AUTHOR'S NOTE
This is the fourth installment of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs. Amset-Ra story, and so you might wish to read Part I: The Egyptian Job, Part II: Breakneck Breakout, and Part III: The Tale of Amset-Ra before diving into this one.
As with the previous installments, this one uses characters and backdrops that were included with the Lego: Pharaoh's Quest line, as well as some sets with the Lego City line. This installment introduces the awesome Scorpion Pyramid (set #7327).
Thank you for reading, and as always reviews and feedback are welcome.
Donatello, man (or turtle) of science, couldn't wrap his brain around ancient magic. Something in Prof. Archibald Q. Hale's eyes told Donnie that the academic was serious as cancer when he said there was magic within these treasures. Despite his deep love of empirical evidance, he had to push aside any preconceived notions of supernatural mumbo-jumbo and act, however ridiculous the pieces of the puzzle looked when laid in front of him.
Donnie wasted no time after the meeting with Hale concluded. He ran at top speed through the sewers, back to the Lair. He told all of his brothers an abridged version of Hale's tale of Amset-Ra and what obtaining all of the artifacts would mean for The Foot Clan.
The other turtles shared Donnie's skepticism.
However, there would be time for that later. Soon, The Foot would figure out that one of the artifacts they needed was located in the very museum they attempted to rob in the first place. When they did, you can bet that it wouldn't be pleasant for Prof. Hale.
"We have to get the Soul Diamond out of that gallery and into our Lair," Donnie urged.
"Nope," said Leo. "The Foot Clan will figure out that the Soul Diamond is in the museum. They'll come after it."
"And?" Raph asked.
"And I say leave the Diamond right there, and defend the museum."
"Why on earth would we leave it right there?" Donnie asked.
"Yeah, genius," Raph scolded. "We could put it safely down here, then defend the museum against The Foot Clan. No risk of the Diamond falling into their hands."
"First," Leo said, "I'm confident we can stop The Foot from getting the Diamond. Second, let's say for the sake of argument that these things are magical. What's to say that Shredder can't use the treasures to find each other?"
The other three understood. Well, maybe two of the other three anyway. Mikey still had a glazed look.
"We wouldn't want them to break off the attack at the museum because they sense that the Diamond is here," Leo said.
"Leo, that is the dumbest move you've made since becoming leader." Raph pointed at his brother, and spoke words seething with venom. "We are going to regret this!"
"It's the right move, Raph," Leo said. "We're gonna do it."
"Aye, aye, General Custer," Raph muttered. He mockingly saluted Leo to help make his point.
The lone Foot Soldier decided to follow in the footsteps of Slick and Earl, who had no problem breaking in through the skylight. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The Foot Soldier easily lifted the pane of glass. He jacked it open with his tsurguri, one of the many alternate uses for the back up sword that a ninja is trained to find.
The Foot Soldier locked his grappling hook onto the wall supporting the skylight, and threw the line down to the gallery floor. He tested it by tugging it hard, to make sure that the grappling hook stayed in place.
He then carefully descended the rope, using the knots tied in it as foot and hand holds. When he was a safe distance from the floor, he let go and fell the rest of the way, and used all of his ninja training to land without making a sound.
He paused. He listened with his acute senses for any sign of detection.
Nothing. Silence.
The Foot Soldier moved swiftly to one wall and followed it carefully, ensuring he remained in the shadows at all times. He used the Heng Pu – the ninja cross-stepping technique – to remain silent and undetected as he approached the Soul Diamond.
Still sitting on its perch in the museum, the Soul Diamond glowed with a soft blue light.
The Foot Soldier paused once again. He tuned his senses to everything around him, trying to ascertain if he was detected.
Silence.
He broke his cover, gliding swiftly across the floor on the balls of his feet and stopping in front of the Diamond, close enough to touch it.
And then he was surrounded.
The turtles seemed to materialize out of nowhere. While the Foot Soldier had done his best to avoid being detected, the turtles had done the same to greater effect. They clearly had the advantage in both numbers and position. With all of their weapons drawn, they were ready for battle.
