#when I die this will go inside my pyramid right next to my tomb

[rukiruu]

Thank god someone else who appreciates Lee Sookyung x Yoo Sangah

Take this doodle:

(sorry it's so dim)

IM SO SICK AND TWISTED IM SO CRAZY INSANE???????????????? IS THIS REAL. IS ANYONE ELSE SEEING THIS. IS ANYONE ELSE SEEJNG THIS? JS THJS REAL? SHOULD I LIVE MYSELF

[belphegor1982]

Twelve years. Twelve years between chapters. But we got there. I can hardly believe it. Anyway, here’s the elusive chapter 17. Hope you enjoy!

FAIRY TALES AND HOKUM

Summary: 1937: Two years after the events of Ahm Shere, the O’Connells are “required” by the British Government to bring the Diamond taken there from Egypt to England. In Cairo, while Evelyn deals with the negotiations and Rick waits for doom to strike again, Jonathan bumps into an old friend of his from university, Tom Ferguson. Things start to go awry when the Diamond is stolen from the Museum and old loyalties are tested… (story on AO3; on FFnet)

(Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16)

Chapter 17: Fight or Flight (on AO3 here; on FFnet here)

Evelyn had rarely been so angry at her son. Alex did have a mischievous streak – often encouraged, to his mother’s dismay, by a father who tended to turn a blind eye to what he judged to be mild shenanigans and an uncle who sometimes still seemed half a child himself – but he hardly ever did anything that warranted more than a stern talking-to.

This time, Evelyn’s anger was proportional to her sudden fear for her child, which took priority over everything else. Alex visibly struggled to explain his actions, in vain.

“But Mum, I’ve been in the pyramid too! I know which way to go, I can help Dad and Uncle Jon while you find the bad guy and stop him!”

“You will do no such thing! This isn’t one of your adventure books, Alex – we know next to nothing about the men inside the pyramid, however I don’t think they’re going to draw the line at harming you. Not to mention the Army of Anubis. They’re set to destroy everyone and everything in their path, including children.”

Evelyn didn’t shout. She was too furious for that. Besides, she usually didn’t need to, and considering the way Izzy was slinking away, looking supremely uncomfortable, this was one of those times.

Unfortunately, Alex had inherited both his parents’ brands of stubbornness, and knew how to dig in his heels when he felt it necessary.

“I know that, Mum. But Lock-Nah and the others didn’t really cut me any slack for being a kid. If it hadn’t been for Dad, he would have killed me in that jungle, and I think he would have really liked it.”

Through her anger, Evelyn felt a stab of retroactive terror and fury at the men who had come so close to depriving her of her only child. Then she forced her mind back to the present and grabbed Alex by the shoulders, resisting the urge to hold him as tightly as she could.

“That’s just it, Alex. You don’t have to place yourself in danger now. You can stay at the camp, with the other children, and,” she added pointedly as Alex opened his mouth to protest, “I can go into that pyramid knowing that you’re safer than if you’d come with me. Have you any idea how worried I’d be for you if you went with me? Or what your father would say if something happened to you while you were down there?”

The argument was a bit of a low blow, but Evelyn was past pulling any punches, as Rick said. Of course Alex could be mature beyond his years. Of course he had endured things no ten-year-old should with remarkable fortitude. Of course – and this broke her heart – he was not unfamiliar with the worst human beings could inflict on fellow men, and even children. But this time he could stay behind, and, if she had anything to say about it, would stay behind.

Izzy’s hesitant voice was loud in the sudden silence.

“Actually. Um. I don’t think we can. Go back to camp, I mean.”

Evelyn’s eyes swivelled from Alex to him, and he pointed at something in the distance.

“Well, we could, but if that means what I think it means, we need to land and get into that pyramid right now.”

Mother and son ran to bend over the rail, disagreement temporarily forgotten.

From ground level came a dot of light that made Evelyn’s eyes water when they met it. After squinting a little in the near darkness, she saw tents lit up by campfires. In the middle, a figure knelt on the ground next to a fire, holding a mirror towards the dirigible.

The signal. Maher and his men had overpowered Hamilton’s men, commando-style, and were telling her it was time to land.

Evelyn closed her eyes and took a shaking breath. They really didn’t have time to go back.

“Alex,” she said, her voice very, very low, “when we get home, you and I are going to have Words.”

Alex swallowed and wisely kept his mouth shut. Visibly his mother’s tone had successfully impressed upon him just How Serious the situation was. Good.

Hamilton’s camp should probably have been bustling, but it was eerily still and silent when Izzy landed Dee next to the dug up top of the Pyramid of Ahm Shere. The men, she found, were huddling together, sitting down in the sand, throwing nervous glances at their captors. Maher’s team was small, but effective.

While Izzy dragged the ramp out of the bowels of the dirigible, Evelyn turned to Alex and knelt down to his eyeline.

“Alex, please promise me you’ll stay here. Please, swear on my life, on your father’s, that you’re going to stay on the dirigible and not wander off.”

Alex still looked conflicted, but eventually nodded solemnly.

“I swear, Mum. I won’t set a foot outside of Dee until you’ve brought back Dad and Uncle Jon.”

His voice rang with absolute certainty, as though Rick and Jonathan were merely busy elsewhere, to be called back to the house for dinner. Not for the first time, her son’s unshakeable faith in her was humbling, and not a little daunting considering what lay ahead. Evelyn wrapped him in her arms and held him close, laying her head against his, her nose in his fine hair. She was almost surprised when Alex hugged her back fiercely, silently, his small hands gripping the back of her blouse so tightly the fabric strained.

She was not surprised, however, when she heard a snuffle and a muffled, “Promise me you won’t die again, Mum.”

Evelyn ran a hand through Alex’s hair; she pulled away to lay a kiss on his crown and rested her forehead against his for a few seconds, until he could give a wobbly smile and pretend he hadn’t noticed she hadn’t promised anything.

As she followed Izzy down the ramp, she looked back only once. Her little boy stood at the rail, firelight behind him, his eyes very bright.

Maher, a tall, willowy man who rarely talked, gave her a gentle smile when he saw her before he went back to watching the prisoners. His lieutenant, Atifa, met her in the centre of the camp, at the foot of the pyramid – or rather, the dozen feet that had been unearthed. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman, a little older than Evelyn who had met her a few years ago on one of her visits to Ardeth and his family.

“Are you sure you don’t want anyone else coming with you?” she asked Evelyn in a low voice.

Evelyn shook her head. “Thank you, but no. You’re needed here; I’m needed down there.” She pursed her lips and breathed deeply through her nose. Her mission – taking down Hamilton by any means necessary – was clear, and she intended to see it through, but she couldn’t help but shudder, like she’d shuddered two years ago, standing nearly in the same spot. She had lost count of the men she’d had to kill in that jungle to protect her son, her husband, and her friend. This, almost more than the memory of the smell of gunpowder and almost throwing up once she’d lowered her rifle, kept her awake at night. And she let it. Killing people should never be easy, she reasoned. The dead, even nameless, had their way of weighing on the souls of the living, their murderers’ in particular.

Come to think of it, stripping Imhotep of his name in the hope of his never reaching the afterlife had been an exercise in futility. Engraving ‘He Who Shall Not Be Named’ on his sarcophagus hadn’t taken away his sense of self any more than it had stopped her from bringing him back to life.

Atifa didn’t argue the point. She held out her hand, and instead of clasping Evelyn’s, laid it on her arm, just below the shoulder.

The warmth of this simple contact nearly undid her resolve before it strengthened it. Apart from Alex, Evelyn realised, she hadn’t felt the touch of another human being in five days. She allowed herself one second of fierce longing for Rick’s arms around her, or Jonathan’s hand in the crook of her elbow, before smiling at Atifa and returning the gesture.

“Be careful,” said Atifa in a low voice.

“You too,” said Evelyn firmly.

And she entered the pyramid, feeling rather than hearing Izzy’s presence at her back. Even the weapons he had brought didn’t make any sound as he walked.

Evelyn herself held a pistol in her right hand and a sword in her left. The part of her that was Nefertiri scoffed at the imbalance and pointed out that a khopesh in each hand would have been better.

If someone asked her one day how one went about being a reincarnated princess from Ancient Egypt and handling both sets of memories and reflexes, Evelyn would be hard pressed to answer. There were facts she knew that she never learned, movements that came to her instinctively in spite of herself… Nefertiri had died a young woman, but Evelyn had a decade on her, plus a child. It had taken her hours and hours of fighting practice before she could truly find a balance between the warrior and the archaeologist.

Right now, for instance, Nefertiri focused on being as stealthy and silent as possible, while Evelyn’s experience in entering tombs kept her eyes and ears open for anything unusual. Which, admittedly, amounted to everything in a pyramid that appeared to hold a veritable jungle in its entrails.

“Did you know about this?” muttered Izzy, startling her. “Was the place already like that when I picked you up last time?”

“No,” she whispered. “Absolutely not. The oasis must have got sucked into the pyramid when the Scorpion King died.”

A shudder ran through her body. If the Oasis of Ahm Shere was now inside the pyramid… did that mean everything else was, as well?

The jungle around her was hardly silent. Some wildlife must have made it home again, from what she could hear, and somewhere a small stream was babbling merrily and dripping over a wall. Against all odds, there was even a slight breeze on her face. So far, there was no sign of the unearthly silence that had preceded the arrival of the pygmy mummies.

“Right, right. The Scorpion King. Was that the one your boy’s gold bracelet led to, the one who was supposed to rise from the dead and destroy the world?”

Evelyn turned sharply towards Izzy.

“It was, actually, outlandish as it may sound. That bracelet almost killed my son, and the Scorpion King almost killed my husband.”

And a three thousand years old resurrected concubine killed me.

Izzy held out one hand.

“Look, couple of years ago I would’ve said this was nuts, but then a wall of water with a face on it tried to drown us and then the desert bloody ate an oasis and an entire pyramid. I’m willing to go on faith. Just… Lemme adjust a little bit.”

“I know the feeling. But you’re going to have to adjust quickly. We—”

The floor shook, the walls trembled. She and Izzy reached for each other at the same time for balance, and she felt his hand grip her wrist and send a shudder through her arm.

“Wha—”

The world went black, and for a second Evelyn felt a wild, irrational fear that she’d just been killed again. The sensation was nothing like she’d ever felt before. The shadow drove itself into the heart of her, like cold fire or burning ice, leaving her with a gaping void. Suddenly she was grateful to feel the grip of Izzy’s hand. It was the only sensation that registered at all.

The shadow left as quickly as it had come. In its wake was a faint, greenish light, as though the braziers and torches she remembered were there had been lit again, somewhere beyond the foliage.

“What was that!?” gasped Izzy, letting go of her wrist.

Evelyn peered into the half-lit passageway to the trail they were following, then back to the way they had come from, her heart pounding in her chest fit to burst.

“I think… I think that was the Army of Anubis.”

Her next words turned to ash in her mouth.

“We’re too late.”

.⅋.

Tomorrow often was a good day to die, Ardeth reflected. Today never was.

Tomorrow was convenient. It allowed room for steely composure and swagger, admiring stares on the part of the less lucky ones who would not be riding out to war, and maybe just a few seconds of feeling sorry for oneself.

Not so with “today”. Today was the moment death stared you in the face and you hoped, wished and prayed that it would look away, just for you, just for one minute. It was the moment when you tried so very hard, as your enemy stormed upon you, to maintain a little bit of dignity and not let your body betray you with violently shaking legs or a loosening bladder.

