Fic: Raider of the Lost Tomb (Part 2)
Aug. 5th, 2011 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amaliakTitle: Raiders of the Lost Tomb (Part 2)
Author:amaliak
Rating: PG
Characters: Lee Adama, Kara Thrace, cylons, mayhem, fun, archeology
Pairings: Lee/Kara, Everyone/Adventure
Summary: The cylons are slowly bringing a war to humanity, taking over one planet at a time. However, a secret division of the cylon forces has been collecting artifacts about the ancient myth of Earth. The colonial forces approached Dr. Kara Thrace, professor of archeology in Caprica City, to help stay one step ahead of what is believed to be the cylon plan: find the map to Earth. But Kara needs to find Bill Adama, the worlds’ expert on Earth lore...
Prompt: Crossover with Indiana Jones: Kara=Indy, Lee=Marion, will hopefully include the phrase "You call this archaeology?"
Warnings: Crack. And cheesiness.
Word Count: 2273
Beta:nazkey helped me out. Because she is the most amazing person ever. WOOT!!
Author's Notes: The highly anticipated second part of the adventure in which nothing much happens. Other than up the adventure factor by adding space and exotic planets. Also, journals and feelings.
PART TWO
Caspian class ship "Iris", in ordit above Troy
Lee stared out the window of the ship into the vast blackness of space.
He remembered a night ages ago when he and Kara had been staring out at the sky, lying in a field by the riverbed, and she had told him how she liked to have her feet on the ground, her hands in the dirt, but something about being in space made her feel like a different person.
He shook his head to clear the memory, thinking to the task at hand.
He and Kara had gotten off Persephone on a transport to Troy, meeting there with a man Kara knew and that Lee had met a few times before: Karl Agathon. The best raptor scout in the business, “Helo” knew how to navigate tricky and more or less uncharted parts of space. He and his wife Sharon (a cylon defector) and young daughter Hera travelling all over the universe, helping expand the limits of the known worlds.
Bill Adama had worked with Helo before the war, when he was nothing more than a gutsy Raptor pilot just out of the Academy. Lee had liked Karl, and was glad to have him along, since he was someone who had been familiar with Bill Adama’s quest. They needed all the help they could get.
Lee walked back into the map room, where Kara and Karl had been pouring over several screens of maps and star charts.
“I know that there’s been activity here,” Helo was saying, pointing at areas on the map in front of him, “and here. It looks like they’re working from the scrolls of Pythia, but having trouble understanding it.”
Kara was frowning, biting her lips as she considered the charts in front her. “That’s probably a good place to start, then.”
“That would be my best guess, yes.” Karl zoomed in the mostly blank map and scrutinized it some more. “Risky jumping into that airspace, though. Don’t know how many cylons are already in that area going in completely blind and it’ll be a mess if they catch us.”
Kara frowned a little more deeply, unconsciously biting her thumbnail. Lee tore his eyes away from her, focusing instead on being helpful with the charts before them. He peered more closely at the area that Helo had brought up on the screen, thinking that something about it looked familiar.
“I’ve seen this before,” he found himself saying, catching Helo and Kara’s attention. “Zoom out a bit, Helo.”
The taller man obeyed, using his hands to widen the view. In a bout of defiance early in his teenage years, Lee had taken to studying the secrets of the stars rather than those of the worlds. Eventually, his father had shown him that there was a way that they were connected. He was glad for it just when something clicked in his mind.
“Those are the moons of Helena,” Lee indicated to a group of bodies in the bottom left quadrant. Moving his finger upwards towards the right, he circled an empty black area. “The book of Pythia doesn’t indicate how to find Kobol, but some ancient texts do state that the tribes had outposts on what they called the Moons of Raging Seas. I think Kobol must be somewhere in this area.”
“Lee, those texts weren’t that specific as to how far Kobol was from the lunar outposts,” Kara interjected. “There could be nothing out there waiting for us but cylon baseships.”
He felt the bristle of the confrontation kicking in, but the logical side of his brain kept it down. She was right.