The Foot Soldier drew a single pair of nunchukus from his waistband and dropped into an attack stance.
It was a stand off.
The Foot Soldier moved first, charging the turtle with the katanas. He seemed the most dangerous. Unmoved, the blue-masked turtle raised his blades and slashed.
The Foot Soldier's nunchukus parried the spot the katanas should have struck.
But it was a feint. A very clever one.
The nunchucks spun in midair, whirling harmlessly.
A second turtle, the red-masked one, brought his hands together as if to clap. But the Foot Soldier's head was in the space where the clap would occur, and the turtle's hands held sais. A pommel crashed into either side of the Foot Soldier's head, and the ninja's world turned dark gray, broken only by spots of light dancing and darting about his field of vision.
When the Foot Soldier had recovered his faculties, he quickly retreated.
The turtles didn't follow.
"Okay, high three!" Mikey said. "We saved the world."
The other three sighed deeply. Mikey just didn't get it sometimes.
"They'll be back," Raph said with a huff. He stormed away.
The Dark Ninja regarded the beaten-up Foot Soldier kneeling before him.
Shredder's self-appointed stand in was furious "Gather all of the available fighters," Dark Ninja growled. "We need an all-out attack on that museum and we take those wretched turtles out!"
The turtles tried to stay vigilant, tried to remain on guard. With the Soul Diamond in the center, they each stood guard in a different cardinal direction. Suddenly, a shadow moved, like a viscous liquid across the floor, and then it rose and materialized: a Foot Soldier.
Armed with a katana, the ninja took a swipe at Raph, who ducked quickly. The bobbed again, and wove as his assailant slashed in quick succession to Raph's left, then his right, right again, then the Foot Soldier spun 180-degrees and made a deadly arc with the katana where Raph's legs should have been.
But the warrior was already prepared for this, and leaped high in the air, pulling his legs close to his chest as the sword passed harmlessly underneath. On his descent, Raph brought the pommels of his sais together on either side of the Foot Soldier's head, dropping his opponent.
Another Foot Soldier stepped from the shadow, a deadly mace already spinning. A third, nunchukus tucked in his belt, twin ebony katanas clutched in each hand. A fourth, a fifth, a sixth, all stepped from the shadows. The turtles could feel the presence of dozens more that had not yet stepped from the shadows.
All four turtles took a step forward, wading into the melee. Donnie slapped two of them with either end of his bo, while Mikey swung his nunchukus in tight circles that connected with the skulls of ninja after ninja. Raph fended the attacks of several assailants using his sais, then landing jabs and devastating front kicks or side kicks to knock his attackers out. Leo blocked blows, somersaulted through attackers, and slashed unaware Foot Soldiers before they knew where he ended up.
The turtles inched ever further from the Soul Diamond as they fought through the sea of Foot Soldiers, moving the battle quickly into other galleries.
And that was exactly what the Dark Ninja wanted.
A rope dangled from the ceiling when the turtles had moved the fighting back about twenty feet, and the Dark Ninja slid to the bottom, a triumphant spider ready to feast upon the prisoner of its web.
Mikey was the first to notice as the Dark Ninja crushed the glass display box and pulled the Soul Diamond free.
"Hey!" Mikey shouted.
The other turtles, to the best of their ability, tried to spot what Mikey had just yelled about. They saw the Dark Ninja cradling the Soul Diamond in a gentle funnel formed by both of his hands. His eyes were lit by the soft blue glow of the artifact, and there was a madness visible in them, even at this distance.
"There's your helping of I-Told-You-So Pie, Leo," Raph grunted, scattering two Foot Soldiers and then quickly engaging another. Two more flanked the warrior, preventing him from breaking combat to engage their leader.
Three Foot Soldiers dropped behind Donnie. Two, nunchukus ready, stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind Leo. Only Mikey was free.
"Mikey, get him!" Leo nodded toward the Dark Ninja.
