Astonishing Travels eMagazine
During the promotion of Tomb Raider Legacy of Atlantis, Meagan Marie created a series of magazine articles named 'Field Notes', which follows Editor-in-Chief Nora Bennett and conspiracy theorist Julian Mercer as they keep track on Lara Croft's movements. Each issue provides a new backstory on how Lara gets to her locations, why she might be there and providing more backstory on Natla and her interests.
For archiving reasons, we've put the article entry below in a drop box. Be warned, they are lengthy reads!!
For archiving reasons, we've put the article entry below in a drop box. Be warned, they are lengthy reads!!
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Issue 310: Lara Croft: Tracking the "Tomb Raider" through the Andes
Nora: Welcome back to Field Notes, Astonishing Travels' recurring roundtable series, where the editorial standards are a little looser, and speculation gets a seat at the table. I'm Nora Bennett, Editor-in-Chief, and joining me as always is our resident fringe specialist Julian Mercer, who spent the last month harassing archaeologists, aviation analysts, and likely government employees in pursuit of this story.
Julian: Allegedly…
Julian: …and I'd like to remind our readers that today's fringe theory has a habit of becoming tomorrow's accepted history. Continental drift was rejected. Copernican heliocentrism was considered heretical in medieval times. Troy was considered myth right up until somebody started digging it out of the ground.
Nora: And that’s why I continue allowing you on these pages, Julian. Just in case one of your theories survives contact with reality. You provide entertainment. I’m here to keep you grounded and Astonishing Travels out of litigation.
Julian: That, and you’d never pass up a Lara Croft cover story.
Nora: Potential cover story. You have to earn it.
Julian: ...Which brings us to my ongoing act of optimism.
Nora: A tradition as unsuccessful as it is persistent.
Julian: Lara, if you're listening, the invitation still stands: one interview and all this speculation goes away. Our door remains open.
Nora: Do you genuinely believe she reads Astonishing Travels?
Julian: Maybe not her personally. But she’s posh enough to have people, right?
Nora: You're assuming she has staff dedicated to managing fan mail?
Julian: You wound me. I assume she has staff dedicated to managing everything.
Nora: Onward. Set the scene, Julian.
Julian: First, the facts. Lara Croft was recently in Peru under unclear circumstances.
Nora: How did you determine she was in Peru?
Julian: Aviation tracking. As with many of our more interesting stories, monitoring aircraft associated with high-profile explorers and private collectors can be surprisingly productive.
Nora: Leading with hard evidence. Starting strong, Julian.
Julian: What caught my attention was where the aircraft landed: a remote strip primarily servicing ore extraction operations in the Andes. Not tourism. Not research. Certainly not somewhere associated with major active archaeological digs.
Nora: Before you get ahead of yourself, flight records don’t prove Lara Croft was personally onboard. Private aircraft get loaned out all the time.
Julian: True. But two days earlier, one of my local contacts flagged an unusual arrival at the same strip. An aircraft linked to Jacqueline Natla, of all people.
Nora: Natla Technologies?
Julian: The very same. Natla herself wasn’t onboard, but the contact described a single passenger deplaning. A blond American man.
Nora: Did you identify him?
Julian: His arrival was kept off the books, and no matches were found through any of our usual channels. No social footprint, no public profiles I could reliably connect to Natla. Either he’s intentionally difficult to trace, or he’s simply very good at staying out of photographs. The whole thing was odd enough that I asked my contact to keep an eye on future arrivals.
Nora: And then Croft’s aircraft landed.
Julian: Exactly. Ground staff confirmed she disembarked personally. Lara Croft is uniquely identifiable due to the brunette hair, long braid, aristocratic accent, and…twin pistols.
Nora: You think the two are connected?
Julian: Possibly. At that point, all I had was an unusual arrival followed by another unusual arrival.
Nora: Natla's interests are firmly in technology. Rare earth extraction attracts powerful people. Why do you connect this to Croft?
Julian: Natla Technologies has always had a wider reach than the name suggests.
Nora: Such as?
Julian: Biotech. Pharmaceuticals. The Amazon is one of the richest natural laboratories on Earth.
Nora: You're thinking about sloth fur again, aren't you?
Julian: I maintain that sloths deserve more respect. A fungus discovered in sloth fur showed activity against certain cancer cells. That's exactly the sort of discovery that attracts pharmaceutical investment in remote ecosystems.
Nora: Julian...
Julian: I digress. More relevantly, Natla Technologies has also quietly funded archaeological projects in the past.
Nora: Buried the lead there, didn't you?
Julian: None resulted in major public discoveries, but there is a pattern. Natla seems unusually interested in reports of so-called lost technologies and forgotten knowledge.
Nora: Better.
Julian: Which is why Lara turning up in the same corner of Peru got my attention. Lara then surfaced in a small Andean mountain settlement several hundred kilometers from the airstrip, one not known for visitors…
Nora: Hold on. How exactly did you track her movements beyond the airport?
Julian: Satellite imagery confirmed the village. A local source confirmed Croft.
Nora: You have access to satellites now?
Julian: Not directly. But I knew this story had legs, so I called in a big favor. Let’s just say there are circles adjacent to archaeology that possess resources most journalists don’t.
Nora: I’m sorry, ‘raider networks’ are a thing now?
Julian: I didn't say that.
Nora: You sort of did.
Julian: The important detail is that the blond American connected to Natla was already at the village when Croft arrived.
Nora: …So now we have Lara Croft and Natla-linked personnel, both arriving at a remote mining airstrip in Peru, before traveling to an isolated Andean settlement.
Julian: Exactly. I think coincidence becomes less convincing the more often it occurs.
Nora: Alright, you’ve got my attention.
Nora: Okay, so why Peru? It’s a massive country with diverse terrain, ancient history, and living cultures. There are numerous things that could attract Lara Croft, including the mountains themselves. She’s an accomplished mountaineer, and this section of the Andes is incredibly remote. A first ascent alone could draw climbers from around the world.
Julian: Sure, and the climbing equipment tracks. The logistics don’t.
Nora: Explain.
Julian: Serious mountaineering expeditions leave a bigger footprint including climbing permits, equipment rentals, and if an uncharted route, significant local coordination. Lara kept the entire operation unusually small and avoided every conventional route into the region. To be fair, she isn’t known for taking a “by the books” approach to anything. She’s chased adrenaline before, certainly, but this feels much more targeted than thrill-seeking.
Nora: So the mountain wasn’t the destination.
Julian: Exactly. It was the obstacle between her and whatever she was actually looking for.
Nora: Fair enough. And… if I remember correctly, Lara has history in Peru.
Julian: Correct.
Nora: In her early twenties, Lara was tied to some…quite dramatic events in Peru and rumored to have been pursuing a lost city. Nothing was ever confirmed, unfortunately.
Julian: Exactly. And South America has no shortage of legendary lost cities to obsess over including Paititi, El Dorado, the Lost City of Z… even Vilcabamba.
Nora: Vilcabamba doesn’t fit the pattern. Historians consider it found.
Julian: Most historians do.
Nora: Here we go. The region Lara entered, deep in the Peruvian Andes, is associated primarily with highland cultures such as the Inca. I'll give you that. Couldn't the area still contain artifacts of high cultural value?
Julian: Certainly. But I don’t think Lara Croft flies into remote territory for a kero (a ceremonial Andean drinking vessel, for readers unfamiliar) regardless of its historical significance.
Nora: You think the scale is wrong.
Julian: Exactly. Lara has always been more interested in mysteries than museum pieces.
Nora: To be fair, she said as much in one of her few public lectures. A fact she felt obligated to make clear in direct response to being given the moniker “the Tomb Raider” in the British tabloids.
Julian: Which makes a traditional artifact feel… small. No disrespect intended to the archaeological community.
Nora: You’re suggesting she was chasing something bigger.
Julian: Something unresolved.
Nora: …and we’ve arrived at the heart of the matter.
Julian: Vilcabamba.
Nora: This still feels like a stretch to me. Vilcabamba is a known archaeological site. A tourist destination, even, for people willing to brave the terrain. So, walk me through your theory.
Julian: The problem is that “Vilcabamba” no longer refers to one clear thing. Depending on who you ask, it can mean a region, a mountain range, multiple cities, or simply the final chapter of organized Inca resistance.
Nora: Give our readers the abridged version, then.
Julian: Vilcabamba was long considered one of South America’s many mythical lost cities before archaeologists eventually connected it to the ruins now known as Espíritu Pampa, translated to “Plain of the Spirits”, in Peru’s Cusco region.
Nora: But the identification process was messy, right?
Julian: Very. Vilcabamba, which means "sacred plain" in Quechua, originally referred to a much larger region inhabited by the Inca beginning around the 15th century. The territory stretched from the high Andes down towards the Amazon Basin and encompassed mountains, cloud forests, rivers, jungle. Brutal terrain.
Nora: The Inca were not the first to inhabit the area, though. Earlier cultures like the Wari had occupied parts of it long before.
Julian: Correct. The area had a storied history before the Inca’s last stand. After major conflicts with the Spanish in the 1530s, Manco Inca, the then ruler, relocated the capital deeper into the Vilcabamba region, believing the terrain would make invasion nearly impossible. And for decades, he was right.
Nora: Until the Spanish made their final advance.
Julian: Right again. In 1572 the last Inca stronghold fell and the final ruler Túpac Amaru was captured and executed.
Nora: And over time the jungle reclaimed much of the region. The city became a myth to many.
Julian: For centuries, historians weren’t entirely sure which ruins actually represented Vilcabamba. Machu Picchu itself was once incorrectly identified as the lost city by Hiram Bingham after his 1911 expedition.
Nora: I’ll concede that even modern histories got parts of the story wrong.
Julian: Exactly. It took decades of competing theories, expeditions, and archaeological debate before Espíritu Pampa became widely accepted as Vilcabamba.
Nora: Go on...
Julian: History tends to simplify messy collapses. The Inca were exceptional engineers and strategic planners. Vilcabamba represents the last known defensive stronghold of the Neo-Inca. I’m not alone in thinking that the broader refuge network included secondary settlements, fallback locations, or protected sanctuaries deeper in the Andes.