A good warrior looked on combat as being ‘today’, because he knew that the true face of war was the face of your comrade in arms and best friend staring at you from the ground with dead eyes, sand mixing with blood in your own wounds and staring at whatever was pouring out of your gut in nauseating terror.

For all his years as a chieftain and a commander of the Medjai, and his experience in battle, Ardeth knew he would never be quite used to war.

He fervently hoped so, anyway.

Spurring his horse to reach the front of the first line, he caught a grim glance from Aziz, chieftain of the Fifth Tribe – a tall, thin man, whose deep-set eyes looked more dour than ever.

His expression did not surprise Ardeth. Aziz was a strategist first, and a warrior second. Although nobody – not even him – had been able to come up with a completely satisfying solution, he had been one of the strongest voices against facing the Army of Anubis a second time with nothing more than a wild hope that things would somehow turn out all right in the pyramid.

But try as he might, he couldn’t think of a better strategy. Having known the Chieftain of the Fifth Tribe for years, Ardeth had a very clear idea of just how much this angered him. In all likelihood, Aziz was now close to seething, and the only thing that stopped him from speaking his mind to his Commander was the men and women standing around them, and, possibly, his own lack of a better plan of action.

But he waited, same as the others, careful not to let his mask of cool self-control slip. Ardeth knew that he felt just the same fraction of mind-boggling terror – voiced by the same instinct of self-preservation that whispered that right here and now was the last place to be.

Once more, though, he silenced it as he surveyed his people.

Most of them had already been there two years ago. He could see the weariness and horror in their eyes that came from knowing exactly what they would face. Some of the younger warriors, those who had never seen a Jackal of Anubis, were throwing worried glances here and there, breathing shallow and fast, but it did not come close to the terror of facing your nightmares for the second time in two years.

The wind changed. Ardeth’s breath caught in his throat.

The stars above were still visible, but their light was cold, as though dimmed. The air suddenly cooled.

In front of them, between them and the pyramid in the distance, dark sand began to move.

Ardeth’s hands tightened around the hilt of his scimitar.

They were coming.

.⅋.

“Kill them.”

“Wait – stop! What!?”

Damn, the guy was fast. In the half-second it had taken Rick to instinctively reach for the gun he knew wasn’t at his side, Ferguson had leaped in front of him and Jonathan, facing his colleagues with a wild-eyed fear in his eyes and his hands held placatingly in front of him.

To their credit, a few agents lowered their guns immediately.

“Robertson, Wyndham, Norton, come on – what does Baine think you are, cold-blooded murderers?” Ferguson’s voice was a little higher than usual, and the sudden edge in it seemed to shake several agents into taking their fingers off the triggers of their guns. “Our job is to protect important and ancient artefacts, not bloody kill people!”

“Thank you for that eloquent address, Ferguson,” said Baine coldly, as though this was just a hitch in the plan, “but I think we’ll do without interruptions now. Gentlemen, proceed.”

From the corner of his eye, Rick glanced at Jonathan, who seemed to be surreptitiously looking for a quick way out. Good. Here’s hoping he’s spotted the little passageway between the two trees and the statue.

Apparently Ferguson hadn’t played his last card.

“Stop – think! Why?”

A burly giant of an agent lowered his gun entirely and asked, frowning, “What d’you mean, ‘why’? It’s a direct order, innit?”

“A direct – oh, for God’s sake –” Ferguson threw up his hands. “What if he ordered you to shoot yourself in the head, you monumental idiot, would you do it?”

“Here, he’s got a point,” a younger agent piped up. “Do we really have to kill them? I mean, this isn’t what I signed up for in the first place.”

“Shut up and do the job at hand, McLean,” came the low, scratchy voice of a much older agent, whose gun was still trained steadily at Rick and Jonathan. “It’s not your place to ask.”

Rick took a minuscule step back. If he could just bump into one of them and help himself to a gun in the process, they might have a chance to get out of this mess alive. What they would do outside against the Army of Anubis was another matter entirely, but right now, the priority was getting the hell away from Baine.

Rick O’Connell always prided himself on his sense of priorities.

The man himself stood silent in the background as voices rose in argument, slowly but definitely reaching inside his jacket for his own gun. Rick took a short moment to appraise the look in Baine’s eyes. The guy was deadly serious.

Meanwhile, even as they clutched their guns, some of the other agents still exchanged uncertain glances at the idea of shooting two fellow human beings in cold blood. Maybe there was something to work with here.

In the blink of an eye, Rick grabbed Ferguson from behind, wrenched his revolver from his holster and shoved the muzzle between his shoulder blades.

The guy stiffened and let out a strangled sound. Rick tried not to wince and whispered, “Sorry, buddy. Just look scared.”

“Not bloody hard, is it!” Ferguson hissed through clenched teeth, as Jonathan inched closer, his face even whiter than it had been five minutes ago.

“Rick, what the hell are you doing?” he whispered angrily. Rick gave an imperceptible shrug.

“Making a gambit. You play poker, you oughta know that.” Then he stared at Baine, hard, trying to make him understand just how deadly serious he was, too.

“You make a move, I kill the guy,” he said as levelly as he could, his heart hammering in his chest. He had played poker before, occasionally with a bad hand, but this was easily the worst hand he’d ever had. “Your call.”

Okay, that got ‘em thinking. They would surely think twice about murdering a fellow agent, someone they’d known for some time, maybe some years. Talk as little as possible, keep your eyes on theirs, make a slow retreat…

“Is it, really, Mister O’Connell?” Baine actually grinned, clearly enjoying the situation. “What makes you think I won’t just shoot him as well? Do you really believe, in that thick American head of yours, that I would let the life of one agent compromise the mission?”

Shit.

Baine raised his gun.

Rick fell back on pure survival instinct and decades-old training. The second before Baine’s finger squeezed the trigger, he dropped to the ground, pulling Ferguson with him. The jungle became a dark green blur as he leaped to his feet and bolted to the door, only risking the shortest glance behind him to check that Jonathan did the same, still keeping a tight hold on Ferguson’s collar with his left hand and on his gun in his right. Leaves, branches, and the occasional chip of stone exploded around them as agent after agent decided to follow the leader after all and shoot.

All things considered, it was a sheer miracle that the three of them were still intact when they finally stopped after what felt like hours of running straight in front of them. Rick made sure of that once he had recovered enough to review his troops.

Jonathan was leaning against the wall for support, ashen-faced and gasping – from retroactive fright, Rick guessed, as well as the actual run – but Ferguson looked worse. His face was an even more alarming shade than his old friend’s, his breaths coming in gasps, gulping and uneven.

The only sound that didn’t come in muffled by the layers of green around them was the same faint gurgle that they’d noticed as they entered the pyramid.

With a bit of luck, they could find the source and follow it upstream back to the entrance at the top.

“All – all right, there, Tom?” Rick heard Jonathan ask uncertainly. When he looked back, Ferguson’s glare was very bright in the half-gloom of the low, small corridor.

“Do I bloody look all right, Jon?” he panted, a bit of colour creeping back into his cheeks. “Those – what a bunch of stupid, mindless – I don’t even – God, I can’t believe that son of a bitch!” he finally exploded with on his face an expression even Rick couldn’t deny was a little bit scary. “When I get me ‘ands on him he’ll be bleedin’ sorry he was born!”

Nobody asked him who ‘he’ was – there was no need.

Thankfully, possibly because of the unsettling hush around them or the stifling damp heat, Ferguson’s fury boiled down to a steady simmer quickly enough, although his dark glower spoke volumes about the fate he reserved for Baine if he was still alive when they got out of there. Rick caught himself thinking it might be kinder for the guy to never see the light of day again.

As for the other agents…

“Orders, they said,” Ferguson muttered as they tiptoed their way up, watching every shadow like hawks. It was almost impossible to see the floor under all the greenery, so they tread very carefully. “Orders. Cretins. That lot wouldn’t recognise common sense if it danced naked in front of them and hit them on the head with a big bloody sign…”

He hadn’t even asked for his gun back. Maybe it was just as well, considering he was still shaking with anger. Rick kept it tucked into his belt, wishing for a lot more than one Browning Hi-Power with 15 rounds for the three of them. A machete would have come in handy, too; they kept getting scuffed and scratched by the ferns and leaves around them. Still, at least they did have a gun, and he could hardly look a gift horse in the mouth.

Too bad they didn’t have a convenient magical spear this time around…

After being surrounded by guards non-stop for days, the total absence of other humans and the relative silence made it tempting to relax a little bit. Rick knew better. He had more than enough experience with people and places trying to kill him to trust this traitorous boxed-in jungle.

Besides, concentrating on his surroundings was a lot more preferable to the alternative, namely what was undoubtedly happening outside the pyramid.

The Army of Anubis, unleashed a second time.

Rick caught himself wondering whether the Warriors actually remembered rising two years ago, fighting the Medjai, then disappearing back into the sands. The Medjai certainly remembered. Ardeth and his people must have followed the trail – which surely meant that they were outside right now, fighting their second worst nightmare again, dying, too, to defend humanity…

At least Ardeth was still alive. Of this he was sure. How, he had no idea, but the gut feeling was there. Funny, really; he had always felt a mixture of wariness and respect for the man, which had turned into a sense of kinship well before the Medjai had pointed out and explained the half-forgotten tattoo on his arm.

Whether Rick O’Connell really had been a Medjai in a former life or not was a moot point. They ‘got’ each other at a slightly different level than anyone else in their extended family. The first few years, Rick had chalked it up to their both being fighters, used to making the hard choices, with an ingrained sense of duty that had nothing to do with traditional military structures. Ardeth had his tribe and the task of guarding the deadly secrets of Egypt; Rick had his family, small as it was, and the deep-seated urge to shield it from harm.

When he had mentioned it to Evy, she hadn’t taken it lightly or laughed, as he might have feared; she had suggested pensively that perhaps the two men had known each other in a previous life.

Rick had smiled at the theory then. But since their adventure at Ahm Shere two years ago he wasn’t so sure.

Now was not the time for philosophical musings, though. Not with a supernatural army probably already decimating the Medjai and a madman down below channelling an Ancient Egyptian god…

“Wait,” Rick said in a low voice. The other two stopped and looked at him curiously. “We can’t just go. Hamilton’s down there commanding the Army of Anubis. We gotta take him down, now.”

Look who’s getting ‘involved’ now. He could almost hear Evy’s sharp voice in his head, telling him ‘I read the book, I woke him up, and I intend to stop him’ all those years ago. If it had been up to him, he would have grabbed her and hightailed it to another continent. Imhotep could be someone else’s problem. But Evelyn Carnahan was principled, opinionated, and in possession of an unerring sense of responsibility; because of that, a stubborn librarian, a reluctant adventurer, a foppish dilettante, and a determined guardian had saved the world.

Oh God, he thought, Evy. Please let Evy and Alex be okay and very, very far from here.

Aw, who was he kidding. If he knew his wife at all, she was at the heart of things right now, doing whatever she could to make things right. Rick amended his half-prayer. Please, honey, take care of yourself. I don’t think I could bear to lose you a second time.

“I’m all for that,” said Jonathan darkly, yanking Rick back to the present, “but how? He practically has his own bloody army.”

“He’s not in command.”

Rick and Jonathan both turned to Ferguson, who was frowning, lost in thought.

“What d’you mean?”

“Remember when I said I went to see the High Priest of Osiris before we left? He said no mortal can claim Anubis’ army.”

“We got that part,” said Rick as patiently as he could, which was not saying much.

“Hang – hang on. He also said that Hamilton’s… that his body and mind would just be a vessel. Without either, the connection would be broken.”

Kill the bad guy, save the world. Sometimes it really was just as simple as it was complicated. At least that tune was familiar.