Lee continued to look at the screen, hoping to find something else that would spark a memory. Something here looked familiar...
Kara found it first.
“There’s something missing here,” she said, glaring at the projection as if it had done it on purpose. “There was another outpost somewhere along this upper side. But I can’t remember it. The ancients called it Meghara.”
Lee felt his lips curl into a smirk. “I know where I’ve seen it.”
He rushed out then, quickly maneuvering back to his quarters for the one other thing that he’d brought with him. He rushed back to the map room, large tome in hand. Kara’s eyes widened. “I thought you’d gotten rid of everything,” she commented, but her voice was relieved, her face hopeful and it made him really smile.
“I lied,” he told her, and opened up the tome.
Karl came around the table, peering at the book that Lee was flipping through. “What is that?”
“Dad kept a log...a journal of everything that he’d discovered over the years,” Lee explained, flipping the familiar pages.
Helo let out a low whistle. “Bet the cylons would give a lot to get their hands on that.”
Kara snorted at that. “That’s why Bill went through the trouble of making sure it would only be on paper, never on any digital copies.”
“Smart,” Helo observed.
“Paranoid,” Lee retorted, “But yes, smart. Though I would have preferred not to lug around this thing. It’s a bit heavy for a journal.” Lee finally found what he’d been looking for. It was a reproduction of an ancient map that his father had found in the ruins of the temple of Daphne when Lee was a child.
Kara was leaning over the page, invading his personal space, her body pressed against his in a painfully familiar way. He shifted away from her slightly, and that made her head snap up at him. She seemed to notice the problem and pulled away from him, studying the book from another angle.
“There’s Medusa,” she said, pointing to the yellowed paper, a tiny and delicate identifier written next to the small representation of the moon.
“Ok, that’s great, but...where’s Kobol?” Karl asked, trying to get his head around the ancient markings.
“When the thirteen tribes left Kobol, twelve of them headed out just beyond the reaches of their known universe,” Kara said, “The ancient tribes settled on their new planets, but they kept a route back for a while. Then it was like...” she waved her hand in the air in a vague gesture, “It was like going back to Kobol was the worst idea they could have had, and the maps were destroyed, wiped away by superstition. Eventually, they even forgot about their lost tribe on Earth.”
“Mostly forgot,” Lee added, and Kara glanced at him briefly.
“Mostly.”
“What’s this stuff?” Helo asked, pointing to the writing around the edges of the map.
Kara leaned closer to read the tiny writing. “It’s...Gaelic, I think.”
“What does it say?”
“Loosely translated, it says ‘beyond this, nothing should be found. There be dragons here,’” Kara told them.
“Hmm,” Helo frowned a bit before letting a small smile play on his lips as he met Kara’s eyes. Lee caught sight of it, seeing Kara’s own features light up in a way that he recognized.
This was the thrill she was always after.
“This could be fun,” she said, still holding Helo’s gaze.
“This could be dangerous,” Helo replied in an practiced tone, one that spoke to Lee just how often Helo was involved in Kara’s life.
“Then it will be really fun,” she answered, winking as she rushed over to the sky chart that they’d been looking at earlier. Lee stepped away and watched as Helo joined her, a cold snake of what he could only identify as jealousy curling in his stomach.
“We’ll need to reach Meghara, if we can find it,” Kara was saying pointing at a specific area.
Helo sat down at the computer terminal, typing away. “How reliable is that old map?”
Kara shrugged. “Not the most exact of coordinates, but I think it’ll get us the general direction.”
“Not good enough, Kara,” Helo replied, still typing away. “I can’t just jump us in a ‘general direction’.”
“Well, I’d like to hear a better idea,” Kara said. “Since there are cylons floating around, remember?”
“What if we jump in at the moons of Helena and have a look around?” Lee found himself speaking up. “They’re made of mostly iron ore right? Should hide us from basic cylon surveillance.”
Helo was nodding, his typing changing the figure of the maps on their screens, scanning the moons for surface temps, possible landing routes. “That could work. Would help us get closer and get a better star reading anyway, figure out where the cylons are.”