Nora: You’re suggesting historians identified part of the system, but not necessarily all of it.
Julian: Exactly.
Nora: Any chance you’d like to bolster your claim’s legitimacy by identifying some of your fellow theorists?
Julian: Absolutely not. My social media footprint grants me the luxury of being dismissed professionally. Most academics still need tenure.
Nora: Humble and pragmatic.
Julian: Always. But there have long been quiet references from fragmented colonial accounts, disputed translations, scattered oral histories, hinting at more remote refuges beyond the traditionally accepted Vilcabamba sites. Smaller. Better hidden. Potentially reserved for leadership if the primary settlements fell.
Nora: Rumor is not evidence, Julian.
Julian: No. But unresolved history tends to produce both.
Nora: So, your theory is that Lara traveled into this isolated Andean region searching for the “true” last refuge of the Inca?
Julian: I think she was searching for something connected to the unresolved parts of the Vilcabamba story.
Nora: But if such a place existed, surely the Spanish would have eventually discovered it. And if they had, there would be records.
Julian: Unless the records were incomplete. Or no one survived, Inca or invaders, to author them.
Nora: Well. That’s appropriately ominous.
Nora: Okay, we’ve gone on quite a tangent. Back to what we know. The village.
Julian: We recruited a local willing to report back to us. According to her, the blond American appeared to be deliberately avoiding Lara. He observed her from a distance, never approaching directly.
Nora: Go on.
Julian: After several days of planning and stocking up on supplies, Lara departed with a local guide named Carlos. No surname given. Our source reported what little was known about him. No family, risk taker, a bit of a loner…
Nora: Sounds like Lara found a kindred spirit.
Julian: Like minds and all that. He had a reputation for taking difficult jobs and apparently knew the nearby peaks better than anyone. I suspect that’s why Lara hired him.
Julian: Anyway, the blond American left several hours after Lara and Carlos, following the same route into the mountains. He returned days later looking significantly worse for wear, covered in bruises and walking with a limp, before eventually returning to the remote airstrip and departing aboard the same Natla Technologies-linked aircraft.
Nora: And Carlos?
Julian: Never returned to the village.
Nora: That’s… concerning.
Julian: Lara didn’t return through the village either. She eventually made her way back to the airstrip via an unknown route. But Carlos was local. People noticed when he didn’t come back.
Nora: Careful. I enjoy avoiding defamation lawsuits.
Julian: For the record, I’m implying nothing. There are countless explanations for someone disappearing in terrain like that.
Nora: Such as?
Julian: The Peruvian Andes are home to apex predators such as pumas. This region also has bears, an assortment of aggressive cave-dwelling bats, and strangely, packs of unidentified canids. Locals describe them as too large to be Andean foxes or feral dogs; they keep out of those mountains for good reason.
Nora: So between the altitude, the unpredictable weather, the rugged terrain, and the unusual wildlife, we're talking about an extremely remote and dangerous environment. Accidents happen.
Julian: Frequently.
Nora: Personally, I choose to believe Carlos took that Croft coin and started a peaceful new life somewhere warmer.
Julian: One can hope. But all of this is exactly why the region interests me.
Nora: The danger?
Julian: The isolation. Places like that can hide things for a very long time. Like the last refuge of a fallen empire...wink wink.
Nora: Did you just wink out loud?
Julian: Yes, for sake of the transcript.
Nora: … Well, if we're indulging increasingly unlikely theories, Peru has produced some genuinely strange paleontological discoveries over the years. Lara Croft has been linked to several improbable stories. We’ve covered one particularly persistent rumor involving Bigfoot extensively. Perhaps she was in Peru hunting "prehistoric predators"...
Julian: And people call me a conspiracy theorist.
Nora: I’m trying to speak your language. Although I recognize dinosaurs would technically be the wrong kind of bones for an archeologist's remit.
Julian: And Lara seems to prefer the ones that come with ancient curses and elaborate death traps. In all seriousness, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something important hidden in those mountains.
Nora: Then explain this to me. Even if a second Inca refuge existed, how would they have built it? Inca engineering was extraordinary, yes, but the Andes are unforgiving.
Julian: Perhaps they had help from an advanced ancient civilization?
Nora: Julian.
Julian: That was a joke.
Nora: Good. Because even Astonishing Travels has standards. There’s no place for that ancient aliens shit here.
Julian: Fair enough. The truth is, whatever Lara was searching for up there remains unresolved. But people don’t move through hidden airstrips, isolated villages, and remote mountain corridors like that without a reason.
Nora: So your official position is still “something strange happened in Peru.”
Julian: My official position is that Lara Croft found something important enough to keep hidden.
Nora: …And you think that earns you a cover story?
Editor’s Note: He got the cover. Even incomplete, it’s a compelling story with an equally compelling character
Julian: Allegedly…
Julian: …and I'd like to remind our readers that today's fringe theory has a habit of becoming tomorrow's accepted history. Continental drift was rejected. Copernican heliocentrism was considered heretical in medieval times. Troy was considered myth right up until somebody started digging it out of the ground.
Nora: And that’s why I continue allowing you on these pages, Julian. Just in case one of your theories survives contact with reality. You provide entertainment. I’m here to keep you grounded and Astonishing Travels out of litigation.
Julian: That, and you’d never pass up a Lara Croft cover story.
Nora: Potential cover story. You have to earn it.
Julian: ...Which brings us to my ongoing act of optimism.
Nora: A tradition as unsuccessful as it is persistent.
Julian: Lara, if you're listening, the invitation still stands: one interview and all this speculation goes away. Our door remains open.
Nora: Do you genuinely believe she reads Astonishing Travels?
Julian: Maybe not her personally. But she’s posh enough to have people, right?
Nora: You're assuming she has staff dedicated to managing fan mail?
Julian: You wound me. I assume she has staff dedicated to managing everything.
Nora: Onward. Set the scene, Julian.
Julian: First, the facts. Lara Croft was recently in Peru under unclear circumstances.
Nora: How did you determine she was in Peru?
Julian: Aviation tracking. As with many of our more interesting stories, monitoring aircraft associated with high-profile explorers and private collectors can be surprisingly productive.
Nora: Leading with hard evidence. Starting strong, Julian.
Julian: What caught my attention was where the aircraft landed: a remote strip primarily servicing ore extraction operations in the Andes. Not tourism. Not research. Certainly not somewhere associated with major active archaeological digs.
Nora: Before you get ahead of yourself, flight records don’t prove Lara Croft was personally onboard. Private aircraft get loaned out all the time.
Julian: True. But two days earlier, one of my local contacts flagged an unusual arrival at the same strip. An aircraft linked to Jacqueline Natla, of all people.
Nora: Natla Technologies?
Julian: The very same. Natla herself wasn’t onboard, but the contact described a single passenger deplaning. A blond American man.
Nora: Did you identify him?
Julian: His arrival was kept off the books, and no matches were found through any of our usual channels. No social footprint, no public profiles I could reliably connect to Natla. Either he’s intentionally difficult to trace, or he’s simply very good at staying out of photographs. The whole thing was odd enough that I asked my contact to keep an eye on future arrivals.
Nora: And then Croft’s aircraft landed.
Julian: Exactly. Ground staff confirmed she disembarked personally. Lara Croft is uniquely identifiable due to the brunette hair, long braid, aristocratic accent, and…twin pistols.
Nora: You think the two are connected?
Julian: Possibly. At that point, all I had was an unusual arrival followed by another unusual arrival.
Nora: Natla's interests are firmly in technology. Rare earth extraction attracts powerful people. Why do you connect this to Croft?
Julian: Natla Technologies has always had a wider reach than the name suggests.
Nora: Such as?
Julian: Biotech. Pharmaceuticals. The Amazon is one of the richest natural laboratories on Earth.
Nora: You're thinking about sloth fur again, aren't you?
Julian: I maintain that sloths deserve more respect. A fungus discovered in sloth fur showed activity against certain cancer cells. That's exactly the sort of discovery that attracts pharmaceutical investment in remote ecosystems.
Nora: Julian...
Julian: I digress. More relevantly, Natla Technologies has also quietly funded archaeological projects in the past.
Nora: Buried the lead there, didn't you?
Julian: None resulted in major public discoveries, but there is a pattern. Natla seems unusually interested in reports of so-called lost technologies and forgotten knowledge.
Nora: Better.
Julian: Which is why Lara turning up in the same corner of Peru got my attention. Lara then surfaced in a small Andean mountain settlement several hundred kilometers from the airstrip, one not known for visitors…
Nora: Hold on. How exactly did you track her movements beyond the airport?
Julian: Satellite imagery confirmed the village. A local source confirmed Croft.
Nora: You have access to satellites now?
Julian: Not directly. But I knew this story had legs, so I called in a big favor. Let’s just say there are circles adjacent to archaeology that possess resources most journalists don’t.
Nora: I’m sorry, ‘raider networks’ are a thing now?
Julian: I didn't say that.
Nora: You sort of did.
Julian: The important detail is that the blond American connected to Natla was already at the village when Croft arrived.
Nora: …So now we have Lara Croft and Natla-linked personnel, both arriving at a remote mining airstrip in Peru, before traveling to an isolated Andean settlement.
Julian: Exactly. I think coincidence becomes less convincing the more often it occurs.
Nora: Alright, you’ve got my attention.
Nora: Okay, so why Peru? It’s a massive country with diverse terrain, ancient history, and living cultures. There are numerous things that could attract Lara Croft, including the mountains themselves. She’s an accomplished mountaineer, and this section of the Andes is incredibly remote. A first ascent alone could draw climbers from around the world.
Julian: Sure, and the climbing equipment tracks. The logistics don’t.
Nora: Explain.
Julian: Serious mountaineering expeditions leave a bigger footprint including climbing permits, equipment rentals, and if an uncharted route, significant local coordination. Lara kept the entire operation unusually small and avoided every conventional route into the region. To be fair, she isn’t known for taking a “by the books” approach to anything. She’s chased adrenaline before, certainly, but this feels much more targeted than thrill-seeking.
