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After the Gold Rush	By : christinecornell Category: M through R > Night at the Museum Views: 5 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: Just an idea that came to me last Thanksgiving after watching the Night at the Museum movies and Steve Coogan on a rerun of Top Gear where he mentioned Around the World in 80 Days, and I thought to combine both worlds. I own nothing!

Chapter List
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The warm tropical air was my bed from that point onward.
Springtime had come to Hawai’i, but the islands were so hot, and the other alternative was to return to San Francisco and be a destitute bum for the rest of my life. Who was I kidding: I had made a bet with Lord Kelvin that I could thumb my way around the world in eighty days, but I had been used by the two whom I had considered to be my friends and my partners in crime. Besides, word had it on the streets of London that Monique had been placed in an arranged marriage: even if I had won the gamble, she would be pushed off into the arms of another man.
I wasn’t going to admit that I was in love with her, not after we had nearly been killed in Lanzhou.
I couldn’t bear to think of her or of Passepartout at this point, not after what happened in China and India, and especially not there after I had taken the final boat out from San Francisco to the Hawaiian islands. Three days, I was at sea, but it was better than trying to make a bet with someone who hated my guts and spend time with people who nudged me to the side. All of the meetings over the summer where I overheard things about becoming the next Minister of Science, and one who would “represent the rapidly growing empire.” I was not the first to admit that I was a greedy bastard and I wanted the entire delicious pie rather than a skimpy slice.
But during the trip across the sea, I recalled Kelvin’s blank expression, one which told me everything before anyone else, especially Passepartout, had even said a word when I had suggested the gamble: Inspector Fix, the man whom Kelvin had hired to chase after us, after me in particular, had it out for me even before I had begun. It was personal, and one which left me wondering as to whom I could trust: as far as I knew, Monique was nothing more than a patsy, especially since she seemed rather distant from me and somewhat intrigued by the suggestion of an arranged marriage back in Istanbul.
I had been lied to this entire time, and now I had to start from scratch, on my own, out in the ocean.
Arranged marriages always left a pit in my stomach, and all of the ministries hired by the empire, in particular the Royal Academy of Science, made a mockery of my distaste for them.
Kelvin thought I was crazy, anyways.
But I watched it happen all around me: engagements made in haste bestowed strained marriages, and more so the case during one hell of a journey about the globe. It was all about becoming an elite, and the desire had lost its luster so quickly once I spent my last few quid in San Francisco. The painter set to become the princess of Turkey once she married the prince, another man who nearly had me and Passepartout killed, and I knew it was about to made official once we returned home to England.
As far as I was concerned, however, I had jumped ship from the empire and found myself in the bottom of a bottle of rum on the black sands of an island called Oahu.
My dark hair was disheveled, and I had used my overcoat as a tent. At least the sun was out, and the ocean air felt quite nice on my skin.
“I think I’ll stay a while,” I said to myself, and I cleared my throat from the lack of anything proper to drink since I had beached the night before. I unbuttoned my shirt to feel the ocean on my chest: I wasn’t used to the warmth, especially this time of year where England was often slammed with droves of rain and left cool during the evening. I looked up to the sky overhead: I usually had idea after idea when I stood out in the sun, but I had been left dry at that point.
I held my hands to my bare chest just to feel my skin and the beating of my own heart.
How could they have pushed this to the side like they did, this beating heart here, one with lead through his veins and mechanical gears embedded in his heart and lungs.
Okay. Not literally speaking.
But I was the inventor and the one who should have led the way, not pushed forth against his own will. I should have done it on my own terms, but instead, I had played as if I was a slab of meat.
I danced with idiots. Every single one of them, a complete idiot—including myself.
A gust of cool wind brushed over my face and my chest. It wound its way through the roots of my hair and down the crest of my back: still too warm to make me think of England.
I opened my eyes and turned my head for a look at the palm trees lining the sand next to me. My coat lay back in the notch in the trees behind me, but I was in no mood to fetch it and change spots. If anything, I preferred finding myself some palm fronds and lumber to build a small house for myself. I showed Passepartout my device which broke the fifty mile an hour speed barrier: I could make something out of the trees. I set my hands down and walked through the hot black sands, barefoot, over to the trees. There was no way I was going to be walking through hot volcanic sand with my boots on.
At least I didn’t have Kelvin yapping in my ear the entire time. He was only head of the academy because his father had bought it for him. And Fix played part of the pig as well, what with being more of a puppet than me and everything.
