Finding the staff

Lara wiped the sweat from her brow as she proceeded down the corridor, vaguely aware of the fact that her pulse remained higher than normal. Paradoxically enough, the fact that she was so relaxed in the wake of her impromptu masturbation session, the precise cause of which still eluded her, had begun to worry her, and she willed herself into being on the lookout for any traps as she moved further and further down the length of the corridor. However, there proved to be no traps there, and she soon reached the end of it, finding herself at the threshold to another round, airy chamber equipped with a domed ceiling that rose to a height greater than thirty feet, a fact that became apparent as the candles that littered the room were brought to life in an uncannily orchestrated fashion as soon as Lara stood ready to enter the chamber. In the centre of the chamber, surrounded by the sea of candles that were mounted on the walls, mounted on candlesticks that stood spread across the room, or positioned directly on the floor with no holder at all, stood an altar, composed of several stone circles that grew thinner with each new layer. Mounted horizontally into the top of the altar was a staff, made from some sort of wood that glimmered darkly in the candlelight illumination.

“This is too easy,” Lara remarked, her brow furrowed as she scanned the chamber for a second time, making certain to note every detail of it. The floor and walls were without decoration, except for the round circle of stone, ten feet wide and ten feet high, that had been fitted directly into the wall on the opposite end of it from the doorways, of which there were three, lined up next to each other, one to her left and one to her right.

“Strange…” Lara muttered at the sight of the two other doorways, and the suggestion that all three paths would have led her to this chamber.
Carefully, she approached the altar. There was a rectangular slab of stone rising up out of the lowest, widest step of the altar, and she could make out glyphs carved into it. Around the altar, the floor was littered with a collection of weapons, pieces of armour and clothes. Amongst the assorted weapons, she could make out old obsidian spears, Spanish-style swords, flintlock pistols and even a Webley revolver.

“Obliteration will greet those who would hide themselves, only those who will not hide themselves shall succeed,” Lara interpreted the glyphs on the slab of stone. Then, whilst knowing that there were probably still scenes of mayhem and carnage being played out in other parts of the temple, she set about trying to decipher the meaning of the message.

“It can’t be,” Lara thought, but the residual arousal that was still present within her after the episode back in the corridor began to flare up, growing stronger as she considered the implications of her first interpretation of the message.

“Well, I suppose it would be a sort of reverence,” Lara thought, negotiating with herself, as she slipped off her backpack and eased it onto the floor, after which her hands began clawing at the bottom of her top.

“This really wasn’t how I imagined this day would turn out,” Lara said out loud, shaking her head at what she was about to do. And yet, as hard as she tried, she couldn’t come up with an interpretation of the glyphs’ riddle than the one that set her on this particular course of action. Lara’s full, round boobs jiggled as they popped free of her top when she pulled it up over her head. Now topless in the innermost chamber of some ancient temple, and fully recognizing how absurd the situation was, Lara proceeded to fold her top and place it on top of her backpack. Next, she got out of her boots and removed her socks, leaving her clad only in her shorts and the panties underneath them. Her holster was next to go, before Lara zipped open and unbuttoned the front of her shorts, pulling them down her long legs until she could step out of them.

She was now naked for her blue panties, the front of which still being a darker shade of blue than the rest thanks to her activities back in the corridor and the slowly burning sense of arousal that had been with her ever since, and after she’d placed her neatly folded shorts next to her backpack, Lara hesitated for a moment.

“I wonder what would have happened if I’d gone through one of the other doorways,” Lara thought to herself, before realising that she’d begun running two fingers up and down the front of her panties, stroking her pussy through the thin fabric.

“Well, I probably wouldn’t be doing this!” Lara exclaimed, out loud, chuckling at her own behaviour. She didn’t stop though, but instead began to moan dreamily as her digits traced their way up and down the outline of her pussy.

