Lara awakes in the wilderness

Lara awoke underneath the dense foliage of a spruce tree, and could hear the chirping of birds. Rolling out from under the tree, she got up on her feet.

“Where the hell am I?” It was a motivated question, since she obviously wasn't in the tomb, or even on the island, any longer. Instead, she was standing in a wooded landscape, with tall spruces and pines rising all around her up and down the shallow slope on which she'd ended up.

Remaining on her feet, Lara did a 360 degree sweep of her surroundings, both to examine them and to make sure that no one was watching her. There wasn't anyone else in sight, nor any sign of the Wayfarer stone, and judging from the landscape, she was in Norway or Sweden rather than Iceland, although why someone would, upon stumbling upon her form down in the tomb, pack her up and bring her straight across the North Atlantic just to dump her in a Scandinavian forest was a question that Lara couldn't answer. Unless she'd been by the militant wing of the Norwegian tourist board, but that seemed unlikely. Although it was undeniably summer here, and it had been December. There were parts of New Zealand that resembled Scandinavia, weren't there?

Squatting down on her haunches and making the peeping toms of the world release a collective sigh that they weren't there to watch her do so, Lara slipped off her backpack. Retrieving her satellite phone, she tried calling back home, and cursed silently when she couldn't even get a signal. Her PDA wasn't of any use either, which left Lara without the ability to contact anyone. So there was nothing else for it then but to pick a direction and start heading in it.

Since she thought she could see the forest end not much further down the slope, Lara chose to head that way, advancing carefully across the broken, moss-covered ground while keeping a lookout for anyone sneaking after her amongst the trees. Oddly enough, not only did she still have her backpack - and at first glance, it hadn't appeared that anything had been taken from it – but her pistols remained holstered on her hips, and a brass check had revealed that they were both still loaded.

Lara's estimate had been correct, and consequently she soon found herself standing at the edge of the forest, overlooking a long valley located between rolling hills such as the one she'd been climbing down. In the valley, probably not much more than a mile away, lay a large village of some sort. Snatching her binoculars from her backpack, Lara took a closer look at the village. It consisted largely of wooden buildings, with the odd stone one thrown in there as well, and seemed to straddle the dirt road that ran along the valley floor. None of the houses looked like they were more than three storeys tall at the most, and they were uniformly built in a utilitarian style, with little in the way of decorations or anything to suggest that they were mass-produced modern houses.

“This is odd...” Lara muttered, only to fall silent when she swept the binoculars along the road and found herself looking through them at what appeared to be a small mammoth pulling a heavy-looking wagon, a man sitting astride the furry beast of burden while two more walked alongside it.

“Well, not as odd as that...” Lowering the binoculars for a moment, Lara soon raised them again, and used them to scrutinize the figures surrounding the mammoth. The two men walking on the dirt road were both wielding spears and had big, round shields slung across their backs, and both of them had a conical helmet dangling from his belt while his abdomen was covered with thick leather armour. Apart from their spears, one man had an axe tucked into his belt and the other a sword sheathed by his side. As for the man mounted atop the mammoth, he had a crude, wooden crossbow lain across his lap.

Lowering the binoculars again, Lara tried to make sense of what she'd just seen. Either she'd stumbled upon some very ambitious live action role players – ambitious and crazy enough to get themselves an African elephant and then gluing lots of fur onto it – or the stone had somehow sent her off to a very strange place indeed.

Either way, she had to decide on what to do next.