Chapter 138: Chapter One Hundred and Thirty Five: Loading Pharaoh Option

“What about this, is this worth anything?” The Chosen One was asking Definitely Bad Guy. He was holding a large fan just out of reach of a very inquisitive Squiggles.

 

“Purely decorative,” Definitely Bad Guy replied dismissively. “It contains no intellectual value.”

 

“Yeah, but is it worth any money?” the Chosen One pressed. The Mage shrugged.

 

“To those who prize aesthetics over knowledge, perhaps,” he said dismissively.

 

The Chosen One lost focus and left the fan drop slightly. In an instant, Squiggles struck.

 

“No, don’t — ah, well, that’s gone,” the Chosen One said, surprisingly unfazed by the potentially ancient artefact being gulped down by the team mascot.

 

“Yes,” Qube said, her head still in her hands. She rubbed her face before showing a bright, albeit slightly manic, expression to the rest of the group. “Yes, this makes perfect sense. The pharaoh, he was never a real Royal, right?”

 

The Chosen One and Definitely Bad Guy stopped their categorisation of the various items to give concerned looks to the half-elf Healer.

 

“Sure,” the Chosen One agreed encouragingly. 

 

“That’s why he was a bad ruler, because he didn’t have Royal blood.”

 

“That is not the only qualification of a good ruler, my dear,” Sexy Screamy Spider Lady interjected. Qube waved the interruption aside.

 

“Or Royal training, or Trials, or anything,” she added in the spirit of diplomacy. “Which meant that he had to have been someone before he became pharaoh. Which must have been just a regular SandBright person! Yes! So when I removed all the trauma that forced him onto those two paths, he’s gone back to being who he was before, which was just a regular person!”

 

“And his bit about reinforcing the seal?” the Chosen One asked.

 

“Some other seal!” Qube said desperately. She noticed that some of her hair was sticking straight out around her head and quickly smoothed it back into place. “Or a desire to put that part of his life behind him, or some such thing! Really, there’s lots of very good explanations that will no doubt become clear in time.”

 

The Chosen One leaned against the tomb’s doorway and regarded Qube with his lopsided smile.

 

“Feeling a bit frazzled?” he asked, his smile turning into a grin as Qube glared at him.

 

“I feel perfectly fine, thank you!” she replied primly.

 

“Sure, okay, so he’s now mentally just another SandBright person,” the Chosen One said easily. “I one hundred percent agree with you.”

 

“You do?” Qube coughed and straightened up. “I mean, of course you do. It’s the most likely explanation. Now, we should probably just take all the artefacts that we can carry and leave this place.” She turned to the former pharaoh, who had tilted his helmet down at the dagger sticking out of his chest. A thought struck her.

 

“Do you think I should tell him to take off his helmet?” she asked the Chosen One quietly. “The other SandBright people might not realise that he’s been reformed, and might attack him if they think he’s still the pharaoh.”

 

The Chosen One stifled a laugh. 

 

“That would definitely be something to see,” he said, amused for reasons which eluded Qube. “By the way,” the Hero turned to Definitely Bad Guy, “did you end up picking up his stick and gem?”

 

“The markings on the flail are interesting, but not in any script I recognise,” the Mage said, pulling out a flail that Qube recognised as the one that the pharaoh had been trying to give the Chosen One. “The gem itself has no explanation.”

 

The gem, which Qube used her excellent deductive reasoning to determine was probably the Light Temple’s, which was most likely called the SandBright Temple’s, item, looked like a small sun that had been crushed by a fist. The centre of the sphere was a vivid yellow, with bursts of light reached out and touching the ends. Fine grains of sand were embedded in the clear crystal that encased the gem.

 

“That’s so pretty!” Qube exclaimed. She looked around expectantly. “Where’s the other gem?” The Chosen One gave her a look of confusion, silently asking her to elaborate. “Normally there’s two gems for each Temple,” she explained. “One from the side of chaos and the other from the side of order. Oh!” she snapped her fingers, “we must have to get the other gem from the Akela!”

 

“Huh, yeah, you’re probably right about that,” the Chosen One said. “Man, you are on fire today with the explanations.”

 

Qube knew this was, as Sexy Screamy Spider Lady would put it, just an expression, and so didn’t have a tiny second of panic that she might actually be on fire, or that the Chosen One was once again calling her a man. She was well and truly above such silly misunderstandings!

 

Or if she did, it was only for a microsecond!

 

Not that she did, of course.

 

She was far too advanced for such things now.

 

“Sure, well, we’ll wrap things up around here,” the Chosen One said, turning to the party. “Everyone, just shove everything you can into your bags. We’ll take it all back to the home base and sort it out there.” He picked up a golden statue of a cat and turned it upside down, looking at the bottom of it for some reason. “This is gonna look awesome,” he said happily.

 

Qube, being the helpful sort, started cramming as much as possible into her backpack. In a surprisingly short amount of time the whole tomb had been stripped clean, everything neatly fitting in their backpacks due to the magic of pockets, and the group had clustered around the exit portal where the pharaoh was crouched, picking up imaginary handfuls of sand and letting the nonexistent grains spill through his fingers.

 

Qube felt like she should say something to the man she’d freed/erased the memories of. A part of her felt like she should apologise, although she wasn’t entirely sure what for. Destroying a part of him? But that part was, even if she didn’t know whether or not it was outright Evil, certainly bad and hurtful not only to him, but those around him.

 

She felt something shift within her mind at that thought. For the past few Temples she’d been worried about what was Good, and what was Evil, and how to know what the right thing to do was. Maybe this was the answer.