“If this is sexual madness,” Lara continued, much less loudly, but with a saucy grin glued to her beautiful face, “I can’t say it seems all that bad…”

But still, Lara willed herself into ceasing her slow stroking of her juicing little honeypot, and let slip an involuntary moan of arousal when she instead grasped hold of the waistband of her panties with both hands and began to tug them down at much slower pace than normal as she savoured the sensation of baring her pink, hairless to no one but herself.

“Mmm,” Lara purred, having already raised her right foot up into the air after stepping out of the panties with her left one, letting them dangle from her foot before jerking her ankle to make them fall down on top of her shorts on the backpack. Now completely naked, she immediately turned her attention back towards her snatch, whimpering with lust as she softly rubbed her right hand against it, coating first her fingers and then the palm of her hand with her wetness.

“It’s such a bloody shame…” Lara muttered, a sly smile on her lips that was transformed into a much more wanton grimace as she raised her hand up and took a long whiff of the scent of her aroused pussy, “here I am, all hot and bothered, and I’m a hundred miles from the nearest man who knows what a clit is.”

“Still, Lara old girl, you can complain about being underpaid and undersexed later,” Lara told herself, wiping her hand clean on her thigh, “there’s still work left to be done.”

Ignoring the itch between her legs, and silently acknowledging that it wasn’t just because of the spell or whatever it was in the corridor that she was so turned on by having stripped naked like this, Lara scrutinized the altar, searching once more for any further clues or any signs of a trap.
She found nothing that could be categorized as belonging to either of those categories, and so began to walk towards the altar, treading carefully and reminding herself of the Minotaur trap back by the bridge. No traps had been sprung by the time that she reached the first step, and while Lara cooed at the feel of cold, smooth stone against the soles of her feet, she pressed onwards.
As she stepped in front of the staff, which indeed had been stuck straight into the stone as though it was some knock-off version of Excalibur, Lara was provided with a much better look at it. Rather than being made exclusively from dark wood, which had been her first impression, the staff seemed to consist of two radically different types of wood, one dark to the point of verging on being black and the other a much lighter, almost caramel-coloured shade of brown, which had somehow been fused together, interlocking with each other as they spiralled upwards towards the head of the staff. The head, meanwhile, consisted of two vaguely male faces, both with noses and cheekbones suggesting that they were Native American in origin, the darker one twisted into a cruel, animalistic snarl and the lighter one taking the shape of a calm, dignified and quite obviously handsome man.
Squatting down, Lara continued to examine the staff, noting that there was no gap whatsoever between it and the stone altar, and that it was impossible how much taller it was than the roughly one yard of it that protruded up from the altar.

“Hopefully the ancient priests and kings who erected this temple weren’t silly enough that that’s how you unlock the staff…” Lara giggled at the thought that had just popped into her head, whilst giving her pussy a soft pat, “Though I’m probably wet enough for it to fit…”

“Yes, this definitely wasn’t how I imagined this would play out,” Lara said, before abruptly falling silent and adopting a much more serious expression, even taking a deep breath that made her full tits rise ever so before slightly sinking back to their usual position of sitting high and proud on her chest. Her breathing stopped altogether as she reached out and grabbed hold of the staff with both hands, an act which prompted an immediate reaction in the form of the staff beginning to rise upwards, with Lara clinging onto it as it rose further and further until it finally reached a length of more than one and a half metre, at which point it came loose from the altar and a soft clicking noise was heard underneath it. Looking down, Lara saw that the top of the altar was completely smooth, with no sign of the hole from which the staff had been released. As for the rest of the staff, it looked exactly like the topmost section of it, a simple but strange looking wooden staff with two different types of wood wrapping around each other without ever blending together.

“That was a bit anticlimactic,” Lara commented on the fact that the release of the staff hadn't resulted in the triggering of any traps or the temple beginning to collapse all around. Relieved, even while a small part of her was disappointed at this lack of excitement and danger, Lara returned to where she’d left her possessions, and carefully placed the staff on the floor. Just as she pulled her panties back on, she thought that she heard something…