“How long will it take us to get there?” Kara asked.
Helo smiled.
****
“So this is the famous Meghara?” Sharon looked around the sandy landscape.
Helo walked out of the transport, wrapping his arm around his wife. “Don’t you just want to set up a summer home here?”
Lee looked back at them from where he was standing in the hot sand, the light from the first cycle sun beating down on them, making his skin itch. It had been a long time since he’d been in a climate this hot, and he didn’t like it.
“Sure, Karl,” Sharon replied in an overly sweet voice. “I would love for our daughter to grow up on a land where there’s nothing but daylight all the time.”
“Common, babe, when will you ever be able to say that you can see both sunrise and sunset at the same time?”
“Will you two shut up and go figure out where Kobol could be?” Kara snapped, jumping down from the transport into the sand next to Lee. She had a compass and transit in her hand and shoved two shovels at Lee.
“We’ll meet you back here at nightfall,” she said.
“There is no nightfall, Kara,” Lee observed, squinting at the sky as he adjusted the container holding the arrow across his back. He decided that he wasn’t going to let this out of his sight, especially since there were the possibility of cylons. He had stowed his father’s journal safely in a bag over his shoulder.
“Fine, at first sunset then,” Kara replied, staring at a copy of another page from Bill Adama’s journal. She walked off, not waiting for him to follow her. Lee supposed that this was because she knew that he would.
“Hey, Lee,” Helo called to him, tossing down a wireless radio to him. “For when the doctor needs to be rescued.”
“Frak off, Helo,” Kara called from a few yards away, and Lee nodded Helo his thanks before taking off after Kara.
The journal had revealed that it was likely that there might be the ruins of an outpost here, and Kara was banking on the notion that this outpost would have had detailed maps of how to get to Kobol from Meghara, or at the very least steer them in the right direction. They hadn’t run into cylons yet, but it seems that they weren’t far. Helo had detected that they were no more than a jump or two away, so to be on their guard.
Lee caught up with Kara, and the two of them walked in relative silence for a few minutes. Lee’s mind was swirling, thoughts of the reality of the quest they were on beginning to take a real hold on his mind. It made him think of what his father would have given to be here.
“He loved you, you know,” he broke the silence, squinting in the sun and avoiding looking at her.
She stopped walking, letting him continue a few steps ahead of her before needing to stop to turn to face her. She was wearing a broad-rimmed hat (a smart move, in light of the heat) that left her face in shadow, but he had a pretty good idea of the look that was crossing her features.
“You see, Dad figured you out a long time ago, Kara,” Lee went on, feeling uncharacteristically open. “He knew what made you tick, said you were the most talented student he’d ever had.” Lee had listened to Bill Adama go on and on about Kara’s intuition enough to even be a little jealous. “He loved you like a daughter.”
Kara ducked her chin, placing clenched fists on her her hips as she gained a little bit of composure. At length, she asked, “Why are you telling me this, Lee?”
“I thought you should know that he cared about you, even if he never said it,” Lee admitted quietly, knowing that this was something that he’d thought about all too often. His father had never been one for declarations of feelings, and it was enough to make anyone unsure. Another feeling surfaced then. “It took a lot out of him when you left.”
Kara had the decency to look abashed. She shook it off quickly, though, moving forward again with a new resolve. “Believe me, it would have been worse if I’d stayed.”
Lee prickled at this, his anger bubbling up in his chest again. “How do you figure, Kara? How could ripping both our hearts out been better?”
She stopped so suddenly that he nearly ran right into her. She pivoted on her heel, slipping just a little on the sand beneath their feet. She could tell she was ready to deck him, and he relished in the idea of it. Finally, they’d be able to get over some of this. But after all this time, Kara could still surprise him. As quickly as it came, her anger was gone, and she dropped her hands to her side in a defeated gesture. “What the frak does it matter now, Lee?”
He swallowed thickly. “I suppose it doesn’t.”