“Right.” Rick checked the gun again, made sure the clip was full and that sand had not jammed the mechanism. “Let’s go break a connection, then.”

Retracing their steps proved easier than going forward, as they only had to follow the broken fronds and the crushed ferns. The jungle weaved an entire tapestry of sharp smells and small sounds around them: chittering, scurrying, chattering sounds that made all three men jumpy.

Rick walked in front, followed by Ferguson, Jonathan bringing up the rear. Ferguson looked like any city dweller who’d just been dropped into a completely new and hostile environment, while Rick’s apprehension came from experience. Jonathan, he noticed, was especially jittery, the fingers of his left hand twitching every now and then.

“I can’t believe we’re going back down there to a bunch of trigger-happy idiots and one tosspot with delusions of grandeur,” Rick heard him mutter. “I suppose we’ll just go ‘Oh, don’t mind us, just popping round to kill your boss, we won’t be a bother’, and they’ll say ‘By all means, old thing, shoot the daft bastard, we’ll just put the kettle on and pass the biscuits around, don’t mind the flesh-eating scarabs and the angry pygmy mummies’…”

The steady stream of nervous chatter should have driven Rick out of his mind. In other circumstances he would have told Jonathan to can it before he really got the ball rolling. But it was familiar, and thankfully not in the way the jungle rustled all around them, boxed in every direction by walls, ceilings, and a floor you couldn’t see. Besides, for all his bellyaching, Jonathan kept walking on.

The last mumbled sentences made Ferguson’s ears prick up.

“Flesh-eating scarabs? I thought those were only at Hamunaptra!”

“Figure of speech. Wouldn’t put it past the place, though.” Jonathan gave a full-body shudder. “Just what we’d need, more creepy little buggers trying to eat us alive…”

“O-kay,” said Rick, who didn’t like where the conversation was going, “let’s not get sidetracked here. Ahm Shere – pygmy mummies and jackal-headed soldiers from hell. Hamunaptra – flesh-eating scarabs and the Ten Plagues of Egypt. We got enough on our plate without mixing the two, dontcha think?”

Jonathan gave him a somewhat sheepish look that instantly reminded Rick of Alex when he could be bothered to actually act contrite, and Ferguson looked uncertain.

“Did you really get all ten plagues? I mean, that sounds awfully… Biblical.”

“You’d better believe it got Biblical,” Rick muttered. “Locusts, boils, blood everywhere, night at two in the afternoon… Our mummy buddy spared no expense.”

“Lucky we stopped him before the tenth, though.” Jonathan shifted uncomfortably. “‘About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die…’ I wasn’t especially keen on seeing whether that pertained to me or not.”

Ferguson’s eyes went round. “That’s right, your mum was Egyptian…” Then he shook his head. “Look at us. Trying to stop a madman from unleashing an army of jackal creatures, talkin’ about mummies and plagues…” He sighed. “I liked it better when me job was pushing paper and trackin’ ancient artefacts.”

Jonathan clapped him on the shoulder. “Welcome to our world,” he said in the tone he used to make himself look more impressive. Rick suppressed a snicker.

“Twice in ten years, Jonathan. Just twice. It’s a lot, but I don’t think we—”

He felt it the second before he had finished putting his foot down. The roots and shrubs parted and the floor vanished – he was only able to press the left side of his right foot on a hard surface before slipping. His leg followed his foot, his entire right side followed his leg, and before he knew it, he was hurtling down a steep slope, his body rolling and tumbling against the stone. Fronds and enormous leaf blades slapped and scraped at him along the way; he only managed to slow down when he caught hold of some kind of root as thick as his wrist. In the sudden lull he heard Jonathan shout his name before the root gave out and he was falling again.

Rick only had time to curl into the tightest ball he could before his body hit the ground and shut down.

.⅋.

A battle won without bloodshed was an even sweeter victory, Atifa reflected, gazing at the Westerners sitting in a huddle in the middle of camp. A few of them had tried to resist, fight back, but they had been quickly overwhelmed by either force or the sight of their already captive comrades. In the end, they had lined up to drop their weapons into a pile and resigned themselves to being prisoners.

All the Medjai had to do now was wait, and pray.

Maher was staring at the top of the Pyramid of Ahm Shere when she walked up to him. As usual, he didn’t need to talk to voice his thoughts. The gaze he turned to her was very eloquent.

“I know,” said Atifa in a low voice. “Everybody felt it.”

Relief flashed in her chieftain’s eyes, quickly replaced by a grimly inquisitive expression.

“Yes, I remember.” How could she forget? They had both battled the Army of Anubis before. They had both faced its herald, the darkness that washed over hearts before being deposited on the sand and turning into a many jackal-headed nightmare. Knowing what followed made it even worse than the first time. Knowing their people and their commander would be fighting it again, and being unable to fight side by side… That was torture.

Atifa’s head turned to the desert as though of its own accord. Maher followed her gaze, then lightly touched her shoulder and shook his head.

Maher hardly, if ever, talked. He devised tactics, gave orders, shared the good times and the bad, almost always silently. This was unusual, and a few people sneered at the idea of serving under a man who was, barring a few exceptions, a mute, but he was the best chieftain Atifa could think of serving. What he lacked in words he made up for in observation skills. He was a fount of knowledge about subjects like tracking, covert operations, and, oddly enough, constellations.

And he demonstrated every day that a man could have a kind, unguarded heart and still be a fearsome warrior in his own right. People had tried to test his role as chieftain. People had failed.

Sometimes he read other people’s faces wrong; right now, though, Atifa only needed to look at him to know he had interpreted her reaction correctly.

“I know we can’t help them,” she sighed. “And I know our place is here, guarding the Pyramid and the prisoners. But –”

She was interrupted by a loud voice and turned to see Djedi, one of her men, running up to her.

“—Coming! They’re coming!”

Maher raised his hands. One he used to get the panicked young man to stop and breathe, the other to encourage him to explain.

“The Warriors of Anubis! Wazad saw a detachment breaking from the main army. They’re coming here!”

Absolute fear washed over Atifa. “How many?” she asked, doing her utmost to keep her voice steady.

“Wazad didn’t say!”

Maher’s hand came to rest on Djedi’s shoulder. With his left, he indicated his eyes, and pointed to the direction Djedi had run from.

“Go,” he said, his voice low. “Count. Come back.”

Djedi swallowed hard, nodded, and ran off.

Maher’s face was stone. He strode to the nearest campfire and picked up a flaming stick, then drew a small circle with it. The aftereffects lingered for a second, giving Atifa the impression of a circle of light around the fire.

“We can’t run, can we.”

Maher shook his head.

“Then we make our stand here.”

A grim nod from her chieftain. The panic abated slightly, enough for sombre resolution to settle. Atifa took a long, deep breath, trying not to think that this might be one of her last, and turned to the men and women guarding the Westerners.

“Farid, Intef, Janan! Leave the prisoners. The Warriors are coming. Take two men each and build a barrier of fire around the camp. We’ll end up fighting inside it and probably outside, so make it big enough. Dismantle the tents if you have to, use everything that burns. Quickly, we don’t have much time.”

The camp came alive with focused despair as men and women left their posts to grab torches and fuel for the flaming barricade. From the corner of her eye, Atifa saw the Westerners mutter between each other with mounting animation.

As she struck down a nearby tent, relieved to see that the structure was made out of wood, she heard a voice call in atrocious Arabic, “Excuse me?”

She turned to the group. A dark-haired man was on his feet, his face pale in the firelight.

“Yes?” she said in English. The man appeared relieved, and continued in his own tongue.

“I thought I heard the word ‘warriors’. That didn’t mean the other, er… your compatriots, did it?”

The last word was unfamiliar, but the question was obvious.

“Your leader released the Army of Anubis. Last time it only spread out from the Oasis of Ahm Shere, but now the jackal warriors are coming here to kill us all.”

The Westerner paled even further. “We, er… How can we help?”

Atifa pinned him with her most withering stare.

“‘Help’?”

“Well, we all agreed that Hamilton’s a madman and that he did something really, monumentally stupid.” A couple of angry mutters rose from the back of the group. The man glared in their general direction, then turned back to her. “Most of us agreed, anyway. If we’re going to die, might as well die standing.”

Atifa took two seconds to think. Then she went to Maher and explained the situation in a few short words. Maher nodded curtly, and went back to the barricade to help and wait for Djedi’s news.

The Westerners’ firearms would be useless. They would only barely have enough blades for everyone. Some would probably find themselves armed with only torches.

This was madness. But they needed the numbers.

Atifa went back to the group to find all of them on their feet, some shivering, some resolute, the rest a mix of the two.

“What’s your name?” she asked the self-appointed spokesman.

“O—Owens. Mark Owens.”

“Mark Owens, my name is Atifa, daughter of Amenia, and I will allow you and your men to fight by our side. If anyone tries to betray us, he will be dead before his hand falls.”

Owens gulped, but stood a little taller. “You’re not the enemy. They are.”

“As long as it is clear to everyone. And remember – when this is over, you are still our prisoners.”

“Better a prisoner than a bloody corpse,” said another man behind Owens. Everybody nodded in agreement.

When Djedi and Wazad came running back from their look-out post with the certitude that they were about to be set upon by about two hundred jackal-headed abominations, the combined forces of the Medjai and Hamilton’s men amounted to eighty people. Eighty human beings huddled behind a bulwark of fire, too low, too flimsy to really protect them. Eighty humans who had been fighting each other just hours ago, and stood now shoulder to shoulder, not ready to face the horrors in the dark but standing anyway.

They could hear roaring now. Atifa’s palms were sweaty around the grip of her sword.

In front of them, under the starlight, darkness advanced relentlessly.

.⅋.

“RICK! You’d better not be dead, so help me God I’ll – Rick! For God’s sake, can you hear me?”

Jonathan knew he was yelling, knew he should not be yelling, and was well past caring. Miles and miles, in fact. Rick had disappeared down some kind of incline so steep it was almost a well, and he had no idea how deep the drop was or how hard the landing had been. This, to him, more than justified screaming his throat raw, prudence be damned.

That bloody pyramid had already been the death of his sister; they had only got her back on a fluke. There was, simply put, no way in hell it would claim his brother-in-law.

Tom dropped to a crouch beside him, his face pale, and laid a hand on his shoulder that Jonathan barely felt.

“Jon – Jon, please, be quiet, mate – Baine and his guys must be lookin’ for us, you’re gonna draw them ‘ere –”

“Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” said Jonathan, still bent over the drop trying to catch sight of how far it went and where the bottom was. “They might have rope with them. Do you have rope? Here, let me see your bag.”

He was aware that he was babbling, that his hands were shaking as he ripped Tom’s rucksack from his shoulders to rummage through its contents, and that he couldn’t seem to get his voice down to a normal pitch. It just didn’t seem very important right now.

Rick couldn’t be dead, he just couldn’t be. He needed to save the world, he needed to go back to Evy and Alex once the dust settled, to butt heads with his irresponsible reprobate of a brother-in-law, to be tired and battered and still make low-key jokes about mummies and big bugs and the end of the world…

Tom grabbed Jonathan’s arm and snapped “Jon, shut up and listen”, making Jonathan realise two things at the same time. One, he’d actually been muttering his train of thought under his breath instead of keeping it safely in his head. And two, in the sudden silence and stillness a small sound rose from the bottom of the precipice.

“Ow.”

The panic rushed out of Jonathan in a flash, leaving him light-headed and shivering. He fell back on his arse in a graceless heap of limbs, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath.

“Rick?”

“…Yeah?”

“Are you all right?”

