Chapter 1.2 - Treys Abroad

Yo yo yo! Wow, it seems like I was just writing in here not too long ago about how I was waiting on my birthday.  Heh, guess I forgot to follow up after all the excitement. I probably would've completely forgotten about my journal if I hadn't needed it for a report for my French class. Guess I'd better catch up before I write that.

I was really excited when my birthday finally rolled around, and it was so totally awesome.  Yeah, a couple of Grandma and Grandpa's friends showed up, but mostly it was all my buddies. 

Yuna and Hanson had their birthdays earlier in the summer so we was all freshmen together.  Tabbi's still a year behind us; her folks think she's still too hyper and hasn't 'matured' enough for high school so they're keeping her back.  I say "Hey, look at Hanson. He's hyper and not mature, and he's going."

Not sure it'd work to convince 'em though.

Grandma wasn't too impressed with the new wardrobe I'd picked, but dang!  Big L is in the hizz-ouse!  LOL.  Okay, not quite.  But Grandma settled down and decided it wasn't too bad, cept for the hat. But I love the hat!  Only downside about it is that my ears stick out.  WTF?  Grandpa says I get them from my dad and that I shouldn't complain about 'em. He looked so sad when he said it that I shut up about em.

So anyway, my party was totally awesome, even if Hanson did have to take a time out part way through to settle down.  Grandma said he got too worked up cuz how all the sugar in the frosting makes some kids hyper. I tried to explain that, nah, he's always hyper like that but she didn't quite get it.

Truth be told, despite the rockin' party leading up to it, my freshman year was pretty boring.  The only real big excitement was when this guy joined us.

This is Falas.  Grandpa brought him home from work one day.  I guess the local no-kill shelter was having a pet fair and he stopped on his way back from work.  There was something about Falas that caught his eye.  Falas was an elder kitty and the shelter was concerned about being able to find him a forever home because of his age.  I just don't get some people, not wanting to adopt because someone isn't a puppy or kitten anymore.  How could you look at Falas and not fall in love with him?

Well, the two of them hit it off right off the bat, so Grandpa brought him home. They was instant BFFs and you can always find them watching TV together and stuff.  Falas also kicked Jeanie out of her doggie bed and took possession of it.

Jeanie was not amused (but she and Falas get along great otherwise)

Now, I know they say your high school years are supposed to be some of the best times of your life, but honestly mine seemed to be kinda boring. Hidden Flats ain't a real happening place. But the summer before my senior year balanced it all out by being AWESOME!  We went to France! 

I guess things finally settled down or evened out enough that whoever had us in secret protection or whatever said it was okay for us to travel and BOY did we travel!  Grandma's been talking about going to France for as long as I can remember.  It's like her ultimate dream.  Being a chef, I can understand, cuz it's like the place to go for cooking and all that stuff. 

We'd barely gotten settled in at our hostel before she'd taken off to one of the culinary libraries to start reading up and learning new recipes and whatever else cooks do in places like that.

Heck I was even inspired to try a little culinary magic myself, though I think my spell kinda backfired.

"It doesn't taste too bad, does it Grandpa?  I mean, you can barely taste the burned parts."

 "It's... not bad.  But maybe you should leave the cooking to your grandmother, Lerrin.  She is a professional."

*sigh*  Yup.  Grandpa was just being polite (he's like that)  Fact was, I wasn't going to be impressing any girls with my cooking skills -- and there's some fine chicks in France, lemme tell you -- so I was pretty bored after the first couple days.  This was not the way I'd wanted to spend my summer, bored off my ### in some foreign place. 

Luckily, my new friend Pierre had an idea.  See, his uncle was feeling a little under the weather and needed some help, and Pierre thought it might be just the sort of thing I'd be good at.

