The Pendants - Intro

Broaden her horizons?! Broaden HER horizons?!? What did they think they were playing at! She had the broadest horizons amongst all of them! This was SUCH bullshit. Just like that time Jimmy Carlisle had been given top marks over HER. It was just ridiculous! Really! FORCING her to go on a sabbatical?! what a ridiculous idea. She could be working on any number of papers demonstrating how much better the world would be if women didn’t have to pay taxes. If men had to go before a council to ask for permission to have sex. If the government provided seperate schools for girls so they would never be influenced by men.

if men were forced to get snipped if they so much as made a girl uncomfortable.
They were all perfectly rational ideas. She had worked 20 years for this position. TWENTY! And a couple years in the board of trustees thought it fit to exile her to sabbatical?! Well she was going to show them that she didn’t need any more damn horizons! She’d go out there and prove that she already was “imaginative” and “capable of seeing a topic from every point of view!”

--- A Few Months Later ---

Carpedia sat at the top of a dry sand dune. The sun was just starting to come up over the jagged mountaintops to the East. It was her third week at the excavation site. This barren place was home to an ancient Egyptian tomb. “What else was there in Egypt besides dead patriarchal leaders and Cleopatra?” She thought to herself as she rose from her sitting position, dusting the blowing sand from her clothing with a frustrated humph. “It’s coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere! I hate it!” Carpe mumbled to herself, “At least I get to be out of the sun today, finally getting to go into this stupid graveyard.”

She walked down the slope of the dune into the excavation area. Going down the slope gave her quite a lot of trouble. She had spent her entire life in front of books and web artices. Before she had arrived here three weeks ago, Carpedia had been more than a little chubby. The last few weeks had burned off some of it. The stresses of traveling, physical labor, and come close to heat exhaustion more than once had shed more than a few pounds on her once plump frame. To say the least, she now looked like a relatively normally shaped woman rather than the crazy college feminist stereotype.

A deep hole had been dug to the entrance of the tomb. It reminded her of the holes she dug when her Mother took her to the beach. She would try to dig as deep as possible and use all the excess sand to build a wall against the incoming tides. It never worked, of course. The ocean tide had always come in and swept all her hard work away. Leaving nothing but a smooth patch of sand where her bastion of work had once been.

She met a group of the excavators, and the lead archeologist Dr. Daniel Grant, at the entrance of the tomb. “Alright, now that we are all here, we are ready to make our first foray into the tomb.” Dr. Grant said clapping his hands together. The Doctor than turned around and headed into the tomb. Carpe gave a huff and shrug, she had only been able to stop for half a second before having to pick her pace up again. Her feet may have gotten used to most of the walking over the past few weeks, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t still exhausted.

The party proceeded into the tomb proper. They went in through a large square entryway typical of ancient egyptian architecture. The door was framed on either side by two statues of incredibly proportioned women. The statues would have made many strippers blush from their curves alone. The statues arms reached up into the sky to hold aloft shallow bowls that most likely would have been filled with some kind of fuel to burn.

Once inside the adventurous archeological party found many more of the same statues. It disgusted Carpedia. She’d rather be out in the sand than have to look at these malformed perversions of the female form. She pushed forward, if for no other reason than she needed to discover more about the tomb in order to give it a proper thrashing in her next blog post.

It took Dr. Grant and his party several hours to make their way from the entrance into the sarcophagus chamber. Unlike all the other rooms in the tomb, this one did not contain any of the perverse female statues. Instead, in the center of the large oval chamber, there was a pair of sarcophagi. The egyptian caskets looked to be connected by an intertwining of hands. As the party carefully approached the sarcophagi, Carpe also noticed that in the pairs intertwined hands was a pair of necklaces.

Once next to them, Dr. Grant bent down onto his knees and examined the necklaces closely. Both were made with a thing gold chain. The main difference was in the pendant attached to either one. The pendants clearly had words inscribed on them, however, Carpe could not read them. Dr. Grant stared at them in awe. “Do any of you know what these are!?” he gasped, and then went on a long diatribe that Carpedia quickly drowned out. It was all pointless stuff she didn’t need to know. The statues were a dead give-away as to what kind of ruler this patriarchal Pharaoh had been.

After the diatribe turned class lecture on some long lost magical egyptian pendants was over, the doctor and his team carefully extracted the pendants and sealed them in seperate cases for later study. The party then made their way back out of the tomb. They had spent so long in the tomb that the sun was setting in the West as they exited next to the large curvy female statues.

Later that night, when everyone but Carpedia had passed out in their tents, Carpe went out to where the pendants had been stored. She opened one of the two, took out the pendant, and replaced it with a pile of sand. She then stuffed the pendant in her shorts pocket and went back to her tent to sleep.

--- Weeks Later ---

After the expedition had arrived home a news story broke about a thief who had stolen one of the “lover’s pendants” as they were coming to be called. Dr. Grant was quoted many a time saying that all he wanted was the pendant back. He didn’t want to press charges. The doctor only wanted to recover lost human history.

Carpedia had scoffed at the morning news report on the story as she ate breakfast with the pendant around her neck. She got a cruel sense of satisfaction from it. She had come to find out that Dr. Grant was, like much of his gender, a disgusting pervert. She had caught him openly viewing Instagram models profiles on his phone during their return trip. Not only that, but the women who’s profiles he viewed tended to be those who preferred to look like the statues outside of that disgusting Egyptian tomb. Only they were more obviously surgically modified than the statues were. She had originally only wanted the pendant for a bit to enhance her blog posts. After seeing what kind of man Dr. Grant was though, there was no way in hell she was returning it now. Besides, wearing it made her feel so good!