Torg Eternity – Dead Legion
Crime City
Nile Empire – Cairo
A tense night had passed underneath the Temple of Osiris, where the four Storm Knights had been hiding out after their old safe house had been raided by the empire's forces. Still, even though she could hardly sleep, Kristina awoke to find Wren seeming to meditate silently with eyes closed on the cot they'd been given. Ghost and Sophia Black were nowhere to be seen.
Adan, the priest who'd guided them to safety the night before, stuck his head into the basement room. "Have you rested well, my friends?" he asked.
"That cot's kind of stiff, but yeah," Kristina replied.
"It's not the royal suite at Ra's Plaza, I'm afraid, but here you will at least be safe."
"Mmmm," Kristina mumbled back. "You know where Ghost and Sophia went?"
Adan tapped his short-bearded chin. "Ah, Miss Black said she planned to post a letter, as I recall. She said something about qualifying for a medal of distinction, after slaying a pair of giant beasts recently. As for the Ghost, he mentioned that with no emergencies requiring his attention, he planned to visit a gymnasium."
Kristina knitted her brows in confusion. "A gym? Why would he care about going to a gym—" Suddenly she stopped and grinned. "Right. Obviously."
She left a very puzzled Adan scratching his bald head in confusion when she went upstairs to stretch her legs.
Slowly, the day passed. Kristina wished she could go out, but with Ghost and Sophia already out taking care of other things, and not quite sure about Wren yet, she felt she needed to stay where she was in case the Delphi Council managed to locate them. That business Adan had mentioned about the head of his temple being sent a vision to find their group worried her. With all the mystical crap they'd had to deal with on their last couple missions, Kristina felt on edge hearing about visions and prophecies. Part of her was worried something really big was about to happen.
She'd reassembled and cleaned her gun for the second time and was about to wake up Wren to have someone, anyone, to talk to, when Sophia came back to the temple. Trailed by a man in a cream suit. "Afternoon, ladies. Looks like you've made some new friends," said Deputy Director Nakatomi, once the four of them were safely sealed into a meeting chamber near the back of the temple.
"Watch out," Kristina warned with a soft sigh. "They said something about the reason they helped us is because of a prophecy or something."
"Hey, you go ahead and be as legendary as you can!" Nakatomi laughed. "We need the people to know powerful folks like you are looking out for them."
"Perhaps you'd better give us this briefing," Sophia prodded him. "The one you made so sound so urgent out in the street."
He looked over at Sophia in mock disapproval. "That's something you'll want to work on, Miss Black. Sticking to business has its place, but so do strong public relations when you're trying to win a war."
"Be that as it may, if you have information for us, sir," Wren also gently prodded him, "having it as quickly as possible would aid our quest."
Nakatomi sighed, but said, "Don't suppose I can argue with that. I need you guys to find an informer named Shafira Azar. She reports for an underground newspaper, the Cairo Clarion. It runs a lot of stuff denouncing the bigtime villains, gangsters, and the empire in general, so it's somebody the Delphi Council wants to help out. She has some kind of hot tip but she won't tell us any way except in person…wants to be sure she's telling it to people who can act on it."
Kristina nodded. "So you came to the best team you know in your territory," she finished, without a lot of energy.
He arched an eyebrow warily. "You seem to have lost that verve I admired so much before, Miss Rouge."
"Mmm," she grumbled. "Look Nakatomi, I'd never seen one in person, but I knew what dinosaurs were before all this got started. Finding out wizards and gods and prophecies and shit like that's real…maybe it's got me a little shook."
"There are darker forces at work in the worlds than magicians and prophecies," Sophia said gravely.
"And maybe some of us are still dealing with that," Kristina grumbled back, but turned to face Nakatomi before Sophia had a chance to reply. "Where do we find this lady?"
Old Cairo was rundown and seedy even for the city of villains. Still, Ghost didn't have any trouble leading them through the tenements until they found the electric sign reading "MI K'S", with the C burnt out. They went down the stairs to the basement club, jazz music already wafting through the heavy door. Casting a suspicious eye on them, the bouncer still did nothing to stop the group as Ghost opened the door and waved the rest of his team inside.