"Right," Mikey winked. Mikey broke his combat and darted toward the Dark Ninja. "Stop!" Mikey shouted, swirling his nunchukus at the Dark Ninja.
The Dark Ninja laughed heartily. "Really? You're gonna stop me?" He pocketed the Soul Diamond in the folds of his dogi and assumed a combat stance.
Mikey swung his nunchuku at the Dark Ninja's temple, and The Foot's pro temp leader caught the end with his hand, and wrenched the weapon free of Mikey's grip.
Dark Ninja brought the nunchuku back on its owner, and Mikey ducked quickly as it passed over his head. Mikey swung the other nunchuku to the Dark Ninja's body, but Dark Ninja blocked it with a quick spin of his appropriated weapon.
Dark Ninja balled a fist and leaned into a mighty left hook that connected with Mikey's midsection, sending the turtle into a small tornado-like spin in the air before landing on the ground with an unceremonious thump.
The Foot Clan leader laughed, a deep and menacing laugh that mocked all four turtles at once. "You call yourselves fighters? Ninja? Ha! You are not worthy of the name."
Dark Ninja tugged at the rope, beginning an ascent to the skylight. But he felt a three-fingered grasp on his leg, and was pulled from the rope before he could react. On the ground, shaking the cobwebs from his brain, he focused on his assailant. Somehow, the orange-masked freak had laid him out.
This wouldn't stand.
Dark Ninja rose from the ground, and threw a straight arm at Mikey, heel of his hand extended, colliding with Mikey's throat and sending the turtle across the room in a heap. Mikey hit the floor and slid against the wall, coughing and clutching his windpipe.
"Up. Now," the ninja commanded.
Mikey tried to turn toward the wall, and guide himself up with his hand. But this wasn't fast enough, as Dark Ninja had Mikey by the mask and whipped the turtle quickly to his feet.
The sudden change in position blurred Mikey's vision and made him dizzy. His head filled with cold foam, expanding at his temples to the top inside of his skull. It felt as if te floor was tugged out from under him, and Dark Ninja caught Mikey before he hit the ground, then threw him headfirst into the display formerly occupied by the diamond. The plywood stand splintered as 200 pounds of mutant turtle crashed through it like a wrecking ball.
Mikey slid on his stomach to the opposite wall, as if on a Slip 'n Slide but with friction. It felt like tiny pins and needles dug through his flesh as his body squealed on the floor, the same sound of shoes on a basketball court. Mikey stopped well short of the wall.
He tried to pull himself up.
"You're kidding," Dark Ninja scoffed.
He marched toward Mikey, and when the turtle was on all fours, Dark Ninja delivered a kick to the breadbasket, then pistoned downward with his fingers interlaced to make the head of hammer, connecting with the back of Mikey's neck.
Mikey went down for good this time.
The Dark Ninja held the Soul Diamond aloft. "Foot Clan, we have what we came for!" He hid the Diamond in the folds of his dogi once again and returned to the rope unchallenged. As he began his ascent, he called out: "Ninja... Vanish!"
Silence. And pizza.
After a defeat like that, the turtles could only sit in uncomfortable silence and chew their pizza slices slowly, without really tasting or enjoying anything.
Leo, Donnie, and Raph were hard on each other, but they saved the worst of it for Mikey.
"Because of you," Leo had said, "The Foot was able to free the prisoner and get the map to the treasure. And now, when you could have protected the Soul Diamond, you let that dark ninja get it!"
"I didn't let him," Mikey retorted. "He was kinda a good fighter!"
"Which means you aren't," Raph pointed out.
It was useless to save face, Mikey thought, so he just let them talk. Now, sitting here in the loudest silence ever, the turtles didn't know what to do from here.
Prof. Hale sensed the tone of uncertainty, and cleared his throat. "If I might offer a suggestion," he said.
The turtles offered him full attention.
"The fellow I mentioned, Raines. Jake Raines. He helped me recover the Soul Diamond. It's possible that he might have some insight on what to do here. He is, after all, a professional adventurer."
The implication that the turtles were amateurs didn't go unnoticed. Well, Mikey might not have caught it. But at least three turtles were offended.
