Carter and Felix were watching basketball at 10 PM one Friday night, the giant Thoth statue casting a shadow of what felt like disappointment. When one player scored against the Lakers, Carter screamed, "Come on, I gambled three hundred dollars on this game!"
Sadie walked into the Great Room looking like an enraged bull yelling,"I SPECIFICALLY told you Carter, no more gambling, you're sixteen! You're setting a bad example for Felix," so she glanced at Felix only to find him giving the TV the finger. She screamed,"FELIX! GO TO YOUR ROOM!" Felix reluctantly got up and went upstairs with the finger held high on both hands. Sadie said,"I don't think he knows what that means...should I tell him?" Carter replied,"Nah, it's pretty funny. He's ten years old, he'll learn what it means soon."
Four hours later (2 A.M.), Carter's phone rang, and it was Uncle Amos. Carter awoke with a jolt (despite his peaceful nap) and picked up his phone. "Amos, it's two in the morning here," Carter said groggily. Amos replied,"We've got a breach in security, get our best trainees and get over here now." Carter immediately jumped out of bed, took a cold shower, got dressed, ate half a granola bar on his dresser, and ran out the door to pound on five other trainees' doors until they stumbled out with bedhead and pajamas on. By 2:45 A.M., Carter had Sadie, Jaz, Walt, Felix, and Alyssa gathered around the Ancient Egyptian artifact on the roof used for quick portal travel through the Duat, a magical Ancient Egyptian realm. Sadie did her portal magic and everyone jumped through, despite the important fact that it was an inauspicious moment.
What the young magicians arrived to was (luckily) not a group of rogue magicians battling in the Hall of Ages, but hordes of monsters pouring in through one of the magic memory tapestries from the beginning of the Ptolemaic Age. They seemed to be various animal hybrids like a cat's head fused on to a giraffe, or a gorilla's limbs on an elephant's head and torso. What was most suprising was that no one could hold them back, not even Amos Kane himself. The animals breathed fire and knocked things over, but the destruction really began when a hippo-lion barged through the hall entrance and the animal hybrids were released to the rest of the First Nome.
"Good Morning," a TV news host announced,"and for our main headline today, February twenty-first, our Egyptian sources tell us that several Ancient Egyptian landmarks have collapsed within five minutes of each other. Could this be a coordinated attack by radicals, or something worse?" The trainees still at Brooklyn House that were awoken by the noise from the Kanes were huddled around the TV in the Great Room at 3:30 A.M. One trainee said,"Uh-oh, there's a serious issue at the First Nome. We need to go help." So off the trainees went to the emergency artifact in the library.