Indiana Jones and the Insidious Fountain of Death

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Posted by Shagiana Joe from cx643543-a.msnv1.occa.home.com on January 30, 2000 at 16:46:03:

Some title, eh? I'm working on a story where a 67 year old Indy and his 17-19 year old son go out to find the Lost City of Ttiletenan, the fabled location of the Fountain of Youth. Will they be successful? What will their opposition be? Only I and the people who help me out know. Give me some feedback, here's the first 2 chapters and intro.


INTRODUCTION
Northern San Francisco, U.S., 1967
It was a humid night in San Francisco, not usual for the almost-metropolis of culture and love in America.
A teenager wearing a white button up shirt and tight fitting blue jeans walked towards an average beatnik pub as a trolley car whizzed past, sending a puddle into what was known as a puddle magnet then: a fur coat.
The teenager shook his head as he walked by the woman in the drenched animal skin and continued into the pub. His dark hair and somewhat dark skin blended in with the smoggy atmosphere. A stench of scum and cigarette smoke filled the air, making the dark teen's nose flare. He made his way past the bar and to the coat rack, picking up a black trench coat and pulling dark glasses onto his hazel eyes.
He struggled into the coat while walking to a brown spot in the pub's cinderblock wall and raised one of his brown hiking boots.
A smash was heard as he kicked through the wall. The smoking patrons all turned and stared at the mysterious 16 year-old’s back. An old man looked over at the boy and walked after him, but the kid ducked into the hole in the wall he just made.
The old man peered through the hole to see nothing, only blackness. He knew the building was about a hundred years old, or at least the location of the building was, but he didn't know about any brown spot. He lit a match and stuck his hand in, and withdrew it in disgust.
His hand was full of chalk and lime stone slime water, which he first thought was human bile. It wasn't any secret passage, it was a link directly to the sewer!
The boy made his way in thigh deep feces water, covering his nose with his trench coat, through the underearth stink hole. He passed 6 passages and jumped, landing at the tail end of a water fall.
The boy fell underwater and began swimming, the smell of the water burning his eyes as he made his way to an underwater passage. A sort of filter straight to the Pacific. He was sucked into the hole in the wall and reached deep into his coat.
He pulled out a bo into his right hand and put it over his head like a propeller. The bo was caught on the edge of the sewer system decoy path a few seconds later, and with all his strength, the boy pulled himself into the only dry space in the damned catacombs. The black iron bo came after him.
The bo, a majestic weapon, was perfected by the Chinese for use in Kobojutsu, the art of the sword. It was held in the middle with both hands and angled as to strike an opponent. Some fisherman put large crab-like pincers on either end to finish off a large sea animal. The bo with the boy had, however, only had both sides sharpened to a point like a doubled British fencing sword and was collapsable and able to be locked out. The boy snapped the bo back into a smaller state so that it looked more like a small black cyllander and replaced it into his trench coat. He pulled out a lighter and moved down the dry tunnel haunched over like a sidekick from a Dracula movie.
When he reached his final destination, he was delighted.
Abner Ravenwood-Jones, or Shaggy Jones as he preferred to be called, had found the greatest damned anthropological find there was in the 150 year old city of San Francisco. He let out a howl and ran over to a skeleton with a knife stuck in the rib cage and his hands on the handle to inspect it.
"Hello, Mr. Corna, greed must've really killed The Cat, eh?" he softly said as he pulled the final map piece from the antique skeleton's last remaining shread of clothes.
The map lead to the "Golden Mountains of Mexico," or the city of Chicemech. Not the city that Cortes was told about, El Dorado, but another city below the Earth that was showered with gold by the Aztec rain God Tlalocateuctli. The lost city, if it existed, could be the greatest archaeological and anthropological find since Troy. Something like this was like finding the lost continent of Atlantis!
A gun's hammer clicked behind the boy marveling at the map. His eyes widened and he looked up at the skeleton in it's eye sockets.
"Ah, young Mr. Jones," an old voice with a british accent said in a ghostly tone, "I see that you and your father found Julius Corna here first."
Shaggy turned toward the ghostly old man in a black tight shirt and khaki brown pants, the great grey beard flowing from his chin like a river of hair.
"Yeah, well, you're a lot slower than when I was 12, Hershey," the boy responded.
"Ha! I never slow, but you however, will now stop."
The man raised the gun to point directly at the boy's head, and being less than a meter away, the barrel was almost making an ident on the teenager's skull.
With lightning fast skill, the boy smacked the gun away from his head so the shot rang through the small false chamber and hit the skull of Julius Corna, making it shatter into dust and spray above Shaggy's head into Hershey's eyes.
The old man howled with pain and dropped his gun, trying to rub the fragments of bone out of his face. Shaggy took the opportunity to get his bo out and smack the switch to make the blades come out of the cyllander. He didn't need to.
A chunk of the ceiling chipped off, smacking the bearded old man in the head and bringing a gush of water into the chamber. All due to the bullet he had fired. The old man fell and was swept into raging feces current. With a scream of terror and defeat, he was gone.
Young Shaggy had another problem to worry about, though: the room was flooding.
He turned around in the sewer, searching for options and saw a way out.
The hole in the wall with the skeleton made it so a light could be seen shining into the room. The slush of dirty water was now up to his kneecaps.
Shaggy squared himself up and pounded the false wall with all his weight, but little happened. He saw the knife in Corna's rib cage and proceeded to draw it out to chip the wall away. But when he turned it, the wall opened up on it's own, revealing a room with a glass ceiling.
An underground construction site. Still no way out, though, and he couldn't let the workers see him or he'd be arrested. The room filled up with water as he jumped out. He made his way over to a nearby manhole, opened it up and made his way in.
A worker turned to his partner in the bright orange hard hat and made a face that said, “What did you eat?”