Kara stared at him for a second more before turning around and continuing over the sands.
*****
TBC....
Author:
amaliakRating: PG
Characters: Lee Adama, Kara Thrace, cylons, mayhem, fun, archeology
Pairings: Lee/Kara, Everyone/Adventure
Summary: The cylons are slowly bringing a war to humanity, taking over one planet at a time. However, a secret division of the cylon forces has been collecting artifacts about the ancient myth of Earth. The colonial forces approached Dr. Kara Thrace, professor of archeology in Caprica City, to help stay one step ahead of what is believed to be the cylon plan: find the map to Earth. But Kara needs to find Bill Adama, the worlds’ expert on Earth lore...
Prompt: Crossover with Indiana Jones: Kara=Indy, Lee=Marion, will hopefully include the phrase "You call this archaeology?"
Warnings: Crack. And cheesiness.
Word Count: 2273
Beta:
nazkey helped me out. Because she is the most amazing person ever. WOOT!!Author's Notes: The highly anticipated second part of the adventure in which nothing much happens. Other than up the adventure factor by adding space and exotic planets. Also, journals and feelings.
PART TWO
Caspian class ship "Iris", in ordit above Troy
Lee stared out the window of the ship into the vast blackness of space.
He remembered a night ages ago when he and Kara had been staring out at the sky, lying in a field by the riverbed, and she had told him how she liked to have her feet on the ground, her hands in the dirt, but something about being in space made her feel like a different person.
He shook his head to clear the memory, thinking to the task at hand.
He and Kara had gotten off Persephone on a transport to Troy, meeting there with a man Kara knew and that Lee had met a few times before: Karl Agathon. The best raptor scout in the business, “Helo” knew how to navigate tricky and more or less uncharted parts of space. He and his wife Sharon (a cylon defector) and young daughter Hera travelling all over the universe, helping expand the limits of the known worlds.
Bill Adama had worked with Helo before the war, when he was nothing more than a gutsy Raptor pilot just out of the Academy. Lee had liked Karl, and was glad to have him along, since he was someone who had been familiar with Bill Adama’s quest. They needed all the help they could get.
Lee walked back into the map room, where Kara and Karl had been pouring over several screens of maps and star charts.
“I know that there’s been activity here,” Helo was saying, pointing at areas on the map in front of him, “and here. It looks like they’re working from the scrolls of Pythia, but having trouble understanding it.”
Kara was frowning, biting her lips as she considered the charts in front her. “That’s probably a good place to start, then.”
“That would be my best guess, yes.” Karl zoomed in the mostly blank map and scrutinized it some more. “Risky jumping into that airspace, though. Don’t know how many cylons are already in that area going in completely blind and it’ll be a mess if they catch us.”
Kara frowned a little more deeply, unconsciously biting her thumbnail. Lee tore his eyes away from her, focusing instead on being helpful with the charts before them. He peered more closely at the area that Helo had brought up on the screen, thinking that something about it looked familiar.
“I’ve seen this before,” he found himself saying, catching Helo and Kara’s attention. “Zoom out a bit, Helo.”
The taller man obeyed, using his hands to widen the view. In a bout of defiance early in his teenage years, Lee had taken to studying the secrets of the stars rather than those of the worlds. Eventually, his father had shown him that there was a way that they were connected. He was glad for it just when something clicked in his mind.
“Those are the moons of Helena,” Lee indicated to a group of bodies in the bottom left quadrant. Moving his finger upwards towards the right, he circled an empty black area. “The book of Pythia doesn’t indicate how to find Kobol, but some ancient texts do state that the tribes had outposts on what they called the Moons of Raging Seas. I think Kobol must be somewhere in this area.”
“Lee, those texts weren’t that specific as to how far Kobol was from the lunar outposts,” Kara interjected. “There could be nothing out there waiting for us but cylon baseships.”
He felt the bristle of the confrontation kicking in, but the logical side of his brain kept it down. She was right.
Lee continued to look at the screen, hoping to find something else that would spark a memory. Something here looked familiar...
