They would most emphatically not imagine that the life of an archaeologist might contain regular occurrences of running for her life in terror to escape ancient deathtraps. They also could hardly imagine that the professional competition between fellow archaeologist might reach levels of animosity that made carrying twin Desert-Eagles and a bullwhip advisable.
People really had no idea!
As she vaulted the trapdoor suddenly opening up before her Minako mused about these and other unfairness in the life of beautiful athletic archaeologist everywhere.
Another unfairness for example was the fact that after millennia of being buried beneath the sand of the desert the deathtraps in buildings such as the temple she was currently in still worked flawlessly. Most of the products of modern society only briefly outlived their warranty period and those ancient moving walls and rolling boulders were always working without a problem.
And then there were the snakes. There always had to be snake pits. Not scorpions or rats for a change, but always snakes. Minako hated snakes! If she had inherited one thing from her grandfather besides her trademark fedora it was her abject loathing of snakes.
In hindsight one might expect to encounter a serpent or two in the temple of Yig so Minako had only herself to blame for that episode under the plains of North America. But there was no reason to install a serpent pit here in the temple of Bast. Bast was an Egyptian goddess of cats. Cats were to be expected here, or mummies or even mummified cats that would awaken to brutally slay any intruders. Minako was okay with that.
What she was not okay with was that after carefully working herself through the temple without tripping any traps she would open a stone door only to find herself face to face with a pit full of slithering horrors. In her mad dash to freedom she must have set of every deathtrap in the entire temple. Ceilings had come down, darts had shoot out at her and the floor had fallen away. Moving walls and rumbling boulders had forced her to flee over crumbling ledges and down dark corridors.
She was now as she was catching her breath moderately safe, but she was also very much lost in previously unexplored reaches of the temple.
The area she was in now appeared to be far older then the upper parts of the temple that she had previously explored. The walls were decorated with primitive cuneiform pictographs, but accompanying them were traditional hieroglyphs and even some ancient Greek suggesting that the temple had been in use for a long stretch of time and that later generations had only added to structures that had already been ancient in their time.
Minako had no idea what the cuneiform might have once spelled out, but the more modern hieroglyphs and the occasional Greek told of legends eerily familiar to the young archaeologist.
They spoke of the moon, which did not make much sense as Bastet was supposed to have been a Sun-goddess that only had acquired her association with the moon after the period of Hellenistic civilization and her identification with Artemis. But here were references to the moon and names that could be pronounced as Artemis predating that by ages.
They spoke of powerful entities from out of space fighting wars in ancient times with cataclysmic results. They also spoke of the eventual return of those entities "when the stars were right". They spoke of winged unicorns guarding the dreamlands and of the primordial chaos at the center of the galaxy sending out lethal emissaries to destroy entire worlds.
This particular temple was said to be the resting place of one of the minor entities of that mythos. The wise advisor A-Tem-Is the white hunter waiting for strange aeons in his eternal sleep for the return of his mistress who was alternately referred to as the light-bringer, the gold-star and described as the sword of the moon-goddess.
Minako had read enough to realize that she had once again stumbled upon secrets that were best forgotten. She had had her fill of eldritch terrors and no desire to learn more things that men were not meant to know. It was best to let sleeping cats lie, she told herself.
Carefully not to touch anything she began to move away to what she hoped was the exit.
Her way led her to a chamber instead. The good news was that it was far to small to contain any sleeping monsters. The bad news was that it only had one exit. The room was bare of any decorations and only contained a single small sarcophagus of the type used to bury household cats.
Minako sat down on it to think and study her map of the explored parts of the temple. Somehow she should be able to retrace her steps to freedom without awakening any elder entities.
Underneath her the stone coffin crumbled. She stood up. It must have been far less sturdy than it had looked.
She turned around to see the last of the stone covering falling of what turned out to be a sarcophagus made of polished metal. An ankh-like sigil glowed brightly upon its front as it began to open with a malevolent hiss. Minako turned and ran as cold fog filled the room behind her. Creatures that rose from metal sarcophagi were almost at bad news as eldritch creatures.
Had the reborn Princess of Venus known just what manner of creature was waking behind her from its long cryogenic sleep to haunt and nag her for centuries to come she might just have run a bit faster.
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(Posted Fri, 31 Dec 2004 11:30)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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