Torg Eternity – Dead Legion

Assault on the GyroFortress

Nile Empire – Sahara Desert

From above, the sun's rays seemed to pelt down on them like bullets. As if conveying Ra's vengeance on them for their misdeeds. One of the shocktroopers standing guard around the edge of the yard made a show of going to a bucket, getting out a wet cloth and wiping the sweat from his brow and arms, shooting the prisoners a mocking grin as he put it back.

And the once-great villainess who called herself the Grand Cicada made no effort to hide her burning scowl. Almost as burning as the scent forcing its way up her nostrils again, reminding her of the humiliating task she'd been given. Her shovel plunged into the steaming pile of manure, and she flung it into the back of a wooden cart.

"Speed it up, Dung Beetle!" one the guards barked at her.

She made no effort to hide her snarl of rage at that, either, as she violently launched a shovelful of manure into the cart.

"If it helps, you're not the only one having a bad time."

For the first time, Cicada looked over at the other woman who'd been loading the cart alongside her. She was dark, with a head of curled brown hair. More than that, she was on the short side, lean but the muscles of an athlete were obvious with her rolled-up sleeves and pant legs. And she was giving what looked like an honest attempt at a friendly smile.

Cicada growled again, but it came out as more of an annoyed grumble. "I guess not, but I can't believe it's come to this. Just a couple of days ago I was an enforcer for one of the pharaoh's overgovernors…now here I am, shoveling this mess!"

"Really?" the dark woman asked, eyes going wide with surprise. "What happened?"

Cicada sighed, but the words just started spilling out. "I found out about a secret message from that 'Delphi Council' that's been annoying Wu Han recently, and chased down one of their people to try and get it back, but she had more help than I was counting on. A Mystery Man, the Ghost. And some woman with a huge gun. Sophia Black, I think they called her.

"They got away, so I tracked them down to a library where they found a tomb in the basement. I was beating them that time, beating them really good. But one of them must've found an Eternity Shard—those objects with special powers the pharaoh's always trying to collect—and it let them just get back up from all my best hits. I got out of the tomb to try and regroup, and…"

"…and?" the dark woman prompted, leaning in curiously.

"And I ran right into the pharaoh! Can you believe that luck?! On the one night Mobius pays a visit to the latrine of the entire empire, I run into him, and he accuses me of letting those Stormers get away! They actually stood up to his powers, thanks to the Eternity Shards they must've found. Long enough to escape with their lives, at least.

"So here I am, shoveling cow dung into carts until they think I've been humiliated enough! Oh, I've been humiliated enough, I promise you!"

"HEY!" one the guards yelled at them. "Stop talking and get working!"

The dark woman laughed as loud and derisively as Cicada had ever heard anyone laugh. "Yeah, you go ahead and shoot us!" she jeered back at the guard. "Then you and your friends can shovel this stuff instead!" The shocktrooper frowned, but turned away and kept walking his patrol around the edge of the yard.

Looking extremely pleased with herself, the dark woman whispered to Cicada, "I've never heard of those people. Cairo's supposed to have a very colorful population, though."

"I won't forget them until the day I die," Cicada hissed. "Somehow, someday, I'm going to get out of here, and get my revenge!"

The dark woman nodded calmly. "Where I come from, we have a saying: in time, dawn always pierces the darkness."

Cicada gave her a cynical stare, before getting back to work.

Eventually, even though it seemed as though it would never come, night settled across the desert. The workers, including Grand Cicada and her new companion, were herded into a long space with a row of cots on each side. A few had a bucket of fetid water and some ragged cloths to wash with, but knowing what they'd have to do all over again the next day, most didn't bother.

There were no lights, no tables to gather around. That kind of thing might prompt the formation of bonds, and there was to be none of that in a revolting prison camp like this.

As if the work didn't make it obvious what was thought of the workers all by itself.

But it was no secret that guards hated their posting to the manure farm as much as the prisoners did. It was, indeed, one of the pharaoh's more cruel ideas for those in his service who committed the mortal sin of displeasing him. Many who'd been offered execution instead were convinced they'd made the wrong decision after a few weeks at the camp. Whether worker or guard.

Maybe if the guards had more incentive to pay attention, the one on patrol near the tent where the workers were confined would've seen the intruder creeping up before it hauled him to the ground. Then silenced him with a single mighty blow before he could let out a sound to alert his allies.

Well into the wee hours of the morning, one of the workers subtly peered around the tent at her fellow convicts. After several minutes of surveillance, she was sure they were all genuinely asleep, and slipped out of her cot with her hands around her chains to try to limit the noise they made. An awkward feat, even for someone with her legendary agility.

It was the dark woman who'd been talking with Grand Cicada that day. The time had come for her to leave.

Through the weeks of experience she'd developed memorizing the guards' night patrols, she made her way from one shadow to another, finally to the edge of the camp where it butted up against the open desert. Waiting there for her, over the body of a shocktrooper smashed into the sand, was a black panther. On its back was a harness holding a large black bag.

