Ash Ketchum: Battle of the Ampere

Ch. 25 The Blue Door

   The city of Cuzco is the kind of place you see in travel magazines and on TV travel shows. Of course Clemont had to tell us all he knew about the city.

  "Cuzco is not only the ancient capital of the Incan empire, but it's the official tourist city of Peru--and it attracts more than two million visitors a year. The original city was built in the shape of a puma, or mountain lion, which, to the Incans, was a sacred animal.

  "When the Spanish explorer Pizarro arrived in Peru with his soldiers, the Incan king Atahualpa tried to run him out, but the king was captured by the Spanish conquistadors. For his release, Pizarro demanded that the Incans fill a large room with gold. The Incans paid the ransom, but Pizarro just took their gold, then executed the king anyway. That's where the saying 'a king's ransom' came from.

  "The Inca Atahualpa was the last great Incan emperor, and forty years after his death the great Incan empire came to an end. The Spanish tore down the Incan palace and built a cathedral on top of it."

   Clemont's Cuzco trivia went on for about twenty minutes. With the exception of Korrina's occasional response, no one else said a thing and eventually even Clemont got tired of hearing himself.

   As we drove toward the city, Brock and Serena changed places and Brock became our GPS, guiding us to the town square, the Plaza de Armas. As Clemont had said, Cusco was a major tourist attraction and the traffic slowed. As the area was crowded with tourists and the people who profit from them.

   Zeus parked the army truck behind the cathedral of Santo Domingo, and we all got out, looking around in awe. The cobblestone-paved square was large and beautifully decorated in the architecture of the Spanish Renaissance. Outside of history books I had never seen anything like it.

   It seemed to me that everyone was looking at us, which made me nervous, but wasn't surprising. We hadn't bathed in weeks and our clothes were ridiculously dirty. Only Calem, whose clothes were stained with blood, had changed shirts and was wearing a Galactic guard's undershirt.

   We split up into smaller groups to avoid drawing any more attention to ourselves, arranging to meet in one hour at the large fountain in the center off the plaza. Then Serena, Clemont, Korrina, and I set out in search of Hostel El Triumfo.

   Finding the place wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. All Raihan had told us about the hostel's location was that it was near the town square. The square was considerably larger than I had imagined and there were dozens of side streets and tiny alleyways leading off of it. Finally, Clemont asked a shopkeeper where we could find the place and he pointed us in the general direction. Serena and I started off for it while Clemont and Korrina fell back, following us at a distance.

   The hostel wasn't especially notable, and Serena and I walked past it twice before she spotted a small, plastic sign hanging hostel's splintered wood front door. We stepped inside, quickly shutting the door behind us.

   The tiny lobby was dark and austere, lit only with candles. At the back of the room, standing behind a small counter, was an old Peruvian man with silver hair and bushy gray eyebrows as thick as caterpillars. Next to him was a young woman dressed in modern clothing. She looked close to our age, perhaps just a year or two older. The man looked at us suspiciously.

   I walked up to the counter. "Do you speak English?" I asked.

  "Si, senor. Un poco."

  "We would like a room for the night."

   The man's dark darted back and forth nervously. "I am sorry, but we have no room. It is the tourist season."