Secret of the Sphinx

      “Dug up” often being the key words.

      My name is Urasina. I’m a mercenary warrior-mare who fights to protect this land. But I’m not out fighting all the time. I still claim to be “Neopia’s Biggest Tomboy Uni,” due to my love of getting messy and digging in the sand.

      That’s what I was doing one day. I was digging around just east of Sahkmet, simply for the fun of it. But then one of my front hooves hit something solid, causing me to stop. It certainly didn’t seem to be a rock. As I pushed the sand away, I saw that it was an old clay urn! I began to get excited, because who knew what historical value it could have?

      I managed to expose the urn, but despite my best efforts, when I went to pick it up, it crumbled under my touch. I huffed in disappointment, only to gain my excitement right back when I saw that there was an old animal hide scroll inside the urn! Thankfully, that remained intact when I picked it up. But I didn’t risk trying to open it. One of my good friends, Ven the yellow Bori, was a translator at the Royal Museum in Sahkmet, and I knew she’d be better at handling this scroll than I would.

      I jumped out of my hole, quickly filled it in, and took flight, heading to the city. A short flight later and I landed in front of the Museum, heading inside to find Ven. She was in her office, looking kind of bored, when I set the scroll down on her desk. Her eyes went wide and she began to quiver with excitement. She promised me to have it translated by the next morning.

     I returned to the Museum the next morning, eager to see what Ven had learned. Sometimes the things I brought her mentioned old undiscovered tombs or ruins, and then she and I would set off to find them. But whatever was on the scroll I had found seemed to have Ven worried. She handed me her translations, gave me a slightly scared look, and simply said “Be safe” before hurrying off. That was very unusual for her.

      I left the Museum building and settled down on the grounds to look at the scroll. It was a poem of some kind, apparently giving directions to something using old standards of measurement that I was only vaguely familiar with. But the last four lines of the poem gave me a bit of a start.

     “Don’t stop, don’t linger,

     Do not sleep in this den.

     For the BEAST will find you,

     And you’ll never wake again.”

      Seemed there was a monster somewhere that needed to be dealt with. But to find it, I’d need some help.

     I returned home to talk to my owner, the human we all called BG, and my guardian Light Faerie, Kouren, both of whom knew the old measurement systems of the Lost Desert better than I did. Kouren procured a big map of the Lost Desert, a ruler, and a straightedge, and as I read the poem to her, she charted the directions on the map. They seemed to go all over the area around Sahkmet with no direction at all…

      Until Kouren drew the last line. It ended…

     “On the Sphinx?” I asked no one in particular.

     “Seems that way,” BG replied. “Are they talking about the Sphinx being the monster?”

     “There is an old legend that if you fall asleep between its paws, you get visited by ghosts,” Kouren said. “But not harmful ghosts, at least according to the stories I’ve always heard.”

     “Some parents tell their kids that the Sphinx will eat them if they misbehave around it,” my owner added. “But we all know it’s nothing but a pile of sandstone blocks.”

      That made me think of something.

     “It may be a bunch of sandstone blocks, but what about… UNDER it?” I asked.

     “How would one get under it?” BG responded. “Archaeologists have tried for years.”

      Kouren looked at the lines on the map, tracing the last one with her finger as she thought.

     “Well, maybe not on the ground, but up on the Sphinx itself?” she reasoned. “Lot less chance of Neopians stumbling into the beast’s lair if the entrance was high up.”

      She had a very good point.

     “BG,” I said, turning to him, “We need to find out where this monster is, and hopefully take it out. If it’s under the Sphinx, we need to find a way in.”

      He nodded.

     “We’ll take the fighter out tomorrow and see if we can’t find a loose block or another concealed entrance,” he remarked.

      The next day, BG and I flew out to the Sphinx in his heavily modified Virtupets starfighter. Kouren had refined her lines to point to a specific spot on the monument’s back, which should be the entrance. My owner brought the fighter right up to the top of the monument and I hopped out to look around. The spot Kouren had pinpointed was a single sandstone block just three tiers down from the top of the Sphinx. I gave it a quick shove, but didn’t feel it move. Which made sense; we’d have to pull it out of place and see what was behind it.

      BG brought the fighter down to my level and handed me a set of chains and hooks.

     “Attach these to the forward landing strut,” he instructed me. “Then use your magic to drive that bolt into the block. I’ll try and pull the stone back.”

      I took the chains and did as instructed, then took flight, hovering overhead to watch. BG eased the fighter backwards until the chains went taut, then gradually increased the thrust. The block held firm for a few seconds, then suddenly began to move! It moved WAY too easily for this to be a coincidence.

      Had we found our entrance?

      BG pulled the block back as far as he dared, leaving an opening big enough for me to get behind it and look. And there WAS an entrance; a hole leading downwards. Just big enough for me to squeeze through, but not big enough to spread my wings. I’d have to free-fall and hope it opened up further down.

      I turned back to BG and nodded. He nodded back and brought the fighter forward to brace the bow against the stone block, preventing it from moving as I worked my way into the hole and dropped in. It was narrow for the first few seconds of free-fall, but once I had reached the bottom of the Sphinx, it opened up into a huge cavern. I spread my wings and slowed to a hover, looking around as best as I could in the dark. Something smelled quite strongly, and I saw what appeared to be black slime trailing down one wall of the cavern. I moved in closer to investigate. It wasn’t slime at all.