Nora: So the mountain wasn’t the destination.
Julian: Exactly. It was the obstacle between her and whatever she was actually looking for.
Nora: Fair enough. And… if I remember correctly, Lara has history in Peru.
Julian: Correct.
Nora: In her early twenties, Lara was tied to some…quite dramatic events in Peru and rumored to have been pursuing a lost city. Nothing was ever confirmed, unfortunately.
Julian: Exactly. And South America has no shortage of legendary lost cities to obsess over including Paititi, El Dorado, the Lost City of Z… even Vilcabamba.
Nora: Vilcabamba doesn’t fit the pattern. Historians consider it found.
Julian: Most historians do.
Nora: Here we go. The region Lara entered, deep in the Peruvian Andes, is associated primarily with highland cultures such as the Inca. I'll give you that. Couldn't the area still contain artifacts of high cultural value?
Julian: Certainly. But I don’t think Lara Croft flies into remote territory for a kero (a ceremonial Andean drinking vessel, for readers unfamiliar) regardless of its historical significance.
Nora: You think the scale is wrong.
Julian: Exactly. Lara has always been more interested in mysteries than museum pieces.
Nora: To be fair, she said as much in one of her few public lectures. A fact she felt obligated to make clear in direct response to being given the moniker “the Tomb Raider” in the British tabloids.
Julian: Which makes a traditional artifact feel… small. No disrespect intended to the archaeological community.
Nora: You’re suggesting she was chasing something bigger.
Julian: Something unresolved.
Nora: …and we’ve arrived at the heart of the matter.
Julian: Vilcabamba.
Nora: This still feels like a stretch to me. Vilcabamba is a known archaeological site. A tourist destination, even, for people willing to brave the terrain. So, walk me through your theory.
Julian: The problem is that “Vilcabamba” no longer refers to one clear thing. Depending on who you ask, it can mean a region, a mountain range, multiple cities, or simply the final chapter of organized Inca resistance.
Nora: Give our readers the abridged version, then.
Julian: Vilcabamba was long considered one of South America’s many mythical lost cities before archaeologists eventually connected it to the ruins now known as Espíritu Pampa, translated to “Plain of the Spirits”, in Peru’s Cusco region.
Nora: But the identification process was messy, right?
Julian: Very. Vilcabamba, which means "sacred plain" in Quechua, originally referred to a much larger region inhabited by the Inca beginning around the 15th century. The territory stretched from the high Andes down towards the Amazon Basin and encompassed mountains, cloud forests, rivers, jungle. Brutal terrain.
Nora: The Inca were not the first to inhabit the area, though. Earlier cultures like the Wari had occupied parts of it long before.
Julian: Correct. The area had a storied history before the Inca’s last stand. After major conflicts with the Spanish in the 1530s, Manco Inca, the then ruler, relocated the capital deeper into the Vilcabamba region, believing the terrain would make invasion nearly impossible. And for decades, he was right.
Nora: Until the Spanish made their final advance.
Julian: Right again. In 1572 the last Inca stronghold fell and the final ruler Túpac Amaru was captured and executed.
Nora: And over time the jungle reclaimed much of the region. The city became a myth to many.
Julian: For centuries, historians weren’t entirely sure which ruins actually represented Vilcabamba. Machu Picchu itself was once incorrectly identified as the lost city by Hiram Bingham after his 1911 expedition.
Nora: I’ll concede that even modern histories got parts of the story wrong.
Julian: Exactly. It took decades of competing theories, expeditions, and archaeological debate before Espíritu Pampa became widely accepted as Vilcabamba.
Nora: Go on...
Julian: History tends to simplify messy collapses. The Inca were exceptional engineers and strategic planners. Vilcabamba represents the last known defensive stronghold of the Neo-Inca. I’m not alone in thinking that the broader refuge network included secondary settlements, fallback locations, or protected sanctuaries deeper in the Andes.
Nora: You’re suggesting historians identified part of the system, but not necessarily all of it.
Julian: Exactly.
Nora: Any chance you’d like to bolster your claim’s legitimacy by identifying some of your fellow theorists?
Julian: Absolutely not. My social media footprint grants me the luxury of being dismissed professionally. Most academics still need tenure.
Nora: Humble and pragmatic.
Julian: Always. But there have long been quiet references from fragmented colonial accounts, disputed translations, scattered oral histories, hinting at more remote refuges beyond the traditionally accepted Vilcabamba sites. Smaller. Better hidden. Potentially reserved for leadership if the primary settlements fell.
Nora: Rumor is not evidence, Julian.
Julian: No. But unresolved history tends to produce both.
Nora: So, your theory is that Lara traveled into this isolated Andean region searching for the “true” last refuge of the Inca?
Julian: I think she was searching for something connected to the unresolved parts of the Vilcabamba story.
Nora: But if such a place existed, surely the Spanish would have eventually discovered it. And if they had, there would be records.
Julian: Unless the records were incomplete. Or no one survived, Inca or invaders, to author them.
Nora: Well. That’s appropriately ominous.
Nora: Okay, we’ve gone on quite a tangent. Back to what we know. The village.
Julian: We recruited a local willing to report back to us. According to her, the blond American appeared to be deliberately avoiding Lara. He observed her from a distance, never approaching directly.
Nora: Go on.
Julian: After several days of planning and stocking up on supplies, Lara departed with a local guide named Carlos. No surname given. Our source reported what little was known about him. No family, risk taker, a bit of a loner…
Nora: Sounds like Lara found a kindred spirit.
Julian: Like minds and all that. He had a reputation for taking difficult jobs and apparently knew the nearby peaks better than anyone. I suspect that’s why Lara hired him.
Julian: Anyway, the blond American left several hours after Lara and Carlos, following the same route into the mountains. He returned days later looking significantly worse for wear, covered in bruises and walking with a limp, before eventually returning to the remote airstrip and departing aboard the same Natla Technologies-linked aircraft.
Nora: And Carlos?
Julian: Never returned to the village.
Nora: That’s… concerning.
Julian: Lara didn’t return through the village either. She eventually made her way back to the airstrip via an unknown route. But Carlos was local. People noticed when he didn’t come back.
Nora: Careful. I enjoy avoiding defamation lawsuits.
Julian: For the record, I’m implying nothing. There are countless explanations for someone disappearing in terrain like that.
Nora: Such as?
Julian: The Peruvian Andes are home to apex predators such as pumas. This region also has bears, an assortment of aggressive cave-dwelling bats, and strangely, packs of unidentified canids. Locals describe them as too large to be Andean foxes or feral dogs; they keep out of those mountains for good reason.
Nora: So between the altitude, the unpredictable weather, the rugged terrain, and the unusual wildlife, we're talking about an extremely remote and dangerous environment. Accidents happen.
Julian: Frequently.
Nora: Personally, I choose to believe Carlos took that Croft coin and started a peaceful new life somewhere warmer.
Julian: One can hope. But all of this is exactly why the region interests me.
Nora: The danger?
Julian: The isolation. Places like that can hide things for a very long time. Like the last refuge of a fallen empire...wink wink.
Nora: Did you just wink out loud?
Julian: Yes, for sake of the transcript.
Nora: … Well, if we're indulging increasingly unlikely theories, Peru has produced some genuinely strange paleontological discoveries over the years. Lara Croft has been linked to several improbable stories. We’ve covered one particularly persistent rumor involving Bigfoot extensively. Perhaps she was in Peru hunting "prehistoric predators"...
Julian: And people call me a conspiracy theorist.
Nora: I’m trying to speak your language. Although I recognize dinosaurs would technically be the wrong kind of bones for an archeologist's remit.
Julian: And Lara seems to prefer the ones that come with ancient curses and elaborate death traps. In all seriousness, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something important hidden in those mountains.
Nora: Then explain this to me. Even if a second Inca refuge existed, how would they have built it? Inca engineering was extraordinary, yes, but the Andes are unforgiving.
Julian: Perhaps they had help from an advanced ancient civilization?
Nora: Julian.
Julian: That was a joke.
Nora: Good. Because even Astonishing Travels has standards. There’s no place for that ancient aliens shit here.
Julian: Fair enough. The truth is, whatever Lara was searching for up there remains unresolved. But people don’t move through hidden airstrips, isolated villages, and remote mountain corridors like that without a reason.
Nora: So your official position is still “something strange happened in Peru.”
Julian: My official position is that Lara Croft found something important enough to keep hidden.
Nora: …And you think that earns you a cover story?
Editor’s Note: He got the cover. Even incomplete, it’s a compelling story with an equally compelling character
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Issue 311: Lara Croft: What Lies Beneath St. Francis Folly?
Nora Bennett: Welcome, readers, to another edition of Field Notes, Astonishing Travels' recurring roundtable series where the editorial standards are looser and speculation gets a seat at the table. A rather oversized seat in this case. I'm Nora Bennett, Editor-in-Chief of this little publication. Joining me once again is our resident fringe specialist Julian Mercer, who I suspect is feeling especially smug after the success of our last cover story tracking the enigmatic Lara Croft to the Peruvian Andes.
Julian Mercer: Our publisher did seem quite pleased.
Nora: As were we. You sniffed out an excellent mystery and connected just enough dots to kindle a remarkable amount of speculation among our readership, and, somewhat unexpectedly, well beyond it.
Julian: Lara Croft and Jacqueline Natla in the same story? Irresistible. One’s a media obsession and the other a conspiracy magnet.
Nora: Which is which?
Julian: The distinction collapses on inspection. The point being, I should have anticipated how far the story would travel beyond our usual readership.
Nora: Humility doesn’t suit you, Julian.
Julian: It certainly chafes.
Nora: A little pride is warranted, though. We sold out of the first run of the Peru edition, subscriptions climbed, and our publisher subsequently loosened the purse strings. For those of you who missed the original story, we’re releasing a limited-edition reprint of #310 with a new illustrated cover, replacing that overused press photo. This issue, which follows Croft to Greece, received the same treatment. Both are illustrated by a talented member of the Croft community; she goes by Illyne online.