"Right on time, Banou," she whispered with a smile. From inside the bag, she produced a wire and twisted it in the locks of her chains, popping them open. Without any hesitation she stripped out of her prison rags and into a sleek black uniform and mask from the bag the panther had brought. Bands of gold-colored metal decorated its boots and arm-guards, a leopard-spotted belt around her waist. No longer was she a mere a dung-shoveler and slave to the oppressors of the Nile Empire.

Once again, she was the great hero, the Golden Leopard.

Her true identity assumed once more, she ran into the desert, her faithful panther charging across the dunes with her.

For hours, it seemed, they raced across the sands with an almost supernatural strength. Until the sun rose, and with it, the outline of a beige convertible waiting atop a dune came into sight. Golden Leopard and Banou headed for it, and well before they got there could see its driver waving to them.

He was quite the sight himself, wearing a black-double breasted suit, gloves, mask and slouch hat. And from the slight smile on his face, he'd been expecting the two of them. "Right on time," he said. "How do you do it, Leopard?"

Golden Leopard shrugged a shapely shoulder. "Maybe hanging around the seers for so long's rubbed off on me," she said, and acrobatically leaped into the passenger's seat. Banou pounced and landed in the back seat. "But enough about that, we've got much big concerns, Major Havoc."

"A woman after my own heart," he said stoically, then started the engine. A minute later they were rolling back toward civilization.

After a while, Golden Leopard found the relative silence of driving through the desert oppressive. Too much like her imprisonment back at that fetid work camp she'd just left behind. She felt compelled to break it. "Major, have you heard of someone called the Ghost?"

The Major frowned, but Golden Leopard didn't notice, staring out over the desert after her confinement. He murmured, "Wasn't that the kid who got partnered with Angel? She was one of the best, I heard."

"One of the other inmates used to be one of Cairo's villains, and she said she was in there because of him, and some ladies he's working with now. They beat her good, and made a clean getaway from Mobius himself."

"What was Mobius doing in Cairo? Hasn't he got better things to do?"

Golden Leopard shrugged. "Had something to do with some powerful item hidden in a tomb, I guess that's why. Isn't that something, though? Couple of people didn't just beat one of those villains, they got one over on the pharaoh himself in the same night."

Major Havoc looked straight ahead as he drove. "Doctor Mobius has been outsmarted before."

"If I weren't so optimistic, I'd say you're being awfully cynical. Trying to find a reason not to be impressed by one of your own Mystery Men and his friends surviving a run-in with Doctor Mobius."

Several minutes of quiet driving passed. Finally, Major Havoc said grimly, "I don't do optimism, Leopard. Vengeance is what makes me powerful."

A small smile was her first reply to her gloomy companion. "It's a new world, Major. Maybe it's time for a new way."

Nile Empire - Cairo

Sore and bleary-eyed, Kristina Rouge stumbled down to the ground floor of the Delphi Council safe house. Already, she was regretting certain aspects of her decision to be transported to the Nile Empire. The most prominent one on her mind at the moment was there was no such thing as automatic coffee makers at the empire's level of technological development. The heroes of this world were a hardier stock than Kristina was first thing in the morning, without a rush of caffeine instantly available.

While she was winding the crank around and around trying to get the endless process of a decent cup of coffee in this godforsaken place started, Kristina Rouge heard something that managed to break through the early-morning miasma covering her mind. It was the grunt of something putting all their force behind a punch. Immediately, adrenaline surged through her body, all thoughts about her morning caffeine forgotten.

Out of pure instinct she seized the biggest knife in her view and went—quickly but quietly—to where the noise had come from.

As soon as she saw what it was, she lowered her improvised weapon in disappointment. The table in the dining room had been leaned against the wall, and in the open space it'd occupied were Ghost and Sophia Black. The leather coat she usually wore was gone, and she had on just a crisp white shirt and black pants. Ghost wasn't wearing his mask, and Kristina was struck by how strangely clean his own shirt and pants were for the first time since she'd met him.

Both of them had their fists raised like boxers, and as Kristina watched, Sophia threw a punch. Ghost easily batted it aside with the back of his forearm and retaliated with a punch of his own to her midriff.

Again, Sophia tried to throw a punch, feinting to her left then suddenly coming at Ghost's face with her right fist. Again, he was too quick for her, grabbing her wrist, then sudden stepping around and twisting her arm behind her back.

"I can see we've got a lot of work to do," he muttered, but smiled.

All of a sudden Sophia kicked backward with her booted foot, aiming the heel at Ghost's shin. Just as suddenly he whirled again, pinning Sophia against the wall with his leg well out of the way of her clumsy backward strike.

"But you know better than to expect an enemy to fight fair," Ghost observed.

"An opponent may be willing to fight fair, but an enemy always fights to harm," Sophia replied.

Ghost snickered, and let her go. "That sounds like someone who's always used to fighting for their life would say, alright." He flinched back just a tiny bit when Sophia responded to that remark by smiling slightly.

Sophia murmured thoughtfully as she closed the distance between herself and Ghost, "Yet, there are other worlds, and other ways. Some, much brighter than I've ever seen."