His uncle didn't seem too impressed me when I went to talk to him, but he said he'd give me a chance.  Monsieur LeBeau was the local antiquities administrator; all locally recovered relics and stuff needed to documented by him before they could be sold or taken out of the country.  He'd been working on recovering some artifacts from a local tomb but felt too sick to continue. Guess he had some bad frog legs or something. LOL. As he explained it to me, it was important to recover them before the looters got to them and while he didn't think I was up to it (I guess Pierre has recommended some lousy folks to him in the past) he was willing to let me try.

  Hey, how hard could it be? I'd seen the Simdiana Jones movies and I'd played all the Simara Croft Tomb Raider games (rawr!)  It all looked pretty easy to me.

But who knew there was all this manual labor involved?   I don't recall Simdy Jones mentioning anything about all this digging!  But I told Monsieur LeBeau I'd get his stupid relics for him, and I would. Grandma and Grandpa taught me that keeping your word is important.

Er, but I don't recall this ever coming up in the Tomb Raider games.  I must have missed the level where Simara got trapped behind the secret door and died of starvation.

It can't be all swinging pick axes and shoving rocks around though, right?  There's got to be some cool stuff -- like a secret hidden switch in this hole in the wall -- right?

 

Aaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!   Bugs!!!!  Maybe that skeleton I saw didn't starve to death! Maybe it was the bugs!!!

*does the crazy dance and shakes bugs off*

*sigh* At least they aren't snakes.

Okay, so there was some cool stuff in there. Yeah, there were creepy crawly bugs and rocks in the way and some nasty traps that scorched parts I probably shouldn't mention, but there neat things in there too.  Stuff like puzzles to figure out and secret doors to find.  The challenges I was running into was making me use my mind as much as my muscles.

I discovered something that wasn't mentioned in no movie or video game.  It seems along with curses, traps, and complex mazes and things like that, the ancients protected their tombs with elaborate locks that needed special keystones to open.  Monsieur LeBeau had given me the one to the treasure chamber before I left so I wasn't stuck beating my head against the wall when I finally reached it.

But really... heart shaped?  How cliché.  WTF was our ancestors thinking?

The graves and the stone chicks really creeped me out, but they weren't what I was there for.  I was really hoping there were no bugs in that hole I was gonna pull the artifact out of. I really couldn't handle more bugs.

Nope, no bugs.  Monsieur LeBeau was gonna be really happy when I brought this back to him.  Maybe he might even have a few more jobs I could do for him.  I guess France isn't as boring as I thought it might be.

In fact, I was really starting to enjoy it.  I could get used to this sort of greeting.

Grandpa was enjoying it too.  He finally had a chance to kick back and do nothing but his favorite pastime for hours and hours -- fishing.  There's no real good fishing spots in Hidden Flats, so he never gets to go back home a lot.

Grandma, on the other hand, found a new hobby.  When she was taking one of her cooking classes, one of the lectures was on nectar and nectar making, and it got her all interested in it.  So she signed up to take a class at the nearby nectary and learn how to make her own.

 Yup, Grandma jumped in feet first and put her all into learning how to make nectar.  I guess she really enjoyed it too, because she bought a bunch of equipment to bring back home, so she didn't need to keep going back to France.  France was keeping all of us all kinds of busy.

Monsieur LeBeau was impressed and excited when I came back with the artifacts he was looking for, and told me he sure did have some more jobs I could help him with.  All Pierre's slacker recommendations left him with a backlog of artifacts to recover (WTF didn't Pierre do this himself? Lazy dork)  So I explored a few more lost tombs, spooky caves, and haunted estates... with varying degrees of success.

But in the end, it was all worth it.  Heh.  I'm starting to enjoy this sneaky, stealthy, exploring stuff. Well, everything but the traps.

 Finally, though, it was time to head back to Hidden Flats.  Much as I liked France, it was really good to get back home. Good thing too, cuz Hanson was really starting to freak out.  Okay, Hanson always freaks out, but he sorta had reason to this time.

It seems Jeanie had a bit of a surprise waiting for us.

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My new pet Chippy.  He comes from France.