Inside, Mick's was a typical smoke-filled bar, full of pin-suited lowlife gangsters and their molls filling it with the runoff from their cigarettes as they drank, laughed and argued. Over in one corner was a small jazz band. Behind the battered wooden bar, pouring a few inches of rotgut to one of the broad-shouldered toughs, was a clean-shaven American with red hair. Ghost made his way over to the bar and as soon as the mob goon had wandered away with his drink, dropped a gold coin on the scratched wooden surface.
The bartender picked it up. "This coin has no value in the world of the disinherited," he declared.
"The value of things is not always engraved on their surface, Mick."
Mick smirked slightly. "You're not what I was expecting."
"It would've helped if I was wearing the mask, I know," Ghost replied. "Is Shafira Azar here tonight?"
"Keep it down, stupid," Mick hissed. "You want to give her away to this crowd?" He got a dirty glass out from under the bar, poured some nondescript whiskey into it, and pushed it toward Ghost. Obligingly, Ghost drank it, fighting hard not to cough from the roughness of the cheap swill. Mick smirked again, and said, quietly, "She's sitting at that table by the wall. The one with the red candle. Go over by yourself, and not too fast or she might think you're one of them."
Ghost didn't ask who they were. He walked over to the table, sipping from his glass to look inconspicuous, to where a slim local woman with dark hair and eyeglasses was sitting. She looked up at him as he sat down, but said nothing.
Looked like it was up to him to break the ice. "I understand you might have something for me."
"Did you come alone?"
He shook his head, and swept his arm across the barroom as if making some kind of wild claim so he wouldn't seem suspicious. Indicating Sophia Black, Kristina Rouge and Wren of Greymarsh as they milled around the room waiting for him to report. Shafira inspected the Storm Knights, then said, "You don't look like anybody in their little group."
He took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, and Sharifa gave him a light. "Do you suppose you'd tell me who they are?" he asked.
"I've been piecing together leads on a group of villains out there now. They call themselves the Retribution League, and they've joined forces because they believe their loyalty to the empire's been ignored."
"Mmm," Ghost mumbled. The Nile Empire had its share of powerful villains, but to see them band together was rare; it usually took something like being enlisted by the pharaoh himself. Otherwise, the clashing egos of a pair or trio of villains inevitably led to betrayal and a short-lived alliance. Hence why the Mystery Men were content to resort to their own small groups and familiar tactics.
Shafira went on, "They're up to something to seize power for themselves, and it has something to do with a set of jars that buried with a great architect who never existed."
"One of those ones from some other world's Egypt that ended up here by accident when the empire appeared, right?" Ghost asked, and she nodded. "Any idea what's so special about these jars?"
She gave her head a short, severe shake in response. "No, but the last one's been spotted used as a decoration at the Anubis Club. The Hooded Cobra stole the last jar besides that from a museum in Italy, but was sighted getting off a plane in Cairo only a little while ago. If he's back so quickly, he may not have found what he was after in Italy. He's probably going to go after the jar here in Cairo next."
"We'll stop him," said Ghost.
"You Mystery Men certainly don't lack for confidence," Sharifa said, with a smirk.
"We're not the Mystery Men," Ghost answered her.
"What are you, then?"
He stood up and held out his hand, which she took. "Running out of time," he replied, "based on what you're telling me." Ghost led the way out of the dive then, weaving around tables but his eyes never leaving the door.
There was only one more table to go when one of the lowlifes suddenly lurched out of his seat and grinned a drunken grin right past Ghost. "Hey, sweetheart! Why you spending your night with a beanpole like that?!" he exclaimed in the uneven timbre of a man not in control of himself thanks to the whiskey in his system. "Why doncha come with me? I'll show you some real exciting places!"
Ghost had balled a fist, but never got the chance to use it. "I'll show you an exciting place," Sharifa said with a coy grin, then hooked her leg behind the gangster's and pulled. He lost his already uncertain balance and fell face-first onto his table, knocking it over and smashing empty glasses on the floor.