"You guys are seriously having boxing practice this early in the morning?" Kristina Rouge moaned from the doorway.

Both of them shrugged at her in synch. "Warriors have to be ready for battle at all times. Enemies surround us, and are always looking for openings to exploit," Sophia said as if it was obvious. Kristina supposed it was on most of the worlds the invaders were coming from. Tyrants like the High Lords of Possibility were supposed to be didn't really strike her as the kind of rulers who kept their subjects in line with diplomacy and good healthcare.

"I'm…sorry, guys," Kristina mumbled. "Still dealing with some culture shock, I guess?"

"Is that why you brought a knife?" Sophia asked, the small smile fading from her face.

Kristina looked down at the kitchen implement in her hand, and sighed. "I thought I heard fighting," she explained.

Ghost nudged Sophia with his elbow. "Sounds like she's got some combat instincts of her own. Should we develop those too, Miss Black?"

"Eeeeeh, I don't really do CCQ…."

"We all have a role to play in fighting for survival," Sophia said with another slight smile. "There's no shame in not being perfect, if you know what you are instead."

Kristina groaned. "I already had one mom, and she was enough."

"Good. Because if you still need your mother, you have no business being on a battlefield," Sophia said grimly.

After Kristina had managed to keep down a cup and a half of coffee and two bagels, the three rode out into the city in a roofless white car whose make neither Ghost or Sophia had any interest in. She drove them out to a grimy shipyard where the city butted up against the Nile River, and as soon as the car stopped Sophia and Ghost climbed out and made their way up to a pair of Egyptian men in blue suits and fedoras standing near a stack of crates.

"My friend here's interested in peacock feathers," Ghost informed them.

The two men exchanged a wary look. "The pharaoh's put a premium on feathers," one said.

"There's a bigger future brewing than just the pharaoh."

Ever so slightly, the men smiled. "These weren't easy to get, my friends," one of them said, tapping the lid of a small crate beside him with his foot. "You have…unusual taste."

"This is an unusual conflict," Sophia said. She walked up and lifted the lid off with a prybar, nodding in satisfaction at what she saw inside: bars of grey, silver and coppery metals, metal molds with round chambers, and vials of strangely-colored chemicals. "Yes, these should do well enough, if they are what we were promised."

One of their contacts held up a placating hand. "They are, on our honor. But we've been told to inform you, you're needed for a new assignment right away. These will be brought to a safe drop now that we know this transaction was legitimate."

"…what assignment?" Sophia asked, frowning in surprise. "I need to prepare before another excursion."

But their contacts shook their heads together. "No time," one said. "The Neuron Master went ahead of schedule. He's going to bombard Cairo with his Madness Ray today. We have to smuggle a team aboard his GyroFortress immediately, or there won't be any hope of stopping him."

Immediately a fire lit in Kristina Rouge's eyes. "Neuron Master? GyroFortress? This sounds huge!"

The other suited man nodded. "If it works here, Cairo'll tear itself apart, and the pharaoh will have to take notice. Who knows what kind of damage Doctor Mobius could do with a weapon like that?"

Sophia rubbed her chin. "It's a bit strange, to be hearing this from a pair of informants, and not the director."

"He couldn't be here," she was informed. "He's meeting with somebody calls himself the Shroud, about potentially sharing information."

"That's a good sign," Ghost nodded. "So how do we get to this GyroFortress?"

Kristina squealed in excitement.

Within fifteen minutes a stack of crates were wheeled onto the back of a truck. Within an hour that load and others were emptied into a warehouse at a small, dingy airport near the outskirts of the large, dingy city of Cairo. Crates were loaded into the hold of a four-engine cargo plane for most of another hour. Then, finally, the loading door closed. Its props spun. And the great transport vehicle lifted away from the golden sands of the Nile Empire.

Far, far away from the bustling city flew the plane, toward a rare sight indeed in the heart of sunbaked Egypt: a thick black storm cloud. Plunging in deeper, soon the plane approached an even stranger sight. Hanging in the middle of the cloud, venting dark fog through panels on its underside, was a massive metal fortress. A flickering plasma surrounded by metal scaffolding, resting on a wide horizontal metal ring, inside of a larger vertical metal ring, inside of a skewed metal ring. A giant gyroscope. The GyroFortress of the insidious Neuron Master himself.

Its widest ring swung by like a wall of death only scant seconds before the cargo plane cruised into a hangar by one of the fog generators that opened up as it drew close, then slammed securely shut again once it was aboard.

Men in grey coveralls and black masks carted the stacks of wooden crates out from the plane's cargo space. After the cargo plane was unloaded, another door opened at the other end of the hangar and it cruised out into the darkness of the sky that surrounded the flying fortress.

Getting out prybars, the crew started opening up the containers and unloaded scores of mechanical components: gears, glass tubes and spheres, and coils and coils of rainbow-colored wire.

One crewman pried open a crate, and was surprised to see nothing but darkness inside. He leaned over to peer in to get a closer look.

Then convulsed as a stun gun was shoved into his chest and tore loose with its powerful voltage. He was thrown against the wall of the cargo bay and slid down, still twitching.

