xp_logs | The Mummies' Return: On Tour (Reply)

The gang see the Wonders of Egypt (tm) with their adorable tour guide Dr Theodore Gaskill

Monet stared up at one of the little pyramids of Saqqara. Having already done the big ones, it was ... underwhelming, a crumbling pile of rock and sand that sort of - if you squinted - looked like it might have been a pyramid once. "I thought it would be bigger," she said.

"We have seen the big ones from the brochures", Kurt reminded her, strolling up to slip an arm round her waist. "And even these are impressive in their way, I think."

She smiled at him. "And they were like, way cooler. This one is 'oh, maybe if I work real hard, I'll grow up to be a real pyramid one day' except it got pleurisy and died as a child." Only, that wasn't so funny. "Laurie! I feel sorry for the pyramid now. I mean, it is old, so I probably shouldn't be mean to it, right?"

"I'm not sure an inanimate object can have it's feelings hurt." Laurie noted with a grin from Monet's other side. She was wearing a rather wide brimmed hat, her pale skin was an almost certainty to burn otherwise. The fact that it hadn't disguised her blonde hair meant that she was still getting rather obvious looks from any locals they passed. "But I suppose if it were a mutant pyramid, it might hear you. Best to be polite, just in case. I still can't believe we're walking in a place that's thousands of years old."

"A mutant pyramid?" Crystal asked, raising an eyebrow. Like Laurie, she was wearing a hat with a wide brim, but unlike the younger girl, her hair was currently a shade of dark brown. She couldn't help but wonder if the heat was getting to the blonde; as far as Crystal was aware, while objects such as houses and pyramids could be hundreds or thousands of years old, the actual land on which they stood had all been around for long before that. "It could be a mutant who is presently taking the form of a pyramid, I suppose, but seeing as how no one has reported a new pyramid coming into existence, this mutant would either have to be very old or would have had to somehow figured out a way to make one pyramid disappear, without being noticed, prior to taking its place."

"That would be pretty cool." Monet stopped to pick up a fragment of a statue - a piece of a small hand. "Wow, this is really cool. Hey, Theodore, can I keep it?" she said, asking their tour guide.

Dr. Theodore Gaskill actually shuddered - and kept twitching, as he glared at Monet. "Put that down," he said, his voice ever so slightly strangled. The archaeologist had been looking darker and darker as he'd listened to their conversation. "You do not remove artefacts. You respect the site you're visiting!"

"I am respecting it! I just want to take some of it home with me, where I'd continue to respect it, on my mantle piece until the mansion gets blown up."

Bony hands clenched and unclenched at Gaskill's sides. When he spoke, he seemed to have regained some of his composure. "If you take that home with you, Ms. St. Croix, what does it become? An oddity. A token of your trip, stripped of all its historical significance."

"All right, fine! I'll it back exactly where I found it... fuck." The fragment of statue, held carefully between two of Monet's fingers slipped from her grip and hit the ground, smashing into three distinct pieces. "I'm really sorry about that. I didn't do it on purpose, you know."

Kurt was at her side immediately, just in case. "Accidents do happen", he said quietly, to both Monet and the archaeologist. "If there is anything we can do..."

From behind her dark sunglasses, Crystal looked at the distressed archaeologist, wondering how he would view Kurt's offer. Obviously, what had happened had already happened, and without a mutant with time travelling abilities or perhaps a time travel machine, there was nothing that could be done about the already damaged statue piece. Experience had taught her that while a large check could help unfortunate situations mysteriously vanish, not everyone viewed such offers in a positive way; some people were offended by such a thought, and Crystal could not say that she blamed them. She was sure, however, that Dr. Gaskill had dealt with rich tourists on previous occasions and that this was not the first time this had happened to him before.

Strangely, Dr. Gaskill smiled. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a pleasant expression. The muscles in his face were twitching rather alarmingly, as a matter of fact, which was at odd with the sudden, bizarre expression of calm in the eyes behind the thick glasses. "Accidents do happen," he said.

Laurie eyed the good doctor with concern, there was something not quite right about that smile, or the twitching, and she wondered just how many tourists he'd led through these sorts of places. "Are you feeling okay, Dr. Gaskill?" she asked, her voice dropping into what she considered her 'doctor' tone. Quiet, efficient and above all, competent sounding, or at least as far toward those things as she could fake in any given situation.

"Quite 'okay', young woman," Gaskill said, the fixed smile remained steady. "Shall we move on?"