"Can you actually hear me up here?"

That voice was something that the professional on the other side of the line was used to hearing; the one belonging to a man who was dangling above a three mile drop above a jungle canyon from a piece of ancient masonry. This prayer piller, constructed thousands of years ago by an advanced and artistic culture that sadly - and mysteriously - died out only two thousand years ago was the only thing keeping the young man alive. His grip was slipping slightly, his feet unable to find purchase on the rock that was slippery from wet grass and slick mould from years of damp, humid rainforest air.

The young man was Chad Blaise Elliot, or Blaize Elliot as he was better known around the world. The son of the legendary Theodore Elliot, whose trails lead him across the globe and discovered so many ancient secrets and treasures, and contributed so much to anthropology and archaeology that entire courses and degrees were based around his works ... Theodore Elliot was a towering force in the profession of finding things from other times.

His son?

... Not so much.

It was actually a mystery where, exactly, Blaize came from. His father never married, the man always saying 'a gentleman never leaves his lady idle in a parlour, wondering if her husband will come back from another adventure'. With his erratic and heavy workload, he found it unseemly to take a wife and leave her for long stretches of time. He had entertained beauties, but he was from the school of thought that one should only court if one had mind to marry.
So when a son turned up, everyone raised an eyebrow and no-one really wanted to ask outright where he came from. Some DID pose the polite question as to where 'your son's mother' could be, something that would always gain the frosty reply of 'she is well, but she is occupied'. It stood to reason that Blaize was some sort of one-night thing, but with whom and where, and why the normally impeccable Sir Elliot broke his moral code were all up in the air.

Not that this seemed to do much to harm Blaize, at least not in a normal way. Raised by a succession of nannies, governors and private tutors until he attended university, he was allowed reign of his fathers house while his father was off making new breakthroughs in ancient history. This made him, to put it bluntly, spoiled, and this really showed when attending higher education.

A man of means and good blood like his would do well to earn stripes in academia like his father. But whereas his father earned his credentials through hard work, good manners, excellent method and perfect intelligence, Blaize got them through ... being the son of that.
While other students burned the midnight oil, Blaize burned the oil dancing and drinking. While others religiously attended lectures, he turned up in one out of five, if at all. While others were driven to the point of near insanity from stress handing in a dozen papers or more, Blaize always had his somehow turn up, despite the man being clearly hungover and barely awake, and earn perfect marks.

Because no-one wanted to criticize the son of Theodore Elliot.

Especially when Theodore mysteriously disappeared in the heavy mists of Shonosha, disappearing in his trusty biplane into the fog and never coming back. His plane was discovered three years later, but he was gone, as was all sign of him ... Though declared dead for reasons of inheritance and law, many still wondered about his ultimate fate. Blaize was seemingly unaffected ...

Like he was unaffected now. Despite being spoilt and handled with kid-gloves by the same institutions that revered his father, he was still his father's son, and the want to climb all over things in the name of knowledge rang strong in his veins.
Even if his way was brute force compared to his father's much softer touch, and he relied much more on his learned parter, who was watching what Blaize was seeing and hearing his voice through a headset they both wore. Telephones and technology were practically useless in locations like these, but their headsets somehow still worked, and while one was hanging off the edge of certain death, the other was watching from a computer chair.