“Kinda.”

“Please elaborate?”

There was a silence, then a distant rustle.

“Feels like I got dragged behind a car for a mile or two. I’m okay, though, considering. No broken bones or anything.”

“Can you stand?”

“Hell, I can even walk. Ow.”

Rick’s voice seemed to come from far away, but it sounded fairly strong and no less articulated than usual. When Jonathan opened his eyes again and crept towards the drop, he could make out a light-coloured blur between the criss-crossing vines and lianas. The wall Rick had fallen along to wasn’t quite vertical, but it was sheer enough to make climbing back up next to impossible, especially without a rope.

“Think we could climb down?” asked Tom, sounding doubtful. Rick’s answer was sharp and immediate.

“Don’t even try. Those vines can’t hold worth a damn. You’d break your neck.”

“Well,” Jonathan pointed out in his most reasonable voice, which had nothing on Evy’s but still worked occasionally, “we’ll just have to find a way down, then, won’t we?”

“No you won’t. I’m coming up. I can see stairs over there.”

“I don’t, so I highly doubt yours lead up to here.”

“They gotta lead somewhere. This place looks kinda familiar, I think I know where to go.”

“Hopefully not into another death trap, old boy. Do you have any idea what Evy would say if I made it out of that bloody pyramid and you didn’t?”

“Jonathan. Just…” Silence. Jonathan wondered if Rick had noticed the way his voice had pitched up near the end of the sentence. With his luck, he probably had. Hence the tone – a mixture of ‘shut up’ and ‘calm down’. “You do remember I still have the gun, right?”

“…Yes?” Jonathan said uncertainly. “And?”

“So you two are gonna hunker down where it’s safe and not attract the attention of the other guys with guns till I can come up and even the odds a little.”

“That’s your plan, is it?”

“Yup.”

Jonathan was torn. On one hand, the idea of staying put in relative safety had a lot of appeal. On the other, it meant keeping the group separated, and he knew from experience that it could lead to all sorts of bad things.

“Your plan,” he declared, mostly for the sake of argument, “is terrible.”

“Maybe. But that’s what we’re gonna do.”

Well, nothing for it I suppose.

“Watch your footing while you’re down there?”

After eleven years, Jonathan didn’t even need to see Rick to know when he was being glared at.

“Just stay out of trouble,” Rick said, and then the light blur disappeared and silence descended once more.

After a while, he heard a shuffle behind him. Tom held his rucksack in one hand, picking up his things with the other.

“You made a right mess of my bag,” he said quietly, a small smile in his voice. Jonathan ran a hand over his face and shuffled closer, picking up a notebook.

“Yes, sorry about that. I – well. I was in a bit of a hurry.”

Tom shot him a wry look, but didn’t comment.

In his frantic search for rope, Jonathan hadn’t really looked at the contents of the bag properly. What he found lying around and handed back to Tom to put away ended up being a pencil bag, a toolkit, two clips of ammunition for the gun currently in Rick’s possession, a half-empty flask of water, a meagre first-aid kit, and two small notebooks.

“You know,” he said, “maybe it comes from having a brother-in-law who can’t travel anywhere without packing half an arsenal, but I think you’re falling a little short of the mark regarding weaponry.”

Tom made a face.

“I don’t know what you think me job is, Jon, but I’m not some kind of gunslinger. Don’t get me wrong, I can shoot, but that’s not what I signed up for.” He sighed. “Then again, what I signed up for wasn’t really what I signed up for, so…”

Jonathan paused, toolkit in hand.

“Well, what did you sign up for, then?”

“Protecting antiques,” Tom replied firmly. “Only, you know, not stealing them from museums. And pretending I’m an idiot as a cover.”

“Only pretending?”

“Oh, do shut up,” grumbled Tom as Jonathan grinned. “I fooled you, didn’t I?”

Jonathan felt his grin slip several notches. A lot had happened since that late afternoon in Giza when his friend had pointed a gun at him and stopped being ‘Tommy’. ‘Tommy’ was a warm memory of loud laughter, daring escapes, bright eyes over pints clinking in the comfortable darkness of a well-loved pub. Tom, on the other hand, was a fairly decent man chucked into a complex situation, who had a wife he loved dearly but lied to about his job, who had not wanted to bring harm to an old friend but had done so anyway.

Who had also put himself between Jonathan and a gun twice, and almost got killed for it.

A lot had happened, indeed, but the reminder was still anything but innocuous. It poked at certain areas that were still somewhat tender.

Tom’s look was apologetic this time.

“Bit too soon?”

“Bit too soon.” A thought occurred, and Jonathan allowed his smile to resurface, cheekily, if a little gingerly still. “You know you didn’t fool Evy for a second, though. She had the measure of you, right enough.”

“Smart woman.”

“You have no idea.”

Into the bag the toolkit went, and Tom picked up the rucksack. It still looked mostly empty despite everything that had gone into it.

The few steps between the edge of whatever it was Rick had fallen into and a safer spot near an archway were made in silence. Which was how they heard the footfall.

It wasn’t Rick. That much was obvious. Unless he had picked up an escort along the way.

Jonathan pushed Tom against a wall and flattened himself next to him. Maybe, if they didn’t breathe or think too loudly, the men walking along the wall wouldn’t cross the doorway. Maybe they wouldn’t see them. Maybe…

Jonathan and Tom looked at each other, drew their hands back in unison, and drove their fists into the first faces that came their way.

Two men fell to the floor, groaning, while a third sprang back, raising his hands frantically.

“Whoa, whoa, stop! We were looking for you!”

“Of course you were,” spat Tom, massaging his knuckles. Jonathan knew exactly how he felt. The shock of colliding with his opponent’s skull had made his entire forearm ring like a bell for half a minute. Surely boxing hadn’t hurt that much when he was a lad. “Baine’s orders were clear, weren’t they?”

“But we’re not acting on Baine’s orders,” muttered one of the men on the ground, rubbing his jaw. “He’s a thug. And Hamilton’s off his bloody nut.”

“Come to your senses, have you?” Jonathan quipped. “That couldn’t have happened earlier, before Hamilton’s little light show and especially before you tried to murder us and my brother-in-law?”

The man who was still standing mumbled something Jonathan didn’t catch, then asked, “Where is the American anyway?”

“He’ll be joining us shortly. What are you doing here, if you changed your minds about killing us?”

The tall, broad-shouldered man Tom had punched was the last to pick himself up from the floor. “Like Vaughn said, we were looking for you.”

“We, er,” said Vaughn meekly, “thought you might know a way out of this death trap.”

Tom’s eyes grew cynical. “Of course. Turn right, then straight up until the supernatural army from hell.”

“And that’s if you escape the pygmy mummies,” Jonathan added smugly, crossing his arms. “But considering the Army of Anubis is your boss’ fault, you might want to do something about that first.”

Two of the three men looked at each other uncertainly. The burly one scoffed. “Pygmy mummies. You must really think we’re some sort of—”

“I don’t have to think, old boy, I know you’re the worst sort of, well, sort. But I’m not pulling your leg.”

“He’s really not, Norton,” said Tom, shaking his head. “Norton, Vaughn, Wyndham,” he added, turning to Jonathan and pointing at each of them in turn. “Maybe not the biggest pillocks I’ve ever worked with after all, but they come close. Are you even armed?”

“Of course we are!” protested Wyndham, opening his bag and taking out a stick of dynamite. “Look, we have explosives, and guns, and –”

“What a splendid idea. How about you lend us a couple?”

Wyndham looked at Jonathan like he had sprouted a second head.

“Why would we want to give you weapons?”

“Because somebody’s going to have to do something about bloody Hamilton and Anubis’ bloody army,” Jonathan snapped, nerves already frayed and nearing the end of their tether. “And frankly, the fact that I’m going to have to be a part of it should tell you just how bollocksed the whole situation is!”

Either his little tirade hit its mark, or the three agents simply didn’t want to get punched again. Jonathan found himself in possession of a handgun similar to the one Rick had taken from Tom, while Tom checked the clip of his own borrowed gun. Norton appeared to be sulking.

Wyndham slunk up to Jonathan, dynamite stick still in hand. “Er… When you said ‘pygmy mummies’… You didn’t mean the chaps in the Congo, did you?”

“Absolutely not. I mean eldritch little creatures about knee-high with sharp teeth and knives who delight in disembowelling people. They make spiffy shrunken heads, too, I’ve seen them.”

“Jon, stop scarin’ the kids,” said Tom. He was a few feet away, investigating a pile of something that must have been stone before it got covered in gunk. “Especially Wyndham here. He’s a bit trigger-happy.”

“I am not!” protested Wyndham.

“Oh yeah? You were one of the first to shoot at me not an hour ago, you little –”

Jonathan shrugged. “He asked.”

Norton said nothing, but looked uncomfortable. Vaughn glanced at Jonathan uncertainly and went to sit not far from Tom with a thoughtful look on his face. The three agents seemed to have absolutely no idea what to do next. Tom appeared to have no such problem: he was digging into the half-solid muck, sleeves rolled up on his arms, trying to extract what looked to be a statuette of a scorpion and a big tablet out of the sludge.

There was a lull in the conversation, followed by somewhat awkward silence. Jonathan, who had no patience for awkward silences, was racking his mind for something to do to pass the time until Rick found them when he realised his heart was going a mile a minute. It was pounding against his ribcage, making him almost sick to his stomach, as though angry that his brain wasn’t catching up.

But what…

When it finally hit him, it hit him like a locomotive going on full speed ahead. The pyramid was silent. Deadly silent. The little sounds that came from unseen bugs and critters had stopped. And this could only mean one thing.

Jonathan’s mouth went dry.

“Tom?”

Tom looked up, puzzled and somewhat apprehensive.

“Yeah?”

A sense of déjà vu struck Jonathan, whose brain helpfully provided him with the memory of him and Tom a few days ago, seconds before the Medjai attack on the camp, saying the same two words, down to the inflections.

“They’re coming.”

A susurrus ran through the plants around them, a hissing whisper that seemed to carry small cackling laughter with it. Jonathan felt the small hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He clutched his gun and glanced wildly around.

The movement got the agents’ attention. Only then did they notice the sounds.

“Here,” said Norton, striding towards the next room, “what’s th—”

A spear whistled through the air and skewered his forehead. He was dead before he hit the ground.

Jonathan screamed. So did Wyndham, half a second later. Vaughn and Tom scrambled up, spouting a mix of curses and inarticulate yelling.

“Fall back! Fall back!” Vaughn shouted. Wyndham ran up to him and Tom, wild-eyed, waving his ingot of dynamite like a torch.

“Where to!?” he wailed. The hissing seemed to come from all directions, bouncing from the walls, surrounding them, taunting them. It seemed to drill into Jonathan’s skull, driving out all coherent thought. He kept pointing his gun at the rustling ferns, searching desperately for something to shoot.

Behind him, Tom yelled, “Don’t, you bloody idiot –”

Jonathan whirled round to see Tom, still cradling his big tablet against him with his left arm, reach for Wyndham with the hand that also held his gun, while Vaughn’s jaw dropped open at the sight of the still-open lighter in Wyndham’s hand.

The tableau burned itself crystal-clear on Jonathan’s retinas just before the dynamite exploded.

It took a while for Jonathan to realise he hadn’t, in fact, lost consciousness. The silence had been replaced with a shrill, high-pitched sound, like some sort of alarm going off much too late. The ferns and leaves were no longer rustling. In fact, when he opened his eyes, blinking a few times to drive away the mist, the plants were all gone. In their place was a mountain of broken bricks and big chunks of what had been a wall of gold and stone.

