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Snakes on a Plane Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 7 8
by spikeNdru
Written for the Snakes on a Plane Challenge. Any fandom, anything goes, as long as there are snakes on a plane somewhere in the story.
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Genfic, Action/Adventure
Story takes place in the Wishverse
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Chapter Six
After her snack, Buffy's energy and interest both revived. If she'd read the carvings correctly, this door should lead to a type of throne room and maybe some storage areas. Buffy was pretty sure this area included valuables, because it took her nearly an hour to break the door code. While she worked at solving the code, Buffy thought about the comparative ease in which she had worked her way through the pyramid.I've been going through the back doors, she concluded. I'll bet this staircase I've been using was a secret. The regular people probably never knew it existed. There must be separate 'front doors' to each level that are accessed through the outside of the pyramid. It makes perfect sense! These stairs are too steep and hidden to lead to the main entrances. I'll bet these stairs were only used by the rulers or the shamans or whoever was in charge here. It was just luck that I came through the underwater tunnel and found them. I'm guessing there were outside doors that could be guarded when they weren't in use. I just don't think ordinary people would have been given this kind of access. Cool!
The door finally opened, and Buffy took a deep breath of the stale air. She grinned in triumph as she realized she'd been correct in her reasoning. I'm at the beginning—or the end, if I'm right about the back door thing—of the storage rooms. She entered the first of a series of small rooms—a veritable treasure house of goodies.
Buffy's eyes widened as she was struck by a thought that amazed her. It wasn't the potential treasures that she cared about—what excited her was that she was beginning to understand the long-ago people who'd lived here. She understood how they thought and what was important to them. She felt a part of them. That's how she was able to figure things out—like the door codes and the idea of a secret staircase and the tribute to the honored warriors. What value did gold or silver have compared to this sense of belonging and accomplishment?
I'm not just a tool . . . a weapon to be used by the Council, Buffy decided. I'm a person in my own right. And I'm not stupid, either! I'll bet I've done every bit as good as any Watcher, with their priceless books and expensive college educations, at figuring this pyramid out! And I'll figure out a way to get back home, too. And when I do, I'm never gonna let them talk down to me, or treat me like I'm not as smart or as good as they are again. “Do you hear me, Gwennie?” Buffy yelled out loud. “You too, Quentin. I'm talkin' to you! Booyah!”
Buffy laughed. With that vow taken care of, and her sense of self reinforced by her amazing accomplishments, she was ready to explore and appreciate the treasures waiting for her perusal.
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The first room she entered was filled with exquisite pottery and weapons. The pots were stored in groupings of similar styles and colors. Buffy was pleased that she believed she understood the reason for the groupings. Joyce had taken her to a gallery that specialized in Southwestern pottery, and each pueblo represented there had their own individual styles and colors. Her mom had glowed when she told Buffy about her visits to various pueblos when she had gone to visit Aunt Darlene in Tucson. Some of the pots featured in the gallery were reddish-orange, some creamy white and some shiny black. The colors were the result of different minerals in the local clays, Joyce explained. Isleta pottery was completely different from Hopi, although the pueblos were not that far apart geographically.Buffy figured these different wares had probably been traded from other cities. Her only regret was that she couldn't tell which was the local pottery. She'd have liked to know which ones were indigenous.
Buffy spent some time marveling at the obsidian weapons. There were knives of various sizes and spearheads, like she had seen in her vision of the Slayer's weapon. There were even some pieces whose usage she couldn't even begin to guess. And all were as razor-sharp as the day they had been crafted.
The small room ended, not at a door as she had supposed, but rather at a short tunnel formed by overlapping walls. When she reached the far wall of the pottery and obsidian storage room, she squeezed through the narrow space to her right. She took sideways steps for about seven or eight feet before coming to the opening into the next room.
The tarnished silver didn't really hold her attention, although she did find a pair of somethings—that appeared to her to be platform shoes made out of silver—interesting. She couldn't imagine they'd be comfortable, though.
The gold gleamed, and was frequently set with turquoise, carnelian, mother of pearl and abalone. She also found several gorgeous orange stones that looked like they were made from fire.
She passed through the treasure room, anxious to see what the next room held. After squirming through another passage way between room openings, she came to what appeared to be a meeting room of some kind.
The walls were adorned with painted frescoes that interested her much more than the gold or silver. These paintings could tell her about how these people lived and what they believed.