The next morning, the turtles returned to the Hale Gallery to meet Jake Raines. He had unkempt black hair that seemed to have a life of its own, thick and wavy with the slightly unwashed look of an action hero. Raines was trying to have a neatly trimmed goatee, but he had also a careless day's growth of whiskers on his cheeks and lip.
Scrubby, but handsome. A lady's man. He definitely had the charisma. It was obvious before he uttered a word. You could feel it when you looked at him.
After initially balking at dealing with four mutant turtles, Raines settled down and was eager to work with Hale on another project.
"Egypt is a nice reversal from the Arctic," Raines said. "It's also way less humid than the Amazon."
"Mr. Raines has found lost civilizations at both the North Pole and in the Amazon," Hale beamed. He was like Raines's press agent sometimes. Leo smirked at the man-crush.
After last night's defeat, Leo needed to make up some ground as the leader. He needed to find some success, and build on it. That's how leadership works: fail, lose ground; succeed, gain ground. He needed a plan, and he needed it fast.
"Okay, we need to figure out where that Dark Ninja is going next. I was thinking -"
"Sorry to interrupt, Leonardo," Hale said. "But I already know where he's going. Only five of Amset-Ra's treasures were taken by the villagers. The sixth and most powerful, the Golden Nemes, served as the pharaoh's funeral headdress. It would be with his body in the Scorpion Pyramid."
Leo's mouth still hung open. He tried to regain control of this meeting. "We don't know where that is, Professor." Quickly, Leo's mind worked out some possible ways to track Dark Ninja back to Egypt. "Why don't we have Donnie hack into some airline or travel databases to see if we can find out where The Foot is headed?"
"No go, Leo," Donnie said. "The Foot has access to private jets. No way Shredder has this guy on a commercial airliner."
"Agreed," Raines said in his husky voice. It was pitched low, without a snarl. Pleasing. "That was a bad idea... Leo, is it?"
"Yes," Leo said, exasperated.
"You're the leader, right? Or supposed to be?"
Raph laughed, clapping Mikey on the shoulder. Mikey held it together, but had to cover his mouth with his hand.
"Right again," Leo said, annoyed.
"Look, if I may," Raines started. His attempt at tact just made him seem more rude. "I recovered a simple nemes in my expedition for the Soul Diamond. It's on display in the gallery. I remembered something about it."
The group adjourned from Hale's office and walked toward the Egyptian Wing of the gallery.
"Where did you get it?" Mikey asked.
Raines remembered fighting a live mummy. He remembered pulling the nemes off the mummy and blasting the creature to sand.
"You don't want to know," Raines said.
The turtles, the professor, and Jake Raines formed a semicircle around the nemes on display. "A nemes is a traditional funeral headdress for a pharaoh. Royalty. It's odd that an ordinary mummified peasant would have anything like it, simple or otherwise."
"And that's what makes it worthy of display?" Donnie asked.
"Precisely," Hale said. He removed the plexiglass covering.
"Here," Raines pointed to a cluster of half-moon markings directly below a wavy line. "Let's say that that is the Nile River, and these objects below it could represent a clustering of hills nearby."
Leo scoffed. He finally had this poser. "Then they'd be to the south of the Nile. That's not possible. The land south of the Nile didn't belong to Amset-Ra."
Raines blinked incredulously, as if Leo had just said the stupidest thing ever.
"You're the leader, but clearly not the brains," he said almost to himself, then looked at Donnie.
Donnie said, "The decision to put north or south on top of a map is purely arbitrary. Ancient Egyptians chose south. That puts the hills north of the Nile."
"Thanks, Brains," Raines said. "Which means I have a really good idea of where the Scorpion Pyramid is located."
How could a structure this magnificent be lost? Why had no one seen this before?
The Scorpion Pyramid stood much as the Great Pyramid at Giza, but less than a quarter of the size. A marvel of architecture, its thousands and thousands of perfectly carved bricks stood one on top of the other with no mortar. It was so tightly configured that you couldn't slide a piece of paper between two bricks, yet so sturdy that it stood for over 4,000 years despite earthquakes, storms, and other disasters (both natural and man-made).