The plants were gone… and so were the four people who had been in the chamber with him.

Jonathan’s mouth opened and closed a few times before his brain sparked into life again. When it did, he took a deep breath and shouted, “TOM!”

“Shush, don’t, I’m right here,” muttered a very welcome voice from the other side of the wall. “Are you all right? Are they gone?”

The emphasis on ‘they’ puzzled Jonathan for all of four seconds before the memories of a couple of minutes ago stampeded back through his brain with the subtlety of a herd of panicked camels. He scrambled up, swaying and seeing stars from the head rush, and clutched the gun he had picked up without even thinking.

Nothing.

The sounds he had come to associate with the in-pyramid jungle were back as though they never stopped. There was no sniggering, no hissing, no susurrus. Only the usual rustling and skittering that meant normal jungle activity. For a given value of ‘normal’, of course.

“Sounds like it,” he said uncertainly, putting the gun in his belt. “Do you hear anything from your side?”

“Only Wyndham’s teeth chattering. He had a bit of a scare.” Tom’s voice had the biting, icy quality it only got when he was badly rattled. “Which should be a lesson to him in the future – if he has a future, considering he’s so terminally stupid as to light a dynamite stick in confined spaces with other people close by!”

“I am not!” protested Wyndham, more weakly than the first time. In the background, Vaughn groaned.

“Bloody hell, Norton…”

The reminder was sobering. The image of the poor bastard with a spear through his head remained seared in Jonathan’s mind whether his eyes were open or closed. At least it had been instantaneous and presumably painless.

“I’m so sorry, Vaughn,” he heard Tom say quietly. Wyndham gave a faint whimper.

There was a silence, during which Jonathan – mostly for something to do with his hands – walked up to the cave-in and looked for rocks to move to take the wall down. Or at least make a big enough hole in it for a man to go through.

“Where do you think those creatures went?” asked Tom after a while. Jonathan kept inspecting the stones.

“As far away from us as possible, hopefully. What was that thing I saw you mucking about with?”

“I have no idea. I think it’s an incantation of sorts, probably for the Scorpion King? I can only make out a few hieroglyphs. It says… hang on… Followers of the Sunset King – no, wait, of the ruler of the West… something something on their side… It’s ‘ard to tell underneath that crust.”

The Scorpion King was dead, and so was Imhotep, yet Jonathan couldn’t help a shudder. “Would you mind not reading it aloud? Just in case. We really don’t need another supernatural menace after us.”

Behind the rock wall, Tom chuckled.

“You didn’t used to be superstitious.”

“I didn’t used to see cursed mummies come back to life every ten years.”

“Fair point.” A pause. “Jon? Can I ask—”

Jonathan never knew what Tom meant to ask him. He was interrupted by a hair-raising scream that sounded like Wyndham and an awful noise that didn’t sound like it could – or should – ever come from a human being but probably came from Vaughn.

From then on, it was pandemonium.

“Where are they…?”

“Tom, what’s—”

“DOWN!”

“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod—”

“Bloody hell –”

“Ferguson! They’re—”

“Oh f—Run!”

“TOM!” Jonathan clawed at the wall, no longer paying attention to which stones he should take down first, completely beside himself with panic and worry. The only thing on his mind was making his way through the cave-in to get to Tom. What else might make its way across didn’t even occur to him. He barely registered a rock falling on his instep.

And then, all of a sudden, there was nothing. The only sound he was aware of was his own blood hammering against his eardrums. Around him, the jungle kept breathing, chattering, living. Of Tom and the other two agents, there was no trace.

“Tom? Are you… Tom, bloody answer me, please.”

Jonathan hardly dared to breathe. His heart had jumped up into his throat, blocking all sound, making his voice come out strangled.

“Tom, I think it’s safe to come out now. They’re gone. …Tom?”

Why wouldn’t the bloody rocks come down already!

“Tom, for God’s sake!”

Only silence answered him.

“Tom? …Tommy?”

.⅋.

Notes:

1) I can hardly believe believe it took 178 pages and almost 111,000 words before this story passed the Bechdel Test, and barely at that. I’m glad it did, though :o)

2) The further this chapter got for eleven years was Ardeth’s part (which was supposed to open the chapter) and 1,200 words of Rick’s, Jonathan’s and Tom’s scene. Hopefully the transition between 26 years old writer Bel and 37 years old writer Bel is seamless. (The rewrites helped.)

3) I am sorry about that last scene and you are free to yell as much as you like as long as it’s inarticulate shouting and not actual insults.

[the-dreamer-traveller]

Dream Fragment: Trio

Silently opening my eyes, I found myself standing on my booted feet. This gives me some sort of a weird vibe or feeling, as I am not sure of whether the place I am is the right one for me or not.

I found myself standing in the edge of a desert town, where it is also a port town where boats will land near wooden docks, heat-tolerant plants and trees are growing on the sandy soil that are exposed and people dress in figure-concealing robes and attires, to protect their skin from the blazing heat and devastating sun rays. I found myself wearing some rugged and light clothing such as a shirt, baggy pants and leather boots, while a light sandy brown cloak warps around my figure.

Tugging my cloak near to my face to cover the lower portions of my face, I quickly move my legs to start moving across the town. With sand particles flying lowly from the ground with every step, I focus my eyes into the grand desert that is in front of me, where the unforgiving sun, scorching hot sand and ever present wind will be a challenge for me to take a journey with.

============================================

Walking through the desert for several hours aimlessly is slowly draining and exhausting. The featureless sandy dunes and plains provide nothing for me to get excited with, and the scorching heat from the sun is slowly sapping my energy to continue of this supposedly ceaseless wandering, while sweat drips down from my skin and face. If I can’t find any shelter or shadow, I might die from dehydration or heat stroke.

In spite of the heat and troubles, I manage to find what I have longed for, where I saw large and tall rock formations from afar. I was curious, since there also appears to be a wide and open road ahead of me. With a sigh of relief and happiness, I pick up the pace and start running towards in.

Once I have reached the road, the looming shadows of these tall, cliff-like land formations causes my body to cool down to my comfort. Soon, the sand on my feet turns into hard, dusty ground and later into some faded tiled floor. When I turn my gaze around, I found that I am in what appears to be a courtyard of a once existing civilization, now leaving behind only five different pedestals decorating in this place. Behind the pedestals are rows of pillars of what could have been either a building, temple or tomb from the past civilization, while the left side of the courtyard is bare, where it only gives a view of the desert, the blue sky and the hot sun with its rays flowing down, casting a shadow on the pedestals. Each of the pedestals possess an anatomically detailed and correct statue of a man in varying pose flexing their muscles, but all of them lack any human genitals.

In the center of the pedestals is a different statue. Like of the rest, it is a man flexing his muscles. However, his chest and muscles are bigger and buffer than the rest of the statues, and there is a long, tail-like projection coming from the back of his rear. This is far more fascinating yet pondering, why would there be a statue that is far different from the rest of the statues? It doesn’t seem to make any sense and entices me to investigate the statue by myself.

Suddenly, the statue itself glows a bright white light and I shift my eyes away from it, trying to shield it with my hands. Once the light dies down, I slowly lower them to see on the statue… or rather what would have been a statue.

Taking a step down with his bare feet, his bluish violet short fur covering his body while his tail sways slightly and his light bluish violet eyes are focusing towards me. Equipped with a beaming and shiny smile, he raises his right arm and opened hand, giving a short wave.

“Hey, Lucid!”

Standing in front of me is Eric Yamaguchi, one of the former recurring dream characters that I encounter many times before. I was standing there, in a mix of being awestruck, confused and stunned, while I silently stare at his naked features. To say that he is hot would be an appropriate pun for the moment, as I gaze in his body. His arms and thighs have muscles forming on them, while his furred torso has some abs in his abdomen along with some biceps. He lacks a genital, which is a common feature in his species, and standing there naked makes everything both self-fulfilling and awkward.

“Hey, Eric.” I replied back, trying to wave but can’t help and be distracted by his sexy body. “You’re naked.”

Pointing out the fact may or may not be one of the best choices right now, since I am concerned that him stark naked will be a distraction to many different people. Eric notices this, looks down to himself and looks back at me, with a sheepish smile. “Yeah, I know right?”

I can’t help but giving an awkward nod to his question. He gives another bright and shiny braces-laden smile I quickly ran to him and hug. Hugging Eric is some sort of my quirk in this dream, since he is a big and buff Furry guy who just happens to be very approachable and friendly. I warp my arms around his neck, feeling his short fur in my arms. Leaning to his ear, I whisper words to him “You need to wear your clothes.”

“I can’t.” Eric whispered back. “I was brought here naked.”

After a few seconds of hugging, I let go of the hug while my hands are still in his shoulders. Blue violet eyes meeting with dark brown eyes, and I can’t help but smile in front of him as she smiles back, with a wide grin.

“Well, we can’t be staying here in the heat of the sun.” I said to him, as he slowly stood up. “We need to find a shade this time.”

“Ah, yeah.” Eric said, rubbing the back of his head.

Pointing my finger into one of the stairs that would lead us inside a shade, we both walk our way upwards to it. With both of us walking on the way, I could only hear the echoes of my boots, as Eric’s own bare feet does not make any noise due to his soles come in contact with the sand, which muffles the sound of his footsteps. As we continue to walk, I couldn’t help but put myself in a thoughtful position in here.

The ruins are ancient, as if their age is identical to the ancient pyramids of Egypt in the real world, but also they seem to have spells that lasts up to thousands of years, something that I think would be improbable as I think that spells placed in an area will soon decay after a certain amount of time. It may be something that I haven’t discovered yet, but for what is certain, I believe it should wait now. For the moment, I must find myself and my friend some shelter from the blazing heat of the sun, lest we might suffer from dehydration and die in the desert.

I wouldn’t mind huddling in a shaded corner together with him. Several real-world months and possible years for him has passed since the last time we met. I just wanted to connect with him again, as a friend… or even a boyfriend, just like the good times.

============================================

Tugging my face mask up and adjusting my hoodie, I slowly climb up the stairs. The place is grimy and dirty, as I could find it typical in the backside of the stadium. However, the front rows would be clean for public’s convenience, leaving behind the scenes quite dirty.

Walking around public with my mask on is a pain in the ass, having some strong humidity will make my lower areas of my face sweaty and hard to breath. With my black hood’s on, I would come across as some loner walking down the street, eying at random people as I am cautious of my own personal space.

While I pass by, something caught the attention of my eye and I took a quick peek on it. In a corner of the hallway, I see three teenage girls, wearing T-shirts, shorts and sneakers. They have no face masks, but they are all practicing on a choreography that is challenging and complex, while a boombox next to them plays loud music with synths, instrumentals and a song in a language that is vaguely sounding like Korean.

Watching at the maskless girls give me a sense of nostalgia. I remember those days where some K-Pop groups led a dance video contest of their fans dancing to the choreography, and it is also where they can be featured in them. It also helps me remember the days where there are no masks walking around, just our faces visible and the air blowing in our face. Ah, I just miss the old days.

[inexchangeforyoursoul]

I’ve had some dreams since the new year started so I better write ‘em up before I forget :P

In the first one (that was also on the first I think) I had some kind of small computer on me... kinda shaped like that Rotom pokédex. Anyway, it detected errors of some kind? Or plot holes in a script maybe? It was black and the also dark display had green text appear on it. That’s all I can remember tho.... #debugging2018

Then there was a scene in our yard; dunno about the details anymore, but the cherry tree in it died and you could pull the bark and inner parts apart like.... hmmm... like bone marrow and bone, is the best comparison I have. I also caught two lizards in our garden, it might have been part of this dream. The second one glittered all golden, and once I held it and looked at it, it had about 6-8 small fins instead of legs on its sides! Was really pretty. I released it afterwards.