Her excitement at discovering the frescoes was making her light-headed. Either that, or her prolonged exposure to the stale air was affecting her. Buffy realized that she'd lost track of time while she explored. Regretfully, she decided she'd better call it a day. Her mag light seemed to be getting dimmer, too. Buffy sat in one of the carved stone chairs around the oval stone table and unbuttoned the pocket in which she'd stored her spare batteries. She carefully lined them up in the proper position on the table in front of her and turned off her light. Absolute blackness encompassed her. She thought she'd be used to it by now, but she wasn't. She quickly replaced the batteries and turned on her light. Carved statues in the corners of the room startled her for a moment, then the beauty of the frescoes struck her anew in the brilliance of the fresh batteries. She was tempted to remain, but her better judgment won out.
With a small sigh of disappointment, Buffy began to make her way back to her campsite. The promise of fresh air and dinner almost made up for the immediate loss of the frescoes.
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Buffy awakened the next morning anxious to explore. She used the last of her water to make oatmeal with dried strawberries and a cup of Tang. She hurried to the well to refill her water bag, grabbed some additional snacks and then entered the pyramid through her roof door.She didn't pause at the first two levels that she had checked out the previous day. She decided that she would come back sometime later to spend more time in the meeting room with the frescoes that interested her, but right now, she couldn't resist the first floor.
Her luck held in figuring out the door codes, and Buffy wondered if Mrs. Post could have done as well. She stopped for a moment and thought about it. If the information was written down in a book somewhere, the codes would be a snap for Mrs. Post and her eidetic memory.
I didn't have access to any books, Buffy affirmed. How did I do it? Buffy gave the matter some thought. She'd used a more intuitive method. She'd carefully fixed the markings in her mind, tried a few things, and then just knew the answer. Buffy grinned. Maybe the people who lived here long ago are helping me. It was a comforting thought. Maybe she wasn't as alone as she had often felt. Maybe the people of this place think I belong here. She felt her lips curling into a superior smirk. But I bet they wouldn't do shit to help Mrs. Post!
Buffy entered a short passageway that opened up into a large room. Three wide, normal-sized stairs led down to the flooring of the room, which reminded her of a sunken living room she'd seen once on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”. Bits of rotted fabric of some kind clung to the edges of the sunken area, which she deduced had originally been carpeting that covered the stone floor.
Four golden statues—Buffy couldn't tell if they were solid gold or gold-plated stone—emerged from recesses on the narrow walkway that bordered the sunken area. The statues were humanoid in body, but they either wore masks or had the heads of animals, which made them look very Egyptian to Buffy. She saw the familiar bird head on one of the statues. The others bore the head of a jaguar, a snake and an alligator or crocodile. The last one looked the most Egyptian of all.
The walls in this room were also adorned with frescoes, but they were of a different type than those on the middle level. The wall paintings there were of static scenes like those that could be found on the walls of many Italian restaurants in Cleveland. These paintings were more like comic books, and each wall panel seemed to tell a different story. Buffy's heart beat faster, and a bone-deep hum of energy raced through her body as she shivered in anticipation. Here were the treasures she had been hoping to find. Myths, legends or history—Buffy didn't care which these people had chosen to preserve. It didn't really matter. What mattered was that the stories illustrated on these walls were the ones that were important to the builders of this place.
Buffy flashed her light around the room, overwhelmed by the richness of the potential knowledge her mag light illuminated. She felt like a kid in a candy store. She wanted to absorb it all, but had no idea where to start. Then, one panel in particular drew Buffy's attention. She drifted toward it and wished she had a better and larger source of light than the narrow beam of her mag light.
Buffy shone her light on the first image at the top of the panel and narrowed her eyes. The brightly-colored pigments had faded with time, but she could still make out the pictures. She wished, for the second time, that she could see the panel in its entirety, but her mag light would have to suffice.
The first drawing showed a caravan of people, moving in single file with goods tied to the backs of a column of animals. Trade goods? Personal possessions? Buffy wondered. And they're tied to a line of . . . camels? Further similarities to Ancient Egypt struck her. Oh, maybe they're not camels. They could be . . . llamas? The second frame showed the caravan winding its way through the jungle, but the painters somehow conveyed a sense of urgency. The people were hurrying toward something. Or, running away from something.
The caravan appeared shorter in the third picture. Buffy went back to the first one and counted. Yep. Five people and three llamas were missing. In the following frame, the people were looking over their shoulders with expressions of terror on their faces. Something was definitely chasing them.