Julian: Needless to say, if Lara wasn’t aware of Astonishing Travels before, we’re absolutely on her radar now. She’s recently been spotted in London, and some of the less principled papers have been hounding her with increasingly lurid theories: that Lara sacrificed Carlos at Vilcabamba as part of an ancient apocalyptic ritual, or that she was recovering some sort of biotech weapon for Natla, among others. By all appearances, Croft’s usual glacial composure remains intact. Neither she nor her representatives have commented on any of it.
Nora: Lara’s returned home, then?
Julian: Yes. Whatever this hunt was, it seems to have encompassed several destinations in rapid succession. We’re effectively playing catch-up, reconstructing an itinerary she’s already completed.
Nora: The world hasn’t ended from some ancient apocalypse, nor has Natla Tech unveiled any miraculous new biotech breakthroughs, so I think we can set aside those theories for now.
Julian: Agreed.
Nora: Our readers are eager for an update. Before departing for Greece, however, let’s tidy up Peru.
Julian: Unfortunately, still no word on Carlos. We intentionally withheld the coordinates of the Andean village in question, and rightly so, to prevent theorists from turning the quest to locate him into an ill-fated expedition of their own.
Nora: Still holding out hope he’s on a beach somewhere.
Julian: In the name of due diligence, I followed up with regional authorities. They weren’t terribly interested in pursuing the matter. Their position was, essentially, that the terrain is dangerous, Carlos’ route was unknown, and those who choose to enter the mountains forfeit closure. Rather callous, don’t you think?
Nora: One could argue pragmatic.
Julian: One could also argue convenient. The authorities weren’t the only ones to stop talking. My contact in the village disclosed a few new details before going quiet as well. I don’t particularly like how quickly doors started closing after we published.
Nora: Nor do I. What did you learn before the door shut?
Julian: That the blond man returned.
Nora: Returned? We reported he left aboard the Natla aircraft.
Julian: He did. With the print deadline looming, I focused my efforts on tracking Lara. When I dug back in, I learned that the same aircraft returned to the airstrip less than forty-eight hours later, with him on board. It wasn’t the only arrival. A number of freight charters came through the strip within roughly the same window.
Nora: And you missed them?
Julian: I prioritized. Remember, this is an industrial airstrip servicing mining operations. Cargo traffic isn’t inherently suspicious. It became considerably more interesting once my contact told me the freight, the contractors who arrived with it, and our blond American all traveled together.
Nora: Back to the village?
Julian: Through it, and then up the mountain. The equipment included industrial lifting gear, generators, and a considerable number of reinforced metal panels and frames. Large ones, transported in sections.
Nora: For what?
Julian: I’m uncertain. Once assembled, though, my contact thought some of the structures looked distinctly cage-like.
Nora: Cage-like?
Julian: Her word, not mine. There was also substantially more helicopter activity in the region over the following days.
Nora: So Natla’s man leaves Peru, comes back two days later with contractors, cargo flights, heavy equipment, modular panels, and helicopter support.
Julian: Unfortunately, those were the last useful details I got. She contacted me once more, only to make it quite clear she wouldn’t be speaking to me again. Given the timing, I can’t help but wonder if someone with a bigger budget bought her silence.
Nora: And you think that might be the case with local authorities as well?
Julian: I’d be naïve to rule it out.
Nora: Okay, so no more boots on the ground in Peru. Couldn’t you have called in a favor with your satellite friend to track the operation?
Julian: No. That favor was strictly a one-off. Part of me laments pulling that string so soon, but realistically, there wouldn’t have been a Peru story without it, so I can hardly complain.
Nora: Perhaps this is a good time to remind our new subscribers how to reach us, should any of them happen to have access to satellite technology.
Julian: That might not be as much of a stretch as one would think.Since Peru hit the stands, we’ve been flooded with tips. Naturally, most of them are rubbish, but a few have been surprisingly helpful.One shed light on a quick stop Lara made between Peru and Greece, a stop I’d already logged but couldn’t explain. San Francisco.
Nora: If you knew about the stop, why didn’t you include it in the last issue?
Julian: Because all I had then was a tail number, a few hours on the ground, and no indication of where she went or why.
Nora: And the delay had nothing whatsoever to do with needing a bridge between stories?
Julian: Two things can be true, Nora.
Nora: I’ve created a monster.
Julian: As a side note, given how much attention this story garnered, I fully expect Lara will find a way to conceal her aviation activities in the future. The nature of print worked in our favor this time. I kept following Croft’s aircraft after the Peru issue had gone to press, and by the time it reached readers, I already knew she’d passed through San Francisco and continued to Greece. What I didn’t have was a theory for the stop. That came later.
Nora: She should thank you. You’ve helped to expose a weakness in her security.
Julian: I’ll temper my expectations for a thank-you note.
Nora: So, what was the relevance of San Francisco to this story?
Julian: Of that, I remain frustratingly uncertain. She landed at night and only stayed for a few hours. Where the tip proved useful, however, was placing her in SoMa.
Nora: And why is that of interest?
Julian: Because that puts her within a stone’s throw of Natla Technologies’ headquarters.
Nora: That is of interest. Did you reach out to Natla HQ for comment?
Julian: Of course. They didn’t respond. Perhaps because they’re being inundated with messages accusing Jacqueline Natla of attempting to take over the world or exploit the innocent sloths of the Amazon for pharmaceutical purposes. I suspect Natla Technologies isn’t particularly fond of the spotlight we’ve shone on them.
Nora: I can’t imagine why.
Julian: The fact that Natla hasn’t made a public appearance in weeks, which to be fair, isn’t entirely unheard of, has only fed the speculation.
Nora: Not a dead end, but a lead on life support.Peru. San Francisco. Greece. Am I missing some sort of pattern here?
Julian: As far as I can tell, there’s no obvious cultural or historical thread connecting them. The pattern is the people. An unusual collection of individuals keeps turning up in the same places.
Nora: We’ll need more than that.
Julian: I have more. Tracking Lara to Greece? No problem. Tracking her within Greece was more difficult. Her aircraft was logged at a small general-aviation airfield outside of central Athens, and at least two people remembered seeing her there. One even posted the sighting to social media. As luck would have it, the airfield had already attracted some unwanted attention that week, so security and patrons were quite alert.
Nora: Because…?
Julian: A sizable group of what appeared to be private security contractors passed through a couple of days earlier. It’s a relatively small airfield, used for private aircraft, flight schools, that sort of thing, so they stood out, especially when rifle cases and other weapons were spotted among the equipment they were unloading. Airport security referred the matter to local police, who quickly assured everyone, perhaps a little too quickly, that the group’s documentation was in order. No further investigation followed.
Nora: Sounds like they were operating legally?
Julian: Or someone made them legal on paper. A local publication covered the complaints, so I contacted the journalist. They subsequently tried to obtain the paperwork the authorities claimed to have reviewed and got nowhere. Even with our resources combined, we couldn’t establish who had hired the group. Photographs taken around the airfield, along with a still supplied by an airport source, weren’t much help either. No insignia, no company markings. No one we could reliably identify. Perhaps for the best.
Nora: …Getting cold feet, Julian?
Julian: My feet are tepid, thank you, but I’d rather not attract the attention of a heavily armed group of professionals whose employer I can’t identify. If all of this is connected, which I am increasingly led to believe, one does have to ask why that level of armament is necessary in the world of archaeology.
Nora: Fair question. Who appeared to be in charge?
Julian: That’s where things get more interesting. The contractors themselves were remarkably professional. Clean-cut. Coordinated. But one local account described a man traveling with them, who was very clearly the odd one out: salt-and-pepper hair, a goatee, possibly a French accent. Much more animated than the others and treated with enough deference that I suspect he was the client, or at least directing the operation.
Nora: And where did they go?
Julian: They loaded up their equipment and headed northwest in convoy.
Nora: When did Lara arrive?
Julian: Within twenty-four hours. Not only did she land at the exact same airfield, but she also headed northwest. Alone this time. No guide, no companion. So, I began working through reports of the convoy: roadside sightings, stops for fuel and supplies, anything I could substantiate. Each one narrowed the corridor a little further, and from there I dug into sites of historical interest along their likely route.
Nora: …And?
Julian: Greece is hardly short on ruins. I started with roughly a dozen possibilities and eliminated the obvious ones first. Major tourist destinations, UNESCO sites, anywhere a convoy or armed contractors would have attracted immediate attention. Several others had active excavations or preservation work underway, which made them equally unlikely. I kept coming back to one compelling candidate: St. Francis’ Folly.
Nora: The Byzantine monastery? It’s been closed for decades.
Julian: The better part of a century. The site itself is potentially much older than the name suggests, but the surviving monastic complex is what most modern records concern. Public and academic access has long been prohibited, ostensibly because both the ruins and the cliff beneath them are dangerously unstable. A collapse has been labeled “imminent.”
Nora: Imminent for nearly a century?
Julian: Imminence is a rather elastic concept, apparently. There have been numerous attempts over the decades to stabilize the cliff and make the exterior approaches safe. Several even got off the ground, although the work rarely extended beyond the cliff face and access routes.
Nora: And no one ever finished?
Julian: No. For one reason or another, these stabilization efforts always collapse long before the cliff does. Funding disappears. Contracts are canceled. The most recent serious effort ended after three workers died in separate accidents early in the project. Famously, a few years ago, a content creator ignored the barriers and trespassing warnings and was found dead at the bottom of the cliff. Since then, there have been no further stabilization attempts.
Nora: Sounds…suspicious.
Julian: Sites this old can be inherently dangerous.
Nora: Are you defending the mundane explanation this time, Julian?
Julian: Hardly. I’m simply noting that cliffs are perfectly capable of killing people without assistance and have been doing so since the dawn of humankind. St. Francis’ Folly is difficult to reach because it was built in a difficult place. Religious communities seeking isolation have not been known for prioritizing convenience.
Nora: So, the location itself doesn’t bother you.
Julian: The location? No. The remarkable consistency with which attempts to investigate or stabilize it failed? That interests me considerably more. That, and there are theories…
Nora: This is what I’ve been waiting for.