Then there was some dream where the only detail I remember was that mom already died, like, probably way back. I think that’s about all there is to it by now... actually, no, I also remember travelling around my old dormitory in Budapest in that one. It’s late fall or winter, I’m at a bus stop at one point.

Then I was late for my, uh... degree awarding ceremony once. (Is that what you call it? I’m a few months early to worry about that lmao, anyway, that dream is from the 4th, before I traveled up to take 2 exams.) I’m positive I was in the dream iteration of the hill with the many vinyards around my father’s place. Which means it looked much more pleasant than it is. I’m p sure my subconscious is molding it together with my short time on my grandpa’s plot, where you could actually see a lot of various flowers planted around. It was oddly close to where I was supposed to go in town, and there were trams. Obviously, I took the wrong one. The settlement looked more like my home town, however, the street was a lot like Sycamore Row with the plants it was named after. I eventually did reach the building, it kinda was a mix of the place we went to for St. Nicholas’ day and my elementary school, there even were those low benches that had seen a lot of wear. Before I could actually catch up to the others after changing(?), I woke.

Then, two days ago on the 7th, I was dreaming of some Egyptian tomb, at least that’s where my memories start... someone killed a dude, and another vaguely pyramid head looking guy got gutted with a longish knife. After the killer hid the stuff happening bahind a blanket, for some reason. The staircase behind them however was already school building-y, and the scene turned into the university building I’m in a lot nowadays. Turning back and removing the blanket, the guy himself is gome and the guts are all shriveled up; there’s a small machine attached to one of the organs, like... a way too oversized pacemaker. That looks like a transformator tbh. Anyway, next thing I know some of me fellow students are there, the first one of them is Adam, and for whatever fucking reason the things on the floor are “his”, and he’s slowly dying on me because his heart stopped and his organs don1t het oxygen anymore. He starts turning purple and all that; spots on his hands and around his mouth, then there’s a cartoony deadness-level also appearing on his head, slowly crawlying up his face. As is customary in dreams, you turn around once and he’s another person, this time Matthew, another student. It was fine watching him/them die and just talk about shit until the friends of his arrived who were all emotional and shit and dream-me caught up tobeing like that soon enough, too. It’s all as if he would have died soon anyway, because he has two sweaters, one for greeting 2018 alive, and one for 2019. (wow I jsut realized how close 2020 is... geez). Anyway, then the next and last thing is that me and the girls are miffed about the staff removing the fuckign coffee machine. (Let’s be honest, the whiplash here is hilarious.)

And today on the 9th... it was a brief one... I remember walking around in the dark, talking to some kids about ghosts and such... then I walk into a house. I’m a maid or something? Maybe? Either way, apart from the one room I start in, everything is fucking dark and creepy, only the lights from outside show the way... you can basically feel the amnesia dude on your back all the time. And all the walls are covered in switches that don’t work. Like, fuck me, right? Needle in the haystack... then the owner dude arrives, and I look for a toilet. Guess I had to go already irl, anyway, there are none and I walk out of the building to some park that also has none. The place has small-ish buildings themed from all around the world, I remember a castle and a Japanese pagoda + shop. It was Japanese because there were geishas painted on it, okay? Okay. Anyway, I make my way back through the street and my system doesn’t really keep any other info, I wake up shortly.

(The street view itself reminds me of another dream I had, from around summer... it was Christmas at a university that I positively never attended before. There was some kind of gifting among the students near the enthrance inside, and a big-ass tree next to the staircase. I go outside; it’s already dark in a big, dirty city and there's snow. I walk along the street, looking for someone. There’s a bridge I cannot cross. The sun rises with some orange-ish hues beyond the bridge and the city centre, it’s relatively cloudy.)

(The previous one also made me remember another recent dream, from last year. I was with, like, a class, but the teachers were the uni professors. We walk deeper and deeper inside in a wannabe-tournament, kind of like the running race from Boku no Hero. I get a regular old gun for hunting with who knows what kind of bullets to shoot at anyone when I come in among the first people in one stage of the race. The gun doesn’t work and I give it back to the dude who handed it to me; I go after them and enter a very Bloodborne-y part of the building. It looks like underground stables, I think thre’s also cows. Since I see noone, I decide to go back and I run into Jeb, our American teach. He leads me to an elevator to lead me out, but does not join me and just sends it down instead of up. As the thing opens a lot of people try to get in; they press some floor up, but the thing goes down again. The mild panic of the people gets contagious at this point ngl- everyone is obviously trying to get up. The next stop is some elementary school place- I follow a teacher to show us the way, but it’s just a dumb joke she draws on the chalkboard. I laugh and get back to the elevator, but take the stairs next to it instead, because fuck this, and I’m gonna get so fucking fit anyways. Except it only takes one floor to get back... I’m at the main entrance with the receptionist. Turns out the entire fucking building is, like, cursed or haunted or whatever. Jeb was just some ghost or something taking up his appearance, and the panicking people around the elevator are more lost students who have been erring around since god knows when. I see the worried professors sitting around near an office and ask them for how long we’ve been gone. Idk what they answer tbh... after a bit more erring around trying to fix things I wake up.)

[mst3kproject]

Face of the Screaming Werewolf

So.  That's a title.

Face of the Screaming Werewolf was directed, so to speak, by Jerry Warren of Wild Wild World of Batwoman fame.  It stars much of the cast of Robot vs the Aztec Mummy, because bits of the first film in that series were used in its construction – just as they were in the flashback sequence of Robot vs the Aztec Mummy itself!  The movie also stars Lon Chaney Jr. by virtue of footage stolen from another Mexican horror film called House of Terror. As you might imagine, the resulting Frankenmovie is not particularly coherent viewing.  Are we gonna see that singing Aztec sacrifice scene again?  You bet your butts we are! In fact, we see significantly more of it.

Scientist Dr. Edmund Redding places a young woman, Ann Taylor, in a trance, and listens to her describe an ancient city of the Aztecs. She hints at something of importance hidden in a pyramid there, so Dr. Redding and his colleagues set out for Mexico to look for it. The pyramid itself prompts Ann to have another vision, and she guides the scientists to a chamber deep inside it, where they find two mummies.  One, which I shall call Mummy A, is our old friend Popoka, who to general horror is up and shuffling around.  Mummy B, as described in a news broadcast, is a modern man who was injected with mummy juice in the attempt to induce a state of undeath.  Whether either mummy is the important thing that drew Ann to the pyramid in her visions, we never find out.

Naturally Dr. Redding brings these corpses, both animate and not, back to California with him and holds a big press conference to announce his finds.  Before he can take the stage, however, he is mysteriously assassinated, and Mummy B is stolen!  The thugs who took it try to ressurect it with mad science, but fail, so they hire a guy to steal Mummy A from Dr. Redding's research institute.  Meanwhile, a chance bolt of lightning ressurects Mummy B after all, and the full moon turns him into a werewolf!  He begins slaughtering scientists, while Mummy A, having knocked out the thief sent to collect him, kills Ann and then vanishes from the movie entirely.

So what we have here are highly abbreviated versions of two different movies stitched together, and wow, are the seams ever visible. There's the scene that's supposed to be Dr. Redding's presentation: we see a big audience applauding, and Dr. Redding stands up... but he's clearly in his own living room, while the audience is in a large hall in what looks like a completely different building!  Even more obvious is the stuff Jerry Warren shot to fill in the holes between the two plots, which is on a completely different grade of film stock (and in a completely different decade) than anything in either source movie.  And while both The Aztec Mummy and House of Terror put some actualy money into their productions (not much, but some), the extra footage had no budget at all, and gives us things like a 'Cowan Research Institute' which appears to be next door to Batwoman's house.

As in other Jerry Warren movies, nothing follows anything else logically, and the fact that we've got two movies mixed together here only heightens this effect.  In fact, I suspect that a lot of things here did make sense in the original movies, before Warren took a hatchet to them.  Take, for example, Mummy A's fascination with Ann.  In The Aztec Mummy this was explained as her being the reincarnation of Popoka's lover Zochi.  Face of the Screaming Werewolf might be doing the reincarnation thing, too, but is way less clear about it.  In House of Terror the mad scientists were working on ressurecting the dead, but in Face of the Screaming Werewolf we are never properly introduced to them and their goals are a mystery – although their hideout, in a wax museum, is creepy as hell and their equipment is incredibly amusing.  Among other things, they appear to subject Mummy B to a giant panini press and a purpose-built corpse centrifuge!

The mixing of stories leaves the movie with a particularly egregious case of No Main Character Syndrome, simply because we never stay with a set of characters long enough to consider them 'main'.  Dr. Redding and Ann are introduced as if they ought to be the main characters, because of course that's exactly what they were in their own movie. Rather than stay with them, however, the movie disposes of them both by killing them offscreen (since at no point in the Aztec Mummy quadrilogy do Eduardo or Flora die).  Then the scientists at the wax museum appear as if they're going to be main characters, but without ever being properly introduced to us.  I don't think any of them even got a name.  The detectives in Warren's added footage might have had names, but if so I don't remember them, and because they can't interact with any of these other characters they never do anything useful to the plot.  That leaves us with only the werewolf and the mummy, neither of whom ever even speak.

The thing I do find rather interesting about a patchwork movie like this is what was kept versus what appears to have been cut.  The Aztec Mummy was eighty minutes long, House of Terror was sixty, and bits and pieces of both have been combined into the sixty-minute Face of the Screaming Werewolf. A lot clearly had to go from each, but what they kept was, in some cases, really strange.  As I noted, we don't ever get proper introductions for the guys at the wax museum, and yet we see the entire Aztec sacrifice scene without any of The Aztec Mummy's backstory to give it context – and without context, the events we see are meaningless.  Why include it when it mostly just draws attention to the fact that Mummy B does not belong in this tomb with Mummy A?  The only answer I can imagine was because it represents the nearest thing Face of the Screaming Werewolf has to spectacle, but the movie didn't need spectacle.  It needed characters and a plot.

Meanwhile, because we never get the beginning of House of Terror, very little from that story means anything to us, either.  We get repeated shots of the museum's creepy wax figures, which were significant in House of Terror, but have nothing to do with Face of the Screaming Werewolf. The werewolf himself has no backstory or motivation, and although we're told he's a modern man who somehow ended up in the pyramid, we're given no clues as to how or why.  He has no lines, I'm guessing because Lon Chaney Jr. didn't speak any Spanish.  His rampage is committed against more characters we've never met, and we don't understand why he kills some people, kidnaps others, and leaves yet more alone.  A scene of him in human form, moping over his sorry plight, suggests that we're supposed to feel sympathy for this character, but how, when we know nothing about him?

If I were in charge of fixing Face of the Screaming Werewolf, he first thing I would do is go back to the source material and make some changes in what actually became part of the final movie.  And once I had my footage all picked out, I would then rewrite the story that goes with it very thoroughly indeed.  As I observed in my review of Time of the Apes, the beauty of dubbing is that you don't necessarily have to stick to the original script.  You can take out irrelevant stuff and add in new material.  I think I would have kept it to a single mummy, and perhaps made lycanthropy a tomb curse of sorts – Chaney's character would be the last archaeologist to profane the pyramid, and he was punished by becoming a werewolf so he could in turn punish any foolish enough to come after him!  There.  I just wrote a more coherent version of this movie in ten seconds than Jerry Warren did in however long it took him.