      It was embalming fluid.

      The cavern was literally dripping with embalming fluid!

      I shuddered a bit and began to descend again. Soon the floor came into view. It was sand, but in places large puddles of embalming fluid had built up. Once I touched down I summoned a Miniature Sun to light the place up. The cavern was a lot larger than I thought, and embalming fluid both ran down some of the walls and dripped from above.

      This was baffling. Embalming fluid is not found naturally, so why was there so much of it here?

      Then I heard it. A shuffling noise. Followed by a rattling noise.

      The BEAST was coming.

      I turned to look in the direction the noises were coming from. And soon enough, something entered the light. At first glance, it wasn’t so threatening. It wasn’t all that big. It looked like a Turty, but all skeletal. Its tail seemed to be a long lash made of bones, and it was whipping it around in irritation. But its shell was the scary part: it was coated with more embalming fluid, and various desiccated parts of Neopians’ bodies were stuck to it, including the very well-preserved heads of a Uni and a Gelert.

      The beast stared at me, then shuddered violently. The heads of the Uni and Gelert slowly opened their mouths and began to exhale a blue gas. Immediately the words of the poem echoed through my mind.

      The beast was generating sleeping gas!

      I quickly raised a shield of Light magic so well sealed that not even air could get through it. I could purify the air inside it for a few hours, but I needed to be careful. The beast was not moving towards me, so I took a moment to focus, then blasted the Uni head clean off its shell with a concentrated beam of Light energy. As expected, underneath the head was a blowhole of some kind, and another quick Light beam super-heated the embalming fluid and sealed it shut. The beast snarled angrily, but I suddenly had another threat on my hooves.

      The beast could not only preserve Neopians’ body parts, but reanimate them too. The Uni head was building a body for itself, literally pulling body parts out of the ground. And soon an undead, desiccated Uni was shambling towards me. Disgusting. I immolated it in a flash. Then turned back to the beast, which had stopped snarling, possibly out of confusion.

      I didn’t give it a chance to do anything else. I focused for a few seconds and blasted the Gelert head on its back with a much stronger Light beam, immolating it and sealing the blowhole beneath in one shot. The gas stopped flowing, but I couldn’t take any chances. The beast stepped back, grumbling like a Sutekh, before beginning to shake itself violently, throwing the body parts still on its back in all directions. As they hit the sand, they all began to build bodies for themselves.

      I took flight again, flying high up. The undead Neopians clustered beneath me. Some threw pieces of bones at me, others coughed up embalming fluid. But none of them could hit me. I focused, charging power, and launched a blast of holy fire down on the undead. They all burnt down to nothing in seconds. Then I turned to the beast. It was staring at me, twitching its bony tail, and clearly out of options to continue the fight. I shot a lethal Light beam at it, setting it on fire, and watched as it burned down to cinders.

      The beast was slain, but one thing I knew about Lost Desert monsters is that half the time, they’d come back from the dead due to whatever curse they were under. I landed again, then began to gather as much Light magic as I could, finally releasing waves of holy fire through the cavern to dissipate the sleeping gas. Then I waited a few minutes before cracking open my shield a tiny bit. I didn’t feel sleepy, so I opened it a bit more. Nothing happened. I dropped it completely and took another look around.

      My holy fire blasts had scorched the cavern and solidified the embalming fluid. There were no traces of the beast or any of its undead minions. But I did see something: a passageway led out of the cavern and turned downwards. That seemed to be where the beast had come from. I headed down that passage, but it only went a few hundred feet. At the end was another room, with something completely unexpected inside.

      The ruined frame of some kind of stone portal.

      Half the frame still stood. The other half was scattered on the ground as oddly shaped stones. Permanent portals were rare in Neopia, and for good reason: they could be VERY dangerous.

     “/Kouren, you need to see this,/” I mentally contacted my Guardian Light Faerie. And in a flash, she was there with me.

     “A portal and a beast, all beneath the Sphinx…” she mused.

     “What should we do with this portal?” I asked her. “We can’t leave it here. Should I blast it?”

     “You may not need to, Urasina dear,” she replied, slowly walking along, looking at the fallen stones. I watched her keenly. After a minute or two, she picked up one stone in particular.

     “As I thought,” she said. “This is an old style of portal, one that relies on a keystone to function.”

      I saw what she was getting at. If we removed the keystone from the area, the portal would never work again. It needed the specific keystone that it was attuned to.

     “I’ll lock this down in my tower,” Kouren went on. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

      Light magic whirled around us, and when it faded, we stood on top of the Sphinx. BG was still using the fighter to brace the sandstone block, but when we appeared, he carefully pushed it back into place. Then I undid the chains and hopped into the cockpit with him.

     “Mission successful, BG,” I said proudly as he rubbed the sweet spot between my ears. “The beast is dead, but there was more to it than that. We need to talk to the experts at the Museum.”

     “And I need to tell Ven that I’m safe.”

     The End.