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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Golden Bee" data-source="post: 9426894" data-attributes="member: 7041055">Empire of the Black Pharaoh! By Paul Wiggidy-Wade WilliamsThe sickos licked their blades. They would spill foreign blood. Finally, something they wanted from the West.This was a super action-packed session. Since the gang has been in Cairo for a bit, I was able to bring back a lot of characters.Yep, the gang was making a movie. It starred Elena Altieri, Guila "Lala" Santinella’s movie industry friend… and Professor Hemett Hazoul’s current crush. Aldous Bingen, ex-butler to the stars, was producing. Trudy Truman was providing good publicity, with Tacìto Uriel Velasco as legal counsel. It was a fearsome fivesome! The movie was beset by problems. The chariot chase scene got out of control, a victim of both a sniper and sabotage. Lala was able to jump onto Elena’s chariot and save her before the thing fell apart. But The problems didn’t end there. At night, an invisible intruder tried to steal the star’s necklace, the eye of Ra. It was an ancient artifact… And some folks would kill to get it.A stuntman died in the chariot catastrophe, so the movie was postponed. The players went to town, but foolishly gave the necklace to in-over-her-head journalist Trudy. While the group tried to fill producer Devika’s massive shopping list, Trudy got grabbed by thugs in an open sedan! The other four hurried to follow, only to be jumped by scimitar wielding sickos.The group battled back, with dirty-fighting specialist Hazoul in his element. He stabbed one thug with an unpurchased kitchen knife, hurled sand at another, and hit from a third behind a fabric stall, emerging only to stab someone else with a giant sewing needle.Tacito was a blur of fist and feet, until the shadowy assassin "Mr. Nowhere" revealed himself. Instead of trying to fight the Jade Jaguar fairly, Nowhere turned his invisibility cloak inside out, and threw it on the lawyer! The Abagado’s heightened senses worked against him. He wanted to perceive something, but his mind was overwhelmed…Elsewhere, Lala drove her stunt cycle through the crowded sûk. The narrow streets stymied the thugs, and she was able to catch up when they cut through a construction site. With Trudy’s help, she grabbed a bucket of white paint… And threw it in the crook’s faces, causing them to spin out! Former sprinter Trudy jumped from the car and barely landed on Lala’s pegs.The group cleared out the crooks, but Mr. Nowhere escaped. (He wasn’t getting paid enough for this.) Hazoul, a master of outsider science, was able to free Tacíto from the cloak, and figure out how to use it. It had a limited charge, but complete invisibility would be useful… Sometime.After that, the gang’s investigation led to a series of tombs near Amarna. They passed through a room with a trio of moving flames, and slipped past a flying blade trap triggered by pressure plates. They were once burned (literally), and twice shy. Hazoul used his climbing pitons to nail down all the sarcophagi they passed.The necklace fit into a slot. With a clunk, it activated a star map that revealed the real treasure was elsewhere within the temple complex. And then the tomb started to collapse.The gang ran for their lives. Sprint past the flying blades, jump over the plates! Around the burning flames… past the collapsing tunnels. They made it back to the surface only a few steps short ahead of certain doom.The lawyer and tomb raider put their heads together. A bit of dead reckoning, some calendar work, and mathematics gave them a precise area, only 20 yards beyond where archaeologists had stopped digging. The next hole in the ground was simple; the trap was corroded by age. Past the puzzle was a strange sphere, like a pockmarked bowling ball with an hourglass inside.Unfortunately, there was someone waiting for them above. The architect of their misfortune, surrounded by his personal army and with a truck-mounted machine gun…THE BLACK PHARAOH!Lala got him monologuing, promising to betray the group if she only knew what he was thinking. Hazoul chimed in.The orb Pharaoh Belloq’d from them controlled time. He would use it to blackmail the world, turning defiant cities into caveman clusters. Egypt would rule the modern world, just like it did the ancient one. To show these imbeciles the orb’s power, he would revert this seemingly broken trap!***The trap was electricity based; the group solved it ingeniously. Tacito used the chains he was bound with as an electrical conductor, untying himself, nailing them to the sand floor, and grounding the deadly arcs. Just in time to prevent a swift death. It was time to get revenge on the pharaoh……and he had an idea of who to talk to. His criminal contact in Cairo, Mahmoud Al-Adwani. Trudy and Lala used all their social graces to set up a meeting at Shepheard’s Hotel. Sure, T.U. Velasco had freed "Million Dollar" Mahler*, but he would make it up to the crime lord. He’d get rid of a Pharaoh, a costumed idiot who would bring the attention of all the cops on Earth. Al-Adwani said sure… In exchange for a role in their movie. Tacìto agreed as Aldous tried to shake his head ‘no’.The party was a bunch of sneaks! And although one of them wasn’t very stealthy, they remembered they had an invisibility suit. With that, they were able to slink into the Pharaoh’s compound outside Minya, bypassing his hired guns and making their way into his sanctum. Which appeared to be a rocketship?! It seemed the Black Pharaoh was not only a magician, but a gifted inventor. The players were able to stow away right before lift off. It was just him and masked slasher The Scarab there. (El Principe Del Inframundo was nearby… But Trudy locked him out of the rocket!)The party was a victim of their own success. They were in close quarters with the villain and a vicious killer. Hazoul, normally a key fighter, was caught between disarming the ship’s weaponry and keeping Scarab contained. Due to his split focus, an energy beam fired… but went wild, reverting a 5-mile patch of Egypt into an ancient floodplain!Trudy tried to get the radio going, while the beetle-themed brawler kept trying to tear it out of the wall! Lala focused on deception and fighting defensively, doing all she could to keep the non-combatants alive. The Jade Jaguar applied knuckles to skulls. In one moment, he had Aldous dip the ship through the air, using the decreased gravity to jump off a wall… and the increased gravity to land a tooth-loosening punch!Trudy, slashed in the gut by the Scarab, finally got through to British air command. This was a secured frequency, but, because she helped save Australia, they were duty-bound to scramble the fighters and intercept the doomsday weapon. The Scarab didn’t like that. As everyone else tried to evacuate, he smashed a glass panel above Trudy Truman‘s face, sending down disfiguring shards!She screamed, and the group decided parachutes were the better part of valor. Lala grabbed her and drove out of the vehicle, her third such rescue of the week. Everyone landed basically on target… Except for Hazoul. He heroically evacuated last, which meant his landing zone was somewhere in the Arabian desert. A few days later, he was rescued at great expense… To the film production. After all the magic he had had to put up with, he was happy to deal with Hollywood accounting.*In the adventure Graveyard by the Nile.</blockquote>

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