Julian: One of my primary sources believes that truly influential people have hidden archaeological sites in plain sight through bureaucracy. Funding can be withdrawn. Contracts can be challenged. A site can remain under safety restrictions indefinitely, for example.
Nora: Is this source a part of your raiding retinue? Your archaeological avengers? What did you call them?
Julian: Once more with feeling: I never said there was an organized network of raiders. I have contacts. You leapt to that conclusion and promoted them to a secret society entirely on your own.
Nora: I leapt off your springboard.
Julian: Touché.
Nora: Fine. Hypothetically, if such an organization did exist, would Croft be a part of it?
Julian: I rather doubt it. Croft has consistently demonstrated a preference for working independently and a documented dislike for institutions as a whole.
Nora: True. As for this source specifically, how trustworthy are they?
Julian: Their information has proved reliable often enough that I take even their more unusual theories seriously. I know frustratingly little about them personally, other than that English almost certainly isn’t their first language and they appear to have an interest in Croft that rivals even mine.
Nora: Any idea where they’re from?
Julian: Francophone, most likely. There have been a few small linguistic tells in our correspondence.
Nora: Could your source be the French man leading the caravan?
Julian: There are hundreds of millions of French-speaking people in the world, Nora.
Nora: What did you say about coincidences last issue, Julian?
Julian: …Coincidence becomes less convincing the more often it occurs.
Nora: Just saying.
Julian: Their theory about certain sites being deliberately kept inaccessible predates this investigation. Once Croft became involved, I reached out expecting they’d have thoughts. They haven’t returned any of my inquiries this time, which is unusual.
Nora: Another closed door.
Julian: Precisely.
Nora: Noted. Back to St. Francis’ Folly.
Julian: Once I homed in on the Folly, I started combing through local police reports for further sightings of the convoy. Instead, I found something rather more interesting. A long-distance backpacker traveling a secluded trail along a neighboring ridge reported hearing explosions from the monastery’s direction. He also saw faint plumes rising above the surrounding hills.
Nora: When did he report it?
Julian: Not immediately. He was well off the beaten path and didn’t reach his next resupply point for another two days. He filed a report there, and several days later police conducted an inspection.
Nora: Did their investigation net anything?
Julian: There was no ground search. Given the site’s instability and restricted access, they deemed that unnecessarily risky and flew a drone overhead. No new damage was visible on the exterior ruins. The only clear sign of recent human activity was a small makeshift campsite near one of the approaches. Discarded food packaging, rubbish, that sort of thing.
Nora: And the police attributed the litter to…?
Julian: A trespasser.
Nora: It doesn’t exactly sound like the calling card of a disciplined military unit.
Julian: Agreed. The campsite could have belonged to any number of people. What matters is that someone had been there recently.
Nora: And the explosions?
Julian: The official conclusion was that the backpacker had mistaken a rockfall for an explosion.
Nora: A rockfall might explain one sound, but he reported several, did he not?
Julian: He did. Dust can resemble smoke from a distance, so the plumes aren't particularly damning either. But no, the report doesn’t neatly account for multiple sounds and multiple plumes. By the time police inspected the site, a number of days had passed.
Nora: Convenient.
Julian: Plausible. Also convenient.
Nora: So, Lara Croft and a heavily armed convoy both head in the same direction. You identify a restricted historical site along their likely route. Then, around the same time, a witness reports multiple apparent explosions at said historical site, and police find evidence of recent human activity.
Julian: It would appear so. Which raises the obvious question: if St. Francis’ Folly was the destination, what could possibly warrant that sort of attention and that much firepower?
Nora: We’ve already established that wealth and publicity don’t motivate Croft. There must be more. Run us through the history of St. Francis’ Folly and the surrounding area. Something tells me you also have a theory.
Julian: Because no authorized modern team has completed a full interior survey of St. Francis’ Folly, most of what we know comes from exterior surveys, drone imagery, and observation at a distance. Engineers have worked on portions of the cliff face and visible approaches, but the interior remains largely undocumented. From the outside, however, the surviving complex is unmistakably Byzantine: a monastery built into an already remarkable location.
Nora: As an aside, the Byzantine era is something of a special interest for Croft, isn’t it? Didn’t it emerge some years ago that she illegally entered Syria in her early twenties while attempting to continue her father’s research?
Julian: There was no official response from Croft or her representatives on that rumor.
Nora: Not surprising.
Julian: What makes the Folly more fascinating is that Byzantine monasteries in Greece were hardly built in historical isolation. Across the region, you find one civilization building over the remains of another: temples reused, foundations incorporated, stone repurposed. Layers upon layers of history. That possibility is one reason academics have been so eager to get inside.
Nora: Give readers the cliff notes.
Julian: Cliff notes on millennia of Greek civilization? Cruel.
Nora: Impress me.
Julian: The earliest substantial remains in the broader region reach back to Mycenaean Greece: the Bronze Age world that would later become inseparable from stories of Troy, Agamemnon, and the Greek heroic tradition. When the Mycenaean palace system collapsed, Greece entered what we now generally call the Early Iron Age: smaller settlements, profound social change, and, for several centuries, the disappearance of written Greek records.
Nora: Followed by Archaic Greece.
Julian: Precisely. Settlements grew, the city-states emerged as major political and cultural powers, Greek communities expanded throughout the Mediterranean, and monumental religious architecture became increasingly prominent.
Nora: Which leads into Classical Greece.
Julian: Athens at its most famous. Pericles, Socrates, Plato. The Parthenon. Greek tragedy. The Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. It’s one of the best documented periods of the ancient Greek world.
Nora: And then Alexander the Great.
Julian: And then Alexander. His death marks the beginning of what we call the Hellenistic period, when Greek language, art, religion, and architecture spread and blended with cultures stretching from Egypt and Anatolia into Syria, Persia, and beyond. It was also an era fascinated with monumental construction, engineering, spectacle, and the reinterpretation of older mythology.
Nora: Which sounds potentially relevant.
Julian: Very. Then Roman power gradually overtook Greece. Athens remained profoundly Greek, culturally speaking, but Roman rule added another architectural layer, expanding existing traditions of baths, cisterns, and waterworks while adding new monumental civic complexes and amphitheaters built for spectacle.
Nora: Including the bloody sort.
Julian: Quite. Gladiatorial contests and venationes: staged hunts involving animals ranging from bears and wolves to lions, leopards, and occasionally more exotic imports like crocodiles.
Nora: And eventually the empire Christianized.
Julian: Exactly. Older temples were abandoned, dismantled, converted, or simply built over as Christianity transformed the religious and physical landscape. By the Byzantine era, churches and monasteries had become defining features of Greece.
Nora: Which brings us back to St. Francis’ Folly.
Julian: The visible monastery belongs to that Byzantine layer. But if the pattern seen elsewhere in Greece holds true, the Byzantines may simply have been the latest people to build on that cliff, not the first.
Nora: So, what looks like one ruined monastery from the outside could, in theory, contain several different periods of Greek history underneath it.
Julian: Precisely.
Nora: Congratulations, impressive brevity.
Julian: This is the appeal of sites like St. Francis’ Folly. At first glance, it’s unmistakably Byzantine. But given the region’s history of building over older structures, a site like this could have been occupied, expanded, and reinterpreted for centuries. Depending on the period, you could be looking at temples or monuments associated with any number of gods: Athena, Apollo, Poseidon, Artemis, Hephaestus, to name a few.
Nora: Is there precedent for a discovery on this scale in the region, or are we drifting into flights of fancy?
Julian: Eleusis alone should temper skepticism. Within easy reach of Athens stood an enormous sanctuary dedicated to Demeter and Persephone, home to the Eleusinian Mysteries: secret initiation rites whose participants were famously forbidden from revealing what occurred within. The complex itself evolved over centuries. If something of that significance could exist so close to Athens, I’m reluctant to extinguish the possibility that something extraordinary still waits to be found.
Nora: When do we believe St. Francis’ Folly was last occupied? Wouldn’t surviving records tell us something about the site’s earlier use?
Julian: Surviving records place a monastic community there by roughly 1270 CE, but they don’t establish precisely when the monastery itself was founded, and they tell us frustratingly little about daily life at the site. The older material is where things become more interesting.
Nora: Do tell.
Julian: Fragmentary accounts from around the middle of the fifth century BCE describe influential Athenians, including statesmen, magistrates, and scholars, connected to an unidentified foreigner and a secret construction project somewhere beyond the city. None name St. Francis’ Folly, naturally, and none clearly state what was being built.
Nora: Now we’re getting somewhere. Is this your Greek equivalent of Vilcabamba?
Julian: I must remind you that the Vilcabamba theory had support from members of academia.
Nora: Select, anonymous members of academia.
Julian: Fair. But yes, there is more. The same body of accounts refers to this foreigner as a kind of golden stranger: A man with no known polis affiliation who was credited with bringing an extraordinary period of order and prosperity to those around him. The surviving trail is scattered. Copies and later family records have surfaced in Corinth, Thebes, and elsewhere, but they all appear to trace back to people with ties to Athens. Whether that dispersal reflects deliberate secrecy or simply centuries of copying is impossible to say.
Nora: Golden. Could this be a reference to Midas?
Julian: Some accounts do compare him to Midas, likely because prosperity seemed to follow in his wake. That doesn’t mean anyone literally believed the Phrygian king had returned. A comparison repeated often enough can itself become a legend.
Nora: Or the whole thing could be political propaganda.
Julian: Absolutely. Rival cities had every reason to diminish Athens by crediting its achievements to some mysterious outsider. But the accounts also contain oddly practical details: stone moved at night, laborers sworn to secrecy, and a major construction project whose purpose was never publicly acknowledged.
Nora: Intriguing.
Julian: What makes it even more fascinating is what supposedly happened next. The project appears to have begun as an impressive but otherwise comprehensible feat of Athenian engineering. Then the builders encountered older construction beneath or within the site, structures they reportedly couldn’t explain. From that point, the work became more elaborate, more secretive, and apparently more dangerous.
Nora: Dangerous how? Are we finally at the point where archaeology turns into an action film?