All this does tend to make one ask: is making one movie out of two, like Face of the Screaming Werewolf, or finishing somebody else's movie, as in Monster A-Go-Go, a lost cause?  I think if you could find a pair of movies that shared actors or sets, it might be possible to come up with something reasonably coherent, but you'd still have the problem of characters who can't interact, or scenes that have to be stitched together where they obviously don't belong.  It seems to me to be something that works better as a joke, as in Kung Pow! Enter the Fist or Ninja: the Mission Force, rather than something to be done seriously.  When not used for Internet Humour, frankenmovie-making seems to be motivated primarily by greed.  Herschel Gordon Lewis finished Monster A-Go-Go in the attempt to sell an unsalable product, and Jerry Warren turned La Momia Azteca and La Casa del Terror into Attack of the Mayan Mummy, House of Terror, and Face of the Screaming Werewolf so that he could release three movies for the price of the rights to two.

Greed is of course at the core of a lot of modern moviemaking.  Summer blockbusters and long-running franchises are designed specifically to earn as much money as possible without anybody necessarily caring if they're any good. A lot of the time they're not, yet despite poor reviews they still earn money, so I guess moviegoers don't care either as long as they get to see something cool.  Even by that standard, though, Face of the Screaming Werewolf is extremely cynical.  Warren figured as long as he gave the movie a cool title, people would pay for it regardless of whether it even made any damned sense.  And you know what?  I watched the damn thing, so I guess I don't care, either.

[zippdementia]

Part 64 Alignment May Vary: Twists and Turns Part 2

When last we left the companions, they had just made their way through a harrowing encounter in the dungeons of the underground Yuan Ti temple. There they discovered a bizarre thing: Carrick’s body, perfectly preserved, identical to Carrick in every way. They also found a weapon, a whip that can extend into a fiery lash, crackling with energy. Carrick seems to know how to use it and he claims it is his, though he does not know how. More of this mystery will come into play as the characters progress through the ever twisting story.

In the meantime, their next goal is about to become very apparent. From their perch on the Yuan Ti pyramid, they find themselves looking down upon a vast landscape, lit with torchlight. To the east is a bizarre silver oval, embedded in the rock, flanked by statues of gigantic serpents poised to strike. Stretching out to the south east and south is an army of monsters and hobgoblins, many of them tending to vats out of which they pull more hobgoblins: some kind of arcane breeding chamber.

Beyond the vats is a chasm, opening up into nothingness. And suspended over the chasm are five portals, crackling with energy.

Suddenly, the crowds below hush, as if struck at once by a spell of silence. The hordes stop all that they are doing and march as one unit towards the silver monument. As they approach it, they begin to chant two words, over and over: Azor Khul!

The monument opens, then, and a being that can only be Azor Khul strides forward to greet his worshipers. He is tall, even for a Dragonborn, and the leathery wings erupting from his back make his presence all the more grand. He throws wide muscled arms and roars out a greeting.

“MY PEOPLE! OUR TIME HAS COME!”

They roar back approval and he continues, his voice washing over the entire cavern, so powerful and piercing that Aldric actually turns around, expecting to see Azor Khul standing behind him. The effect of the Dragonborn’s voice is befuddling and all consuming: none of the companions can think of anything except his words as he speaks.

“We are on the brink of a new world, a new age. Forget what you have learned from living in the shadow of humanity and elves. Today is the day we take back what is ours and build a new future, a glorious future as envisioned by our goddess, Tiamet.

“This land requires cleansing and we are to be the instrument that does it. The humans think they defeated us at Brindol, but they do not know our numbers are eternal, our victory undeniable. They are defenseless now, unable to withstand such an attack again. And so we send you, our greatest warriors, fresh from the womb of Tiamet, through the portal. You will emerge near Brindol tonite and take the attack back to their broken gates, storm their ruined streets, and finish what was started.

“You cannot fail in this. For even if every one of you falls in battle, tomorrow we will send a new army. And again, and again. So go forth without fear and with only the desire for bloodshed in your heart, for death in battle will not be permanent. My power will bring you back and you shall fight again!

“To all the enemies of our goddess, may they beware, for tonight they burn!”

The crowd yells so loud at this last proclamation that the cavern shakes with the echo of their fervor. Azor Khul lowers his arms and retreats back inside the monument, which closes behind him.

While Carrick, Aldric, and Imoaza stare out over this, they are interrupted by a door opening in the side of the pyramid, right behind them. Zaeintar, their Drow ally, emerges.

“Don’t scare me like that,” he exclaims, grabbing his heart and taking a deep breath. “I’ve been scouring the pyramid for you.” He stops suddenly, looking at Aldric’s fists, raised in preparedness to fight. “What? Were you going to punch me to death?”

“Or strangle you,” Aldric says. “Whichever was easiest.”

“Maybe I can help you avoid the choice altogether,” Zaeintar says, dropping their bag of holding on the ground. “Came across your things in my wanderings. I don’t suppose you’d want them back?”

“It will be good to be armed again,” Aldric admits.

“You do know I could summon Drosselgreymer whenever I wanted, right?” Imoaza asks the others, calling the scythe into her hand as she speaks.

“Then why didn’t you?” grumbles Aldric.

“I didn’t forget,” Carrick says. “I just assumed that like the rest of us, you didn’t want to fight an ancient summoned demon in the basement of a tomb. Furthermore, showing your scythe down there might have encouraged Aldric into believing that we could survive such a fight and he might have done something stupid...”

“What?!” Aldric protests. “I wouldn’t have done anything stupid!”

“.. like rushed the thing with his bare hands.”

“Okay, actually yes, that does sound like me.”

“That’s pretty much it, yeah,” Imoaza says, nodding.

The companions eagerly re-equip themselves, Blackrazor exclaiming that there’s some weird stuff in that bag of holding (”who put the tuna melt in there?”) After this, Zaeintar seems eager to move on. He tells them that in order to take down Azor Khul they have to get inside that monument and to do that they’ll need a blue stone key that the Drow leader, a House Captain named Raznika, who took command of the Drow after Azor Khul appeared. She bowed almost immediately to him and their House was forever corrupted. Zaeintar is only too happy to murder her on the path to Azor Khul.

He lays out the beginnings of a plan. Imoaza is a Yuan Ti, so Zaeintar is banking on her knowing some back door into the higher chambers, where Raznika resides. Zaeintar will distract her guards and then the players can attack from Imoaza’s secret passage.

The plan is a little desperate. It relies heavily on Imoaza knowing her way around this temple. But Imoaza is all for it, unwilling to admit that she may know less about the temple than the group thinks she does. In any case, she doesn’t have a better idea of how to find and kill Raznika.

But Carrick is staring out at the portals, wondering which one goes to Brindol and wondering how many innocents will die tonight even if they do kill Azor Khul. He is about to announce his intention to stay behind and find a way to shut down the portal when Aldric speaks up: “We can’t leave. Not until we destroy that army.”

Zaeintar is incredulous. So is Imoaza. “Why do you care if a bunch of humans die?” she asks, while the Drow fervently nods in agreement. “You would throw away the war to win a single battle!” he protests. But Aldric refuses to leave. “You all go,” he says. “I’m going to save Brindol. They... they trusted me. I can’t betray that.”

“Dude,” Blackrazor speaks up. “I gotta say I agree with the lizard lady and the creepy emo dude. There’s no profit in this and we risk losing our lives for nothing.”

“Are you kidding? Look at all those souls waiting to be reaped!” Aldric says.

“True,” Blackrazor muses, but though the temptation is clear in his voice, it sounds like he is considering something else, judging Aldric’s sudden change of character, perhaps.

Carrick interrupts the conversation. “No,” he says. “You three continue on towards Raznika. I’ll take care of things here. Look,” he speeds ahead before the others can protest. “You need a distraction, right? I’m planning on making a big hell of a distraction down there. And besides, Aldric, I was the hero of Brindol long before you showed up.”

Rolling high on his persuasion check, Carrick manages to convince the group to go along with his plan. He spots something Zaeintar is carrying slung over his shoulder and something deep inside his slowly awakening memory recognizes it as explosive devices. “Zaeintar, let me have those,” he says. “I’ll use them to bring down those portals.” Then he points at Aldric. “Aldric, I need you to lube me up.”

Aldric is only too happy to oblige.

With that, the companions separate, three of them heading into the pyramid again, while Carrick stands on the balcony and surveys his distant goal.

“Here we go,” he says, and leaps from the balcony.

Won’t be Ready for a 100 years...

This section epitomizes a new form of DMing that I am beginning to favor. Basically, I set a scenario and have a bunch of stats ready to go for monsters and various obstacles, but I let the players steer the action.

For instance, here I set up two goals: find and kill Raznika and stop the army from reaching Brindol. I wasn’t sure going into this scene how the players would approach these goals (or if they would even choose to save Brindol). I certainly didn’t expect them to split up. So I’m letting them and their rolls steer what happens next.

This form of DMing gives me enough notes to work with that I can ensure a good session and steer us back on track if needed, but lets the players create exciting and unexpected scenarios. It keeps the game fresh and fun for me, because I have no idea how each adventure is going to play out or what the situation will be at the end of the night!

For this scenario, we start with Carrick, who launches himself off the balcony. Before this, he had Aldric help him lube up with an Oil of Etherealness. As he falls from the balcony, his skin begins to move and tear apart, drifting like smoke into the limbo between worlds.

DM note: see, I didn’t expect this at all. So I had to come up with what the ethereal plane would look like on the fly, and since Carrick was essentially bypassing the armies that stood between him and the portals (meant to be a major obstacle) I wanted to populate his trip to the portals with something else.

Carrick’s view of things in the ethereal is strange and unclear. It is like trying to peer through a thick fog. The pyramid stretches out beneath him not as a solid object but as a mixture of colorful waves, sloshing and slapping against themselves. He soars down past these waves until he sees the ground ahead of him as a brown colored mist that he could pass through if he wished. He avoids this, however, as he senses that the elemental power of the rock could overwhelm his form and trap him forever. Instead he glides just above this, heading in the direction he hopes the portals lie in.

As he drifts, he passes hobgoblin warriors and chimeric monsters, their lifeforce shining out of the fog, red glows that wax and wane in time with the beating of Carrick’s heart. And then he hears something odd. The banging of a hammer on anvil. Curious, he floats towards it and eventually sees what is making the sound.

It is the beardless dwarf from his dream a while back. The dwarf is forging a blade here in the ethereal. Carrick doesn’t know how he knows it is a blade, as he can see nothing suggestive of its final shape, yet he does know it is a blade, a powerful blade. The dwarf looks up as Carrick approaches, but only for a moment before returning most of his attention to the sword.

“Didn’t expect to see you here!” he exclaims. “It is not yet time for you to come for the blade. It is not yet ready. You are not yet ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“For the end of the world. I had a chance to stop it, Carrick. I tried to stop it, to bring things back into balance. But I wasn’t able to do it. The winged one stopped all of my plans. And now the world will topple towards a final end. On the one side there will be life and light and hope. And on the other, dark and death and despair. But make no mistake: no matter what happens, it will be over forever. Eternal light, or eternal dark. There will be no coming back, no second chances. And when that time comes, much will depend on what you do, Carrick.”

“I saw my body deep below here. What was that? Do you know who I am? Do you know how I got here?”

The dwarf hesitates. “I cannot answer that,” he says after a moment. “The answer is deep inside of you. I can see its shape but I cannot describe it. Given enough time, you may find it yourself. I can tell you only that you are powerful, Carrick. It was your power that called me from the brink of the abyss. Most of my soul now resides in the dark caves of Ia’fret, where the winged one sent me. There I suffer eternal damnation for my crimes. But a piece of me was trapped by you and now I will work as best I can for the light, to atone for the wrongs I did.”