Not far away another crewman was opening a crate and was surprised to find nothing inside. Almost as surprised as he was when an invisible fist crunched into his face and knocked him flat on his back. One of his fellow crewmen came running over to see what was going on before he was knocked out by an invisible blow too.

A last crewman had been in the process of lifting off the lid of another crate, but stopped in the middle when he saw his companions being knocked around. He lifted his tool as an improvised weapon and charged toward the woman in the colorful vest and the masked man who'd just appeared out of thin air. As soon as he turned his back the lid of the crate flew off, a woman in a leather coat rising up and pouncing on him. Clenching her hands together, she delivered a rabbit punch to the base of his neck that left him out cold on the floor.

"Looks like that's all of them," Ghost whispered to the others.

"Why are you whispering?" Kristina whispered back.

"Because we're uninvited guests, child," Sophia quietly rebuked her.

"Yeah, but we're in a huge airplane hangar! Who's gonna hear us if we talk normal?" Kristina glared back.

Ghost reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. "Sophia's got a point," he whispered. "Look, we're pretty good, but even we're not strong enough to fight every single minion on this place. We need to destroy the ray machine and get back off of here before they've got a chance to stop us, okay?"

Kristina nodded. "Yeah."

The service door to the hangar leading into the hallway opened, but no-one came through, then closed again. A few seconds later a couple of hollow knocks on the door, and it opened again, Sophia Black and Kristina Rouge slipping quietly into the hallway. A procession of crewmen were wheeling the crates containing the supplies they'd been smuggled in with through a maze of corridors, some breaking off to take lifts up or down into the bowels of the GyroFortress. No doubt to tend to some apparatus that was vital to the master of the fortress's grand plan.

It was the only guide the infiltrators had, and inevitably, it ran into an obstacle. Four troops, also in grey coveralls but holding heavy machine guns, stood at a security checkpoint near the end of a hallway just before another lift. A thin stripe of daylight shone down from above its open portal.

Which Kristina Rouge was a hair's breadth too late in noticing while slipping back out of sight. A guard lowered his weapon and aimed it down the hall.

"Step forward! Whoever you are, step forward and be seen if you have nothing to hide!" he commanded. The other guards aimed their weapons too, and realizing a fight might be about to break out, the crewmen hurried by them and into the lift.

For a few seconds, nothing happened. One of the guards standing in front took a step forward and cocked his weapon menacingly. "Come out!" he repeated. "Or we'll find you!"

Suddenly a reply came. Two echoing gunshots and two small bursts of flame from the middle of the air. Two guards fell, and the crewmen behind them jabbed even more furiously at the call button for the lift as bullets ricocheted off the wall behind them.

Fast as thought, Sophia Black and Kristina Rouge stepped into the hall as Ghost reappeared, firing around him at the last guards still on their feet. The guards' weapons barked fire in return but it was in the same instant the intruder's own bullets hit home and brought them down. Bullets from the guards' guns tore into the ceiling, knocking out a few hanging lights. With the only obstruction out of the way, Kristina Rouge started running down the hall to stop the crewmen from escaping in the lift, but they were already rising up the shaft before she was halfway to them. By the time she'd gotten to the shaft at the end the lift was out of sight.

"Well, that takes the surprise out of our surprise party," Kristina muttered. She looked back at the others. "What do we do when we get up there?"

"We take stock of the situation immediately and attack before they have a chance to organize," Sophia immediately answered her.

"Prioritize anything that looks like a madness ray," Ghost added. Sophia gave him a strange look, but Kristina was grinning, and nodded.

At the top of the shaft, on the deck of the GyroFortress, a hastily-assembled group of security guards had managed to surround half of the opening the lift came out from. Just as they were expecting, the cage sank down the shaft again. The mechanisms whirred for a few seconds, then stopped. Then, the whirr began again and the cage clattered on its way back up.

Of course the intruders were still coming. They hadn't taken such risks to run away at the first smell of trouble.

Typical Stormers.

None of them were expecting the small metal cylinder that popped out of the shaft and exploded, flooding the deck with blinding light. The flashbang was something the technology level of the Nile Empire was a bit unfamiliar with yet.

But not Core Earth. Kristina Rouge came springing into view from the top of the lift cage, wearing black goggles and spraying bullets. Four guards cried out and fell in the first few seconds.

"It's clear! Hurry up before the bad guys' buddies can get up here!" she yelled over her shoulder.

Sophia came up first, automatically stepping in a circle to survey her surroundings for threats. Automatically, she raised her rifle toward the top of a metal tower in the middle of the deck.

"What is it?" Kristina asked.

"Our enemy. This 'Neuron Master' person, I should imagine," Sophia whispered back.

Following her gaze, Kristina saw a pale-skinned man through a window at the top of the tower. He had on a white coat, goggles that shone with the same purple light in the plasma globe atop the helmet he wore. He was sneering down at them, rubbing his gloved hands together like a cliched old-time mad scientist.