Gales of laughter erupted from all over the room, no doubt from members of a rival gang. As the two of them headed for the door, followed by the other Storm Knights, Ghost was sure he even saw one man at a corner table salute them!
Kristina slipped past them on the way up the stairs, and was behind the wheel of the black roadster they'd been lent by the Delphi Council by the time the rest got to street level. Still a little untrusting of this kind of technology, Sophia and Wren got in the back and buckled their seatbelts. For his part, Ghost held the door for Sharifa and then got in beside her. "Remember how to get to the Anubis Club?" Ghost asked across to Kristina.
"You gonna let another weird movie exec hit on me when we get there?" Kristina muttered before she started the engine and drove away, not waiting for Ghost to respond.
It wasn't long before they skidded dramatically to a stop across the street from the Anubis Club, with the same clean white walls and grim visage of the god of death overseeing the front doors it'd had on the night the Storm Knights had been there to trick Janus Challenge. Even the bouncers with their mirrored sunglasses and spotless white suits flanking the doors were the same.
Kristina Rouge eyed the last feature in particular. "You really think they're gonna let us in? Last time we had to be all dressed up and they wouldn't let us bring in any weapons."
"I'll go and ask," Sharifa volunteered. Ghost got out of her way and waited along with the rest of the Storm Knights in the car. After getting to the top of the impressive staircase, Sharifa said something to the bouncers. Neither of them moved. Shafira spoke up again, but still no response. She nudged one of them with her hand, and he fell right over.
When the second bouncer fell over, totally unconscious, at Shafira's touch, the Storm Knights were already up the stairs and in front of the doors. "Are they dead?" asked Sophia, but already Wren and Kristina were bending down to look for a pulse.
"No, just knocked out, I guess," Kristina said. "What does this mean?"
Ghost fixed his mask in place at the same time he answered. "That we just barely got here in time!" He shoved the doors open before his gloved hands sank to the guns on his weapons belt.
Kristina was expecting everyone to stop and look up when the doors swung all the way open with a crash, but the only sound they made was a muffled WHUMP that could barely be heard over the orchestra that was suddenly blaring through the doorway the group entered. The only couples on the dance floor who paid them any attention at all were the ones who happened to be facing the door already. The Storm Knights came in quickly and started looking around, with the doors anticlimactically closing silently behind them.
Nothing seemed out of place, any more so than their last visit to the club, at least. The tables were full of well-dressed Cairo citizens, beautiful dark-haired women in leotards and tights weaving between the tables selling cigarettes. Across the dance floor, the song the band was playing was winding down, and some of the couples were already heading back to their seats.
A gorgeous Egyptian woman in a black dress and elbow gloves walked from behind curtains next to the bandstand. The master of ceremonies was standing under the spotlight, and announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, for your enjoyment, we present, Cleopatra!" he said and extended his hands to indicate the beauty in the black dress. She stepped up to a microphone and started a slow soulful croon of "Baby, Be My Pharaoh Tonight."
At almost the exact same time another beauty stepped into view, through a heavy door labeled MANAGER. She had coppery red hair that hung past her shoulders, and wore a wide-brimmed red had and a slink dress and elbow gloves of the same color. The dress showed a golden design of a cobra wrapping itself around an hourglass. An hourglass, the shape of the monocle she wore in her right eye.
Next to her was a fat Egyptian man, no doubt the club's manager, wearing a white suit, but his face and hands were covered in perspiration. Those glistening hands were cupped around a small clay jar with a face wearing a traditional headdress worked into the lid.
Suddenly Ghost disappeared. Before the other Storm Knights could make a move not to be seen, it seemed they had been.
The singer suddenly stopped, and a gurgle of surprise was carried over the microphone. A man had the barrel of a strange pistol pressed against Cleopatra's throat, but he was quite a sight himself. He wore a white loincloth, striped headdress and sandals like one of the Nile Empire's soldiers, but the headdress was shaped to resemble a cobra's hood, and the face of a cobra hid the face of the man wearing it.
