'm tellin' you, me old son -- you stuff a few pieces o' coal between yer cheeks, an' you'll soon be able ta shite diamonds!"
Chance sighed. Maybe Pete being back hadn't been such a good thing after all.
The pretty, red-booted girl known as Crasher had continued the search for the map after the Raptor had literally leaped outside through a shattered wall to meet their attackers head on. And even though it seemed then that the entire tower could very easily crumble all around them, it seemed to hold. Moreover, it soon became less noisy the farther away she went from the battle scene, and she could soon hear none of the battle raging outside.
Would Euro be able to battle that one-eyed creature alone with only his sword to protect him? Yes. He had to. With Chance the only one in the group with any field medical experience (severely limited though it was), he had been left behind to take care of her close friend Ameristar, and the other one, Drax, had been left to guard the both of them. She was the only one now who could find that map. And she would find that map, or Ameristar's ordeal would all have been for nothing.
Still, as she raced through the labyrinthine passageways that confused her very sense of direction, she began to feel the crushing weight of the darkness of this place all around her. It wasn't merely the lack of light -- no, it was an evil that permeated every rock and stone used to construct this tower. She wondered briefly how many had been sacrificed in its building and buried between the walls to ensure its virility? How many virgins had been slain to celebrate its completion? Blood literally seeped through this hell-spawned place.
And then a miracle occurred.
Crasher literally ran into a couple of armed guards who seemed to be casually walking the other direction, engaged in animated conversation. They seemed to be carrying something between them -- something that looked very, very familiar. Quickly dispatching the two guards before they were aware of what had happened when she crashed into them, she bent down to inspect the bundle they had been carrying.
"Jackie, this is your lucky day," she breathed to herself. For she had found Ameristar's armor.
Crasher quickly donned Ameristar's armor but now got herself definitely lost in the passageways of the tower as she wandered for the next several minutes. She seemed to have passed by the same old torch on the wall about six times by now, though she couldn't be sure it was the same one each time. This place was hell on the senses. It completely threw her sense of direction off.
"What the--?!" she said then, as she skidded to a stop in another room which looked all-too familiar.
"Crasher?" Drax said, turning around and seemingly ready for a fight. "I'm glad one of you finally returned. Where's Raptor?"
"I don't... but... how...?" Crasher said, scratching her head in puzzlement. "Huh. That's so weird. I don't know how I got back here, but..." She looked at the prone form of Ameristar. "...now that I'm here, I think I'd better look after Ameristar. I take it Chance has gone off to look for the map?"
"Yeah, I think so..."
"Good. He should have an easier time trying to find it than I did," she said, walking up to her friend. She looked at Ameristar's head wound and noted that she couldn't see any blood emanating through the bandages. There was that much to be thankful for, she supposed.
"So where's Raptor?"
"Raptor? Oh, shoot! Drax, I think you'd better head outside as soon as you can! Euro's fighting all by himself against who knows how many newcomers? All I know is that none of them look friendly."
"Well, it's about time!" the fluffy white dragon said with what seemed to be a grin on his snout-like face. "I've been itching for some action ever since we got ourselves outta those VR units!" He moved quickly through the large passages toward an exit, eager to be useful once more as more than a guard-dragon.
Chance had also run into five more guards in his travels through the Tower of Cuccubao in one of the rooms. He had picked up one of them by the feet and was currently using him to knock down the four other guards while they were still reaching for their side-arms. Wordlessly, Chance knocked each one down and cracked their heads against the ground enough to knock them unconscious. They were left alive, since they seemed to just be hired thugs, but they'd have massive headaches when they woke.
"Well, you've sure doused these scuts quickly, b'y," Pete's ghost said as Chance wiped his brow from all the physical exertion of the running and the fighting. "It's funny, me old son -- I dinna recalls you being so violent before! You always seemed ta be the peace-lovin' type..."
"Different situations call for different measures, Pete," Chance said as he looked around the room carefully for the first time.
To his delight, this seemed to be an ancient store room of some sort. There were several old pots and vases adorned with pre-Incan symbols all around, most of them broken and swept off to one side. It was obvious that -- whoever it was who had been using Cuccubao as a base for their own evil operations -- they hadn't cared about the archaeological value of this place. They may have looted it for whatever precious metals could be found, or even sold some of the unbroken pottery to unscrupulous collectors, but everything else had just been left to ruin.
"What a waste..." he breathed, making a note to himself that he'd have to get Dr. Henry Quantos to tell one of his archaeologist friends about this place. These artifacts needed to be catalogued and studied.
"A waste, ye say? Like the waste dropping outta yer bare arse?" the ghost said, chortling fiercely. The ghost's laughter sounded like it was coming from an echo chamber.
"It's funny, Pete, I don't recall you having such a vulgar sense of humor before," Chance retorted.
"Ahh, ye di'n't really know me tha' well, b'y. None o' yer MBL boys did. Why d'ya think I spents so much time away from the group as much as I could? None o' you ever had ta eat trash all the time just ta survive. Unless you've lived on the streets, you don't know what it's like. You just don't know. Only T.C. had any idea wha' that meant..." The ghost's voice seemed to grow weaker and quieter as he spoke, until finally he grew quiet. After a moment he piped up again. "That's all behind me now, tho', me old son. I'll spend my death tormentin' the likes o' you as long as I cans." Another round of ghostly laughter followed. Chance just shook his head and kept Pete from seeing him grinning.
The Luckiest Man Alive had already knelt down and begun searching through the shards of pottery. On a hunch, he looked up and began feeling the wall. Yes! There was a definite crack that ran along it. And it was man-made, no doubt about that. Nothing natural could have made it so straight and smooth. Chance brushed away the shards of pottery with his arms and was now able to follow the crack to its ends, until it trailed downward again to the floor on both sides. It seemed to be some kind of panel cut out from the rock itself. Feeling his fingers along the floor in the dark, he found an indentation directly in the center between the two vertical cracks.
"Hmm... This doesn't seem to be a handle of any kind -- there's nothing to grab." He tried pushing the panel with both of his hands, then, but nothing gave. He felt the indentation again. It seemed to be perfectly circular. Perhaps something else would work; perhaps it was meant to be pushed in at that spot only. Chance straightened out his index finger, pulled his muscular arm back, and directed all of his force into his finger as he thrust it into the indentation with more force than a normal man could have mustered using his entire fist. For Kristofer Schanz had studied several martial arts since he was a youth and had mastered many techniques of applying force with one's body without breaking said body.
"YES!" he exulted as the panel turned, the bottom part pushing inward as the top part pushed outward and down flat onto the ground.
"Just beginner's luck," the ghost breathed mockingly.
"Well, it's some kind of luck, I'll agree, Pete. You always seemed to be luckier than I ever was -- I think some of it's beginning to rub off onto me the more you're around," laughed Chance. The ghost of Pete Glover just frowned and crossed his arms grumpily.
As he cautiously reached into the opening that had perhaps not been opened for several centuries, Chance felt something with a soft texture and pulled it out. It was made of papyrus, and it could barely be seen in the dim light of the room, but it was most definitely what he and the others had been searching for. "Pete, you lucky bastard, you! We've found it! We've found the map!"
"Hey, wow... that's great, fuckwad!" a sneering voice said from the open passageway. It was X-Acute, the gunslinging acrobat of the Project Omicron team. "Now, if you'd be so kind as to hand that over to me, I won't have to splatter your brains all over the wall with my guns, here."
Chance frowned as he recognized the jerk from the Uffizi Museum who seemed to be an acrobatic clone of Dirk Bell. Guns. Chance hated guns.