"And what do we have here?" a snide voice called through a loudspeaker. "A few lost Stormers? One castoff from the Gaunt Man's sad little world, if I'm not mistaken. Well, my darlings, in a few minutes, you'll have a chance to see real terror when the vacuum tubes finish warming up and I unleash my mighty Madness Ray on Cairo below!"

Kristina knitted her brow. "Do all the bad guys here really explain everything before they do it?" she murmured.

"Pretty much," Ghost said as he appeared beside her. She jumped back in surprise, but seemed to be smiling as she did. The masked hero pointed up at something hanging from the top of the inner ring of the giant gyroscope on which they stood: another plasma ball, like the one on Neuron Master's head, but bigger, and connected to a wide parabolic dish. "That must be the ray."

"We can't possibly do any damage from down here," Kristina Rouge pointed out.

"Obviously," Sophia muttered."

"Right," Ghost agreed. "So we need to get to where the weapon's being controlled and stop it from there, right?"

Kristina nodded, smiling knowingly. "I'll go left." She looked at Sophia. "You go right." She looked at Ghost. "What about you?"

Ghost shrugged.

Then disappeared.

With barely a nod to each other, the ladies took off running toward the tower where the Neuron Master was sneering down at them. Hatches were flung open in the deck, and a few guards climbed out and immediately opened fire as soon as they realized they had targets. Machine gun bullets thudded into the leather of Sophia's long coat, leaving painful impacts on her legs and back. She grunted with each one, knowing she'd have a series of livid bruises the next day, but kept on running.

While she ran the other direction, Kristina Rouge wasn't as lucky. A bullet grazed her left thigh, then another the back of her right shin. She stumbled. But survival instinct took over, whipped another flashbang from her belt and threw it across the deck. Another blinding flash, and the guards stopped shooting for a few seconds. It didn't last long, and Kristina Rouge didn't get very far with the new wounds she'd just earned.

What she did manage to do was look like an easy target to the Neuron Master as she limped along. "The pharaoh will have to notice my brilliance after he sees the power of my weapon," the villain chuckled. "But personally slaying a meddlesome Stormer could only help!" He started working a complex array of levers and switches on the console inside his control room. Above, the ray swiveled around to point over at Kristina Rouge, the antenna inside its dish starting to glow as it warmed up to fire. Neuron Master grinned fiendishly as his finger lowered upon the fire button.

Suddenly he jerked his hand back as a flying sliver of glass slashed across his skin, and more glass debris peppered the small control room. Outside the window was a masked man in sand-stained clothes, who'd just smashed the glass open with the butt of his pistol. Neuron Master snarled in rage and stabbed for the fire button of his ray again. He pulled back his hand with all possible speed when he heard the uncomfortably familiar bark of a gun warning him not to try.

"Your fun's over, Neuron Master!" the masked man shouted, pointing the gun in his hand between the villain's eyes.

"…and just who are you supposed to be?" grunted the archvillain while he clutched his wounded hand. "Another pale imitation of the Guardian?"

The masked man swung inside, keeping his gun trained on Neuron Master in the narrow confines of the control room. "The Guardian inspired us all, but even he can't be everywhere."

Neuron Master sighed over the chatter of gunfire from Sophia and Kristina's running battle with his guards down on the deck. "Pity," he said. "If it had actually been the Guardian, I might've worried." He turned to look Ghost in the eyes and fired a glowing ray from the bulb atop his helmet.

It was supposed to turn Ghost into a mindless slave. So the Neuron Master could savor the savage irony of making one of the arrogant Stormers kill his own allies. But maybe Ghost had seen the attack coming. Maybe Neuron Master's lack of emphasis on his physical attributes was starting to slow him down. Because at the same time Ghost let out a scream of pain when the blast hit him in the forehead, he spun and emptied half the clip of his pistol into the control panel.

Sparks flew. From above, a hideous grating sound came. In horror, already knowing what he'd see, the Neuron Master ran to window facing the other side of his control tower. Indeed, the Madness Ray was fountaining sparks from all its joints, and even as its fiendish creator watched, the plasma globe at the center broke loose from one of its struts and dangled from the other. A horrible metallic creaking that made the villain's bones itch sounded for a few seconds.

His prized Madness Ray broke loose, and fell.

The nefarious Neuron Master saw his guards panicking and fleeing in all directions as the superweapon they were going to use to bring Cairo to its knees smashed a hole in the deck. He noticed as flames jumped from the hole, and sparks the size of a man and the color of lotus blossoms pelted up, melting holes in the top arc of his mighty GyroFortress. He saw the pair of miserable Stormers being the only ones who weren't running in terror, instead looking up at the control tower. He saw a smile of quiet triumph on Sophia Black's face.

In a bit of irony, the only thing the great Neuron Master didn't see was Ghost pulling the trigger behind him.

Only a minute later, Sophia and Kristina had climbed to the top of the control tower and stood in the same room as Ghost. "This whole place is falling apart!" Kristina yelled, stumbling and having to brace herself against the wall, with the uneven footing she had with one boot on top of Neuron Master's head. "We have to get out of here!"