Julian: We’re one pressure plate away. In all seriousness, the surviving descriptions are too vague to say. Ritual architecture, defensive mechanisms, structural hazards, or simply a story growing more extraordinary with every retelling. I won’t pretend we have enough to distinguish between them.
Nora: Do any of these accounts match an existing archaeological site?
Julian: Not conclusively. And nothing ties them directly to St. Francis’ Folly. But the Folly does satisfy the few conditions we can infer: close enough to Athens, difficult to access, and still largely undocumented within. That’s enough to keep it in consideration, not enough to call it a match.
Nora: So, no solid evidence connecting the “golden stranger” to the Folly.
Julian: No. Circumstantial evidence and an uncomfortable number of unanswered questions.
Nora: Including why someone would be invested in limiting access to it.
Julian: Now you’re thinking like me. Which leaves us with the question I find considerably curious: if there is something worth protecting at St. Francis’ Folly, is it something worthy of Lara Croft’s attention?
Nora: More questions than answers, Julian. What if this entire story began as exactly that? A story? Some ancient tale repeated often enough that people eventually mistook it for history?
Julian: Well, I certainly can’t rule that out. But you don’t keep me around to arrive at the easy answer. You keep me around explicitly to wander off the beaten path.
Nora: Turns out there are an unexpected number of new subscribers down that particular path.
Julian: Then I suppose I should close out this chapter of our mystery.
Nora: Please do. Did the contractors leave through the same airfield they arrived at?
Julian: Some did.
Nora: Some?
Julian: Far fewer were seen leaving. By the best count I could assemble, a third of the original group departed through the same airfield. Witnesses said those who did looked considerably worse for wear.
Nora: You think the others are dead?
Julian: How oddly sensational of you. I said they’re unaccounted for. They could have left by another route, remained in Greece, or received new orders somewhere beyond my ability to track them. But given the reports of explosions at the Folly, I’d be foolish to rule out casualties.
Nora: Hence the hesitation I’ve been sensing from you.
Julian: Can you blame me? I can’t confirm that anyone died. I can confirm that people connected to this story keep disappearing from the record. Carlos. Contractors. Sources who suddenly stop talking. At a certain point, one must consider that this may no longer be the sort of mystery people pursue merely for an artifact or a bit of historical glory.
Nora: It certainly appears to have become something else. Was the French man among those seen leaving? The apparent leader?
Julian: He was not.
Nora: And your longtime source, the one with an unusual interest in Lara Croft, who you believe may be francophone, stopped responding at roughly the same time?
Julian: …Yes.
Nora: Food for thought. I understand the cold feet. Strip away the wilder theories and we still have Lara Croft on an international adventure, Jacqueline Natla absent from public view, an unidentified group of armed contractors, authorities who seem remarkably incurious, reported explosions at a restricted historical site, and a mystery more than two millennia old that has never been satisfactorily resolved. I’ll grant you this much: it’s a curious collection of coincidences.
Julian: Again, not cold feet. Appropriate caution.
Nora: Let the record reflect that Julian just made a sound I’d characterize as nervous laughter.
Julian: Rude.
Nora: You know this world better than most, Julian. Tell me why this one feels different.
Julian: I’ve spent nearly my entire career in conspiracy circles. Most conspiracies are complete bollocks. Some contain a grain of truth. Others are deliberately engineered to distract from an even less savory truth. And, on very rare occasions, you uncover something that makes you wish you’d stopped digging a few steps earlier. I’ve learned to exercise caution when I can no longer tell which kind of story I’m chasing.
Nora: That was uncharacteristically unsettling.
Julian: I rather wish it weren’t.
Nora: Back to the contractors.Any idea where they were headed?
Julian: Their charter was bound for Egypt. And Croft followed.
Nora: And then, apparently, returned home.
Julian: Eventually. We know where she ended up. How she got from Egypt back to London is proving considerably more difficult to reconstruct. That’s what I’ve been digging into next, along with the rather larger question of what ties Peru, Greece, and Egypt together.
Nora: You realize Egypt is going to make this substantially harder to ignore.
Julian: Few places have inspired as much fascination, or as much speculation, as Egypt.
Nora: I’m almost irritated by how much of this story remains circumstantial.
Julian: Almost?
Nora: Because, against my better judgment, I very much want to know what happened next.
Julian: Glad to be of service.
Editor’s Note: That makes two of us. If you have credible information that may help fill the gaps, such as sightings, photographs, travel records, aviation data, or anything else connected to Croft’s movements through Egypt, we want to hear from you. Anonymous tips are welcome. The investigation continues in a future issue of Astonishing Travels.
Julian Mercer: Our publisher did seem quite pleased.
Nora: As were we. You sniffed out an excellent mystery and connected just enough dots to kindle a remarkable amount of speculation among our readership, and, somewhat unexpectedly, well beyond it.
Julian: Lara Croft and Jacqueline Natla in the same story? Irresistible. One’s a media obsession and the other a conspiracy magnet.
Nora: Which is which?
Julian: The distinction collapses on inspection. The point being, I should have anticipated how far the story would travel beyond our usual readership.
Nora: Humility doesn’t suit you, Julian.
Julian: It certainly chafes.
Nora: A little pride is warranted, though. We sold out of the first run of the Peru edition, subscriptions climbed, and our publisher subsequently loosened the purse strings. For those of you who missed the original story, we’re releasing a limited-edition reprint of #310 with a new illustrated cover, replacing that overused press photo. This issue, which follows Croft to Greece, received the same treatment. Both are illustrated by a talented member of the Croft community; she goes by Illyne online.
Julian: Needless to say, if Lara wasn’t aware of Astonishing Travels before, we’re absolutely on her radar now. She’s recently been spotted in London, and some of the less principled papers have been hounding her with increasingly lurid theories: that Lara sacrificed Carlos at Vilcabamba as part of an ancient apocalyptic ritual, or that she was recovering some sort of biotech weapon for Natla, among others. By all appearances, Croft’s usual glacial composure remains intact. Neither she nor her representatives have commented on any of it.
Nora: Lara’s returned home, then?
Julian: Yes. Whatever this hunt was, it seems to have encompassed several destinations in rapid succession. We’re effectively playing catch-up, reconstructing an itinerary she’s already completed.
Nora: The world hasn’t ended from some ancient apocalypse, nor has Natla Tech unveiled any miraculous new biotech breakthroughs, so I think we can set aside those theories for now.
Julian: Agreed.
Nora: Our readers are eager for an update. Before departing for Greece, however, let’s tidy up Peru.
Julian: Unfortunately, still no word on Carlos. We intentionally withheld the coordinates of the Andean village in question, and rightly so, to prevent theorists from turning the quest to locate him into an ill-fated expedition of their own.
Nora: Still holding out hope he’s on a beach somewhere.
Julian: In the name of due diligence, I followed up with regional authorities. They weren’t terribly interested in pursuing the matter. Their position was, essentially, that the terrain is dangerous, Carlos’ route was unknown, and those who choose to enter the mountains forfeit closure. Rather callous, don’t you think?
Nora: One could argue pragmatic.
Julian: One could also argue convenient. The authorities weren’t the only ones to stop talking. My contact in the village disclosed a few new details before going quiet as well. I don’t particularly like how quickly doors started closing after we published.
Nora: Nor do I. What did you learn before the door shut?
Julian: That the blond man returned.
Nora: Returned? We reported he left aboard the Natla aircraft.
Julian: He did. With the print deadline looming, I focused my efforts on tracking Lara. When I dug back in, I learned that the same aircraft returned to the airstrip less than forty-eight hours later, with him on board. It wasn’t the only arrival. A number of freight charters came through the strip within roughly the same window.
Nora: And you missed them?
Julian: I prioritized. Remember, this is an industrial airstrip servicing mining operations. Cargo traffic isn’t inherently suspicious. It became considerably more interesting once my contact told me the freight, the contractors who arrived with it, and our blond American all traveled together.
Nora: Back to the village?
Julian: Through it, and then up the mountain. The equipment included industrial lifting gear, generators, and a considerable number of reinforced metal panels and frames. Large ones, transported in sections.
Nora: For what?
Julian: I’m uncertain. Once assembled, though, my contact thought some of the structures looked distinctly cage-like.
Nora: Cage-like?
Julian: Her word, not mine. There was also substantially more helicopter activity in the region over the following days.
Nora: So Natla’s man leaves Peru, comes back two days later with contractors, cargo flights, heavy equipment, modular panels, and helicopter support.
Julian: Unfortunately, those were the last useful details I got. She contacted me once more, only to make it quite clear she wouldn’t be speaking to me again. Given the timing, I can’t help but wonder if someone with a bigger budget bought her silence.
Nora: And you think that might be the case with local authorities as well?
Julian: I’d be naïve to rule it out.
Nora: Okay, so no more boots on the ground in Peru. Couldn’t you have called in a favor with your satellite friend to track the operation?
Julian: No. That favor was strictly a one-off. Part of me laments pulling that string so soon, but realistically, there wouldn’t have been a Peru story without it, so I can hardly complain.
Nora: Perhaps this is a good time to remind our new subscribers how to reach us, should any of them happen to have access to satellite technology.
Julian: That might not be as much of a stretch as one would think.Since Peru hit the stands, we’ve been flooded with tips. Naturally, most of them are rubbish, but a few have been surprisingly helpful.One shed light on a quick stop Lara made between Peru and Greece, a stop I’d already logged but couldn’t explain. San Francisco.
Nora: If you knew about the stop, why didn’t you include it in the last issue?
Julian: Because all I had then was a tail number, a few hours on the ground, and no indication of where she went or why.
Nora: And the delay had nothing whatsoever to do with needing a bridge between stories?
Julian: Two things can be true, Nora.
Nora: I’ve created a monster.
Julian: As a side note, given how much attention this story garnered, I fully expect Lara will find a way to conceal her aviation activities in the future. The nature of print worked in our favor this time. I kept following Croft’s aircraft after the Peru issue had gone to press, and by the time it reached readers, I already knew she’d passed through San Francisco and continued to Greece. What I didn’t have was a theory for the stop. That came later.
