For those of you who read the first WIP, you're in for a bit of a surprise. The entire intro piece has been completely revamped, and is a completely new piece from the previous submission (don't worry, I still have it, and much of it will be groundwork for the piece that will follow the final version of this current draft). What can I say? Inspiration lead me down another path, and a long, slow day at work gave me a lot of time to think. Also, I incorporated a story element I'd worked out that hadn't fully gelled on its own into the intro, creating a mythos and story that has really added a lot of substance to not only Amelia's origin, but to where I would like to take this character, as well as greatly elaborating on the Enisha civilization, though the entirety of what I've concocted about them is not revealed yet. That is a mystery that is integral to Amelia's road of discovery, though I've made sure to talk a little more about them and make them more than simply a McGuffin/fluff for the sake of making a character.

What follows in a WIP of the piece, and as last time, any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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There had better be something down here, Amelia thought fervently. There has to be.

All of her findings and research led her here, and though the puma tried to reassure herself, the fact that this was the second week of searching, and that her last three expeditions had been busts, gave rise to a nagging doubt. It didn’t help her mentality that she was almost out of money for the trip as it was, and if this venture failed, she’d be dead broke. She couldn’t stop her mind from extrapolating the downward spiral that would surely follow.

Amelia shivered, despite all the cold weather gear she was bundled up in. While she knew any place still undiscovered had to be remote, she found herself wondering why anyone in their right mind would build a shrine in a place that was so blasted hard to reach.

Because they wanted it to remain hidden, she chided herself, again reminding herself that anything worth finding was worth searching for.

And so, once again, she made sure her pitons and line was secure, before carefully rappelling down yet another hole in the cave complex. This one she knew she had to take special care with, for no matter what angle she directed her helmet light, it illuminated nothing. As it was, she wasn’t entirely sure what she’d do if she reached the end of her rope without her boots touching something solid. She had a few stones in a pouch at her side to test depth, along with her trusty light, but even the first few drops from the top of the hole returned no discernable echo, which worried her.

But she had to try, and that was exactly what she was doing. She descended slowly, as much to keep her position stable while essentially dangling from the rope, having nothing to brace her feet against, as to keep from making any errors. Between the gloves, padding, and layers, she could hardly really feel a thing properly. Amelia wasn’t used to layers, more accustomed to warmer climes. Her first few big finds were in jungles, and she had grown to enjoy such warm weather, in spite of all the bugs. So long as one was prepared, it was often lovely weather. It was easy to carry around her stuff, to move, and really take her leisure investigating the sites. Sometimes, she recalled, she would even purposefully take her time translating writings just to have an excuse to enjoy the sun.

She nearly missed the end of the rope as she was lost in thought. Fortunately, that’s why she often made foolproof safeties in her equipment if it wasn’t an included feature, and her clip stopped abruptly as it hit the knot that marked the end of the rope. The jarring stop brought her full focus back to where it should be, and it took a few moments to get her heart to stop hammering from the surprise. Once it settled back to its normal rhythm, she extended her legs below her. As she had feared, they toughed nothing but air.

A bit dejectedly, she took a stone out of the pouch, looking up at the same time to make sure that her sudden stop hadn’t loosened anything. She didn’t have the money anymore to get more equipment, and if this rope wasn’t long enough, there was no way for her to explore this cavern. After dropping the stone however, she was surprised at how quickly and sharply she heard the impact. That meant that the floor couldn’t be more than a few feet below her, but if that were really the case, then she would have heard something from up top.

Maybe I just hit an outcropping or something, she thought, looking down to confirm her suspicion. Her light illuminated quite a broad area of stone beneath her. Surprised, she carefully turned her head as far as she could without rotating her position, looking both ways, to see how big the shelf was. The examination revealed that it was either an improbably large shelf of stone, or it was indeed a solid section of floor.

Must’ve been a weird play on the acoustics, she thought. But then, why couldn’t I see anything with my light either up top? After a few moments, she dismissed the thought. She was wasting precious time, and time was more valuable than money at the moment, especially with how intrinsically tied the two were for her.

Carefully unhooking herself from the safety latches, she slowly lowered herself down, dangling from the rope from her arms alone. It was a bit of a strain with the gear in her backpack weighing her down, but nothing she couldn’t handle. And as she got down as low as she could, he toes touched just managed to touch something solid. It would mean she’d have to jump to get back up to the rope, but she wouldn’t be trapped if she let go.

As her feet firmly hit the ground, making hardly a sound as they did, an involuntary shiver ran through her body. She felt oddly chilled, despite her layers, as though she were standing outside late autumn in a chill breeze wearing nothing but shorts. It was now the second shiver to run through her in only a few minutes, but this one was different.