Where he stood unseen, Ghost stopped. He recognized the strange villain: the Hooded Cobra, who'd been disgraced and trying to take over some of Cairo's mobs even before…
…before Angel died.
With his free hand Hooded Cobra grabbed the singer's microphone. "Let's not have any heroes tonight, my friends, and we all might just survive to enjoy tomorrow night," he warned.
In a way, his words had their desired effect. No-one in the crowds of clubgoer tried to be a hero. Where the first scream came from, it was impossible to tell, but within seconds the Anubis Club was engulfed in chaos. Guests stood up and fled. Band members abandoned their instruments in their hurry to be elsewhere. Suddenly the front doors flew up and armed shocktroopers charged into the room.
And even in the middle of all that, the villains didn't fail to notice those representing powerful resistance. The woman in red spotted the three Storm Knights, scowled, and seized the jar from the manager's hands.
Kristina Rouge acted first, dashing across the open floor between the front doors and the office, while Sophia drew a revolver and Wren started waving their hands through the air. Fleeing patrons ran past Kristina as they tried to get to the door, but she'd been in a few races and learned a couple things about getting out of the way of something moving at high speed. She dodged and spun out of the way of the panicked crowd members, but the woman in red saw her coming, and lobbed the clay jar.
Hooded Cobra held out his hand to catch it.
It didn't go far enough.
The jar's arc carried it to the middle of the dance floor in front of Hooded Cobra. It smashed itself to bits on the wooden surface.
But that didn't seem to matter, because Hooded Cobra herded Cleopatra forward with him to where it had landed. He was starting to lean down, when a crowd of people, panicked at the gun-toting shocktroopers in the door, ran back the other way. A woman's high-heeled foot almost came down on Hooded Cobra's hand, but ended up kicking his objective to the side of the dance floor.
For a few moments the villain was torn between holding onto his hostage and snatching his prize: a magnificent, if small, golden was, a slim scepter with a curved surface on the top etched to resemble the jackal face of the great Anubis.
Just when he thought his moment had come and he could grab it without letting Cleopatra get away, Hooded Cobra stopped in the middle of his lunge and fell to the floor, pulling the startled singer down with him. An unseen hand lifted the golden was, then the was itself disappeared.
"Hourglass!" Hooded Cobra called out over the frightened screams of the swarming patrons. "Stop them! We've finally got the scepter in our reach!"
"Don't call me that!" the woman in red replied, a haughty edge to her words even at the volume she needed to be heard.
"Very well, Lady Hourglass!" Hooded Cobra screamed. "Stop them!" Under his breath, low enough only for his captive to hear, he added, "But don't think I'll forget this insolence…!"
Smiling to herself, Lady Hourglass narrowed the eye behind her monocle and scanned through the panicked crowd, until she felt just the faintest contact with a human mind where there was no human body to be seen. "There! Fire there!" she pointed into the crowd.
Shocktroopers obeyed, leveling and opening fire with their guns at the location where Lady Hourglass had pointed out to them. Several clubgoers fell, and between them another person appeared out of thin as he also fell, clutching the bloodied bicep on his right arm. It was a masked man in sand-stained clothes, guns holstered at his belt and the golden was stuck next to one.
Lady Hourglass stayed back, but nodded for the shocktroopers at the door to move in. Three of the soldiers made their way closer, weapons trained on Ghost. They took aim, but suddenly clapped their hands over their ears and let their guns dangle from their shoulder straps. Ghost managed to scramble awkwardly to his feet. Behind the shocktroopers he could see Wren give him a thumbs up, and he gave one back.
Before drawing a gun with his left hand and firing into the three shocktroopers. Two went down, but the soldier in the middle seemed to see the shot coming and at the last second managed to twist his body out of the way of the worst of it. He charged over on his sandaled feet and threw a punch aimed at the bloody wound on Ghost's arm. The masked man gasped in pain, distracted just long enough for the trooper to snatch the was from Ghost's belt and throw it to Lady Hourglass.
A spate of gunfire erupted from the door to the club, a collective scream of panic from the people still trapped inside. Some stampeded away from the door, back to the dance floor again. And in Lady Hourglass's direction. The villainess ran to get there ahead of them, but someone lunged from the shadow of an overturned table. It was Kristina Rouge, who tackled Lady Hourglass to the floor.