Nora: She should thank you. You’ve helped to expose a weakness in her security.
Julian: I’ll temper my expectations for a thank-you note.
Nora: So, what was the relevance of San Francisco to this story?
Julian: Of that, I remain frustratingly uncertain. She landed at night and only stayed for a few hours. Where the tip proved useful, however, was placing her in SoMa.
Nora: And why is that of interest?
Julian: Because that puts her within a stone’s throw of Natla Technologies’ headquarters.
Nora: That is of interest. Did you reach out to Natla HQ for comment?
Julian: Of course. They didn’t respond. Perhaps because they’re being inundated with messages accusing Jacqueline Natla of attempting to take over the world or exploit the innocent sloths of the Amazon for pharmaceutical purposes. I suspect Natla Technologies isn’t particularly fond of the spotlight we’ve shone on them.
Nora: I can’t imagine why.
Julian: The fact that Natla hasn’t made a public appearance in weeks, which to be fair, isn’t entirely unheard of, has only fed the speculation.
Nora: Not a dead end, but a lead on life support.Peru. San Francisco. Greece. Am I missing some sort of pattern here?
Julian: As far as I can tell, there’s no obvious cultural or historical thread connecting them. The pattern is the people. An unusual collection of individuals keeps turning up in the same places.
Nora: We’ll need more than that.
Julian: I have more. Tracking Lara to Greece? No problem. Tracking her within Greece was more difficult. Her aircraft was logged at a small general-aviation airfield outside of central Athens, and at least two people remembered seeing her there. One even posted the sighting to social media. As luck would have it, the airfield had already attracted some unwanted attention that week, so security and patrons were quite alert.
Nora: Because…?
Julian: A sizable group of what appeared to be private security contractors passed through a couple of days earlier. It’s a relatively small airfield, used for private aircraft, flight schools, that sort of thing, so they stood out, especially when rifle cases and other weapons were spotted among the equipment they were unloading. Airport security referred the matter to local police, who quickly assured everyone, perhaps a little too quickly, that the group’s documentation was in order. No further investigation followed.
Nora: Sounds like they were operating legally?
Julian: Or someone made them legal on paper. A local publication covered the complaints, so I contacted the journalist. They subsequently tried to obtain the paperwork the authorities claimed to have reviewed and got nowhere. Even with our resources combined, we couldn’t establish who had hired the group. Photographs taken around the airfield, along with a still supplied by an airport source, weren’t much help either. No insignia, no company markings. No one we could reliably identify. Perhaps for the best.
Nora: …Getting cold feet, Julian?
Julian: My feet are tepid, thank you, but I’d rather not attract the attention of a heavily armed group of professionals whose employer I can’t identify. If all of this is connected, which I am increasingly led to believe, one does have to ask why that level of armament is necessary in the world of archaeology.
Nora: Fair question. Who appeared to be in charge?
Julian: That’s where things get more interesting. The contractors themselves were remarkably professional. Clean-cut. Coordinated. But one local account described a man traveling with them, who was very clearly the odd one out: salt-and-pepper hair, a goatee, possibly a French accent. Much more animated than the others and treated with enough deference that I suspect he was the client, or at least directing the operation.
Nora: And where did they go?
Julian: They loaded up their equipment and headed northwest in convoy.
Nora: When did Lara arrive?
Julian: Within twenty-four hours. Not only did she land at the exact same airfield, but she also headed northwest. Alone this time. No guide, no companion. So, I began working through reports of the convoy: roadside sightings, stops for fuel and supplies, anything I could substantiate. Each one narrowed the corridor a little further, and from there I dug into sites of historical interest along their likely route.
Nora: …And?
Julian: Greece is hardly short on ruins. I started with roughly a dozen possibilities and eliminated the obvious ones first. Major tourist destinations, UNESCO sites, anywhere a convoy or armed contractors would have attracted immediate attention. Several others had active excavations or preservation work underway, which made them equally unlikely. I kept coming back to one compelling candidate: St. Francis’ Folly.
Nora: The Byzantine monastery? It’s been closed for decades.
Julian: The better part of a century. The site itself is potentially much older than the name suggests, but the surviving monastic complex is what most modern records concern. Public and academic access has long been prohibited, ostensibly because both the ruins and the cliff beneath them are dangerously unstable. A collapse has been labeled “imminent.”
Nora: Imminent for nearly a century?
Julian: Imminence is a rather elastic concept, apparently. There have been numerous attempts over the decades to stabilize the cliff and make the exterior approaches safe. Several even got off the ground, although the work rarely extended beyond the cliff face and access routes.
Nora: And no one ever finished?
Julian: No. For one reason or another, these stabilization efforts always collapse long before the cliff does. Funding disappears. Contracts are canceled. The most recent serious effort ended after three workers died in separate accidents early in the project. Famously, a few years ago, a content creator ignored the barriers and trespassing warnings and was found dead at the bottom of the cliff. Since then, there have been no further stabilization attempts.
Nora: Sounds…suspicious.
Julian: Sites this old can be inherently dangerous.
Nora: Are you defending the mundane explanation this time, Julian?
Julian: Hardly. I’m simply noting that cliffs are perfectly capable of killing people without assistance and have been doing so since the dawn of humankind. St. Francis’ Folly is difficult to reach because it was built in a difficult place. Religious communities seeking isolation have not been known for prioritizing convenience.
Nora: So, the location itself doesn’t bother you.
Julian: The location? No. The remarkable consistency with which attempts to investigate or stabilize it failed? That interests me considerably more. That, and there are theories…
Nora: This is what I’ve been waiting for.
Julian: One of my primary sources believes that truly influential people have hidden archaeological sites in plain sight through bureaucracy. Funding can be withdrawn. Contracts can be challenged. A site can remain under safety restrictions indefinitely, for example.
Nora: Is this source a part of your raiding retinue? Your archaeological avengers? What did you call them?
Julian: Once more with feeling: I never said there was an organized network of raiders. I have contacts. You leapt to that conclusion and promoted them to a secret society entirely on your own.
Nora: I leapt off your springboard.
Julian: Touché.
Nora: Fine. Hypothetically, if such an organization did exist, would Croft be a part of it?
Julian: I rather doubt it. Croft has consistently demonstrated a preference for working independently and a documented dislike for institutions as a whole.
Nora: True. As for this source specifically, how trustworthy are they?
Julian: Their information has proved reliable often enough that I take even their more unusual theories seriously. I know frustratingly little about them personally, other than that English almost certainly isn’t their first language and they appear to have an interest in Croft that rivals even mine.
Nora: Any idea where they’re from?
Julian: Francophone, most likely. There have been a few small linguistic tells in our correspondence.
Nora: Could your source be the French man leading the caravan?
Julian: There are hundreds of millions of French-speaking people in the world, Nora.
Nora: What did you say about coincidences last issue, Julian?
Julian: …Coincidence becomes less convincing the more often it occurs.
Nora: Just saying.
Julian: Their theory about certain sites being deliberately kept inaccessible predates this investigation. Once Croft became involved, I reached out expecting they’d have thoughts. They haven’t returned any of my inquiries this time, which is unusual.
Nora: Another closed door.
Julian: Precisely.
Nora: Noted. Back to St. Francis’ Folly.
Julian: Once I homed in on the Folly, I started combing through local police reports for further sightings of the convoy. Instead, I found something rather more interesting. A long-distance backpacker traveling a secluded trail along a neighboring ridge reported hearing explosions from the monastery’s direction. He also saw faint plumes rising above the surrounding hills.
Nora: When did he report it?
Julian: Not immediately. He was well off the beaten path and didn’t reach his next resupply point for another two days. He filed a report there, and several days later police conducted an inspection.
Nora: Did their investigation net anything?
Julian: There was no ground search. Given the site’s instability and restricted access, they deemed that unnecessarily risky and flew a drone overhead. No new damage was visible on the exterior ruins. The only clear sign of recent human activity was a small makeshift campsite near one of the approaches. Discarded food packaging, rubbish, that sort of thing.
Nora: And the police attributed the litter to…?
Julian: A trespasser.
Nora: It doesn’t exactly sound like the calling card of a disciplined military unit.
Julian: Agreed. The campsite could have belonged to any number of people. What matters is that someone had been there recently.
Nora: And the explosions?
Julian: The official conclusion was that the backpacker had mistaken a rockfall for an explosion.
Nora: A rockfall might explain one sound, but he reported several, did he not?
Julian: He did. Dust can resemble smoke from a distance, so the plumes aren't particularly damning either. But no, the report doesn’t neatly account for multiple sounds and multiple plumes. By the time police inspected the site, a number of days had passed.
Nora: Convenient.
Julian: Plausible. Also convenient.
Nora: So, Lara Croft and a heavily armed convoy both head in the same direction. You identify a restricted historical site along their likely route. Then, around the same time, a witness reports multiple apparent explosions at said historical site, and police find evidence of recent human activity.
Julian: It would appear so. Which raises the obvious question: if St. Francis’ Folly was the destination, what could possibly warrant that sort of attention and that much firepower?
Nora: We’ve already established that wealth and publicity don’t motivate Croft. There must be more. Run us through the history of St. Francis’ Folly and the surrounding area. Something tells me you also have a theory.
Julian: Because no authorized modern team has completed a full interior survey of St. Francis’ Folly, most of what we know comes from exterior surveys, drone imagery, and observation at a distance. Engineers have worked on portions of the cliff face and visible approaches, but the interior remains largely undocumented. From the outside, however, the surviving complex is unmistakably Byzantine: a monastery built into an already remarkable location.
Nora: As an aside, the Byzantine era is something of a special interest for Croft, isn’t it? Didn’t it emerge some years ago that she illegally entered Syria in her early twenties while attempting to continue her father’s research?
Julian: There was no official response from Croft or her representatives on that rumor.
Nora: Not surprising.
Julian: What makes the Folly more fascinating is that Byzantine monasteries in Greece were hardly built in historical isolation. Across the region, you find one civilization building over the remains of another: temples reused, foundations incorporated, stone repurposed. Layers upon layers of history. That possibility is one reason academics have been so eager to get inside.