Kara found it first.
“There’s something missing here,” she said, glaring at the projection as if it had done it on purpose. “There was another outpost somewhere along this upper side. But I can’t remember it. The ancients called it Meghara.”
Lee felt his lips curl into a smirk. “I know where I’ve seen it.”
He rushed out then, quickly maneuvering back to his quarters for the one other thing that he’d brought with him. He rushed back to the map room, large tome in hand. Kara’s eyes widened. “I thought you’d gotten rid of everything,” she commented, but her voice was relieved, her face hopeful and it made him really smile.
“I lied,” he told her, and opened up the tome.
Karl came around the table, peering at the book that Lee was flipping through. “What is that?”
“Dad kept a log...a journal of everything that he’d discovered over the years,” Lee explained, flipping the familiar pages.
Helo let out a low whistle. “Bet the cylons would give a lot to get their hands on that.”
Kara snorted at that. “That’s why Bill went through the trouble of making sure it would only be on paper, never on any digital copies.”
“Smart,” Helo observed.
“Paranoid,” Lee retorted, “But yes, smart. Though I would have preferred not to lug around this thing. It’s a bit heavy for a journal.” Lee finally found what he’d been looking for. It was a reproduction of an ancient map that his father had found in the ruins of the temple of Daphne when Lee was a child.
Kara was leaning over the page, invading his personal space, her body pressed against his in a painfully familiar way. He shifted away from her slightly, and that made her head snap up at him. She seemed to notice the problem and pulled away from him, studying the book from another angle.
“There’s Medusa,” she said, pointing to the yellowed paper, a tiny and delicate identifier written next to the small representation of the moon.
“Ok, that’s great, but...where’s Kobol?” Karl asked, trying to get his head around the ancient markings.
“When the thirteen tribes left Kobol, twelve of them headed out just beyond the reaches of their known universe,” Kara said, “The ancient tribes settled on their new planets, but they kept a route back for a while. Then it was like...” she waved her hand in the air in a vague gesture, “It was like going back to Kobol was the worst idea they could have had, and the maps were destroyed, wiped away by superstition. Eventually, they even forgot about their lost tribe on Earth.”
“Mostly forgot,” Lee added, and Kara glanced at him briefly.
“Mostly.”
“What’s this stuff?” Helo asked, pointing to the writing around the edges of the map.
Kara leaned closer to read the tiny writing. “It’s...Gaelic, I think.”
“What does it say?”
“Loosely translated, it says ‘beyond this, nothing should be found. There be dragons here,’” Kara told them.
“Hmm,” Helo frowned a bit before letting a small smile play on his lips as he met Kara’s eyes. Lee caught sight of it, seeing Kara’s own features light up in a way that he recognized.
This was the thrill she was always after.
“This could be fun,” she said, still holding Helo’s gaze.
“This could be dangerous,” Helo replied in an practiced tone, one that spoke to Lee just how often Helo was involved in Kara’s life.
“Then it will be really fun,” she answered, winking as she rushed over to the sky chart that they’d been looking at earlier. Lee stepped away and watched as Helo joined her, a cold snake of what he could only identify as jealousy curling in his stomach.
“We’ll need to reach Meghara, if we can find it,” Kara was saying pointing at a specific area.
Helo sat down at the computer terminal, typing away. “How reliable is that old map?”
Kara shrugged. “Not the most exact of coordinates, but I think it’ll get us the general direction.”
“Not good enough, Kara,” Helo replied, still typing away. “I can’t just jump us in a ‘general direction’.”
“Well, I’d like to hear a better idea,” Kara said. “Since there are cylons floating around, remember?”
“What if we jump in at the moons of Helena and have a look around?” Lee found himself speaking up. “They’re made of mostly iron ore right? Should hide us from basic cylon surveillance.”
Helo was nodding, his typing changing the figure of the maps on their screens, scanning the moons for surface temps, possible landing routes. “That could work. Would help us get closer and get a better star reading anyway, figure out where the cylons are.”