Before the others had a chance to answer, the GyroFortress suddenly jerked to one side and threw all three of them in a pile against the wall.

Next thing they knew, the control tower had snapped off from its fastenings and was falling through the sky.

Sophia winced, her face pressed against the glass of the only surviving window. And already a worrying web of tiny cracks was starting to form because of the weight of the others on top of her.

"Sir!" she snapped. "Watch where you put your hand!"

Ghost held up both of his leather-clad hands. "I didn't have these anywhere near you, Sophia!" he protested. Kristina Rouge held up her own, and a look of icy disgust solidified on Sophia's face as she realized the implications of an unwanted touch.

She had little time to dwell on it anyway; the rooftops of Cairo were much closer than Sophia would've thought from fighting the Neuron Master in the clouds. Pieces of his fortress were falling all over the city. As she watched, one flaming pierce of the GyroFortress's arcing rings impaled and sank a pair of boats in the Nile that were parked beside each other. A building disappeared in a cloud of fire as some burning piece of machinery Sophia never could've named fell on top of it.

"Did you guys hear that?" Kristina asked anxiously. They had; creaking and snapping coming from below, no doubt as the tower littered Cairo with its own pieces. A great tearing came from above, splitting the entire top room they were in apart.

And the three heroes fell into Cairo, torn apart from each other by the rushing air.

"…although he couldn't be here today to witness its dedication, Overgovernor Wu Han expresses his regrets that he was unable to be present to see the monument erected in his honor. His duty to Pharaoh Mobius always comes first, he says. As it does for all citizens of the Nile Empire."

The turbaned official turned away from the crowd, seemingly oblivious to the forced cheers they gave off under the watchful eyes of gun-toting shocktroopers. He tugged on the beige sheet obscuring the object in the center of the park, and it fell away, revealing a statue of Wu Han, carved from luxurious red stone. Its depiction of the Oriental master criminal had him holding out his hands in welcome and giving a wider smile than anyone who'd ever seen him could actually recall.

"Though the pharaoh's reign on this world has been a short one, let us be assured that he and his loyal lieutenants are here, watching over us all, day and…night?" he asked in surprise as darkness suddenly seemed to fall over the park.

Around him, the spectators' cheers had turned to screams and they'd already run to the edges of the park. The retinue of armed shocktroopers was right behind them. Some huge shadowy shape was filling the sky.

It came down like a missile, crushing the statue of Wu Han into a pile of luxurious red dust. Now the park would be known as the final resting place of a fire-blackened hunk of metal scrap that had once been part of the mighty flying fortress of the Neuron Master. From inside, groaning and clutching their heads, crawled Sophia Black and the Ghost. From around the edges of the park, the spectators who'd come to see the dedication crept closer.

Fastest to react was a newshawk who finally saw something newsworthy. He brought up his camera and caught the scene of destruction with a blast from its flashbulb, making sure to centrally frame the two responsible.

Others were quickly following suit, snapping up pictures or getting the microphones off their bulky portable recorders. Sophia shook her head a few times, saw what was going on with alarm, and grabbed Ghost by the arm.

"Ghost, pull yourself together, man!" she hissed. Ghost blinked a few times, then nodded. Around them the shocktroopers who'd been on hand to guard the dedication were closing in, and looking extremely displeased to see a masked Mystery Man and another obvious outsider make a mockery of what'd been meant as a display of the Empire's power.

Ghost pulled something out of a pouch in his weapons belt and lobbed it ahead of him. The shocktroopers it came down toward gasped and jumped back as it burst.

Releasing a cloud of smoke that covered the little park in seconds.

When it cleared again, Sophia and Ghost had both disappeared. Not far behind were the reporters, grinning like demons as they ran off to deliver this unexpected development to their wire services.

A click.

A flip.

The briefcase was open, full of neatly-stacked bills. Wu Han reached out, dragging his claw-like fingernails across the expensive mock leather of the briefcase before he gripped the corners and pulled it across his desk.

He looked up at the gray-suited emissary from the Hajjar mob. The emissary hadn't moved, despite having delivered that month's cut of the take that was due to the Overgovernor. With his most superior sneer, Wu Han asked, "Something on your mind, grunt?"

"Honestly, sir, yes," the emissary replied. "My employer was curious about something, and had me promise I'd ask after I handed over this month's cut of the take to you."

Wu Han turned his expression into a practiced scowl to make it obvious the lowlife in front of him was wasting his time and could expect great reprisal if they didn't correct themselves quickly. It always seemed to work on his own minions, but the emissary stood there stoically, waiting for the reply. "And what is he curious about?"

"He wanted to know why you insist on always taking the deliveries personally, instead of having us just hand it off to one of your people," explained the emissary. "Like everyone else we do business with's happy to do."

Rising up and leaning into the light lancing in from his glass atrium ceiling, Wu Han drummed his fingernails against the cold stone on the edges of his desk. "It's so you never forget who's in charge around here. I was placed in charge of this region because the pharaoh—"

Whatever answer he'd been about to give was drowned out by the glass ceiling shattered as something crashed through it from above. Wu Han grabbed the case with his payoff and stepped back as a corpse slammed into his desk, sending cracks racing all across the expensive stone, bounced once, and then fell still, arms and legs twisted at angles that were painful just to look at.