Nora: Give readers the cliff notes.
Julian: Cliff notes on millennia of Greek civilization? Cruel.
Nora: Impress me.
Julian: The earliest substantial remains in the broader region reach back to Mycenaean Greece: the Bronze Age world that would later become inseparable from stories of Troy, Agamemnon, and the Greek heroic tradition. When the Mycenaean palace system collapsed, Greece entered what we now generally call the Early Iron Age: smaller settlements, profound social change, and, for several centuries, the disappearance of written Greek records.
Nora: Followed by Archaic Greece.
Julian: Precisely. Settlements grew, the city-states emerged as major political and cultural powers, Greek communities expanded throughout the Mediterranean, and monumental religious architecture became increasingly prominent.
Nora: Which leads into Classical Greece.
Julian: Athens at its most famous. Pericles, Socrates, Plato. The Parthenon. Greek tragedy. The Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. It’s one of the best documented periods of the ancient Greek world.
Nora: And then Alexander the Great.
Julian: And then Alexander. His death marks the beginning of what we call the Hellenistic period, when Greek language, art, religion, and architecture spread and blended with cultures stretching from Egypt and Anatolia into Syria, Persia, and beyond. It was also an era fascinated with monumental construction, engineering, spectacle, and the reinterpretation of older mythology.
Nora: Which sounds potentially relevant.
Julian: Very. Then Roman power gradually overtook Greece. Athens remained profoundly Greek, culturally speaking, but Roman rule added another architectural layer, expanding existing traditions of baths, cisterns, and waterworks while adding new monumental civic complexes and amphitheaters built for spectacle.
Nora: Including the bloody sort.
Julian: Quite. Gladiatorial contests and venationes: staged hunts involving animals ranging from bears and wolves to lions, leopards, and occasionally more exotic imports like crocodiles.
Nora: And eventually the empire Christianized.
Julian: Exactly. Older temples were abandoned, dismantled, converted, or simply built over as Christianity transformed the religious and physical landscape. By the Byzantine era, churches and monasteries had become defining features of Greece.
Nora: Which brings us back to St. Francis’ Folly.
Julian: The visible monastery belongs to that Byzantine layer. But if the pattern seen elsewhere in Greece holds true, the Byzantines may simply have been the latest people to build on that cliff, not the first.
Nora: So, what looks like one ruined monastery from the outside could, in theory, contain several different periods of Greek history underneath it.
Julian: Precisely.
Nora: Congratulations, impressive brevity.
Julian: This is the appeal of sites like St. Francis’ Folly. At first glance, it’s unmistakably Byzantine. But given the region’s history of building over older structures, a site like this could have been occupied, expanded, and reinterpreted for centuries. Depending on the period, you could be looking at temples or monuments associated with any number of gods: Athena, Apollo, Poseidon, Artemis, Hephaestus, to name a few.
Nora: Is there precedent for a discovery on this scale in the region, or are we drifting into flights of fancy?
Julian: Eleusis alone should temper skepticism. Within easy reach of Athens stood an enormous sanctuary dedicated to Demeter and Persephone, home to the Eleusinian Mysteries: secret initiation rites whose participants were famously forbidden from revealing what occurred within. The complex itself evolved over centuries. If something of that significance could exist so close to Athens, I’m reluctant to extinguish the possibility that something extraordinary still waits to be found.
Nora: When do we believe St. Francis’ Folly was last occupied? Wouldn’t surviving records tell us something about the site’s earlier use?
Julian: Surviving records place a monastic community there by roughly 1270 CE, but they don’t establish precisely when the monastery itself was founded, and they tell us frustratingly little about daily life at the site. The older material is where things become more interesting.
Nora: Do tell.
Julian: Fragmentary accounts from around the middle of the fifth century BCE describe influential Athenians, including statesmen, magistrates, and scholars, connected to an unidentified foreigner and a secret construction project somewhere beyond the city. None name St. Francis’ Folly, naturally, and none clearly state what was being built.
Nora: Now we’re getting somewhere. Is this your Greek equivalent of Vilcabamba?
Julian: I must remind you that the Vilcabamba theory had support from members of academia.
Nora: Select, anonymous members of academia.
Julian: Fair. But yes, there is more. The same body of accounts refers to this foreigner as a kind of golden stranger: A man with no known polis affiliation who was credited with bringing an extraordinary period of order and prosperity to those around him. The surviving trail is scattered. Copies and later family records have surfaced in Corinth, Thebes, and elsewhere, but they all appear to trace back to people with ties to Athens. Whether that dispersal reflects deliberate secrecy or simply centuries of copying is impossible to say.
Nora: Golden. Could this be a reference to Midas?
Julian: Some accounts do compare him to Midas, likely because prosperity seemed to follow in his wake. That doesn’t mean anyone literally believed the Phrygian king had returned. A comparison repeated often enough can itself become a legend.
Nora: Or the whole thing could be political propaganda.
Julian: Absolutely. Rival cities had every reason to diminish Athens by crediting its achievements to some mysterious outsider. But the accounts also contain oddly practical details: stone moved at night, laborers sworn to secrecy, and a major construction project whose purpose was never publicly acknowledged.
Nora: Intriguing.
Julian: What makes it even more fascinating is what supposedly happened next. The project appears to have begun as an impressive but otherwise comprehensible feat of Athenian engineering. Then the builders encountered older construction beneath or within the site, structures they reportedly couldn’t explain. From that point, the work became more elaborate, more secretive, and apparently more dangerous.
Nora: Dangerous how? Are we finally at the point where archaeology turns into an action film?
Julian: We’re one pressure plate away. In all seriousness, the surviving descriptions are too vague to say. Ritual architecture, defensive mechanisms, structural hazards, or simply a story growing more extraordinary with every retelling. I won’t pretend we have enough to distinguish between them.
Nora: Do any of these accounts match an existing archaeological site?
Julian: Not conclusively. And nothing ties them directly to St. Francis’ Folly. But the Folly does satisfy the few conditions we can infer: close enough to Athens, difficult to access, and still largely undocumented within. That’s enough to keep it in consideration, not enough to call it a match.
Nora: So, no solid evidence connecting the “golden stranger” to the Folly.
Julian: No. Circumstantial evidence and an uncomfortable number of unanswered questions.
Nora: Including why someone would be invested in limiting access to it.
Julian: Now you’re thinking like me. Which leaves us with the question I find considerably curious: if there is something worth protecting at St. Francis’ Folly, is it something worthy of Lara Croft’s attention?
Nora: More questions than answers, Julian. What if this entire story began as exactly that? A story? Some ancient tale repeated often enough that people eventually mistook it for history?
Julian: Well, I certainly can’t rule that out. But you don’t keep me around to arrive at the easy answer. You keep me around explicitly to wander off the beaten path.
Nora: Turns out there are an unexpected number of new subscribers down that particular path.
Julian: Then I suppose I should close out this chapter of our mystery.
Nora: Please do. Did the contractors leave through the same airfield they arrived at?
Julian: Some did.
Nora: Some?
Julian: Far fewer were seen leaving. By the best count I could assemble, a third of the original group departed through the same airfield. Witnesses said those who did looked considerably worse for wear.
Nora: You think the others are dead?
Julian: How oddly sensational of you. I said they’re unaccounted for. They could have left by another route, remained in Greece, or received new orders somewhere beyond my ability to track them. But given the reports of explosions at the Folly, I’d be foolish to rule out casualties.
Nora: Hence the hesitation I’ve been sensing from you.
Julian: Can you blame me? I can’t confirm that anyone died. I can confirm that people connected to this story keep disappearing from the record. Carlos. Contractors. Sources who suddenly stop talking. At a certain point, one must consider that this may no longer be the sort of mystery people pursue merely for an artifact or a bit of historical glory.
Nora: It certainly appears to have become something else. Was the French man among those seen leaving? The apparent leader?
Julian: He was not.
Nora: And your longtime source, the one with an unusual interest in Lara Croft, who you believe may be francophone, stopped responding at roughly the same time?
Julian: …Yes.
Nora: Food for thought. I understand the cold feet. Strip away the wilder theories and we still have Lara Croft on an international adventure, Jacqueline Natla absent from public view, an unidentified group of armed contractors, authorities who seem remarkably incurious, reported explosions at a restricted historical site, and a mystery more than two millennia old that has never been satisfactorily resolved. I’ll grant you this much: it’s a curious collection of coincidences.
Julian: Again, not cold feet. Appropriate caution.
Nora: Let the record reflect that Julian just made a sound I’d characterize as nervous laughter.
Julian: Rude.
Nora: You know this world better than most, Julian. Tell me why this one feels different.
Julian: I’ve spent nearly my entire career in conspiracy circles. Most conspiracies are complete bollocks. Some contain a grain of truth. Others are deliberately engineered to distract from an even less savory truth. And, on very rare occasions, you uncover something that makes you wish you’d stopped digging a few steps earlier. I’ve learned to exercise caution when I can no longer tell which kind of story I’m chasing.
Nora: That was uncharacteristically unsettling.
Julian: I rather wish it weren’t.
Nora: Back to the contractors.Any idea where they were headed?
Julian: Their charter was bound for Egypt. And Croft followed.
Nora: And then, apparently, returned home.
Julian: Eventually. We know where she ended up. How she got from Egypt back to London is proving considerably more difficult to reconstruct. That’s what I’ve been digging into next, along with the rather larger question of what ties Peru, Greece, and Egypt together.
Nora: You realize Egypt is going to make this substantially harder to ignore.
Julian: Few places have inspired as much fascination, or as much speculation, as Egypt.
Nora: I’m almost irritated by how much of this story remains circumstantial.
Julian: Almost?
Nora: Because, against my better judgment, I very much want to know what happened next.
Julian: Glad to be of service.
Editor’s Note: That makes two of us. If you have credible information that may help fill the gaps, such as sightings, photographs, travel records, aviation data, or anything else connected to Croft’s movements through Egypt, we want to hear from you. Anonymous tips are welcome. The investigation continues in a future issue of Astonishing Travels.