I
"Dad!" Shaggy said triumphantly, braving rough stares as the odor of the sewer was still on his person in the hotel lobby, as he burst through the lavish studio, "Dad, I got it!"
Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones, Jr. came out of the bathroom in his robe into the living room, cupped his hand over his nose and looked at his son.
"Whatever you have, it doesn’t smell like flowers," the 67 year old man stated. His cheeks were wrinkled and hair bright white, with a small bald patch on top of his head. His back had gotten a little weaker than in his younger years, too. Other than that, the old man was in perfect health.
"The last piece of the puzzle, pop. I told you I could do it," came a very cocky reply.
"Ah..." Indiana said, sitting in his robe on a blue leather couch, looking up at his son, "You had no business, Abne- sorry, Shaggy. Do you know what danger you put yourself in? I could've lost you!"
"Oh, Dad. You sound like grandpa when you say things like that, now take a look at this."
Shaggy, acting as nonchalant as possible in front of his mentor, was actually exploding with joy on the inside. His greatest want in life was to make his father say something like, "Nice job, son," or "Why don't you tag along?" He took the aged piece of cloth out of his pants and set it in the correct spot on what was already made of the map on a ruffy board. The map to the city of the golden mountain was now complete.
"Who knows what else we might find from this thing, Dad? The Ark of the Covenant? The Towers of Babel?" and then clasping a somewhat clean hand on his father's shoulder, Shaggy said, "The Holy Grail?"
"The Ark's in the U.S. government's hands, the towers of babel were destroyed and the Holy Grail's lost forever in H'alecandretta," came a mumbled reply.
"Huh?"
"Nevermind, that. And what's this 'we' stuff, kid? There's no chance in Hell that you're going on this expedition, Shaggy. It's just me and 2 or 3 students that I deem fit. You had no right to put yourself in danger. What if Janus Hershey came after you or there was some sort of trap?"
"Uh, Dad... I don't think we have to worry about Hershey anymore."
"What?"
"He came after me... Some sort of... eh... trap did him in," a sort of uneasiness filled the teen's speech.
"And you made it past all that, boy?"
"I even looked Corna in the eye. Sort of. Eye socket. The walls in the sewer chamber were kinda fake, pop."
Indiana just sighed and sat back on the couch. He nodded toward the bathroom.
"You smell like a sword thrower I once knew. Hit the shower, son. We have a plane to catch.”