“What wrongs were those? Who were you?”

“I was called Haggemoth the arcane, Haggemoth the great, Haggemoth the gifted. But I was also called Haggemoth the betrayer, the banished, the lost. I deserved all of those names, but perhaps none so much as Haggemoth the Foolish, Haggemoth the Prideful, Haggemoth the Sorrowful.”

Suddenly, Haggemoth looks up at Carrick and stops his work. “There is no more time for us to speak now. I must concentrate fully on the blade, it already won’t be ready for a hundred years or more. Listen: twice now you have seen me. The third time will be our final meeting. You will know to seek me when the last star falls and the last newborn cries. Watch for the one eyed witch, the promise that was kept, the shattered gem, and the failed justice. When all gather, then the moment of decision will be nigh.”

“Go now!” the dwarf suddenly yells, and brings his hammer down heavily on the anvil, causing sparks to fly. “There are other things that lurk in the ethereal and your light draws them. Do not linger here. Leave me to my work!”

Carrick suddenly feels uneasy and hurries on, until the ringing of the dwarf’s hammer is only a memory. Soon enough he comes to a place where the ethereal is split by a set of five mighty rifts, swirling pools of color and light which pull at the fog of the ethereal like mouths sucking in air. The portals... he has reached his goal.

DM Note: The portals are built over a mighty pit, suspended in mid air by complex machinery. That’s all I knew going into this scene, but seeing Carrick’s plan is to use explosives to blow it up, I come up with an apt description: The central machine is a mighty cylindrical core which is suspended over the core by four huge metal arms which are embedded in the rock face underneath a large stone platform which leads out to the five portals. As Carrick floats down towards these arms, I have him roll investigation and when he passes, tell him that setting the bombs on arms where they connect to the rock could rip the whole thing free of the wall and send it tumbling into space. Carrick floats down towards the bottom arm as the oil wears off and he lands, ready to go to work.

But first I need to switch back to the other group. Give them some time in the spotlight.

Best Laid Plans

Imoaza and Aldric and Zaeintar enter the hallways of the temple. “Now what?” Zaeintar says, looking at the Yuan Ti. Where do we go?”

DM notes: I ask Imoaza the same question, point blank. Imoaza’s player thinks about this and then says, well, you said there are murals all over this place, right? Maybe Imoaza can make some sense of them. Maybe they act like a road map, showing someone who knows how to read the signs where to go. This is a really cool idea, so we go with it, and Imoaza rolls investigation to see if she can interpret the signs correctly.

For a time, Imoaza leads the group with confidence, barely stopping at each branching pathway before making a choice. In this way, they quickly wind their way through the heart of the pyramid. But ahead looms an obstacle.

DM notes: I had a table written down of obstacles they might encounter in the pyramid, including a wandering patrol of Drow, a trapped hallway, and a cleverly locked door. I rolled the door as a result, but hadn’t stated it out. I don’t love inserting real life riddles and puzzles into my games, so I had to come up with a quick way to use skill rolls to bypass this while still making it interesting and descriptive.

The door that looms ahead of them is metal and stone and covered in carvings of snakes. They take a closer look but none of them pass their intelligence checks except, unusually, Aldric. Aldric notices that pieces of the snake carvings move and when he adjusts one of them, a small metal ball dislodges from the top of the door. Trapped behind the carvings, it rolls along passages created by the snakes, coming to a halt against one of the carvings, until Aldric moves it. That creates a new path for the ball to roll along.

“So we have to get the ball to the bottom?” Aldric says.

“Wait!” Zaeintar says. “Look down there. There are multiple paths it can end up going and multiple depressions it can fall into. And next to each depression is a rune.”

“I can read them,” Imoaza says, but then as she runs a finger along the runes she is overcome by emotion. Tears appear in her eyes as she traces the writings of her ancestors, overcome suddenly by the sheer weight and unfairness of time. Too long she has spent looking for signs of her people, only to discover their self made grave.

The runes are cryptic: UP, PASS, DEATH, ALARM, PAIN, BEHIND

DM Notes: So the way I design this is that the marble has to reach one of the six holes to cause an effect. Most of them are bad. Up is actually the best, it will raise the hallway up to the higher levels where Raznika is. The players have to pass an investigation roll to see if they can suss out the correct path for the marble.

Aldric and Zaeintar flub their rolls badly and Imoaza doesn’t get much better. The group decides to roleplay it out that Imoaza thinks she knows what she is doing and rises from the floor, confidently moving several snakes and dropping the marble swiftly towards the bottom.

DM notes: because they flub this so badly, I just have them roll a d6 to see which hole they reach. Imoaza rolls a two and they fall into PASS.

Everyone breaths a sigh of relief as the mechanisms which control the door come to life, turning and spinning and pushing the door open. The three companions are startled to find themselves staring into some kind of command room, where Drow surround odd devices much like the ones they saw in the basement of the pyramid. Beyond the room is open air looking out onto the interior of the pyramid. Several doors lead from the room but clearly this was not one the Drow knew about, for now they turn to stare in disbelief at the intruders.

Before the Drow can react, Aldric is rushing in with Blackrazor, swinging at who he assumes is the ranking Drow here (he doesn’t fully understand Drow hierarchy and ignores the only woman in the room, who is the actual leader). He slices at a Drow male holding two scimitars and manages to roll a critical failure, smashing apart one of the odd devices in his fervor.

Imoaza follows suit, summoning her scythe and rushing in with it, spinning it around her in wide deadly arcs and sending Eldritch blasts flying ll over the room. Zaeintar sighs and draws guns from his belt (he’s a Drow Gunslinger) and also joins the fray.

DM Notes: I have a belief about splitting up the party that the only good way to do it is to have what is happening to one party have some effect on the other. In this case, Aldric’s critical failure gives me the perfect opportunity to tie our two disparate plots together.

Critical Fail

Back at the portals, Carrick has been climbing on the struts that hold the core to the rock wall. In the ethereal plane, he couldn’t see the metal but he could see the energy flowing through wires embedded in the cliff wall and across the struts towards the core, then being processed into the five portals. As he clambers over the struts now, he can imagine that same energy passing through the metal bars he grips and swings around on.

Two of the bombs are placed, on the bottom two struts, when Carrick places a hand poorly and slips, falling out towards the infinite space of the chasm. He catches himself at the last moment, then darts out a hand to catch the last two bombs before they can fall into the abyss.

He is catching his breath here on the strut when suddenly the whole contraption shudders and sparks of electricity start to spray all over the struts. “Somehow, I know this is Aldric’s fault,” he says out loud as suddenly electricity and power surges along the top strut like a ring of fire and lightning, slamming into the core, which soaks it all in and redistributes it to the portals.

Another surge starts to form on the strut just below the top one. Carrick then realizes that he is on the third strut, the next strut down, and soon he will be subjected to forces that will rip his body apart. He gets to his feet and begins to run for the core. Behind him, the surge builds up and then rips through the strut. However, this time the surge hits Carrick’s bomb, placed where the strut connects to the wall. There is a tremendous explosion and the strut tears fear of the wall, groaning. Carrick is thrown from the strut to land on the one beneath him, holding on for dear life. And once again the surge is building up at the bottom strut to head for him.

Then Carrick has an idea.

DM notes: I’ve really left this whole section open to suggestion from Carrick. If he fails to take down the portals, it won’t end the campaign, though it will be the end of Brindol. How hard he wants to push towards that goal is up to him. I do tell him that he hasn’t placed enough bombs to destroy the portals. So he decides to place the last bombs all together at the core and let the surge do its work. I roll a secret die to see what happens...

Carrick sees the surge coming and jumps backwards off the core, keeping an eye on what’s happening. The surge occurs... but disaster strikes! Before the power surge can reach the core and the bombs there, the bomb at its base goes off, wrecking the strut and tearing it free from the core, electricity playing up and down its entire length. The bombs Carrick have placed at the core sit there idly and safely, not doing what he had intended.

Carrick thinks fast and begins lobbing eldritch blasts at his bombs. Because he is falling, he has disadvantage on the roll. One shot misses, absorbed into the core. One hits and the bombs do nothing. Another hits...

BOOM.

The core goes up like a light candle, flame and power fighting for control all up and down its sides. It twists and groans and folds and rips the entire metal structure free of the wall, the apparatus tumbling down after Carrick. Carrick falls with a smile on his face. He lets himself be free for a moment, free of all concern, free even of gravity, before he reaches into a pocket and pulls free a potion. Careful not to let the liquid fall out, he pops the cork and quickly downs the liquid, cringing at the taste. A moment later, Carrick is gone and a green cloud is working its way back up the chasm and over the chaos that is erupting among the hobgoblin armies.

Driving the Narrative

While Carrick has risked life and limb at the portal, the situation in the command room has quickly gotten out of hand. Aldric had leaped into the fray of things and now he is targeted from all sides. Imoaza tries to reach him, but three Drow block her way and she is forced to fight them instead, though her immunity to their poisons is helping her a lot. Aldric takes them down one at a time while getting cut all over, but his most skilled opponent is the male Drow he attacked first, who wields a shortsword and a scimitar and slices into Aldric with alarming speed. But a bad misstep takes him off rhythm and Aldric slices him in the side with Blackrazor and then shoulder bashes him, sending him stumbling backwards and off the command platform, where he tumbles to his death a hundred feet below in a crowded courtyard. Even as shouts of alarm rise up, Aldric feels an arm go around his neck and the one female Drow in the room hisses in his ear: “That was my favorite lackey.” She drives a poisoned blade towards his throat.

There is a mighty boom and the Drow backs away, holding her ruined hand. Zaeintar stands nearby, holding up one of his guns. “Back away, Aldric,” he says and Aldric rolls away from the female Drow as Zaeintar utters a command word and the bullet embedded in her hand explodes, taking off her arm and knocking her unconscious.

“And now I really think we should be leaving,” Zaeintar says.

DM Notes: the key to a good session is to keep the situation moving. There should always be another obstacle to cross, another goal to achieve. “But then...” is a DM’s best friend at the table. Not that there shouldn’t be slow burns and opportunities for long rests, but even these should be breaks from an evident situation the players are actively pursuing.

Cries of alarm are erupting from below and Aldric runs over to the edge of this room and sees at least a dozen Drow pointing and shouting. Suddenly a Drow steps up right next to him. He startles, but the Drow grabs his arm and speaks in Imoaza’s voice: “It’s me. I cast disguise self to look like them. I want them to be as confused as possible.” Saying this, she raises her hand and utters an incantation to her serpentine goddess. The dead around her shiver and shake and suddenly rise, zombies under her control. And far below, the body of the male Drow gets up and bites out the jugular of a nearby Drow soldier.

“Follow us,” Imoaza orders the zombies. “Kill any Drow you see. Except me.” The zombies groan in answer and begin their slow shuffle after the party as they run along new passages, heading ever higher in their search for the House Captain.

The zombies soon lag far behind, though a distant echoing cry of pain says that they found and delayed at least one patrol. Then, turning a corner, the three run directly into The House Captain and her three male guards. There is only a moment to react. Aldric draws Blackrazor. Imoaza straightens and prepares to summon Drosselgreymer. And Zaeintar turns, points his gun, and pulls the trigger.

The gun, pressed against the back of Aldric’s head, blows a fist sized hole through his face, and the body crumples to the ground in a heap.

“My Queen,” Zaeintar says, bowing to the House Captain.

The next post, the third in the Twist and Turns series, will conclude this underground adventure and drive the campaign to new heights!