On the body's head were a pair of smashed goggles and a helmet with a cracked glass globe atop it.

It had taken an awfully long time to get back to the Delphi Council safehouse, making sure they weren't being followed after entrances that attention-grabbing. Still, the day was finally over for the trio of mismatched heroes.

The safehouse had been strangely empty when Sophia and Ghost had gotten back, with no sign of Kenneth Nakatomi anywhere. Ghost hadn't paid it any mind, pouring himself a bucket of hot water, taking off his shoes and soaking his aching feet while he fanned himself in a chair in the living room.

Now that they were in relative safety, however, Sophia let her decorum slip. "That was the most harrowing experience of my life!" she exclaimed. "I can't believe we ever survived such a hellacious fall!"

Kristina Rouge shrugged. "I mean, I guess that was kind of intense." Ghost shrugged.

Sophia sputtered in disbelief. "Ghost! Don't tell me you agree with this child!"

"Child?!"

He looked back at them, a distant look in his eyes as if coming out of a daze. "…hmm? Oh, the fall? I guess it was pretty intense, yeah."

"Intense?! We fell out of a fortress in the sky, and I can't begin to imagine how fast we must've been going when we hit the ground!" Sophia stared at him in utter disbelief.

"I can imagine how fast it was," Kristina mumbled.

Sophia glared over her shoulder, but then back at Ghost. "How can you be so casual about something like that! It's absolutely unbelievable!"

He sighed and put down the fan in his hand. "That's probably true where you're from, too. I don't know, though…That time I got shot and fell off the roof of the Van der Gelte mansion, I couldn't believe I survived that, yeah. But after I had to jump off that scientist's machine, and later when I was fighting the Claw and we fell down the shaft together…I guess I got used to long falls." He reached up and stroked a hand through his mussy hair, and sighed. "And, now the hat's gone."

Kristina Rouge smiled. "You look better without it. With your hair all…wild. Makes you look more daring."

Ghost looked up at her, eyes slightly wide in surprise. He ran his fingers across his head again, as if that might give him deeper insight into her comment.

Strolling over, Sophia gave him an inspecting look too. "For once, the child might have a point," she observed.

"…for once?" Kristina said under her breath.

Not seeming to notice, Sophia went on, "There is a certain ruggedness to how it looks, I'll admit," she said, a soft smile creeping into her lips. "Yes, I'll say it. You ought to keep that as part of your style, Ghost."

Again Ghost looked up, at both of them this time, again a look of surprise in his eyes. "I've never had a woman like that comment on my looks before," he said, practically to himself.

"And what kind of woman do you mean?" Sophia asked, canting her head curiously.

Ghost looked at her, then Kristina, then looked between them. After a minute of silence, still looking away from them, he said, "Strong women."

After that, Ghost hadn't said a thing. A while later he took some tentative steps on his sore feet, went upstairs and slept until evening. Then he came back down, wearing his mask and his weapon belt, before slipping out into the night.

Kristina Rouge was already asleep by the time Ghost came down to go out looking for crime to fight. To her annoyance, Sophia was finding her eyes growing heavy, and the rays of the setting sun were still visible through the safehouse windows.

It made absolutely no sense. She used to be able to stay up two days and nights at a time before she needed to sleep. Three if she really pushed herself. Was this sun-drenched land with its melodramatic forms of evil making her go soft?

Or was the more frightening possibility that this land and its human villains was the one that was too much for her? The slayer from a world of darkness and unassailable evil.

How could Ghost go with so little sleep, while she was needing more, she dazedly thought as she slipped into a chair. Was this new reality and its rules beginning to affect her? Was she losing her edge? Would she lose touch with the reality she'd called her own all her life, and change over to the reality of this Nile Empire? She'd heard of such things happening, mostly to the people of Core Earth who'd been nearby when one of the invading realities first appeared…

It was the last thing Sophia thought before sleep claimed her.

Days of silence followed. No word from Kenneth Nakatomi. Part of Sophia felt familiar pangs, of the kind whenever a fellow slayer or soldier never returned from their appointed duty. It was a way of life on her home of Gaea, but one never truly learned to shut out all such feelings of lost companionship. Doing such a terrible thing as to forget a fallen ally was only a lure to the darkness that fed the horrors of her world…

But late one morning not long after, someone knocked on the back door. Three long knocks in a row, then two short. A signal they'd been taught meant a Delphi Council agent making contact. All the same, Sophia slid a pistol into her back pocket before she went to answer the door.

Apparently, Kristina Rouge heard it too, and slipped over to the side of the door, a silenced gun in her own hand while Sophia undid the locks and opened the door.

Standing outside was a small, native woman with close-cropped hair. Her expression was neutral, but it changed to a small reassured smile when she saw Sophia. Even when her eyes flicked down to the butt of the revolver sticking out of Sophia's back pocket.

"You are…?" Sophia prompted.