"Give me that thing now, and maybe I'll let you up with most of your teeth still in your mouth!" Kristina warned.
"Oh, you wouldn't do that," Lady Hourglass crooned, an unearthly light shining in her monocle. "A woman of strength like you knows better than to let the key to power to like this fall into unworthy hands."
"…yeah, you're right. That's really important." Kristina leaned back, letting Lady Hourglass get to her feet and run as fast as she could in high heels. She went running right past Hooded Cobra, who went through the curtains next to the bandstand, still dragging the singer behind him as a hostage.
At the same time, Ghost staggered from the shocktrooper he'd been fighting landing a fist on his jaw. The trooper sneered and closed for another attack. "I always thought you Mystery Men were overrated."
All of a sudden Ghost lashed out and slammed his knee into the trooper's stomach. A strangled wheeze trickled out of the trooper's throat, then nothing at all came out when Ghost slipped behind him and put him in a headlock, blood from the gunshot wound oozing onto the trooper's cheek. Ghost's fist slammed into his face, sending him falling to the floor with blood from his broken nose mingling with the blood from Ghost's arm.
"I always thought you shocktroopers were underrated," Ghost muttered. "Thanks for proving me wrong."
"GHOST!" he heard the familiar voice of Kristina Rouge yelling over the scattered gunfire for their allies fighting it out with the remaining shocktroopers, and shrieks of panic from the clubgoers who were now huddling as far as they could away from the door. "They're heading out the back!" Kristina yelled.
He looked over one shoulder, seeing Sophia drop a shocktrooper with a shot from her revolver and automatically taking aim at another, honed hunter instincts at work. Another soldier was about to fire at Wren, who just then completed a spell and a dumbfounded look seem to come over the shocktrooper's eyes. He squeezed the trigger but his barrage went wide.
They had the situation under control, and the more dangerous prey was escaping with their goal. Ghost ran up to the curtains by the stage where Kristina was waiting for him. Together they ran through a hall, past a series of dressing rooms, to a door at the rear of the club that was hanging open. Just as they got to the doorway the familiar squeal of a car racing away at high speeds reach their ears. Lady Hourglass was at the wheel of the car, Hooded Cobra sitting in the back, waving the was scepter mockingly against the window glass.
"Damn…," Ghost cursed.
"What about that?" Kristina said, pointing to a white soft-top convertible. She jingled a set of keys. "Feel like a drive, Ghost?"
A roar from the engine confirmed Kristina's keys were indeed meant for this car. The tires squealed even louder when she swung it around before she flattened the accelerator.
"Where did you get the keys for this thing, anyway?" Ghost asked her from the backseat.
"Out of the pocket of the club manager," Kristina said, sounding very pleased with herself. "That Lady Hourglass must've got him real good, he was still hypnotized when we left. She only got me for a few seconds, guess that wears off faster."
"Why'd you take it, though? We drove here, remember?"
"Hey, a rich guy must have a better car than whatever hand-me-downs the Delphi Council can beg for!"
Ghost made a quick scan of the car: leather seats, gold-plated radio knobs, even a little cabinet under the backseat that held a bottle of champagne and two crystal drinking flutes. It was easy to believe this car belonged to someone like the owner of the Club Anubis.
"Do you want me to shadow them?" Kristina asked, interrupting his appraisal. "See where they're going?"
"No!" Ghost exclaimed. "We can't let them get wherever they're going with that scepter. Catch up, and let's see about stopping them."
She laughed. "Whatever you say!"
So she whipped the car around a corner at top speed, going so fast Ghost was sure he smelled smoke.
Rapidly the distance closed between the two vehicles just like Kristina promised. Clearly they'd been spotted, with how the villains' car went around a corner at unsafe speeds headed for the nearest main road. Kristina Rouge took the turn even faster and drove even harder, the tail of their borrowed vehicle swinging out so hard it skidded into the opposite lane for a second. Another car drove onto the sidewalk to avoid them, but the Storm Knights paid no attention, speeding away after their targets.