 

Evil was things that hurt people, without any real reason behind it. Good was what reduced pain and suffering, or added meaning to things.

 

It wasn’t a perfect system, even now she could tell that, but it felt like the groundwork for something that could withstand the rigours of the increasingly complex world she lived in. She would need to be careful that she didn’t accidentally hurt people, but it felt more measurable, now that she’d lost the immediate guidance of the Golden Prophecy’s occasionally painful direction.

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So she just had to make sure she did her best!

 

Starting with the man she may or may not have just technically brainwashed. 

 

“Hi,” she said to the pharaoh. He turned his painted face towards her. “It would probably be best if you removed your helmet,” she said kindly. “So people know that you’re one of them, rather than…” she paused, trying to think of how best to phrase ‘the tyrant who murdered a bunch of them for terrible reasons and they wanted destroyed’ in a nice way, “someone else,” she finished. Perfect!

 

The former-pharaoh lifted a hand and touched the side of his helmet.

 

“Here, let me help you,” Qube said, reaching forward and grabbing his head. She tugged, ignoring the yelping sounds from the pharaoh. “Huh, that's odd,” she said. “It appears to be stuck. Hold on, let me—” she yanked harder. But it was no good. Whoever had affixed the helmet to the pharaoh must have moulded it directly onto his face. The neck part wasn’t actually large enough for the rest of his head to fit through.

 

“How did they even manage to do this without burning you with hot molten gold?” Qube asked, astonished as she planted a foot on the pharaoh’s chest and pulled with all her might. “Don’t worry, we’ll get this right off you!” she said as cheerfully as she could while exerting all her energy on de-helmeting the man.

 

“My dear, I don’t know if that’s going to work,” Sexy Screamy Spider Lady said worriedly. She took a step forward, only to have the Chosen One raise an arm, barring her path.

 

“No, no,” he said, a terribly familiar glee in his voice. “I want to see what happens.”

 

“My beloved—” the Hunter said warningly.

 

Qube scrabbled for seams along the edge of the helmet where it might have been sealed, trying to pry it open.

 

“We can — urrrgh — get the Chosen One to — almost! — cut it open if this doesn’t — come on! — work!” she said, grunting as she tried to free the pharaoh.

 

Her grip slipped and she was sent flying backward, directly into the mouth of the portal.

 

---

 

Her momentum didn’t carry through the teleportation. Instead, disoriented, she calmly stepped out of the portal. The world she stepped into was strangely grey and foggy. In the time it took her to rub her eyes, the Chosen One appeared and took his place by her side.

 

“Oh no,” she heard him whisper.

 

“This is not exactly what I pictured the SandBright people’s home to look like,” Qube confessed. The others joined them, and from their various exclamations Qube could tell that they felt the same.

 

“Something terrible happened here,” Sewer Bard said solemnly.

 

“What have we done?” Sexy Screamy Spider Lady gasped.

 

“This was not how I would have done it,” Definitely Bad Guy said critically. The other two party members looked at him. The Mage shrugged.

 

In the perpetual twilight that stretched before them, Qube could see where there had once been a nomadic homestead. The skeletons of circular, colourful huts still stood, the scraps of fabric peeling off the wooden support structures. Innumerable mirrors were strewn about, capturing what little light there was and directing it all to a massive, golden throne that was set on a plateau midway through a small, sandstone pyramid.

 

Sitting on the throne, bathed in refracted light that caused his golden paint to glow, was a figure that looked identical to the pharaoh. Mummies shuffled about, adjusting and readjusting mirrors to capture the filtered suns to keep the light on their indisputable leader.

 

Qube didn’t know why she’d thought the SandBright people would be human. The way the Chosen One had spoken about how the pharaoh’s reign of terror would involve him turning the deset people into mummies might have done it. That had just been a guess on his part, though. Presumably these mummies could talk, unlike their Temple counterparts. Unless… had the mummies in the Light Temple been SandBright people, or constructed by the Temple? Qube wasn’t sure how she felt about Temples making actual people out of pure mana.

 

That just seemed dangerous.

 

“Do you think that’s the Akela?” Qube asked. “She certainly looks like the leader.” She turned and looked for their former pharaoh. “Where is he?” she asked as she scanned the group.

 

“I don’t know if he can travel through the portals,” the Chosen One said as he tore his eyes away from the scene before them.

 

“Oh,” Qube said, frowning. The pharaoh had clearly modelled his appearance after the Akela, so it was probably best that he didn’t come outside until they’d figured out some way of removing that helmet from him, and maybe the gold paint too. Was he also made of bandages underneath that paint?

 

Maybe they could ask the Blacksmith back in Cobbletown for help. It would be awful if they’d freed the pharaoh from the horrors of his past just to have him trapped in that tomb forever.

 

They’d also need some way of helping him through the portal, if the Chosen One was right and he couldn’t use them for some strange reason. Wait! Qube didn’t have to figure that out on her own! She turned to Definitely Bad Guy.

 

“Can you please investigate that and see if there’s some way we can bring him to the surface?” she asked with a polite smile.

 

She’d really learned a lot from being more in charge! Now she knew how to delegate! She didn’t have to do everything herself! Especially since the Chosen One didn’t think she needed to know the answer to everything.

 

It felt incredibly freeing.

 

In fact, the whole experience of the others and her being in charge of the Light Temple had been a really amazing, positive experience. They’d all grown so much!

 

Looking out at the darkened, mummy-filled settlement before her, Qube felt her heart lighten. 

 

This was the result of their hard work! And things were only going to get better from here!

 

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