II

When they finally got to Cambridge, Marion Ravenswood-Jones was almost done screaming at her husband about putting ideas in their son’s head.
“Marion, you know I can’t do my old globe-trotting nowadays…”
“So you’ll let your son do it for you, you bastard?”
“You know you’re beautiful when you’re angry.”
“You know I’m more beautiful now than when I was 16?”
“The boy wants to go, sweetheart,” he said, speeding up the Ford.
“Oh yeah? What are you after this time? The… the… shield of Tututiticaca?” Marion said, her lack of archeological knowledge showing through her teeth.
“No, actually, the lost city of Tt…” Henry stopped himself from sounding silly, “Never mind. The point is that archeology has gone the way of astronomy. Everyone was making up myths and having adventures in the stars and we didn’t know anything about them, but now, stars are just a bunch of balls of gases. Archeology is research, Marion, reading. Studying and analyzing if we’re lucky. There are no lost cities, there are no forgotten cultures, there are no ancient languages, it’s just fact, and the fact is, Marion, that X never, ever marks the spot.”
“So what you’re saying is that archeology is an exact science?”
“Exactly!”
“Belloq seemed to disagree with you.”
“And now Belloq is dead, and I’m still alive.”
“Fine, you win, you big jerk. Why did I ever marry you?”
Jones stopped the car on the side of the road.
“Because, Marion, I love you.”
“Oh, Indy…”
“Besides, there’s just one relic that I think is in that city.”
“Indy…”
“Yes.”
“What in the Hell do you think is important enough to fool me into one of your college speeches to get my…”
“…our.”
“…OUR son to endanger his life?”
"Something that Coronado, Cortez, Listo, Fererre..."
"Get on with it, Indy."
"...could only dream of finding. The fountain of youth, Marion."
"Oh."
There was a sudden silence as Henry continued driving, Indy looked all around himself. He thought that if he actually believed that the fountain was real, then he was as crazy as Marion's Dad or Belloq was about the Ark.
"Indy?" Marion suddenly broke the silence, and being in deep thought, Indy swerved across the road, cursing at himself.
"What do you want, sweetheart?!" Henry said, trying to stay on the road.
"Keep your eyes on the road, Jones!"
"I know, Marion!"
A truck swerved past them. Indy slammed the brake, but nothing happened.
"Indy!"
"Marion! What?"
"What?"
"What is it Marion!"
"Why aren't you stopping!? Hit the brake, you bastard!"
"The brake isn't working, Marion, but at least the road is flattening out."
They broke through a farmer's fence and were heading straight for a cow. Marion stuck her head out the window and started to wave it off in a panic.
Jones braced for impact, but nothing happened. They had stopped in a puddle of mud, sending Marion out the window from the sudden stop.
"Marion!"
The doctor got out and tredged through the mud to find his love covered in mud and laughed, almost maniacally.
"Shut up, Jones," Marion pouted through gritted teeth, "After you pay for those brakes, you're paying for my dress. And..."
She pulled him down into the mud.
"..a new jacket."
They both broke into a fit of senile laughter, hugging and kissing passionately. Indy pulled back suddenly.
"Where did we have to be, again?"
"Don't worry about it, Jones, we'll talk about it in the morning."
She wrapped her legs around him and kissed him passionately as the cow gave off a moo before falling asleep standing in front of their car.

III
The sentance How did I end up working with so many insane people? went through Abner's mind every few minutes at the Historical Society's Personal museum. A man with a large scar down his face, wearing a bullet proof vest and a dagger on his belt to his right, and a fair skinned woman with dark hair and an eccentric look in her eye to his left. They were following Dr. Chen down a hall filled with Egyptian and Arabian ahnks with a onyx trove every few feet, all 3 trying to make out the Doctor's broken English.

So now what? Hint: Dr. Chen is an older Short Round.


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