Unlike the plain pyramids of Giza, however, the Scorpion Pyramid had a giant stone scorpion over its southern wall, clinging to the facade the way an insect defies gravity by walking on a wall. The claws were clasped together, as though the stone beast prayed to some unknown elder god, and covered what the Dark Ninja assumed was the door.
A set of steps led out of the sand to a precipice directly below the claws. The Dark Ninja stood on this landing, looking at the claws. He instinctively knew what to do. He held the staff aloft.
Lightning from the clear blue sky forked down and circled the tip of the Golden Staff. Then, a blue beam shot out and struck the claws. They parted, revealing a short tunnel dug into the pyramid. A door further blocked Dark Ninja's progress.
He advanced slowly, sheathing the staff behind his back. He withdrew the Golden Scarab Shield and the Golden Sword, though he didn't think he needed to arm himself. Everything in this pyramid was long dead.
When he reached the door, he saw an indentation in the door shaped like an inverse scarab. It was the exact size of his shield. He pressed the shield against the indentation, and he heard several tumblers sliding and the door then lifted slowly into the air.
Dark Ninja walked inside the pyramid. He had strong feelings for each fork in the path and each intersection, and was able to very easily navigate the maze to the inner burial chamber.
Instead of a sarcophagus, he found a throne with a mummy seated upon it.
The occupant of the throne looked much like the mummies Dark Ninja had battled already, except that it wore a golden nemes with elaborate decorations. Where King Tut's nemes had a snake, a small but elaborately carved scorpion peeked out. The Dark Ninja dropped the sword and shield in front of the mummy on the throne.
"Oh great Amset-Ra, please hear my plea," the Dark Ninja said reverently.
He opened his leather satchel, strapped around his shoulder, and produced the Golden Crystal, dropping it on top of the sword and the shield.
"I offer your treasures back to you. I humbly ask to be your servant, I humbly ask to share your immortality."
Dark Ninja produced the Soul Diamond, and laid it in front of the pharaoh. Then, he unsheathed the Golden Staff and placed it near Amset-Ra's hand.
The long dead hand of Amset-Ra reached out and curled its dry fingers about the shaft of the Golden Staff, creaking with the disturbing sound of bone scraping bone. A machine unoiled for many generations.
Dark Ninja stepped back and waited. "I can be the general of your army!" he roared.
Beneath the bandages, tiny red pinpoints of light illuminated the dried-up eye sockets.
"He lives!" Dark Ninja shouted. "Amset-Ra lives!" Dark Ninja cackled crazily, his arms aloft and spread so his body formed a Y.
Amset-Ra rose from the throne. He looked toward Dark Ninja. "I see everything about your soul," he said. "You are evil and charismatic, a capable leader and a fine general."
"I will serve you well," Dark Ninja bowed.
Amset-Ra raised the staff, and pointed it at the Dark Ninja. "But you have already betrayed one master. Why should I fare any better?"
A beam of energy shot from the staff, blowing all of the flesh off of Dark Ninja's sinewy muscles, then the muscles were torn off the bones, so that only a skeleton was left standing as the energy beam dissipated. The skeleton crumbled, bone by bone, to the ground. The skull was the last to hit the stone floor and it shattered, dashing itself to pieces amid the once sturdy bones of the Dark Ninja.
Amset-Ra raised his staff again. A beam shot from the tip straight up, out of the Scorpion Pyramid, and broke into fragments of dazzling light. The patchwork light raced across the lands of Egypt and spread out to the rest of the world, lighting by malevolent disco ball.
As each dancing light roared over a graveyard, the bones rose from their graves. The light broke again, its fragments surrounded each body and cloaked it with bandages.
The dead walked the earth now.
From the Scorpion Pyramid, Amset-Ra cackled with delight. "It has begun. Now I will take my rightful place as ruler of Egypt, and the world!"