“Place must be a natural freezer,” she mumbled to herself, “among other stupid natural phenomena. Still, this place certainly has all the ambience of an ancient shrine location.” She fumbled a bit with her gloved hands through her pack to retrieve her notes to double check something that came to mind, her fingers feeling even less sensitive then they had grasping the rope. Sure enough, what she was feeling was more or less described by the old journal, though in more verbose and mystical mumbo jumbo. It was her most solid lead in this now seemingly crazy venture, and when she’d first read through it, it had sounded more like exaggeration than crazy talk, which was a big factor as to why she was shivering in this remote cave.

She hadn’t actually thought it was real, reading it back in her study, but actually being there, she had to admit that in a way it was actually quite accurate. Still, it wasn’t as is “the darkness feed on the light, heat, and even the soul of the living” like the journal put it. Amelia thought it exasperating just how verbose and overdramatic some people could be, even in personal writings.

Setting the old book back into her pack, Amelia took a deep breath and picked a direction to walk until she hit a wall. From there, she could discern what exits there were and how big this hole really was. It was an eerily short lived search, as within moments her head lamp illuminated a stone wall of the cavern. “All right…this is kinda spooky,” she said, talking out loud to herself. It was a habit of hers that her friends occasionally joked about, as though it usually helped to calm her down, she was rarely actually conscious that she was actually talking aloud, rather than in her head.

Upon further inspection though, the stone did seem darker than usual. That would make them harder to see in the dark by itself, and it seemed like they also didn’t reflect much light either. Given those factors, the cave became less spooky and more interesting. The stone and acoustics made the cavern some kind of weird dead zone, affecting light, sound, and ambient heat. The stones would be more interesting to a geologist though, as she had something far more valuable in mind to find. Still, even the stones could be a find, so she made a mental note of it to mark it as an item of interest in her future report.

Luckily for her patience and schedule, there was but one path from the cavern that wasn’t the hole above her, which was also consistent with the journal she’d largely based this expedition upon. With a rising sense of hope, she set off at a brisk pace, the odd chill all but forgotten.

The tunnel was longer than she’d expected, or at least seemed to be. The stone of the cavern was present here as well, its annoying qualities almost making it seem as though her light was dimmer than it really was, making it difficult to see all that far ahead. She could see where she was stepping though, and despite the occasional bends, ups, and down, she was reasonably sure she was still on the same general bearing and elevation that she’d started on, which she thought unusual as well. Then again, it seemed like there was nothing really “usual” about this place, and the last thing she needed was her mind chasing shadows of unfounded conjectures.

She couldn’t really stop her mind from chasing such shadows completely however, flitting about the edges of her mind like buzzing gnats about her head, until she saw the double doors. That they were doors was obvious, standing near ten feet tall and nearly as wide combined, seemingly carved from the same stone the cavern was made of rather than installed from some exterior make. If that wasn’t enough, she saw what she knew to be Enisha inscriptions upon the door. She couldn’t read them, but she could recognize them instantly.

“Bingo.” Without further hesitation, she tested the door on the right, to see if she could get it to move. As she put her hands on the door, she felt instantly colder, and for a brief moment she felt as though her body was producing no heat, and that her skin was nothing more than a shell covering nothing, as though her insides suddenly matched the void of space.

The bizarre sensation was brief, but gave her pause. She’d never felt anything remotely like that before. Taking her hands away from the door, she slowly set them back onto the stone. Nothing special happened.

“Get a hold of yourself girl, there’s nothing to be afraid of. That’s all that was, fear. Even if there’s nothing inside, it’s still a find, and you will get a finder’s fee. That should surely cover the next few months at least as you look for something else. You don’t need to strike it rich. Just inventory what’s here and you’ll keep yourself from losing everything.”

But even as she began applying pressure to the door, there was that nagging sensation in the back of her mind that it had been more than the fear of crestfallen disappointment that would lead to a downward spiral starting with bankruptcy, as real and close as that fear had been over the last few months. She ignored it though, as the door came open with comparative ease on hinges that were remarkably smooth. She still needed to push, but no more than thick steel factory doors would need.

Turning her head to look inside, all other thoughts were banished from her mind with the sight before her. The doors opened into a pristine and elegantly carved chamber with a seemingly perfectly smooth domed roof, devoid of the light dampening stone, giving her a perfect view of the statues lined along the walls. They were life size representations of people, each a different color in her light, and even from a distance she knew them to be of incredible craftsmanship and unblemished from time.

At the opposite end of the room stood a solid black figure, though the species she wasn’t sure of at a distance. Looking left and right, there were similar figures in dark blue, light blue, brown, orange, and white.

“Jackpot,” she breathed, her inner jubilation so great that her body could not even comprehend what to do, and so stood there, almost shaking. She knew what these figures must surely represent; the avatars of existence that the Enisha worshiped like gods. Until this point, there had only been vague references to their existence found, so vague that, though it was the strongest evidence of the Enisha being a truly separate culture, it was debated that it was just interpretation and verbiage and not an actual distinction. This, however, would shut up any naysayers, as this was solid, physical proof.