Ghost checked his guns, then checked his arm again and winced. Looked like he wouldn't be fighting with both weapons as usual. He drew a knife and sliced a hole in the softcover roof. Ignoring the pain, he worked the slide on his gun with his right hand and stood up through the hole he'd cut.
And fired a shot.
The rear window of the villains' car disintegrated into a cloud of glistening shards. Hooded Cobra jerked his head to the side, but his headdress was now missing a hunk off the side. Ghost tracked the movement and fired again, the bullet puncturing the back of the car just beside the shattered window. Immediately Hooded Cobra's masked face filled the window, but there was another hole through his headdress, right next to his head, with blood painting a red shadow on the skin.
He had two his weird pistols pointed through the window, and clenching his teeth in rage, he fired them at the same time.
Twin bolts of electricity ripped through the Cairo night. Kristina veered suddenly, slamming into another car. A headlight fell off and her door caved in, but she hit the gas and kept going. Ghost did as well, taking aim and firing another bullet. This one went through Hooded Cobra's shoulder, and Ghost could hear his yell of pain even over the sounds of cars speeding through the heart of Cairo.
"Not bad for shooting with my off-hand!" Ghost called, and Kristina laughed. Neither of them laughed at what Hooded Cobra did next, which was grab Cleopatra the lounge singer and hold her in front of him as a human shield. He shot back with another electric bolt, but only one, the other pistol aimed at the singer's face. The blast singed Ghost's hair, but he ducked back inside the car before Hooded Cobra had a chance at another shot.
"Not gonna risk another shot with the damsel in distress? You were doing great!" Kristina exclaimed.
"There's a time to stop pushing your luck," Ghost breathed. "It comes a lot sooner when somebody else might get killed if your luck runs out. Besides, look around. We're almost to where they're going, I'm sure."
Kristina only had to take a second to study their surroundings and realize Ghost was right. Buildings were thinning out around them, giving way to chainlink fences and airplane hangars. A great white twin-prop plane was waiting at the edge of a runway, and after the villains' car crashed through the gate they headed straight for it at breakneck speed.
They stopped and the rear door flew open, and Cleopatra flew out of it, landing on the dusty ground. Hooded Cobra and Lady Hourglass got out of the car and were halfway up the rolling staircase beside it before Kristina stopped at an overly dramatic skid.
It was already too late. Its boarding door had barely closed before the plane's propellers came to life and the aircraft cruised down the runway. Kristina and Ghost jumped out. "You okay, Miss?" he asked while he helped the distressed singer back to her feet.
"Yes, I'm fine!" she said, sounding more annoyed than recovering from panic. "But look at this dress, it's ruined! This was a gift!"
The plane left the ground and start shrinking into the sky. Ghost kicked the ground in frustration, but spotted a low wooden building, painted an ugly, that looked like an office. The next thing he kicked was the door.
A startled little man jumped back in fright, the papers he was working on scattering all over his desk. Ghosts slammed both fists down on the desk knuckles-first, sending even more papers fluttering. "That plane that just left. Where was it going?" he demanded.
The little clerk's thin mustache trembled, accentuating the terrified gape he directed up at the masked man. "I…I can't just give…give…give out confidential information like that!" he barely managed to sputter.
"Friend, I've had a very frustrating night. Don't test me."
The clerk's eyes darted from Ghost's masked face to his dirt-smudged, torn clothes, to the blood still trickling from the wound on his right arm. Back to the scowl on the angry man demanding he reveal private information.
With trembling hands, he reached out to a sheet of paper pinned under Ghost's knuckles. Ghost lifted his fist and let the clerk take it, and said nothing for a few moments while he examined it.
"…Abu Miqnar…no, Abu Minqar. They were booked to fly to Abu Minqar. The orders came from someplace called…Abkhemurna."
"Thank you, sir. You've been a big help. I trust neither of us will discuss what you've just told me, so you can keep your job here."
The clerk nodded.
Ghost turned and walked out of the records office, closing the door quietly behind him.