"Pleasure to meet you, my name's Salma Fayoud. May I come in?" the woman asked. "We shouldn't be taking unnecessary risks."

"No, we shouldn't," Sophia agreed, and stepped back to give the woman room to enter. She did, but as Sophia was closing the door she felt it bump into something she couldn't see. For a horrified second she thought they'd let themselves be infiltrated, then calmed down as she realized yes, they had.

The instant Sophia had closed the door again, Ghost appeared, covering her with his pistol. "Hello, miss," he said. "Maybe you'd like to explain why you need to meet with us."

She turned around to face them, not seeming bothered at all by two other people carrying guns, and obviously willing to use them if provoked. "Good morning, my name's Salma Fayoud. I'm here to deliver some information the Delphi Council thinks would be of great interest to you."

"Where's Nakatomi?" Sophia asked cautiously. "He's the one who always gives us our orders."

"The Deputy Director's involved in negotiations with some of the local heroes about joining forces," Salma replied evenly. "It seems some are willing to consider alliances all of a sudden, after they've heard stories about how Storm Knights from different worlds got one over on the pharaoh and slipped right through his fingers."

"Over that?"

"…well, and a few other things," Salma smiled knowingly. "Believe there was some business about a giant aircraft exploding over Cairo. Some archvillain's plan was stopped in the nick of time. Or so I heard."

Cautiously still, Sophia asked, "Is that the Empire's official version of the events?"

Hearing that, Salma Fayoud broke out into laughter. "Oh, of course not! Their version of the story is insurgents ran away in fear from the pharaoh! And dangerous insurgents stopped another dangerous insurgent from menacing Cairo with his airborne dreadnought. The Delphi Council knows better, of course, and one of our jobs is delivering that truth to the people."

Cautiously, still, Sophia stated, "You didn't come here just to tell us something so simple."

"Not quite," Salma agreed. "I'm actually here to invite you all the premiere of new film, 'The Cypriot'. Quite a clever espionage story, it's supposed to be. Starring Amal Faisal."

"He sounds kind of hot," Kristina Rouge said, with a faint smirk.

"Yes, indeed," Salma smiled back. "Now, if you'll follow me, we don't want to miss the showing."

Exchanging a cautious glance, Ghost shrugged at Sophia, who gave a simple nod in reply. They headed for the front door, but as they did, Kristina Rouge held back and walked along with Salma Fayoud.

"What was that thing you called us?" she asked.

Salma Fayoud smiled again. "Storm Knights. It was the idea of one our contacts in Europe, I understand. She wanted agents to have a name that made it clear they're heroes fighting the reality storms spreading over the planet…"

The theater Salma Fayoud's driver dropped them off was a ritzier place than the rundown corner establishment they'd been going to see the latest newsreels. Instead of finding seats on the main floor, she led the three to a private box on the second floor. Two sets of two seats, separated by a small aisle. Fayoud took a seat by the wall, and Ghost was mildly surprised to find himself being steered toward the other pair of seats by Sophia. Kristina Rouge gave her teammate a strange look, and took the other empty seat next to Salma Fayoud.

Soon the lights dimmed and the screen lit up. As usual, a chapter of a serial appeared on the screen before the film they'd been invited to see. It read "The Mighty Fists of Mobius, Chapter Six." Ghost sat up in his seat when he read the chapter's title: "The Airborne Fortress".

Appearing on the screen was the Neuron Master's Gyrofortress, an enormous hovering gyroscope. A cargo plane landed in a hangar aboard it, crates were unloaded.

A block of text asked, "The fortress of the rebel villain, Neuron Master, approaches Cairo with a fully functioning madness ray. Who dares oppose such villainy? Who can save the loyal subjects of the Nile Empire?"

Sophia appeared on screen, knocking down a crewman and pouncing on him. Text whirled in front of her as she fought. "Featuring…the Monster Slayer!" it read. Next Ghost becoming visible as he jumped into the fray, and again text formed, this time, "The Vanishing Vigilante!" Finally, Kristina Rouge sending the crewman flying with a jab from her stun gun. "And the Gun Bunny!"

"Why does everybody keep calling me that?" Kristina Rouge muttered.

"It makes you sound like a more colorful character," Salma answered, but her smirk went unnoticed in the darkness of the theater.

Onscreen, the trio ran down a hall and fought a group of guards, almost but not exactly mimicking their real battle from the a few days before. There were slight differences with the performers too, like the streak in "Sophia's" hair being a bit too bright, too artificial. "Kristina Rouge" wore long sleeves and pants, and had jeweled clips in her hair instead of the plastic images of hearts and unicorns the real one did. The actor playing Ghost having a scar down one cheek, and his pistols being scuffed and dented. To make him seem more "rugged," Ghost supposed.

"What's going on?" Sophia hissed at them from across the aisle.

Salma Fayoud looked back at her across Ghost. "Someone made a film of your invasion of Neuron Master's fortress," she explained, as the three Storm Knights raced down a corridor and fought their way past a group of guards. "We were hoping you'd help us find out who, and why."