“How long will it take us to get there?” Kara asked.
Helo smiled.
****
“So this is the famous Meghara?” Sharon looked around the sandy landscape.
Helo walked out of the transport, wrapping his arm around his wife. “Don’t you just want to set up a summer home here?”
Lee looked back at them from where he was standing in the hot sand, the light from the first cycle sun beating down on them, making his skin itch. It had been a long time since he’d been in a climate this hot, and he didn’t like it.
“Sure, Karl,” Sharon replied in an overly sweet voice. “I would love for our daughter to grow up on a land where there’s nothing but daylight all the time.”
“Common, babe, when will you ever be able to say that you can see both sunrise and sunset at the same time?”
“Will you two shut up and go figure out where Kobol could be?” Kara snapped, jumping down from the transport into the sand next to Lee. She had a compass and transit in her hand and shoved two shovels at Lee.
“We’ll meet you back here at nightfall,” she said.
“There is no nightfall, Kara,” Lee observed, squinting at the sky as he adjusted the container holding the arrow across his back. He decided that he wasn’t going to let this out of his sight, especially since there were the possibility of cylons. He had stowed his father’s journal safely in a bag over his shoulder.
“Fine, at first sunset then,” Kara replied, staring at a copy of another page from Bill Adama’s journal. She walked off, not waiting for him to follow her. Lee supposed that this was because she knew that he would.
“Hey, Lee,” Helo called to him, tossing down a wireless radio to him. “For when the doctor needs to be rescued.”
“Frak off, Helo,” Kara called from a few yards away, and Lee nodded Helo his thanks before taking off after Kara.
The journal had revealed that it was likely that there might be the ruins of an outpost here, and Kara was banking on the notion that this outpost would have had detailed maps of how to get to Kobol from Meghara, or at the very least steer them in the right direction. They hadn’t run into cylons yet, but it seems that they weren’t far. Helo had detected that they were no more than a jump or two away, so to be on their guard.
Lee caught up with Kara, and the two of them walked in relative silence for a few minutes. Lee’s mind was swirling, thoughts of the reality of the quest they were on beginning to take a real hold on his mind. It made him think of what his father would have given to be here.
“He loved you, you know,” he broke the silence, squinting in the sun and avoiding looking at her.
She stopped walking, letting him continue a few steps ahead of her before needing to stop to turn to face her. She was wearing a broad-rimmed hat (a smart move, in light of the heat) that left her face in shadow, but he had a pretty good idea of the look that was crossing her features.
“You see, Dad figured you out a long time ago, Kara,” Lee went on, feeling uncharacteristically open. “He knew what made you tick, said you were the most talented student he’d ever had.” Lee had listened to Bill Adama go on and on about Kara’s intuition enough to even be a little jealous. “He loved you like a daughter.”
Kara ducked her chin, placing clenched fists on her her hips as she gained a little bit of composure. At length, she asked, “Why are you telling me this, Lee?”
“I thought you should know that he cared about you, even if he never said it,” Lee admitted quietly, knowing that this was something that he’d thought about all too often. His father had never been one for declarations of feelings, and it was enough to make anyone unsure. Another feeling surfaced then. “It took a lot out of him when you left.”
Kara had the decency to look abashed. She shook it off quickly, though, moving forward again with a new resolve. “Believe me, it would have been worse if I’d stayed.”
Lee prickled at this, his anger bubbling up in his chest again. “How do you figure, Kara? How could ripping both our hearts out been better?”
She stopped so suddenly that he nearly ran right into her. She pivoted on her heel, slipping just a little on the sand beneath their feet. She could tell she was ready to deck him, and he relished in the idea of it. Finally, they’d be able to get over some of this. But after all this time, Kara could still surprise him. As quickly as it came, her anger was gone, and she dropped her hands to her side in a defeated gesture. “What the frak does it matter now, Lee?”
He swallowed thickly. “I suppose it doesn’t.”
Kara stared at him for a second more before turning around and continuing over the sands.
*****
TBC....