It took several long moments before she could move, reminding herself that she had to play her cards right if she was going to get the most out of it. And the first step in that was to examine all things present and get a value of their worth, both archeologically and monetarily.

Thinking it easier to go in a circle around the room, Amelia turned to her right and approached the dark blue statue, the first in the line. Taking a proper look at it, she found it to depict a handsome wolf, devoid of clothes, and anatomically correct in every way. Though the posing was rather bland, just standing in a neutral position, up close she could really appreciate the exquisite level of detail, so that the statue almost seemed to have fur. The statue almost seemed to be alive, it was so lifelike.

Noticing the gleam the material, she leaned in closer, and thought if she had any more shocks that she’d surely have a heart attack. The statue was made of what she was positive was sapphire. How in the world that was possible she had no idea, but she did know that the finder’s fee on this piece alone could likely be enough to set her for life, let alone the other five. And if the other five were made of precious stones or metals like this one was…

Calm down, she tried to tell herself, her hands visibly shaking in her excitement. Don’t rush it. Appraise this one, then move on to the next.

Taking off a glove, she felt the statue, to see if it felt like the gemstone she thought it was, and to feel if there were any blemishes. Once again, something other than a sense of touch reached her mind. For a similarly brief moment, she felt like she was submerged in water, with a calming relaxation over her. But the feeling was not as strong as what she had felt when she’d touched the door, and also was a more exterior, distant sensation, though it was over just as quickly. That feeling she couldn’t pass off as having a root in her anxiety, as it was almost the exactly opposite feeling. And it didn’t seem to match the euphoria she was dealing with either.

“Calm down,” she told herself once more, taking a few deep breaths to emphasis the command. “You’re just letting your emotions get the better of you. It’s been a taxing few months for you, physically and emotionally. Get through this, take a month off, as you have at least that much, then get the ball rolling on this find. It’ll be okay.”

Thinking of home, her mind saw an almost uncanny resemblance between the wolf depicted in sapphire and her friend Damian. In fact, as she continued to scrutinize it, it practically looked as though the statue were actually modeled off of him, such was the resemblance. Amelia found the coincidence quite amusing. She’d have to point that out to him when she could. Heck, maybe she’d joke about it with him in that month off. She’d been so desperate to find something to bring in some money that she’d hardly seen him in the past year. With this find though, she’d be able to spend a lot more time with all her friends.

As her gaze began to sweep over the room as she made her way to the next statue, depicting a horned lizard that she speculated was made of topaz given the orange hue, her head came to an abrupt stop as it spotted a break in the arrangement of statues. There was a blank stand between the brown and white ones, the space she recognized as belonging to the black one, the one that had been directly across the room from the doors. But…it wasn’t there now. It simply just wasn’t there anymore.

Moving her head more to the left, she thought her memory must have gotten jumbled in her excitement, until she saw the black statue standing in the middle of the chamber, where she knew it hadn’t been there before. More disturbing, it didn’t look like a statue anymore, the reflections showing a smooth flowing form rather than that of a carving.

And then it moved.

Amelia stumbled over herself in fear, panic quickly threatening to overwhelm her. There simply was no rational explanation for what she was seeing, unless she was hallucinating. Maybe that’s all it was, that there was something in the air that was getting to her head. But the thing seemed real enough, and it was between her and the door.

Now that it was closer, she could see that it resembled a puma, and perhaps more disturbing than the fact that what should be an inanimate statue moving with fluid grace, was the fact that it possessed a disturbing resemblance to herself.

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There is a fair bit of dialogue that follows,but at the moment I'm not satisfied with how it's going, so I've left it off. The rest of it I am currently rather pleased with, which is part of the reason I'm sharing it with you all now, as I've certainly been more than overdue in giving all of you a reason to continue watching me. That, and I really appreciated the feedback I got last time.

As you've no doubt noticed, there is yet to be any element similar to the engulfment leading to transformation like there was in the last WIP I posted, despite what I have posted being the same length. Rest assured, it is coming; that is one story element that will be in the final piece, but that comes after some dialogue, which is the current hurdle. The story is far more complex than "fortune hunter finds McGuffin that changes her and now bad people are after her", that was really all I had the first time around, and I hope to capture that in a way that will captivate my readers.

If you can spare the time, I'd greatly appreciate hearing what you think. While a critique would be lovely, even just passing thoughts or opinions will do. As I'm coming out of my rut, expect to see a fair bit more from me, with the finished draft of this piece being just the start. I kinda feel I owe it to you to show you all what I've been doing, and showing you some work that I'm really starting to feel proud in.

Thank you all for reading.