Buffy was thoroughly caught up in the story unfolding frame by frame as she swept her light over the paintings. The next picture showed only a half-dozen people and two llamas running flat out. The goods were gone, and small people—Children, Buffy realized—were clinging to the llamas' backs.
Buffy gasped and almost dropped her light when she came to the next picture. Broken, bloody bodies were strewn over the jungle floor. She thought she recognized a clump of trees and went back to a previous picture to check. It was definitely the same clump of trees the caravan had hurried past. Something was following them and attacking from their back-trail. Buffy had a pretty good idea that she knew what it was.
Her guess was confirmed by the next painting. A lizardy-type of monster? Demon? Shit, it could even be a fucking dinosaur, for all I know! had ripped apart and was feeding on one of the people from the caravan. If the scale in this drawing's right, that thing is the size of Godzilla!
The few remaining survivors of the caravan came to a village in the next painting and tried to warn the villagers. In the next, villagers were running in all directions, as the Godzilla thing lay waste to the village. The story continued as the survivors made their way north, until they eventually came to this place. Buffy caught her breath in wonder at seeing the actual buildings in all their glory, without the camouflage of vegetation that had made them the shapeless mounds with which she was familiar. She was torn between wanting to savor the details of the painting, matching them in her mind to the mounds of her time, and wanting to know what happened next in the unfolding story.
Her curiosity to discover what happened won out, and she shone her light on the next picture. The survivors were greeted by a group of obviously important people—probably the king or ruler, masked people who had to be priests or shamans, and . . . the Watcher from my vision!
The Watcher went to the large stele she'd observed and did what Watchers have done for millennia—He's looking stuff up! Buffy giggled at the thought that even thousands of years ago, Watchers used whatever was handy to write stuff down so that other Watchers could look stuff up.
The Watcher returned from his quest to 'look stuff up', and he met the Slayer in front of the very pyramid in which Buffy was now standing. The front of the pyramid faced the original mound the plane had crashed into, with a broad avenue joining the two. I was right about the front doors! Buffy thought.
The Slayer and her Watcher didn't enter the pyramid, however; they went around to the back and headed for the cenote. They turned northwest at the cenote and followed a faint path, which was detailed in the next three frames. Eventually, they came to a rock formation honeycombed with small openings that led into the rock. Hundreds of snakes slithered over the formation, some entering and leaving through the openings, some sunning themselves on the rock formation.
The Slayer withdrew what looked like a small rodent from a bag over her shoulder. The Watcher rubbed something from a small pot, the size of a perfume bottle, into the rodent's fur and then let it go. Apparently, the Slayer and her Watcher repeated their actions, because in the next picture, six rodents were attempting to scamper far away from the nest of snakes. They obviously didn't succeed, because the next frame showed the Slayer picking up six limp snakes. Probably drugged, Buffy thought.
The next several paintings were the ones that had caught Buffy's attention and drawn her to this panel. They showed what she'd already seen in her vision—the Slayer with the drugged snakes wrapped around her arms and her unusual weapon—half stake, half spear or sword—tracking the monster that had been terrorizing the people and decimating villages as it made its way northward from South America.
Buffy watched the battle unfold with bated breath. Her mag light shook in her hand until she came to the frame that showed the huge Godzilla monster slain, and the tiny Slayer, bruised and bloody but alive, in the act of beheading the enormous creature with her obsidian blade. Buffy cheered out loud. The snakes were no longer in evidence, so it looked like they'd done their job and brought Godzilla down, but the Slayer wasn't taking any chances that it would get up again. You go, girl!
The Slayer returned to a triumphant welcome, but in the next frame, while the people feasted, the Slayer was off by herself, tending to her wounds while her Watcher—communed with? Reported to? Worshipped?—the great stone face in the underground cavern by the pool.
Buffy felt like she had just watched an intense action movie—but one in which she had a strong emotional involvement.
“I'm glad you made it back okay,” Buffy said, as she allowed her fingertips to rest for a moment on the painted image of a young girl, all alone, taking care of her own injuries. She tenderly ran her index finger down the length of the painted hair in a caress of understanding from one Slayer to another.
Buffy glanced at all the other wondrous stories waiting to be discovered, but she was emotionally exhausted and didn't think she could give them the attention they deserved right now.
“Another time,” she said, as she began to retrace her steps. “Tonight, I need to rest, 'cause tomorrow I've got a rock formation to find and snakes to catch!”
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Continue to Chapter Seven
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