When I stood under a tree, the fronds protected me from the hot sun: the shade felt good on my head and shoulders, and more so on my chest. I glanced up at the tall palms around me.
I had my pocketknife on my belt, and thus, I could readily strip them off and make a roof as well as a hammock. Coconuts were impossible to break open, which I found out straight away, and thus, they could act as barricades should it ever flood: middle of the ocean, there were bound to be storms of incredible proportions.
I leaned against the trunk of the tree behind me: last I had eaten was on the boat, and I had eaten a great deal as I had no idea as to whether or not Hawai’i had an adequate amount of food. The last I had heard was that the Laplace of France had inflicted so many terrible ailments on the population and killed so many of them all at once. But regardless of that empire’s dirty laundry, or the dirty laundry of any empire, I was genuinely beginning to feel hungry at that point.
I didn’t think I would die out in the middle of the ocean, the middle of nowhere, but I had a feeling that that was my fate.
A rustling in the trees before me caught my attention, and I gazed ahead. A slender woman with dark skin and even blacker hair peeked at me through the trees. I pursed my lips as I struggled not to frighten her.
An Englishman with long shaggy dark brown hair, big soft brown eyes, and a full build: I could potentially pass off as Polynesian. I had been torn to pieces, but I could do it. Indeed, she poked her head out more from behind the tree, and she showed me her long grass skirt as well as her bare exposed breasts with dark nipples.
I could feel my face growing warm at the sight of her. I sank my shoulders and relaxed.
“Oh. Hello there.”
She showed me a little smile, followed by a wreath of little golden-orange flowers in her hands. Gingerly, she approached me, and she lifted the wreath up over my head.
“Around my neck?” I asked her, to which she nodded. I bowed my head, and she rested the wreath about my neck and shoulders. Her fingers brushed against the sides of my neck as she nudged my hair back out of the flowers, all of which smelled wonderful and sweet. She stood upon her toes and lightly kissed me on the cheek.
“Thank you,” I said to her with a break in my voice.
“Aloha mai Oahu,” she greeted me in a voice so sweet that it made me think of sugarcane. “Welcome to Oahu. Come with me.”
I ran my fingers through my hair and followed her into the trees, towards a pathway carved through the bushes. The sticks and sand were hard on my feet, but I had to keep walking.
“I have traveled far,” I confessed. I daren’t tell her that I hailed from England, as I knew that things were raw about those wares.
“You seem as though you have,” she replied, and she walked side by side with me once we reached the trail. “A man does not cross the ocean and not seem as shattered as you do.”
I shuddered at the thought of that. “Do you have anything to eat?”
“There is plenty abound,” she promised me, and she lingered closer to me. If nothing else, I had my eye on her breasts: it was not often in England when women bore their full chests forth; to see her gave me a rush of blood straight to my head. “In fact, I was about to participate in a midday feast when I spotted you on the beach.”
“What’s your name, mind me asking at all?”
“Leilani,” she answered. “And you?”
“Phileas,” I replied. “Phileas Fogg.”
“Very interesting name,” she noted. “Are you English?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” I replied, and I could feel the pit in my stomach once again.
“What’s unfortunate about that?”
“My country as well as the French, the Portuguese, and the Americans have been ravaging your tropical paradise like a slab of meat,” I confessed, and the heavy feeling on my shoulders lifted as the words left my lips.
“Even the most poisonous of oceans have drops that are benevolent,” Leilani assured me.
I showed her a little smile, even as we walked onward through the palms.
She nudged a frond out of the way for us, even though I would have been more than happy to do that for us. We were met with a broad street comprised of hard soil, lined with more palms as well as small huts with grass and frond roofs. A few old women ensconced in heavy fabric sat at a patio right before us: they sipped on what appeared to be rum and coconut milk and talking in Hawaiian, which I knew in my heart I was going to have to learn if I was going to stay a while as I had promised. They looked on at me, and I bowed my head as a result so as to not give them the wrong idea.
I had a feeling I was going to be doing that quite a bit throughout the islands, and more so when I felt Leilani rest a hand on the small of my back. They watched me, but once we had strode on past them, I glimpsed over my shoulder to see their expressions had changed. Perhaps I could relax, and more so once she fetched me something to eat.
Once we had passed several more huts, she let go of me and I tucked one hand into my pocket. I had completely forgotten that Monique had wrote a letter to me on the train ride over the Alps, but she never told me about what she had written to me. I hoped that it would not be any senseless nonsense, especially with Leilani next to me.
Not on my life.
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After the Gold Rush